Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

The N.Y. Times reported that FBI Director James B. Comey is moaning and whining about Apple's new iPhone privacy technology which will put encryption in the hands of the user and thus leave Apple Inc.,  empty and powerless to comply with any government befehl to hand over data. 

Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.”  He cited kidnapping cases, in which exploiting the contents of a seized phone could lead to finding a victim, and predicted there would be moments when parents would come to him “with tears in their eyes, look at me and say, ‘What do you mean you can’t’

 oOo

Wasn't there some of story that said:  Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing?

From Obama to Comey to the detective on a case the plaintive and whining cry rises up: the babies!  the virgins!  the widows!   We need more tools and more power to fight "those who would blow up the world"  ... (and sell dope on a street corner)!

And people fall for it over and over again, just as they fell for tales of Infidel outrages in Holy Jerusalem, Germans roasting babies on their bayonets and now "unspeakble beheadings"  (as distinguished one supposes from the  US troops who killed an Afghani detainee after four days of non-stop "pulpifying" -- the coroner's term.)  

The Fourth Amendment is the supreme law of the land.  The only thing illegal here is a government that refuses to abide the Constitution,  a Supreme Court that will do its sophistical best to gut it, and a Congress that is too supine and degenerate to return to our lawful roots.

The definition of a "tyranny" is precisely that --  a government that refuses to abide the law.    The operative presumption of a free and civil society is (1) that all citizens are trustworthy and innocent of wrong doing and (2) that as such they are entitled to privacy in all their personal affairs.   If the government has reason to suspect a deviation from the presumption let it get a warrant based on probable cause.   Period.  

Beware the man crying "danger!"

Islamic State of Photoshop?

While you can  download execution-clips from Bonnie & Clyde on You Tube, the media has been less than forthcoming with posting videos of ISIS atrocities, which are alleged to be too graphic for sensitive and civilised eyes.   But at least some of the photos appear to us to be faked....

Dear Mr. (Editor of the Guardian UK)

The photograph filenamed "screengrab-showing-militia-009.jpg"  appears to be "photoshopped"

There are two lines of men -- the shooters (L) and the kneeling victims (R).  You will notice:

(1)   the focus between the two lines is not consistent:  the fourth from left shooter is fuzzier than kneeling man in the striped blue shirt (3rd from foremost victim);

(2)   in fact, the two rows are not properly aligned, with the striped blue man angled ambiguously between the 2nd and the 4th shooter

(3)   the height of the kneeling victims is also off;  the heels of the foremost victim  align vertically with the knees of the 1st from left shooter

(4)   the edge of the back of the foremost victim seems too sharp.

I am an amateur photographer.   I have (for fun) manipulated all sorts of images, both superimposing objects and taking them out.   My eye immediately recognized that something in this photo was not right.

This is a serious issue.  There is a lot of disinformation or propaganda taking place in connection with ISIS.  The photo could have been composited by ISIS or by some Rumsfeldian outfit.  But whoever did it, it is a fake and creates a false fact. 

Sincerely

She Fattens & Dies

To the N.Y.  Times:

Ms Rosenberg states diabetes “can be prevented most of the time by eating right and exercising. This was not a mystery; lack of knowledge wasn’t the obstacle. The obstacle was getting people to actually make these changes.”

If knowledge isn’t the obstacle, then the problem lies with the will (or lack of it).  So the question then becomes how do we get Americans to stop being lazy, apathetic slobs? 

That does present a conundrum, because by definition apathetic people are not animated by passions or goals.  As Edward Gibbon would say, once people become “enervated” that’s the end of the game.   Sorry America.  To paraphrase Ausonius, “She fattens and dies.” 

Rosenberg's article goes to list a numbing array of interventions and campaigns aimed at getting people to actually make positive life style changes.  These studies and plans seem to me to be beside the point.  The usual grant-in-progress bandaids which avoid fundamentals.  

The top-down solution is to generate an economy that does not push junk food at people and which allows for dinner at mid-day (like most civilized places) instead of two hours before bedtime.

 
The top-down solution is to generate a culture which does not inculcate the passive “ingestion” of infotainment and advertisements thus cultivating  a couch-potato posture and potato mind mental state.

Lastly, traffic and transportation systems have to be radically revised so as to severely restrict the automobile and force people to walk, skate and bicycle.

Simply put, we have to generate social norms which are antithetical to mental and physical laziness and remove those economic norms which are incompatible with walking and relaxing at the right times in the right way.   But these norms cannot be divorced from the economic fundamentals of which they are but the social manifestation.  To illustrate:  you can't get people to "eat right" and at the same time protect and promote a billion dollar industry based on shoving junk into people's mouths.

Once the structural and economic causes of the problem  are understood,it can also be seen that there will never be a real solution.  The U.S. is what it has become.    Better luck, next cycle. 

Ol Gringo Rides to the Explanation

*gallop*

Social Basics

To: New York Times
Re: Obama's New 50 billion Job Stimulus


Whether Hoover/Roosevelt's WPA or Hitler's Arbeitsdeinst, everyone has understood the necessity and utility of public works projects. The defect in the Administration's policy is that it conceives of such programs as temporary, stop-gap measures. They are not; such programs are only the beginning of economic recovery and stability.

A truly social conception flows from the premise that every citizen is directly entitled to a guaranteed standard of living in terms of: education, employment, housing, health-care recreation and retirement.

This is not a question of "welfare" or "minimal scroungables". It is a question of building a society that has as its broad basis (not as its limit) a soci-economic egalitarianism that protects the integrity and develops the potential of the whole person.

National Socialism understood this from the beginning. FDRoosevelt promoted this concept at the very end in his April 1945 speech about an "economic bill of rights"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effDfpKYcVo)

And of course, economic rights is the social premise of communism and social democracy. Everyone has understood the concpet except for the US ruling caste from and after LBJ. The neo-liberal premise, espoused by all administrations from Reagan to and including Obama, is that if we throw enough goodies at the rich enough of it will miss its mark and actually hit the poor...sometimes, maybe. I seem to recall that Eduardo Porter of this paper's editorial board once wrote an article entitled "Feeding the Rich feeds the Poor."

The time for this kind of thinking has come to an end. It is not necessary to abolish capitalism, but only to regulate so that it becomes the servant of society not its master.

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Supposing Truth out of Hysteria

To: Truthout

Re: John Pilger's Article on Propaganda

I'm not sure Bernays was the first to invent propaganda ... after all, Manifest Destiny was a propaganda as much as Cromwell's 'liberation' of Jamaica from the oh so dastardly Spanish.

Behind every 'liberation' there is a bete noire and what is really interesting is to hypothesize that perhaps the bete was blanc.

So returning to Bernay's 'magnum opus' ... suppose the 'dastardly' Germans never sank the Lusitania; suppose the Kaiser was right that it was the French and the Russians who started the Great War; suppose it was the dastardly English who inhumanely sought to starve the German civilian population in submission.

Suppose, Hitler was right that the Allies sought to impoverish Germany with chains of debt and to encircle her with meancing armies while she was prohibited from self defense. Suppose Canada and Mexico lopped off chunks of land from the United States and Canada held a 'corridor' from Montreal to New York City. Suppose as Chamberlain said and John Foster Dulles implied, a 'war party' in the U.S. and Britain in fact were the guilty parties who precipitated the World War.

Most people -- in fact 99 percent of them -- are almost congenitally incapable of asking liberating questions. Most of what people are taught as history is really hysteria -- that is, propaganda and myth which it is taboo to so much as question.

However, once you do start to question, you will never see the world in the same light again.

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Worshipping One's Golden Ass

To: Truthout
Re: Article on Jewish "Exceptionalism"

In the West, "Exceptionalism" -- also known as stuck up self-righteousness -- is particularly prevalent among Protestants and Jews, the main difference here being that between a sneer and a whine.

The Nazis too were steeped in exceptionalism, and Pope Pius XI's words to them in 1937 are particularly appropriate:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State or any other value of the human community— however necessary and honorable their function -- above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God and is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in anoble love of freedom and loyalty to their country [But] None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God and of a national religion, or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah XI, 15).

In so saying, Pius went to the heart of the matter: i.e. that exceptionalism which by extalting self (or tribal self) goes beyond a happy pride and ends up debasing and destroying others.

Whether this exceptionalism is Nazi, Protestant, Jewish, or German, Anglo-American or Israeli, it is all cut from the same cloth and is equally obnoxious to the rest of us.

One of the true virtues of Catholicism is the belief in Original Sin, which counterbalances individual and tribal ego with sentiments (in Latin) such as "Who am I, when the Just are mercy needing?"

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The Silence of the Monster

To:-- Truthout.Org

Re:-- U.S. Government Conspiracy of Silence Covering up Murders a Guantánamo

Since 2003 we Woodchippers have demanded that our elected representatives speak out against the Governments barbarities.

Back in June 2006 we wrote to senators (the ultra 'liberal' Barbara Boxer included) demanding that they speak out against the ongoing torture at Guantanamo. Of course we had no way of knowing that the suicides were murders. What we did know was that Washington's dismissal of the suicides as reflecting "no regard for life" was a "depravity" that bespoke the "moral putrefaction" that pervaded the government.

Back in 2005 we protested the "pulpification" murder of a 22 year old Afghani cab driver by US Army goon interrogators who strung him up at beat him to death over a four day period; and back in 2003 we excoriated the beyond belief brutality of the Guantanamo camp commander who dismissed detainee suicides as the acts of psychiatric cases with mental problems... Problems caused by US provided torture.

So when the 2006 "suicides" came to light we wanted to know: "When are you and your supine colleagues going to show some impulse other than craven ambition and political cowardice? When will you recover a sense of shame? When will rise up and speak out against the depravity of this Administration and the culture of thuggery that has seized Washington?"

We never received an answer. We never heard a peep.

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A Zig Zag Wall

To:--Truthout

Re:--A report on the Christians Only hiring policies of "World Vision" an international NGO charity that receives public US funds

1) I am *very* suspicious of anyting USIA is involved in. 2) I was never fooled by Obama's pseudo-progressivism. 3) I am not entirely at ease with fundamentalist networking in the Pentagon and other branches of government.

HOWEVER, I would put a brake and a gag on anti-clerical, atheist, secularist rants. The idea of a "wall of separation" between Church and State is yet another absurdity from the lexicon of Jeffersonian Conceits. Church and State intersect all the time and always will. The delicate rule fashioned by the US Supreme Court is that state action (1)must have a secular legislative purpose; (2) must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion and (3) must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion. --

In applying this standard to World Vision, the following should be taken into account: 1) what percentage of its operations are overseas, and not in the USA and 2) what the taxpayer monies specifically fund. The Establishment Clause was directed against the oppressiveness of officializing a particular creed and requiring religious conformity for office holding and receipt of government benefits. I do find it hard to see how those evils are implicated here.

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Badgering Peter to Pay Back Paul

To:-- San Francisco Chronicle

Re:-- Jewish Complaints about Pope Benedict's Upcoming Visit to a Synagogue in Rome

It is irrational and obsessional to be grinding an axe against Pope Pius XII for supposedly "not doing enough" to "save the Jews." What was he supposed to do, with what? when? and on the basis of what knowlege?

Jews who harbor these resentments seem to think that the entire conflict revolved around them and that "saving the Jews" ought to have been everyone's top priority. This is petulant nonsense. The actual nature and extent of Nazi exterminations was not known until 1945. The Pope was the spiritual leader of Catholics who were embroiled in the conflicts and were themselves (laity and clergy) persecuted by Nazis. The entire continent was being blasted into rubble as millions were slaughtered in battles and bombings and dying of starvation as refugees -- and what? Pius was supposed to what? Climb some mountain and say "Stop, I say, stop! whatever you are doing to Jews!!"

Benedict should give up on "relations" that boil down to no more than Jewish bullying and badgering.

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Discovering Obama

To:-- Socialist Worker

Re:-- Waking up to the Disappointment of Obama

One did not have to wait for the summer Onion crop to cry over Obama. Back in November 2008, we chipsters wrote: "We are sorry to rain on the party, but Obama is not going to introduce any fundamental change to the neo-liberal regime... Domestically and diplomatically Obama will provide some emollients and better manners, but I doubt little else."

There will be no change until Americans wake up to the reality of what they call "their" country; and this will require them to discard 90% of what they believe to be evident and true.

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The Beast Destroys Us

To:-- Truthout

Re:-- Robert Reich criticizing government bailouts as the source of our woes.

Reich misses the point. It is not that the Dow is up because government is "helping out" Mega Corp. Inc. It's that MegaCorp Inc is PLUNDERING the public treasury.

In other words, in addition to plundering each of us as individuals these same predators are plundering all of us collectively

Cheney happily called "destroying the beast" -- what he really meant is that he and the forces he represents want to destroy America and they are succeeding.

They will continue to succeed until the American people pull their hands out of theiz CheezO bags and do something else with them.

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Moloch's Maw of Health Care

To:-- San Francisco Chronicle

Re:-- Medical Tourism and Comparative Health Care Costs, reporting on the immense price differential for treatment in the United States and just about anywhere else.

Once again, more proof of the utter depravity of the US for profit medical system, doctors included.

Back in July I moved to Canada. I knew our whores in congress would not achieve a rotten thing, and I was right.

The Canadian system proves how the Molochs Maw of avarice is at the root of evil. Medical care (which is state regulated and provided) is affordable; dental care which is not regulated is as expensive as the U.S. But at least Canada joins the whole rest of the world in accepting that medical care is a human right.

All US doctors need to be shipped to Cuba for spiritual reorientation and moral retraining. Medical Insurance companies if they are allowed to exist at all should be subjected to the thumb screws of regulation. Congress needs to be purged, and the Senate abolished.

I'll say it again: the US is in a state of economic, political and moral degeneracy. The health care obscenity is only a part. Wake up people Reclaim your vision and your destiny.

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The Great Sign Robbery

To:-- San Francisco Chronicle

Re:-- "Auschwitz to Beef Up Security" - in wake of theft of "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign which the article "explains" cynically meant "work sets you free". A reader commented on the headline.

Very funny, Finn Fish.... the headline is "spooky"

Well ... the phrase was NOT invented by the Nazis. It had been in use for at least a century and was the correlative to "idleness is the devil's handiwork". The phrase was adopted in 1928 by the Weimar government as a slogan extolling the effects of their desired policy of large-scale public works programmes to end unemployment." The Nazis continued using it as one of their slogans well before 1942 when Auschwitz was first opened.

Ever notice how these stories start getting reported around Christmas time? There were two concentration-camp stories earlier this month, plus articles on Demjanjuk. This Great Sign Robbery has made headlines three days in a row.

What will Christmas Eve bring? More tales bearing grief and atonement?
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Medi-Profit's Maw

To:-- San Francisco Chronicle

Re:-- Medical Tourism (12/21/09), reporting on the pricing of medical procedures in other countries and detailing the beyond belief price gouging and chicanery of the US medico-insurance establishment.


Once again, more proof of the utter depravity of the US for profit medical systeml, doctors included.

Back in July I moved to Canada. I knew our whores in congress would not achieve a rotten thing, and I was right.

The Canadian system proves how the Molochs Maw of avarice is at the root of evil. Medical care (which is state regulated and provided) is affordable; dental care which is not regulated is as expensive as the U.S. But at least Canada joins the whole rest of the world in accepting that medical care is a human right.

All US doctors need to be shipped to Cuba for spiritual reorientation and moral retraining. Medical Insurance companies if they are allowed to exist at all should be subjected to the thumb screws of regulation. Congress needs to be purged, and the Senate abolished.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the US is in a state of economic, political and moral degeneracy. The health care obscenity is only a part. Wake up people! Reclaim your vision and your destiny.

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A Caveman Approach to Housing

To: -- San Francisco Chronicle

Re: -- Big Win for Tenants reporting on Mayor Newsom's promise to veto legislation extending for equal rent control standards to all rental units.

Welcome to Neanderthal Nation. Not only is the United States the only "developed" country in the world not to have universal health care, it is also the only one not to have universal tenant rights. Figures. Needless to say the neanderthals are proud of their primitiveness. Uggghaa Ugghhha Ughhaa Thump Thump Thump

No person's abode should be subject to the vicistudes of the market, much less the idocyncratic vicistudes of landlord moods. Every person deserves security of habitation.

Habitation, no less than health care, should not be an excuse for profiteering. People who want "freedom to play the market" should find other things to invest in.

Of course, landlords are entitled to a reasonable, regulated return on their investment and this includes factoring in the cost, value and condition of the unit. Landlords also require effective protections against having their property trashed.

The way to insure a proper balance is to take landlord tenant issues OUT of our inane and antiquated "justice" system and into a truly impartial adminisrative arbitration board that allows for quick and accessible resolutions of disputes (without lawyers).

A substantial measure of the injustice in landlord-tenant relations is due to the courts themselves with their imbecilic and antiquated procedural requirements to say nothing of paperwork and costs. Courts work only for vested interests and those with money enough to hire lawyers. Most tenants and a substantial number of small landlords have no effective access to the courts and this gives rise to uncertainty, self help and the perceived need for pre-emptive protections against the other side. Obviously such a system is inherently dysfunctional.

Just as obviously, yet another pseudo progressive demorat shows his true colours as go-fer for Big Buck.

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The Fetish of the Health Care Product

To: Truthout
Re: Health Care Should be driven by Mission / Phillip Casper MD,
___describing the corporatization-for-profit of health care in the U.S.

Although Dr. Casper falls into the prevailing habit of describing phenomena in their moral aspect, he is not romanticising anything. At bottom, he is simply describing the effects of what Marx called the Fetish of the Commodity -- i.e., the way in which the capitalist exchange system perpetuates itself by becoming a mental fetish.

Not only do people (including Obama) believe a whole bunch of ridiculous mantras -- such as the "magic of the market place" and the like -- they actually see the world as a matrix of for- profit exchanges and they actually believe that this perception emanates from an unalterable objective reality. Last but not least they believe that this system -- the object of their beholding -- is capable of producing goodness and joy.

The Catholic theologian Von Balthasar went deeper and attributed our moral dysfunctionality to the ruthless reductionism of Cartesian thought, which his mentor, Pope Benedict has written produces pathologies of thought which end up being both unscientific and immoral.

Alas the American mind (such as it is) is incapable of grasping anything larger than a pea. It thinks it can "fix" health care "within the system" without revolutionizing the system of which the broken health care "product" is a manifestation. This atomization of thought produces little more than political heteronomy in which everyone chases willy-nilly after his or her object of desire and personal-validation issue without grasping or dealing with the whole.

By the time the country figures anything out it will be far too late. The US has become a colossal, obnoxious, boring failure. The sooner it self-destructs (which it is doing) the better for all concerned.

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Holo Witch Hunt

To:-- San Francisco Chronicle

Re:-- War Crimes Trial of Demjanuk

This trial is an obscenity - nothing more than holo-witch hunt instigated by Jewish interest groups and inflamed by a willing press.

The US Justice Department already prosecuted Demjanjuk for being a sadistic guard ("Ivan") at another camp. The DOJ did so on the basis of knowingly false testimony. The U.S. Sixth Dist. Court of Appeal found that the DOJ (sic) comitted "fraud on the court" and threw out the conviction.

The DOJ then got its contacts in Israel to bring another case charging Demjanjuk with being a guard at Sobibor. His alleged peripheral participation in genocide is based on vague statements in a confession obtained by Soviet interrogators.

The ISRAELI SUPREME COURT threw out this case because it violated basic principles of Double Jeopardy. It also rejected the DOJ's excuse that it had never heard (sic!) of Sobibor.

But the guilt ridden Germans can always be persuaded & so we all get to watch the nauseating drama of "Witchunt on 34th Street". Merry Xmas
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BBC Coys with the Truth

To:-- BBC News

Re:-- The Man Who smuggled Himself into Auschwitz (2009/11/29), reporting the story of British POW Dennis Avey who "wanted to witness what was going on inside and find out the truth about the gas chambers, so he could tell others."

This is a truly heart-rending story that restores faith in humanity even in the depth of darkness.

But... what was the truth he witnessed "about the gas chambers"? Did he get to see where they were? Did he see victims being led into them?

Since Avey had heard about this terrible secret while he was outside the camp, and since he secreted himself into the camp in order to verify it, surely he got more than simply more hearsay; surely he verified something that explains his 60 year silence.

I sincerely hope BBC isn't withholding the answer just to boost its ratings.
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Spotting the Real Loonie

To:--San Francisco Chronicle

Re:--The Inexplicably Anti-American Encounter between Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Ahmadinejad

The unmistakable thrust of your report is to infuse your readers with the notion that two hot-headed, anti-American (and, lest we never forget, anti-Semitic) crazies are conspiring together for no good reason to create mischief in South America.

What your article does not disclose is that the U.S. has (1) reactivated the Fourth Fleet (Carribean) and (2) established a base in Columbia for "full spectrum" forces. For those who haven' a clue -- "full spectrum" operations are what we are doing in Iraq and Afpakistan; i.e., promoting chaos and control.

Under cover of the "war on drugs" = the U.S. is getting ready to destabilize the region (Bolivia, Ecuador, Columbia and Venezuela) in order to seize its resources.

The article does not disclose that to protect itself Venezuela has also bought arms/firmed up relations with Russia, Spain, and Brazil. This is not a question of "two loonies"

The only loonies here are the US and Israel. A US willing to destabilize a continent and and paranoid delusional Israel itching to bomb Iran.-- Iran has no desire to cut off oil. What will send the price of oil through the roof and trigger a permanent depression are the lunatics in Jerusalem.

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