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Subject: swagger
Without swagger, the avian flu would be just another virus that gives your average chicken an excuse to skip work and not cross any roads for a few days. Throw in some swagger, and you've got a global pandemic that could kill half of those it infects. Woohoo!
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Subject: White banking?
Banking for broads
We've got women's colleges, women's gyms -- and women's blogs -- so why not women's banks? Today's Telegraph reports that Astrid Hastreiter, a 41-year-old information technology specialist from Germany, has founded "Frauenbank," a she-centric bank designed to "liberate female customers from dealing with patronizing, traditional bank managers."
Though Hastreiter still needs to raise the equivalent of $12 million in order to pay for a full-service banking license, Frauenbank's first branch -- in Munich -- has already attracted 300 customers. Who are they? According to Hastreiter, her clients are overwhelmingly university educated and between the ages of 30 and 55. "It is extraordinary how many German women avoid talking about their money and what to do with it, simply because they are not keen to sit opposite a sharp-suited banker who has little understanding of their needs," she tells reporter Kate Connolly. Indeed, buoyed by the public's positive response, Hastreiter intends to open three more branches of Frauenbank in other German cities and to offer credit by the year 2007.
Could an all-woman bank have crossover appeal? Of course, says Hastreiter -- in fact, already, "a handful" of Frauenbank's customers are male. "We are women friendly, but that does not mean that we are hostile to men," she explains.
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Subject: fag mountain
steers and queers
I'd like to see Sandy Dixon say "A cowboy who's lusting after his buddy isn't fit to wear cowboy boots" to some of the men down at the Rainbow Cattle Company here in Austin. If he actually had the balls to do it, he'd likely find one of those boots in his backside.
-- deno [Premium Member]
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Subject: secession - part of the plan
Not All Secessionists Are Created Equal
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 09:35 AM
From Forrest McDonald's Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (1982 paperback edition, p. 359), writing about the attempt by the New England Federalists to secede from the union after Jefferson's election in 1800:
"Northern Federalists, convinced that Jefferson and the Republicans would destroy everything they held dear, had regarded the Louisiana Purchase as the last straw: it fundamentally altered the constitutional compact . . . . Under the leadership of [U.S. Senator from Massachussetts] Timothy Pickering, New England Federalists decided that the only way to save the Union was to leave it -- to secede and form a separate country of which New York would become a part."
Note that the man who has been described as America's greatest historian of the Constitution calls it a voluntary compact between the states, and correctly notes that any state that voluntarily entered the compact was assumed to be entitled to leave on its own volition as well. He praises the New England Federalists here, since he is a Hamilton worshipper and a Jefferson hater. Separating from the Jeffersonians of the South would have been a good thing to do, McDonald suggests, and it would have been a right that was assumed by everyone at the time to be enjoyed by the citizens of all the states.
The New Enlanders debated secession for more than a decade and eventually decided against it for practical political and economic reasons. But Forrest McDonald's beloved Hamiltonians, champions of protectionism, central banking, corporate welfare, and a monopolistic or "consolidated" central government, finally won out in the end. As he writes (approvingly) on page 362: "The Civil War brought the triumph of the Hamiltonian way, leaving Jefferson's beloved South a wretched and accursed backwater. The rest of the nation moved on toward greatness." (Yeah, like the "greatness" of the Spanish-American War, our stupid and diabolical entry into World War I, the Great Depression, which was caused by Hamilton's beloved central bank, and WW II). Great.
Like all other totalitarian regimes the Republican Party, run by the New England Yankee ideologues, made sure that a massive re-education campaign and the rewriting of history would take place. As McDonald describes it -- again, very approvingly: "[Hamilton] got his just deserts because most of american history was written by New England Yankees who . .. almost uniformly idoloized him."
Gee, I wonder if this generational brainwashing has anything to do with the reasons why so many Americans -- even many self-described libertarians -- are so ignorant of the Jeffersonian, states' rights tradition of limited, decentralized government, and its opposition to central banking, promotion of free trade, and deep suspicion of governmental activism in general? Just a thought.
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Subject: our government
Military Intelligence (and Other Oxymorons)
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 01:18 PM
Yesterday's Baltimore Sun had an article about a new nature preserve on the eastern shore of Maryland, across the Potomac from Quantico, Virginia. I seems that there are literally hundreds of sunken boats and ships of all descriptions in a shallow bay there, some of which date back to the Revolutionary War. Trees are growing out of the ancient, rotting hulls, and fish and wildlife are flourishing. Nature lovers in the region are thrilled about the new park.
Buried in the middle of the story was a description of the largest source of the sunken ships: a collosal waste of taxpayers' dollars during World War I. The feds hired a contractor to build 400 wooden ships that would supposedly zip across the Atlantic so fast that the German submarines couldn't catch them, and they could supply the British with armaments and other supplies. All 400 ships were built, and the contractor became a very rich man, but NONE of them could float. Every one of them sprang a leak. So the government engaged in a version of throwing your trash out the window of your pickup truck onto a public highway: it dumped all 400 leaky vessels in one spot in the bay that would become a Maryland nature preserve some 85 years later. And that was just the beginning of the military/industrial complex.
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Subject: Republican Party funds la Raza
GOP Also Funds the Far Left
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 09:59 PM
Marcus Epstein informs me that according to a Dec. 2 article in Human Events, the GOP not only hands out hundreds of millions to private companies who then cook up pro-war propaganda in Iraq, but it also funds various far-left organizations. Human Events reports that the National Council of La Raza ("the race") just got a $4 million grant from the Republican Congress which will partly be used to lobby for including illegal immigrants on the welfare rolls of the states -- one of the priorities of the "Council."
For the past 20 years or so the GOP has worked diligently to increase its share of the black vote from 1% to 1.5%. Congratulations Bushites everywhere. With that great political success under its belt it is now apparently willing to spend any amount of our money to increase its share of the Hispanic vote as well, regardless of the effects on the rest of society. Wadda they care? Power is all that matters to these turkeys.
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Subject: National (jew) Review
NR turn fifty
Posted by Norman Singleton at 08:31 PM
and puts out a special issue where, in an article on 10 ways to increase liberty, Robert Bork says we should reimpose censorship to restore our freedom to not be offended by indecent expression. In the same piece, David Frum recommends a national ID card, after all, since the state is going to monitor us anyway, it enhances liberty to make the surveillance state as efficient as possible!
NR does make a few gestures toward (regime) libertarianism. For example, Stephen Moore suggests it would increase liberty if Congress voted against all unconstitutional spending bills (Moore does not mention it, but there is already a Congressman who does this, his name is Ron Paul) and Jacob Sullivan calls for ending the drug war. Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose is listed as one of the most influential conservative books of the last fifty years, as is Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions, and Charles Murry's Losing Ground.
However, the list of great books also includes two Straussian tracks: Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided and Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. In his tribute to Jaffa, Charles Kesler celebrates how Jaffa's Lincoln-worshiping vanquished "neo-confederacy" among NR's writers and readers.
Finally, the NR Comintern has shoved Joe Sobran, America's finest writer, down the memory hole.
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Subject: how it works
Michael Kinsley on the Beltway: "It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system - your connections in it, and your understanding of it - for personal profit.
"And it remains true, sort of, but faster. Even the appalling Jack Abramoff had ideals at one point. But he took a shortcut straight to corruption. On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25th anniversary in January. Reagan and Co. arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him.
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Subject: censorship popular among cons
G. Gordon Liddy has also advocated press censorship on his show, and today, Rush Limbaugh said Congressman Jack Murtha, who has advocated an end to the war, should be associated with the "T word" (Treason).
The neocons really are the Party of Lincoln. Abe had his torture chambers in the U.S, although it was Northern civilians who were tortured, not combatants; press censorship in the North was pervasive, with over 300 newspapers shut down; he deported a congressman who, like today's Congressman Murtha, simply called for an end to the war; and he stated that even remaining silent when the war was being discussed is an act of treason (which is punishable by death according to the Constitution). And, Abe wanted to find 10 percent of the southern adult male population to be the "majority" that ruled over the rest, with the strict guidance of the Republican Party. If this sounds familiar, an almost identical idea is called "democracy in Iraq" by blabbering jackasses like Rush, Liddy, Hannity, and all the rest of the state's media mouthpieces.Michael Kinsley on the Beltway: "It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system - your connections in it, and your understanding of it - for personal profit.
"And it remains true, sort of, but faster. Even the appalling Jack Abramoff had ideals at one point. But he took a shortcut straight to corruption. On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25th anniversary in January. Reagan and Co. arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him.
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Subject: pay per press
In March, 2000, Alexander Cockburn reported (in CounterPunch) the findings of a Dutch journalist who had discovered military personnel from the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, working as employees at CNN headquarters in Atlanta in the production of news stories.
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Subject:
re: Rothbard on Persuading the State
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 09:57 AM
As a footnote to J.H. Huebert's post below about the futility of trying to educate politicians on doing the right thing with regard to economic policy, I can't help but point out the equally futile enterprise of preaching the Constitution to them. The Heritage Foundation just published a very large book of essays on the Constitution, and Cato has been distributing mini-copies of the document for years. The assumption behind this Giant Waste of Money is that politicians will somehow have one of those "I should've had a V-8" moments, slap themselves on their foreheads, and begin enforcing the Constitution. Yeah, and elephants might fly out of my ears someday.
All of this wasted time and money is a direct result of the fact that even most libertarians are ignorant about America's true constitutional history, having been brainwashed in the New England version of history. The real history is that the founders always intended the Constituton to be enforced by state and local political communities. The central government was created as the agent of the citizens of the respective states, who delegated only a few enumerated powers to it. That's the most important aspect of federalism, or states' rights as it should be called. But this means of enforcing the Constituton was destroyed at gunpoint in 1865, and ever since then talk of constitutonal government has only been just that -- talk.
Cato is sincere but misguided in its Quixotic efforts, but I suspect that what drives Heritage is its desire to dupe older (and wealthy) conservatives and libertarians into writing big checks to Heritage, seduced by the fine-sounding constitutionalist rhetoric. It can then use their money to promote such unconstitutional policies as the war in Iraq and the imperialistic quest for "global democracy." This of course would require a government so massive that there would be absolutely nothing at all left of Constitutional constraints on government.
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Subject: Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton and the dirty deeds of the fur the children crowd
Hillary and "Protection" of Children
Posted by William L. Anderson at December 1, 2005 08:39 AM
Norman's post is spot on. Let us recall that Hillary Clinton pushed for Janet Reno to become U.S. Attorney General in 1993 because Reno was "good on children's issues." Why did Hillary consider her to be "good"? It seems that Reno as state's attorney in Dade County, Florida, was at the forefront of the child molestation witch hunts during the 1980s. That mean malicious prosecutions against day care owners based upon "testimony" from very young children that was extracted from them by government social workers.
Those of you not familiar with what happened was that social workers would take children one by one, and browbeat them until the kids came up with fantastic stories of all sorts of things (which I will not mention here, except to say that the stories seemed to be the same across the country) that were supposed to have happened that, when one applies simple logic, were impossible.
In one case, Reno accused a couple of molestation and had the wife, an 18-year-old Honduran immigrant, held without bond, naked in a jail cell (in full view of male guards) for a year. Finally, after Reno told her that she would remain in this situation until she was willing to testify as to what Reno wanted to hear, the woman broke and "testified" against her husband. (She since has recanted.) This was not the only lying and malicious prosecution on Reno's watch, but one of the most notorious.
Of course, after taking office, one of the first things she did was to massacre dozens of children at Waco, and then lied about the whole thing. Jim Bovard and Judge Andrew Napolitano have documented many of Reno's crimes in their various books.
So, at least we have an idea of what Hillary means by "protecting the children": falsely accuse people, commit murder, massacre children -- and watch the adoring media swoon.
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Subject: transfer tax, by greedy govt
Thou Shall Not Steal, Either
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 06:48 PM
Lew is right: The gang of criminals and killers known as "government" dwarfs any malfeasance by any individual citizen. An good example was in the news here in Maryland recently. A title company was the victim of a class-action lawsuit by one of those left-wing public interest law firms that accused the company of overcharging settlement fees at real estate closings. After reading about this off and on for about two years, an article appeared last week explaining that the title company finally gave up and paid a $2 million "settlement" where $265 went to each of seven thousand former clients, and loads of cash went the the "public interest" lawyers.
The title company never admitted guilt, and is probably simply another corporate victim of legalized extortion at the hands of the legal profession. That doesn't matter, though, since most who have read about this will assume that it was guilty of something.
$2 million. That's chump change compared to the BIG Rripoff of Maryland homebuyers (and sellers) that is administered by the state government of Maryland. It's called the "tranfer tax." In order to sell your house you and the buyer must hand over 2% of the sales price to the state if you want to transfer ownership.
Let's see, in the affluent D.C. suburbs of Maryland the average house price has to be at least $350,000 (twice that and more in some counties). Two percent of that is $7000. For the same 7000 housing transactions that were a part of the class-action lawsuit the buyers (who normally pay the title fees)would have paid $49,000,000 (7000 buyers x $7000 per transaction)in "transfer taxes," more than twenty-four times what the title company paid in its settlement. THAT'S where the REAL criminality lies in the Maryland real estate racket.
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Subject: nigger chaser invented
Buzz off! 'Mosquito' aims to drive away teens
Device's inventor claims ultrasonic sounds audible only to young people
Dec. 2: A store owner in Britain is using high-pitched sounds to keep rowdy teens from hanging around. NBC's Ned Colt reports.
LONDON - A Welsh inventor claims to have found the perfect solution to rowdy youngsters — noise.
Howard Stapleton says his device, the "Mosquito," emits an uncomfortable high-pitched ultrasonic sound that can be heard by children and teenagers but almost no one over 30.
It has successfully driven away noisy teens from a grocery store in the Welsh town of Barry and a shop in Stapleton's home town Merthyr Tydfil, making smoking, lounging and foul-mouthed youths a thing of the past.
Story continues below ? advertisement
The ability to hear high frequencies deteriorates with age, but some adults might still be able to hear the Mosquito. No one except young troublemakers appears annoyed, however.
"All I'm getting is pats on the back," Stapleton told Reuters. “No bricks thrown at me yet.”
He said teenagers he had talked to welcomed the device too, because they used to be intimidated by gangs hanging around the shops.
The Mosquito has turned Stapleton into a media star, with appearances on British TV and radio and interest from as far afield as Australia, the United States and Canada.
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