The Zenzoid Files

Crisis creation; crisis solution: this is a favorite tactic that governments around the globe have, at one time or another, unleashed on its citizen-victims… and the Ameedican gubmint has taken it to a fine art. Jim Babka, of DownsizeDC.org, nails it right on:

Please share with concerned friends . . .

Subject: Making illegal things legal using fear and fraud, plus other urgent stuff

President Bush wants Congress to legalize his illegal spying on Americans. The current vehicle for doing this is HR 3138. The fuel for driving this vehicle is fear and fraud.

Recently, the TSA reported that terrorists have been conducting dry runs in airports preparatory to a new attack. These supposed dry runs were no such thing. One involved a leaky ice-bottle, the other involved Wisconsin cheese in a suitcase next to cell phone equipment.

The TSA determined immediately that they were NOT dry runs, but a report was leaked to the media saying the exact opposite. We assert that these false reports were designed to induce fear.

If Americans can be made to feel fear, another power grab can be justified. Legalizing illegal spying is the power grab that’s on the table at the moment. There’s a push to pass HR 3138 before the Congressional recess. If we can keep this from happening now we have a great chance of preventing it forever.

Reject fear. Reject fraud. Make Congress fear you instead. Send them a message telling them you oppose HR 3138.

The campaign we have for this issue is somewhat obsolete, and we don’t have time to update it. But it doesn’t matter — you can still use it to send a message to Congress. Just add to your personal comments that you oppose HR 3138.

You can send your message here.

Meanwhile, the heat is still on with regard to the two issues we mentioned yesterday. We need to keep telling Congress that they must NOT add grassroots regulations to the ethics bill.

You can do that here.

We must also keep telling Congress we want them to restore habeas corpus and dismantle the military tribunals. Tell them you support . . .

* S. 576 to dismantle the military tribunals
* S. 185 to restore habeas corpus

You can do that here.

Time is short. Votes are near. Please hit Congress on all three issues if you possibly can.

Thank you for being a DC Downsizer.

Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

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My priest and good friend, Fr. Andrew Tregubov, was recently invited to give a talk on Soviet History at Woodstock High School in Woodstock, VT. Thanks to his new recording toy that his family gave him for his birthday, he was able to make a recording of it.

Life in the Soviet Union was basically one big prison camp with government surveilling and controlling virtually every aspect of life for a typical Soviet citizen. Using examples from his experiences both as a slave in the Soviet Union and right here in modern-day Ameedica, Fr. explained how *all* governments are, by their very nature, fundamentally parasites at best, and outright predators in the worst cases; all governments use coercion and deception to control and manipulate their citizen-victims. This includes the Ameedican government which has been in full-out predator mode since the war of Yankee Aggression. When states who had voluntarily entered the Union were not allowed to legally succeed from that Union but, instead were forced by fire and sword to remain in the Union, then the federal government became a predator, a wild beast concerned only with power, getting it and keeping it, and feeding on those weaker than itself. It became the feral gubmint.

The talk is about an hour and twenty minutes long and goes by really fast. It’s an engaging and thought-provoking talk that everyone should listen to. I’ve already listened to it twice. You can download the MP3 file of the talk here (47 mb) and play it on your compooter or your favorite MP3 player.

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Ron Paul grassroots support proved: “

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) drew a crowd of 150 supporters to Pembroke, N.H., late Saturday night to support his potential bid for the Republican Presidential nomination.

The fundraising reception, organized by a supporter and held at a private home, raised over $14,000 for Paul’s campaign.

Paul, who was originally scheduled to speak from 9 to 10 p.m., stayed late and greeted supporters until almost midnight, as late arrivals streamed in from the nearby New Hampshire Liberty Forum in Concord.

‘He is a living, breathing, elected, example of what our founding fathers had in mind for limited government,’ said Ed Naile, chairman of the Coalition for New Hampshire Taxpayers. ‘You won’t see much in the press about it, but 150 is quite a large crowd for a Congressman this early in the campaign. Enough to make some of his issues part of the debate on the Republican side, I would say.’

‘Paul’s message can unite fiscal conservatives, republicans, libertarians, constitutionalists, and others who are disillusioned with the direction in which the country is headed, in the cause of less government and reasonable spending and on getting the country back on track with regard to foreign policy,’ said CNHT board member Jane Aitken. ‘Finally a candidate we can all get behind.’

CNHT does not endorse candidates for public office but its members do arrange meetings with them and comment on them as individuals, Aitken said.

‘For most of history people have lived under tyranny,’ Paul said. ‘The world still lives under tyranny, and our country is is coming closer to that every day.

‘Our numbers are growing and we’re trying to stop that movement away from liberty.’

Paul received repeated rounds of applause for his limited-government stance, backed by his decades-long voting record in Congress, where he’s known as ‘Dr. No’ for voting against bills he believes are unconstitutional. ‘I give a lot of speeches on the House floor and nobody’s there, nobody claps,’ Paul said of his colleagues. ‘Here, everybody claps.’

Paul also spoke Sunday morning at the closing ceremony of the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, drawing a crowd of nearly 350 attendees and supporters, who also clapped and gave two standing ovations.

‘I believe there is a fertile field out there for our message,’ he said.

‘My goal was not only to run on a serious platform, but to stick to what I said when I got there,’ Paul said of his time in Congress. ‘I had no desire to be in office if I had to cave in and pander and say what each group wants to hear.’

Paul spoke out against the Iraq war, calling for the U.S. to bring the troops home and to revamp foreign policy to emphasize peace and trade rather than nation-building and ‘you do it our way or we’re going to bomb you’ intervention in other countries’ affairs, noting that the Republican Party has historically been the beneficiary of anti-war movements.

‘We need to understand why the terrorists are anxious to come here,’ he said. ‘They came over here because we were over there [before 9/11]. They want to bleed us. They don’t want the war to end. The worst thing that could happen to Al-Qaeda would be for the war to end.’

Paul also called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve System and the return to the gold standard, currency backed by intrinsically valuable precious commodities, accurately noting that the Federal Reserve caused and exacerbated the Great Depression. ‘Money created out of thin air is so evil and wicked,’ he said. ‘This is how big government is financed.’

Few understand this truth about fiat money such as current U.S. dollars, he said. ‘It’s eroding our standard of living today and people don’t know why,’ he said.

He also railed against the expanding nanny state. ‘Freedom works,’ he said. ‘If you don’t have the nanny state, lo and behold, somebody just might get medical care without the government. It’s already been proven that you can get educated without the government. Our best hospitals are usually associated with the name of a church. Never was a patient turned away. Today it’s harder to get medical care than ever before.’

Like John Stossel the night before, Ron Paul emphasized that the free market can solve virtually any societal problem, so long as government keeps its distance and resists the temptation to make matters worse with its attempts to fix things, and that governments which follow such a socialist path always fail.

‘[Economist Ludwig von] Mises told us many years before that it would collapse, that communism would not work because it’s fatally flawed,’ he said. ‘Their philosophy was a failed philosophy and was doomed to fail. It’s softer here, but it’s just as seriously flawed.’

Paul didn’t officially announce his candidacy, but said he would remain ‘engaged’ and sources close to the campaign say that he expects to make an announcement within the next two weeks.

‘We have had presidents who have tried to do too much,’ he said. ‘How can I run for office and say I want to be a weak president? We need a strong president, strong enough to resist the temptation of taking power the President shouldn’t have.’

Michael Badnarik, 2004 Libertarian Party presidential candidate, officially endorsed Ron Paul for President on Friday at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, drawing mostly support from attendees but some ire from within the LP.

Paul will appear in a televised presidential debate April 4 on CNN.

”

(Via Homeland Stupidity.)

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The tension we see today between the Ameedican Establishment and Russia is just a continuation of the millennial tension between Western and Eastern Christianity. I don’t mean to imply that it’s theological– heh, I wouldn’t know a theological argument if it burrowed into one ear and out the other. No, we live in a post-Christian world. But Eastern and Western Christianity have left their thumbprints in their respective post-Christian cultures. Ameedica, like it’s Western European forebears, does not understand the Orthodox (or post-Orthodox) Christian worlds and never has. The same barbarian mentality that led to the sacking of (Eastern Orthodox) Constantinople by Roman Catholic armies is very much alive and thriving today (remember Kosovo– another Eastern Orthodox enclave abused by the West). Keep this in mind as you read this illuminating article from Daniel Larison, a history student at University of Chicago.

Persecuting Putin: ”

Since his rise to the Russian presidency in late 1999, Vladimir Putin has represented to the Western media and political class an infuriating obstacle that needs to be removed and a kind of politics that they regard as utterly abhorrent. Increasingly savage criticisms of Putin and his regime have over the past 4-5 years flooded the pages of a certain kind of putatively conservative magazine and newspaper—periodicals which evinced little interest in Russia when it was being misgoverned by the inebriated Boris Yeltsin, and looted by the Communist kleptocrats he put in charge of ‘privatizing’ (i.e. confiscating) its massive state enterprises.

The new preoccupation with how well Russia is being governed, and how freely its smaller political parties can express their opinions is relatively new—and, I would argue has little or nothing to do with any particular concern about Putin’s heavy-handed and admittedly increasingly populist-authoritarian rule. Writers really concerned about human rights have much more serious matters with which to concern themselves than the fortunes of a few imprisoned or otherwise thwarted oligarchs—whose Swiss bank accounts are stuffed with money stolen from Russia’s citizens, monies they use to fund ‘opposition’ movements which are little more than front-groups working for special interests. One hears little from such writers about the virtual genocide in Darfur or the persecution of Christians in China—much more atrocious abuses by far more reprehensible regimes.

Then what is it that motivates the new ‘Russia hawks’ who populate the British and American press with grim warnings of the ‘threat’ posed by an allegedly resurgent Russian bear? There are several factors at work, I would argue. In no particular order, I would cite:

• A lingering post-Cold War suspicion of Russia.

• A not-so-latent Russophobia cultivated in America and in most Western European countries.

• The geostrategic designs of proponents of activist foreign policy in the United States.

• The schemes treasured by Europeans who wish to expand the social democratic project of the European Union eastwards to the Urals.

Media objections to the moves by Putin against billionaire oligarch Khodorkovsky and his oil company, Yukos—to take one famous example, did not center on whether they were damaging Russia or retarding her development (though they might be)—but that Putin’s moves were making the Russian state strong and capable of resisting the preferred policies of his critics.

Something that became perfectly clear early on to most Russians was that Western backers of privatization, liberalization and ‘reform’ and their Russian counterparts were supremely uninterested in the well-being of Russia and Russians. Rather, like the transnational elites in the West who were supporting these policies and whose example Russian ‘liberals’ sought to follow, the ‘reformers’ desired to exploit Russian resources in the name of abstract ‘growth’ that never included reinvestment and real development of any part of the Russian economy. The insidious and self-serving collaboration between the oligarchs who raped Russia during the ‘90s under the guise of ‘privatization’ and the proponents of Russian liberalism (or, more often, the advocacy of ‘liberal democratic’ reforms by the oligarchs themselves) had two goals:

• To diffuse political power away from the center, which would work to the advantage of the oligarchs’ building up their own fiefdoms free from central interference.

• To conceal the predatory and criminal practices of men who are scarcely better than mobsters under the sacred mantle of ‘the free market,’ whose attempted regulation would automatically be denounced as a return to the bad old days of the USSR.

Because a relatively strong, assertive Russia poses an unacceptable threat to the ability of Washington and Brussels to dominate their desired spheres of influence in post-Soviet space, every policy from Moscow that appears to advance the interests of such a relatively strong Russia is viewed as hostile in Western capitals and receives almost unremittingly negative coverage in the Western press. The anti-Russian view, as a matter of U.S. foreign policy, enjoys a wide range of bipartisan support (as do most of the positions tied up with current American aggressive interventionist foreign policy).

This is true even of politicians whose views are otherwise largely admirable—captive as many of them are to the neoconservative fantasy that all the earth must be remade along American lines. Think of former Sen. Rick Santorum, who routinely listed Russia on his list of America’s enemies—alongside North Korea, Iran and Venezuela during his pretentious ‘gathering storm’ speaking tour and afterwards.’ Earlier this year, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden (D-DE), stated bluntly that he believed President Bush should have a ‘direct confrontation’ with Putin over his international consolidation of power. Rather than being examples of extreme or unrepresentative fringes in their thinking about U.S. foreign policy, Santorum and Biden represent different parts of what is very much a consensus view about the Russian government. Ideologues who imagine that U.S. foreign policy should (or could) serve to democratize the planet and spread ‘American values’ work together with cold-eyed nationalists who seek to ensure that that the U.S. remains the unchallenged, single superpower in the world—a goal which was frankly admitted in the infamous 2002 National Security Strategy. Members of each group share a common antipathy to Putin’s Russia because it represents one of the single greatest barriers and potential threats to their goals.’

Every action undertaken by the Putin regime, whether at home or abroad, has been fitted into a pessimistic narrative of the re-freezing of Russo-American relations and revived geopolitical rivalry, and this narrative has served as a self-fulfilling prophecy as it has poisoned American and European minds against Russia. Every apparent reaction against Putin at home or in Russia’s near-abroad in the former Soviet republics has been hailed by the Western press and Western political leaders as evidence of ‘pro-Western,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘democratic’ and ‘capitalist’ resistance against resurgent authoritarian statism.

It is for this reason that the appalling, corrupt nationalist, Viktor Yushchenko, whose bigoted supporters make Bolivian President Evo Morales’ voters appear liberal and cosmopolitan, was made into a hero and near-martyr of liberal democracy in Ukraine during the so-called ‘Orange Revolution.’ Looking at the politics of the leading members of the 2004 Orange coalition, it would have been more accurate to call it a red-brown revolution.

As this supposed resistance has weakened or disappeared in the past two years with the collapse of the Orange governing coalition over Yushchenko’s appointment of his former rival, Yanukovych, to be prime minister, and the economic and political isolation of Saakashvili’s Georgia last year, Western scrutiny and criticism of the Putin regime have increased—as if to take up the slack. 2006 saw a number of events in Russia or in some way related to Russia that Western journalists, pundits and politicians have used to increase suspicion of the Putin regime and force Russia into increased isolation from and opposition to the West, such as Moscow’s recent decision to off gas supplies to Belarus>(and, thus, to countries farther west as well), its embargo imposed on Georgia, the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the radiation poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. The exploitation of these events to fan the flames of anti-Russian sentiment (and thus encourage an equally irrational anti-Western backlash in Russia) serves the interests of neither country. However, it certainly does conform very well to the policy aspirations of different interested parties in the West that would like to see Russia cut off, cornered and on the defensive.

The most well-known of those recent episodes was the radiation poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB operative and long-time Putin critic with ties to the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Posing as an independent journalist, Litvinenko helped propagate Berezovsky’s fairly outlandish tale that the Moscow apartment bombings of September 1999, which the Russian government blamed on Chechen terrorists, had been the work of the FSB (formerly the KGB) security and intelligence service. Once Litvinenko became ill from his poisoning and died, after garnering tremendous media attention in Britain and throughout the West, the predictable accusations that Putin had ordered his death began flying. At the time of this writing, the investigation is still ongoing and it remains unclear exactly what role Litvinenko’s allies and rogue FSB agents may have had in Litvinenko’s death, but so far nothing substantive has been made public that corroborates the reflexive reaction of blaming the Putin regime.

Regardless, thanks to six years of a steady drumbeat of warnings about Putin’s authoritarianism and the supposed menace a ‘new Russian imperialism’ poses to Europe, the former Soviet republics and, ultimately, the entire world, the unsubstantiated claim that the Kremlin authorized the exceedingly clumsy, public murder of Litvinenko seemed only too plausible to people who have been conditioned to think of Putin as a new Stalin.

What of the truth of Berezovsky and Litvinenko’s claims?’ According to the government, the 1999 Moscow bombings had been masterminded by Amir Khattab, a Saudi Arabian Salafist jihadi who had taken up the Chechen cause in the name of Islamic radicalism, and given Khattab’s previous history and the increased Islamicisation of the Chechen cause in the 1990s this remains the most plausible explanation for the attacks. The bombings led directly to the resumption of open hostilities in Chechnya. The Moscow bombings had come shortly after Chechen rebels had begun to infiltrate neighboring Dagestan where a bombing earlier in the month had prompted Russian military action. It was the potential destabilization of Dagestan, which was and is, like Chechnya, a part of the Russian Federation, that represented the real provocation to Moscow to resume the war against Chechen separatists—not the Moscow attacks. Because of the very real human rights abuses that have occurred during the prosecution of the Chechen wars—as they have happened in Iraq, by the way—Western public opinion has tended to look favorably on reports that cast the Russian government’s methods and motives in the worst possible light, which has played very well into the hands of anti-Russian forces.

This brings us to Western agitation about Chechnya. Chechnya has been a preoccupation of certain influential and prominent American Russophobes in particular at least since the start of the Second Chechen War. Sen. John McCain, one of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination in 2008, was already on a tear about Russian depredations in Chechnya in his 2000 campaign and gave indications during the campaign that he considered it an important priority to intervene in Chechnya in some manner to bring an end to the war there. As some will recall, Sen. McCain was at that time the poster boy for aggressive, neoconservative foreign policy activists inside the Republican Party, and his hard line on Chechnya matched the long-running neoconservative interest in encircling, containing and weakening post-Soviet Russia that recurred throughout the ‘90s. Beginning with the infamous 1990 Wolfowitz Memo, which laid out a proposal for massive military buildups and interventions in the non-Russian republics, it continued throughout the decade and included brazen, full-throated neoconservative support for the U.S. and NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999 respectively. Praise for the Chechen cause, descriptions of Chechnya’s ‘president,’ Aslan Maskhadov, as a freedom fighter, and apologias for Chechen terrorism (which none of the writers would have accepted on behalf of, say, Palestinians or anti-American terrorists), became regular staples of neoconservative commentary for a decade. Their most frequent outlet was the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, a veritable fountain of pro-oligarch and anti-Putin articles. Many prominent neoconservatives, such as Midge Decter, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and Bill Kristol, among many others, joined together with others after the start of the second war in Chechnya to continue their blatant anti-Russian campaigning by forming the euphemistically-named organization, American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus.

Much as many of these same people were eager to break Kosovo off from Serbia proper as a way of weakening a state whose government they wanted to see brought to heel, the ACPC’s goal of aiding Chechen separatism and terrorism has the clear goal of increasing political fragmentation inside Russia and inciting ethnic resentments of minority groups against Russia in an effort to foment internal disorder and achieve the eventual break-up of the Russian Federation.

It is in the context of such dangerous and provocative anti-Russian Western activism that Americans and Europeans need to view the inevitably heavily biased reporting, frequently excessive criticism and ideologically and politically driven commentary that seek to make Putin’s regime appear somehow uniquely abominable and seeks to make Russia, a natural ally against jihadis, once more into an implacable enemy. This does not require us to endorse all of the Putin regime’s actions, nor does it mean that Americans should ignore when legitimate American interests do conflict with those of Russia, as will sometimes happen, but it does require us to be wary about trusting the obsessive vilification of another nation and another government when tension and conflict between America and Russia serve the interests of neither great nation.

Daniel Larison is a doctoral candidate in Byzantine history at the University of Chicago.’ He blogs at Eunomia

{extended}
”

(Via Taki’s Top Drawer.)

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Why can’t Americans see what’s coming?: “

‘The American public and the US Congress are getting their backs up about the Bush Regime’s determination to escalate the war in Iraq. A Massive protest demonstration is occurring in Washington DC today, and Congress is expressing its disagreement with Bush’s decision to intensify the war in Iraq.This is all to the good. However, it misses the real issue — the Bush Regime’s looming attack on Iran.’ (01/28/07)

”

(Via Rational Review - Commentary.)

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I must have taken some real bad acid ‘cuz it seems like I’ve entered Bizarro World. In the UK, simply making a racist remark warrants police action. But, if I were a cop, I’d much rather go after these kinds of “criminals” as opposed to, oh I dunno, real criminals. You might actually get hurt going after those people!

Get ready, Ameedica, this is a glimpse at your coming police state.

Police contact Big Brother’s Jade: “Police investigating alleged racism on Celebrity Big Brother make contact with former contestant Jade Goody.”

(Via BBC News.)

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powered by ODEO

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First your money, then your children’s minds (via government schools), now they want your actual children! Awaken, ye sheeple, for Big Brother cometh for you and your loved ones.

Babies ‘removed to meet targets’: “Young children are being removed from their parents so that councils can meet adoption targets, MPs claim.”

(Via BBC News.)

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Granted that government is an abstraction, we see that assiduity is of finite durability. This is our premise. If assiduity’s expectations are engaged, then government is exhalted. We see how government, and its invariant tendencies, can be ignored. The presence of government’s assiduity is coherent in government’s physical instance, referential to the coherentism of assiduity’s justification. It is quite a contradiction!

Today, while looking at my journal, I am enlightened. Where there was pacification, now exists the disfavor of amelioration. We make no real progress. For example, we find assiduity a normative condition for government’s reference. This revelation of government’s meaning is beautiful to me. I am at peace.

However, what we appreciate most about government is the common fact that it is obscured. Does it not follow that assiduity seldom counteracts government? Slowly, we formulate an answer. We ultimately appease assiduity, merely through placation of government’s own refinement. We follow cleverness.

Elsie will be rewarded well tonight by her insite into this subject. Without assiduity, we have no juxtaposition in government. No normative outcome is possible without further analysis. There is no assiduity in which government is favored, except that state where government presumes leadership. She must re-invent the meaning of government, and find assiduity’s corresponding influences.

When influenced by cleverness, we act correctly. If assiduity is a viewpoint for government, then government must be a viewpoint for cleverness. Such is cleverness’s typical assiduity. (Understanding will come — be patient. ) The normative requisition of assiduity is unfair, unless fairness is presupposed in government’s mediating influence over assiduity.

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Stephen Colbert is one funny dude. Check out this video of his schtick at the White House Press Correspondent Roast.

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The future of Amerika?

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FT.com / World / Oil

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There’s another Nanny-bill up for hearings in Concord.  This is House Bill 1711 which, in keeping with the current fashion trend, is named after a little girl, Amilia’s Law.  The bill seeks to require licensing for tradesmen who work with natural gas or propane. The language of the bill is broad enough to include any tradesman whose work involves gas in any way: plumbers, appliance repair techs, construction crewmen, excavators, and carpenters to name but a few.

The gist is that the Luhrmanns were having some remodeling done. As part of the demolition and cleanup, a carpenter accidentally cut a propane line while doing some demolition (it’s not even clear he was aware the line was cut because the gas was off at the time and the noisy, dirty nature of doing demolition work). Family comes up (from Massachusetts), turns on the gas and the furnace and BOOM.  Everyone escaped except their little daughter. For more information read, “Parents call propane bill a lifesaver,” by Kathryn Marchocki, in the Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006 edition of the Union Leader [link].

The story is tragic but the solution is, yet again, moronic. Even if this bill were in force at the time of the accident, it would NOT have prevented this disaster! The carpenter doing the demolition would have had no reason to seek such training. And, as mentioned, it’s not even clear that he was aware that he had cut the gas tube.  

The sponsor of the bill, Bonnie Mitchell, was on Against the Grain with Gardner Goldmith on WNTK Talk Radio, 99.7 FM, 1490 AM. I called in while she was on to speak with her.

Mitchell confirmed that this bill, opportunistically named Amillia’s Law, would not have even prevented the Luhrmann tragedy. Yet this bill is named after the Luhrmann’s daughter who was killed in a house fire caused by the cut gas line. Mitchell also stated that some members of the Legislature have been trying to pass this law since 1990 and that it’s been regularly defeated. So what’s really going on here is that some politicians in Concord are exploiting the Luhrmann’s tragedy to use it as an emotional vehicle to attempt to pass, yet again, a hugely unpopular and stupid bill.

So what’s really behind the push for this bill? Well, let’s see: what do bureaucrats and politicians love above all else? That’s right: Money! And, as you’d expect, this bill is all about increasing revenue for the state bank account– more money for them to spend on other feel-good programs. HB 1711 includes testing “fees” (read: taxes) for both Master and Journeyman gas fitters as well as annual licensing “fees” (taxes). The exact amount of the license tax is to be determined by the State Fire Marshal who, not surprisingly, supports this tax increase.

The real intended consequence of this bill is to raise taxes. Period. Full stop.

The unintended consequence of this bill will be to restrict the number of servicers that customers may call for gas service. It will also result in longer delays in getting service for simple things like converting an appliance from natural gas to propane. And these services will become more expensive and a lot less convenient.

And here’s another point:  I carry one million dollars worth of liability insurance.  If we have a clear and present danger from bad propane connections lurking in every household, then why hasn’t my insurance company required me to have a gas fitter’s certification as a condition of my insurance policy?

Hearings on House Bill 1711 are on Feb 9. You can read the text of the bill here.

If you live in New Hampshire, contact your representative and ask him or her to dump this bill. HB 1711 is bad for business, bad for consumers, and bad for New Hampshire.

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RFID where will it go next

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Let’s see now: President dropping in the polls; impeachment talk over illegal wiretaps gaining traction; majority of Americans now supporting withdrawal from Iraq; Abramoff scandal reaching into the White House; big push starting for war with Iran; the Bush gang reduced to defending their crime, deception and despotism with their last, threadbare card, the “terrorist threat”…..

Why, yes, I think it’s about time for a guest shot from Osama!

[...]

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If the Democrats were a real opposition party or if they had at least one other principle that they fervently believed in besides the government seizure and redistribution of my money, they would filibuster this court-packing move by King George. But, as expected, they simply whimper and roll over. What we really have is a bipolar one-party system.

With the fate of the U.S. Constitution in the balance, it’s hard to believe there’s no senator prepared to filibuster Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, whose theories on the “unitary executive” could spell the end of the American democratic Republic. …. Under this government envisioned by Alito and Bush, Americans would no longer have freedoms based on the Constitution and the law, but on Bush’s tolerance and charity. Americans would, in essence, become Bush’s subjects dependent on his good graces, rather than citizens possessing inalienable rights. He would be a modern-day king. In the face of such an unprecedented power grab, Americans might expect senators from both parties to filibuster Alito and resist Bush’s consolidation of power. But Republicans seem more interested in proving their loyalty to Bush, and Democrats so far are signaling only a token fight for fear of suffering political reprisals. …. A disciplined filibuster focused on protecting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would have a chance of attracting traditional conservatives as well as moderates and liberals in a cause larger than any political grouping. Indeed, the filibuster could be the start of a grand coalition built around what many Americans hold as dear as life itself, the principles of a democratic Republic where no man is above the law, where no man is king.

[...]

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A former US spy turned leading privacy activist has slammed the UK’s ID card plans, saying they will weaken national security and lead to abuses of government power. Bill Scannell is a former agent at the National Security Agency (NSA) and now a huge privacy advocate, currently heading up a campaign against the introduction of a national driving licence across the US. The US Real ID legislation was railroaded through Congress on the back of a budget bill, with virtually no debate or consultation, and all states must now have a standard driving licence by 2008. But already costs have spiraled way above the original $100m estimated by the government. … Speaking as a former government agent, Scannell also warned of the potential abuse of a national identity register by those in power. He said: ‘When you know what the tools of the state really are you are wary of unrestricted power. Governments abuse their power. That’s a fact.

[...]

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What does it mean when an Establishment mouthpiece like the Christian Science Monitor runs an article like this?

Republicans’ capture of both Congress and the White House was, understandably, a demoralizing blow to the left. But the latter can take solace that “Republican” is no longer synonymous with spending restraint, free markets, and other ideals of the political right.

While the left did not get its way on tax cuts, this may be only a temporary defeat: Freewheeling spending has made future tax cuts politically a lot harder.

During the first five years of President Bush’s presidency, nondefense discretionary spending (i.e., spending decided on an annual basis) rose 27.9 percent, far more than the 1.9 percent growth during President Clinton’s first five years, according to the libertarian Reason Foundation. And according to Citizens Against Government Waste, the number of congressional “pork barrel” projects under Republican leadership during fiscal 2005 was 13,997, more than 10 times that of 1994.

Certain trends have been favoring the left for the past several decades. In the early 1960s, transfer payments (entitlements and welfare) constituted less than a third of the federal government’s budget. Now they constitute almost 60 percent of the budget, or about $1.4 trillion per year. Measured according to this, the US government’s main function now is redistribution: taking money from one segment of the population and giving it to another segment. In a few decades, transfer payments are expected to make up more than 75 percent of federal government spending.

[...]

It’s like I’ve always said, redistributionist systems never voluntarily reform themselves; reform always comes as a nasty wake-up call. One point the article brought out was that

We are on track to become more like the welfare states of Europe and Canada, where entitlement spending leaves limited funds available for bold foreign policy initiatives.

They make it sound so benign, like we’ll just drift off to socialist entitlement la-la land and end up like those limp-wristed weenies in Europe. But if this trend continues, at some point the Dollar will cease to be the world’s reserve currency– and deservedly so. These types of currency displacement events are usually accompanied by tumultuous “the emperor is naked” moments that trigger a crisis of confidence, the eventual killer of all fiat currencies.

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The commander-in-chief has been under intense pressure in recent weeks, accused of trampling on civil liberties in pursuit of terror suspects.

His defence has been that America is a nation at war.

So Bin Laden’s latest threats to launch new attacks on the US will only serve to underline this argument.

[...]

Uh huh. Are you seeing the pattern yet? King George gets caught with his hand in the snoop jar, the story starts to get legs so, for damage control, they pull out the Bin Laden puppet to frighten and confuse the sheeple. Classic marketing ploy by the Imperial White House. And we are nation of highly conditioned consumers. Who’s not buying it?

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Bin Laden Returns- by Justin Raimondo

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