Waiting for the world to begin...

hipsterlibertarian:

Good Monday Morning!  Here’s concerning news from the ACLU to start your week off wrong:

What if a government spy agency had power to copy and data mine information about ordinary Americans from any government database? This could include records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records. Literally anything the government collects would be fair game, and the original agency in charge of protecting the privacy of those records would have little say over whether this happened, or what the spy agency did with the information afterward. What if that spy agency could add commercial information, anything it – or any other federal agency – could buy from the huge data aggregators that are monitoring our every move?

What if it wasn’t just collection but also sharing? Anything that was reasonably believed to be necessary to “protect the safety or security of persons, property or organizations” or “protect against or prevent a crime or threat to national security” could be shared. Imagine the dissemination was essentially unlimited, not just to federal, state, local or foreign governments but also to individuals or entities that are not part of the government.

It has already happened.

Once the data is collected, it can be shared with “literally anyone” even if there is no suspicion of terrorism.  And all this came about through a rule change — not a law, not a treaty, but a quiet little rule change in a labyrinthine bureaucracy of spies.

(Source: bonniekristian, via bonniekristian)

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

—

The Greatest Crimes Against Humanity Are Perpetrated by People Just Doing Their Jobs

Time to reinvent ourselves.

(Source: truth-out.org, via stopkillingourworld-deactivated)

As most of the American political firmament expressed respectfully nonideological condolences for victims of the Aurora, Colorado shooting massacre, Mayor Michael Bloomberg distinguished himself by talking, unapologetically, about gun control.

In particular, he called on President Barack Obama and would-be president Mitt Romney to issue more than just “soothing words” and enunciate an actual position on guns.

After Texas congressman Louie Gohmert wondered out loud why, given all the people in the movie theater, there was no one with a gun who could shoot back, Bloomberg told CBS News’ Bob Schieffer that, “To arm everybody and have the wild west all the time is one of the more nonsensical things you can say.”

Just who does the mayor think he is, to be sounding off on gun policy at such a time?

One answer is: He’s a lame-duck billionaire who can afford, quite literally, to be as impolitic as he pleases.

But another, more important answer, is that he’s continuing to establish himself as the most prominent gun-control advocate in America, with the promise of lots more to come when he leaves office.

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Capital New York, “Why It Matters What Michael Bloomberg Thinks About Guns.”

Say what you will about Mike Bloomberg — he’ll put his money where his mouth is.

socialismartnature:

The Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, wants to close Taunton State Hospital so bad that he is using his veto power in order to overrule the state legislature which recently passed a bill to fund it. He claims the poorest and most vulnerable among us need to make sacrifices because of budget woes. But if someone needs to sacrifice, why not go after the state’s wealthiest?

Even imposing just a one-time tax of 1-2% on the wealth of Massachusetts’ 82,000 households with assets over a million dollars — or instead, just a 4-5% tax on the wealth of Massachusetts’ 6 multi-billionaires — would alone raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem is not that the above idea is unfeasible, but rather that Deval Patrick, as a former top Coca-Cola executive, would be loath to ever impinge upon the excessive wealth of such people because they are his corporate kinfolk.   

I tell you, with ”friends” like these in the Democratic Party, who needs enemies!? Things like this just verify the notion that we don’t really have two parties in this country, but rather just one corporate party with two heads. 

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“In times like these we should not be turning on each other but to each other. The governor’s continued push to close TSH is a direct attack on the most vulnerable and disenfranchised citizens of the commonwealth,” said Karen Coughlin, nursing supervisor at TSH. She firmly added, “We are failing. I once was a proud employee of Taunton State Hospital. Right now I am ashamed to be an employee of the Department of Mental Health.” 

The proposal to close TSH was announced during a meeting of senior DMH staff and shocked hospital personnel, patients and the public. This could result in the elimination of 169 beds from the commonwealth’s already strained and overloaded mental health system.  Across the state psychiatric patients clog emergency rooms and some wait boarding seventy two hours or longer for a psychiatric bed placement.  This is unfair for patients and places a strain on overburdened Emergency Rooms.    
         
Massachusetts should not abandon the mentally ill in our society with budget cuts. The state should not balance the budget by eliminating services of mentally ill. If budget cuts occur, people will continue to go without care, the crime rate will go up, homelessness will increase, more people will end up in the corrections system, and many will commit suicide. Weren’t we trying to prevent all of these things from happening in the first place?

(Source: heraldnews.com, via socialismartnature)

baseballlibertarian:

The first thing all dictators do is disarm the citizenry.  That makes them easier to control. 

This country has become a soft police state already.  Now they are flying drones spying on us, they can stop us for no reason, detain us indefinitely for no reason, and spy on us with out just cause or a warrant.  The next step to total totalitarianism is to disarm all of us. 

Ice-T: Well, I’ll give up my gun when everybody does. Doesn’t that make sense? If there were guns here, would you want to be the only person without one?

Krishnan Guru-Murthy, anchor, Channel 4 News: So do you carry guns routinely at home?

Ice-T: Yeah, it’s legal in the United States. It’s part of our Constitution. You know, the right to bear arms is because that’s the last form of defense against tyranny. Not to hunt. It’s to protect yourself from the police.

Anchor: And do you see any link between that and these sorts of incidents (Aurora)?

Ice-T: No. Nah. Not really really. You know what I’m saying, if somebody wants to kill people, you know, they don’t need a gun to do it.

Anchor: It makes it easier though, doesn’t it?

Ice-T: Not really. You can strap explosives on your body, they do that all the time.

On anti-gun laws: “That’s not going to change anything. The Untied States is based on guns, you know.”

(Source: moralanarchism)

Government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.

—Frank Zappa (via nirvikalpa)

(via moonwards-deactivated20121210)

iambinarymind:

misesman:

English Warning To Americans: DONT GIVE UP YOUR GUNS! (by alielbaryeshua)

The British people have been completely disarmed according to UN resolution, and here are personal accounts of british citizens of why Americans need to fight for their constitutional rights.

This is an issue of property rights.  We either own ourselves or we don’t.
Self-defense is an extension of self-ownership, the true source of inherent rights. So called “gun control” is only another example that we are serfs/slaves rather than free individuals.
~iambinarymind~

(Source: youtube.com)

I see two scenarios playing out. In the first, we allow Wall Street to carry on its merry way, as the foreclosure crisis continues and Wall Street steals all homes, packaging them into bundles to be sold for pennies on the dollar to hedge funds. All wealth will be redistributed to the top 1% who will become modern day feudal lords with the other 99% living at their pleasure on huge feudal estates.

You can imagine for yourselves just what you’re going to have to do to pleasure the lords.

This will take years, maybe even a decade or more, but it is the long march Wall Street has formulated for us. To be sure, “formulated” should not be misinterpreted as intention. No one sat down and planned the creation of Western European feudalism when Rome collapsed. To be sure, the modern day feudal lords on Wall Street certainly conspire—to rig LIBOR and muni bond markets, for example—and each one individually wants to take as much as possible from customers and creditors and stockholders. But they are not planning and conspiring for the restoration of feudalism. Still, that is the default scenario—the outcome that will emerge in the absence of action.

In the second, the 99% occupy, shut down, and obliterate Wall Street. Honestly, I have no idea how that can happen. I am waiting for suggestions.

(Source: azspot, via azspot)

(Source: nbcnightlynews, via wespeakfortheearth)