I sent out an email other day. One answer bothered me. I was asked not to send comments that made one person too angry.
I wonder what has happened to discourse in this country? When did we, as a nation, reach a point where we can not discuss the issues with which we disagree. When did honest discourse about difficult issues become war? I agreed to the request. I have a similar agreement with my brother, though the topic is different.
Why must we all march in lock step like good soldiers. Why can’t we disagree and still get along. The health care issue shows that point perfectly. The right has issued a stream of lies and distortions, organized their people, and sent them to Town Hall Meetings and Tea Bag Parties everywhere. I can not swing a dead cat, or click a button on my remote, without hitting some person who believes that a public option is socialism, Democrats are out to kill their grandma, and Obama was born in Africa. When did disagree about an issue become attempted murder of a persons ideas?
The American Medical Association has weighed in on the new Obama health care proposals.
The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves. The Gastroenterologists had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of nerve.
The Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a misconception.
Ophthalmologists considered the idea shortsighted. Pathologists yelled, “Over my dead body!” while the Pediatricians said, “Oh, Grow up!”
The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists could see right through it. Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing. The Internists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow, and the Plastic Surgeons said, “This puts a whole new face on the matter….”
The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists were
pissed off at the whole idea. The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn’t have the heart to say no.
In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the Assholes in Washington.
I’ve been watching “The Century of Self” by By Adam Curtis on youtube. It is a disturbing series about the way that Freud’s ideas were used by Bernays and others to control humans. This material is not entirely new. I’ve touched upon it in other blog entries “Capitalism, Media Ownership, and Change,” “Globalism – An Historical Fable,” and “Swimming in Cocytus….” Discovering this video, recommended highly by my SIL, has pushed my own ideas about humanity in new ways. The idea that we are driven by unconscious desires that can be manipulated by corporations to sell us things we don’t want and politicians to lead us to places we don’t want to go is disturbing. I have to ask, are we rational beings, irrational beings, or a strange blend of the two?
What this really did was to get me thinking about society, history, and humanity. Because Freud’s ideas were and are used to control what Americans want and believe, I began wondering about history as a whole. It appears, that all of history could be defined by looking at the way that cultures attempted to control people. The way Freud’s ideas are tied up with Democracy and Capitalism are really no different form the ideas of Imperial Britain, or Medieval France. People must be controlled, and so societies were engineered, often with no real idea that they were engineering societies, so that people could be controlled. Clearly that drive to control humans goes back to the beginning.
Our earliest ancestors, I hesitate to call the primitive because clearly their societies were as complex as ours, humans were managed in a different way. For most of our history, we evolved in small, exogamous groups that lived in balance with other species in nature. This, however, greatly limited population and left them prey to shifts in climate. As we moved to agriculture, a more stable source of food was found, but it required more work to control people. This has continued to the present time. The difference is that Freud and his family showed us how we could manipulate people to sell us things we don’t like and to create stable societies. What his has done is to change my very ideas about the nature of freedom. I am not yet entirely sure of where I am going, but my very ideas about our nation, our shared culture, are changing.
A few days back Georgia Congressman David Scott (D-Georgia) held a heated townhall meeting where opponents to Health-care Reform attacked him with the normal lies, misinformation, and unveiled threats fo violence. Today, they upped the hyperbole and showed that the same crowd opposing health-care (that being Republicans, Conservatives, and mindless neanderthals, and the Health Insurance Ponzi industry, mostly) upped the rhetoric by painting a Swastika on the Congressman’s sign at his office. Congressman Scott is black, and so these good old white racist Nazi’s have decided to use the tried and true method of white supremacists to try and terrorize him.
Of course, they call it a militia. Clearly, their attempt is to organized in a paramilitary fashion with the intention to destroy the United States and replace it with something from their own paranoid racist dreams.
Posted on Thursday, July 23, 2009 9:30:21 AM by dools007
It is about time those of us who believe in the 2nd Amendment to form our own “Militia Clubs”. These clubs would be comprised of local volunteers led by peers of their choosing. Individual units would not necessarily be formed by state or town. Militia Club members would be expected to adopt military organization and skills–and become proficient in them.
Thoughts anyone?
Interestingly, this parallels the militias set up under the Clinton administration that led to the Oklahoma City bombings. Are they looking for McVeigh
My SIL sent me an email and a link to Free Republic. As strange as this sound, this site is still openly advocating treason against the United States of America.
Notice to Obama, Democrats and any Republicans foolish enough to vote for ObamaCare!
The unlawful federal government’s takeover of the financial, banking and insurance industries was just a prelude to the planned complete unconstitutional Marxist takeover of all of America.
Your nearly trillion dollar per month spending habits have bankrupted our country. You’re running up our taxes and the national debt, saddling future generations with enslaving burdens of taxes and debt that they can never repay.
You’ve taken over car manufacturing companies, illegally wiping out the stockholders, bondholders and distributors and awarding the remaining assets to the labor unions or other political cronies of your choice.
You are wasting trillions of our hard earned dollars on foolish and ill advised so-called attempts to stimulate the economy, but are actually being used to reward political cronies, criminal political organizations like ACORN, government employee unions, entrenched government employees, corrupt government officials, etc.
Your administrations, departments, agencies, bureaucracies and congressional offices are fraught with crime, graft, bribery, corruption, waste, ineptitude, incompetence and worse.
Your planned destruction of the oil, gas, coal and energy producing sectors will cripple our economy, raise costs for every product and service manufactured, provided, transported, or delivered in our nation.
Your idiotic socialist policies will increase our taxes, increase our costs at the wholesale and retail levels, bankrupt our businesses small and large, drive up unemployment, drive up foreclosures, drive up personal bankruptcies, cause banks to fail, drive up unemployment and entitlement costs and make it all but impossible for city, state and local governments to provide basic services.
Your incompetent, ill advised and cowardly foreign policies, international agreements to weaken our defense systems while at the same time crippling our heavy manufacturing, raw goods, transportation systems and our economy in general are making our nation a sweet target for our enemies who wish to destroy us.
And now you want to takeover our health care industry. You want to control our health insurance industry to the point that government has a monopoly. Drive out all private insurance and private health care providers. You want government bureaucrats making our personal health care decisions for us. You want government bureaucrats to make life and death decisions for us, determine who is worthy to receive health care and who should be allowed or even encouraged to die.
Well, sirs. This is the end of the line. The free American people will not allow this tyranny to stand!
Vote yea on this bill, sign it, try to enforce it and you are signing a declaration of war on we the people of the United States of America.
Advise you dust off and study the Declaration of Independence dated In Congress, July 4, 1776 to learn your fate.
Fill your hands you sons of bitches!
Rebellion is brewing!
DONT TREAD ON ME!!
My name is Jim Robinson and I approve this message.
Hopefully, this will not be the next thread that Free Republic must scrub because they are openly advocating murder and assassination. This is another one to send as a hot tip to the FBI and Homeland Security.
Grover Norquist and the American Conservative Union have been caught in a payola scheme, showing once and for all that they are nothing more than whores whose only principle is money.
Exclusive: Conservative group offers endorsement for $2M
The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then the group’s president flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.
For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)”
The conservative group’s remarkable demand — black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as “pay for play” — was contained in a private letter to FedEx , which was provided to POLITICO.
The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money.
People bring things to my attention. The most recent is “Accuracy in the Media,” a right wing blog that appears to define “Accuracy” as whatever lie they an get away with. They have a post by a man named Hilmar von Campe whose book “Defeating the Totalitarian Lie” is clearly being pushed by this website. The premise of Mr. Von Campe’s blog is stated in this quote:
The national Socialist ideology was built on lies-the most important being that that there is no God.
Mr. von Campe tries to convince us that Germany under Hitler was a Godless regime. The truth of course is exactly the opposite of his claims. Hugh Heclo, Religion and Public Policy, ) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in “The Occult Roots of Nazism” and many others show that the Nazi State and the people who lived under it were very much a creation of their religion. Religion, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or other protestant faith occupied the status of state religions. (Martin Luther was a rabid anti-semite as shown by his writings.) The state collected church taxes and gave those funds to the churches. This information is easy to find, a few hours work on the computer followed by a few hours at a library will suffice to show the absolute lie that Mr. von Campe and “Accuracy in the Media” are attempting to perpetrate. If there should be a totalitarian pusch that overthrows the government of the US, it will be applauded and supported by these people.
I’m not feeling newsy today, nor opinionated (at least anymore opinionated that usual). but I am in blogging frame of mind. Today, I’ll choose a scatergun technique.
Cool gray Mist / Blankets Van Dam Peak / Cries Dew on Leaf / Draws tear trails down glass / Morning – M. Frank Darbe 5.29.2009
Occassionally, I do listen to music in other languages. My wife, Eva, introduced me to this, and I am thinking of her…
This was sent by Kathy… OK, Just a little opinion…
I grew up with the space race, with astronauts. In my Grandpa’s house, I sat on a small red stool (really just a foot stool) nearest the television. Through clouds of fragrant, swirling, Prince Alber tobaco smoke I wathed Armstrong, Aldrin, and others go up as Spam in a Can and visit a swirling chunk of rock that lovers kiss under on warm summer nights. The shuttle is going away and because our government went on a Capitalist Bender that did not recognize how important space is, the Shuttle is closing up shop and we are hiring the Russian Taxi Drivers to get us where we need to go.
MOSCOW (AP) — The Russian space agency says it has signed a $306 million deal with NASA to ferry its astronauts to the international space station in 2012.
Roscosmos said Friday the agreement covers four launches aboard the three-person Soyuz capsules to swap out crews in the orbiting laboratory.
NASA said Russia would supply comprehensive support for six NASA crew members taking part in long-duration missions.
