This is a fascinating article. While I never trust predictions of spending out to 2030-40 much less 2017, it is interesting to note that he indicates Medicare is in arrears effective 2007. This is unsustainable spending, of course. It also speaks to a politician’s complete and utter incapability to make rational economic decisions in policy much less be able to extrapolate the bad or perverse effects of these idiotic policies. Imagine a suburban neighborhood in which an elected representative docked 50% from everybody’s pay to accommodate “services” and then not only insisted on borrowing but advanced large lines of credit in their name without their signature on the contract but they would be held liable for payment of the debt. The ne’er-do-well would be lynched in short order…unless he surrounded himself with a praetorian guard – much like our present occupiers in DC. -BB

A person who is in the pay of the government is not always free to speak publicly about the most pressing issues he confronts. Administrators who are appointed to perform specific tasks are generally not free to contradict or even to challenge policies. They often cannot advocate for specific proposals, even if they think that such proposals will be needed to prevent catastrophe.

When Dr. Alan Carlin, a federal Environmental Protection Agency official, wrote a report in March, 2009 that criticized the EPA’s process of formulating regulations, the report was squashed both internally and publicly. Emails from EPA officials state that “a very negative impact on our office” made use of the report impossible. To protect the bureaucracy, Dr. Carlin was told to cease his criticisms.

Such officials must often make a choice: to remain silent and keep their jobs, or to resign and speak the truth. Faced with this dilemma, on March 12, 2008, David Walker chose to resign.

David Walker is the former Comptroller General of the United States, and former head of the Government Accountability Office. As the nation’s chief accountant he was appointed by President Clinton. He resigned near the end of George W. Bush’s second term. He had no authority to decide how a single penny of government funds should be collected or distributed. His job was to count those funds.

Mr. Walker’s enormous range of mind extends far beyond a single budget year. His long-range perspective allows him to project fiscal trends decades into the future, and to assess, through simulations, the impacts of policy decisions beyond their immediate effects. He truly understands the economic maxim, promoted by Henry Hazlitt, to look beyond the visible effects of any given policy and to consider its unseen consequences.

When Walker plotted these trends, and considered demographics among many other factors, what he found was “chilling.” If fundamental reforms are not begun now, he concluded, the United States will experience a financial and political collapse comparable to the fall of Rome.

In a presentation to the National Press Foundation, January 17, 2008, Mr. Walker brought forth the following facts and projections:

1. From 1966 to 2006, the percentage of federal funds spent on Medicare rose from 1% to 19%. This trend will grow exponentially as millions of “baby boomers” enter the entitlement pool.

2. For the same period, spending for mandated government commitments rose from 26% to 53% of the total budget. The budget is increasingly out of the control of government officials.

3. As of 2007, Medicare is running in arrears. In 2017 Social Security will be in deficit. By the year 2040, Medicare and Social Security alone will be running annual deficits of nearly 900 billion dollars.

4. Medicare spending from now until 2032 will be 235% of economic growth. By 2040, Medicare will be spending about 10% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product annually, and the annual deficits of the United States will total some 20% of the total Gross Domestic Product.

The bottom line is this: mandated fiscal entitlements, projected into the future, are over 52,000 billion dollars. That will equal 90% of all household wealth in the U.S., and will place a burden of over 450 thousand dollars on every household in the land. This is almost ten times the present median household income level.

Mr. Walker concludes that “We face large and growing structural deficits largely due to known demographic trends and rising health care costs.” Further, “GAO’s simulations show that balancing the budget in 2040 could require actions as large as cutting total federal spending by 60 percent, or raising federal taxes to two times today’s level.”

To close the revenue gap through growth, the United States economy would need to expand in the double-digit range for the next seventy-five years. During the boom years of the 1990s, the economy grew at an average rate of 3.2%. Walker concludes, succinctly: “we cannot simply grow our way out of this problem.”

Health care entitlements constitute by far the largest single piece of this economic disaster. Those who think that creating thousands of billions of dollars in new government entitlements—in a health care bill that adds tens of millions of Americans to government programs—will do anything except hasten the coming bankruptcy are out of touch with reality.

See: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5631

Mr. Walker has taken his show on the road, in an attempt to educate Americans about the financial disaster they are creating. He was accompanied by both the Brookings Institute on the left, and the Heritage Foundation on the right. He stresses that this coming financial meltdown is known by everyone in Washington–but no one wants to acknowledge it.

The Rasmussen poll shows that almost twice as many Americans think that cutting the deficit, rather than health care reform, should be the president’s top priority. Another poll shows that twice as many people think that the reform legislation will drive up costs than think it will lower costs. Perhaps these Americans grasp Mr. Walker’s point better than their elected representatives do.

A nation that violates the rights of its citizens cannot, in the long run, escape the consequences of its moral failure. When a nation with the unique strength of the United States does so systematically and over decades, the results must necessarily be catastrophic. The dire economic forecast of David Walker illustrates the connection between the moral and the practical. To regain our economic viability we must regain our moral viability.

John David Lewis (website) is a Visiting Professor of Political Science, Duke University. He has been a Senior Research Scholar in History and Classics at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, and an Anthem Fellow. He is a contributing writer for Capitalism Magazine, and a Consulting Editor for The Objective Standard.

Bumper summed up the case for a non-interventionist America better than I ever could.  He ably demonstrates that minding your own business is a virtue not an eccentricity.  -BB

If there was ever a classic example of a quagmire, it has got to be Afghanistan. Hey, they’re going on 8 or 9 years of killing the terrorists and just now getting a good start. What began out as a quest to kill or capture Osama bin Laden has morphed into long-term occupation of the country.

Hardly a week goes by without reports of new deaths, including Afghani citizens and U.S. soldiers or allied foreign soldiers.

Yet, despite the constant death toll and the lack of a well-defined mission, the Pentagon insists on the importance of continuing the occupation of Afghanistan.

Why?

Because the Pentagon knows that if the troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan and the Middle East, Americans might well begin asking the questions they should have asked in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came crashing down and the Soviet Empire disintegrated: What do we need a huge standing military force for? What do we need an overseas empire for? What do we need the enormous expanse of military bases across America for? Indeed, what do we need the Pentagon for?

The fact is that despite deeply seeded fears and anxieties that the federal government has succeeded in engendering within the psyches of the American people, there is no nation on earth that has the military capability of invading and occupying the United States. To cross either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans with an invasion force would require tens of thousands of ships and planes, a capability that is nonexistent among all foreign nations.

Of course, the big bugaboo that the Pentagon now uses to justify its existence (along with the enormous tax burden necessary to sustain its enormous military) is terrorism (as compared to communism, which was the bugaboo prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Empire).

But the threat of terrorism is a direct result of what the Pentagon did both prior to and after 9/11 as part of its aggressive, interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. That threat has remained constant, of course, given the continuous killing of people in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 8 years.

But the Pentagon knows that by withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Middle East, that constant threat of terrorist retaliation plummets. At that point, the only risk of terrorist retaliation would be from some disgruntled person whose family members or friends were killed by the U.S. military sometime in the past. There’s no need for an enormous military to deal with that possibility, and the Pentagon knows it.

If the Pentagon withdrew from the Middle East, military officials know that people might well ask, Why stop there? Why not withdraw from Europe? After all, the Cold War ended long ago. Why not withdraw from Japan? It surrendered soon after the atomic bombs were dropped. Why not withdraw from Korea? The war there ended decades ago. Why not withdraw from Africa? What business do the troops have there?

In fact, the only argument that the Pentagon will have left is the one it was making in 1989 to justify its continued existence: the drug war, especially in Latin America.

The Pentagon knows, however, that there are risks with that justification. One big risk is that people all over the world, including the United States, might finally decide to bring an end to this decrepit old war by legalizing drugs. Reputable and credible people from all over the world are now arguing that that is the only solution to the drug-war horror. In fact, in a move toward legalization Mexico recently legalized possession of small quantities of illicit drugs.

Moreover, the Pentagon knows that one of these days Latin Americans might start asking a discomforting question: If the American people will not permit the U.S. military to wage the war on drugs in the United States, why should Latin Americans permit it to wage the drug war in their countries?

The best way to avoid having Americans asking why we still need a big military force is simply to continue the occupation of Afghanistan. Not only does the occupation provide constant proof that there are still terrorists to kill, it also generates its own never-ending supply of terrorists. The Pentagon knows that under those circumstance people are less likely to question the existence of an enormous military, along with all the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to support it.

See:

http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-08-27.asp

The bottom line for me is that our family will not trust the government to stay ahead of the evolutionary curve of virus mutation. It is impossible. Polio never went away and was simply re-flagged as aseptic meningitis. You may tale whatever action you wish but I wold urge you to consider the body of evidence before leaping into yet another medical quagmire.  -BB

Hiding Polio Quotes
Diagnosis Polio [Polio now hides behind these names: Viral or aseptic meningitis, Guillaine Barre Syndrome (GBS), Chinese Paralytic syndrome, CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME, epidemic cholera, cholera morbus, spinal meningitis, spinal apoplexy, inhibitory palsy, intermittent fever, famine fever, worm fever, bilious remittent fever, ergotism, ME, post-polio syndrome, acute flaccid paralysis Synonyms for GBS]

See: flaccid paralysis Chinese Paralytic syndrome

“Polio has not been eradicated by vaccination, it is lurking behind a redefinition and new diagnostic names like viral or aseptic meningitis…….According to one of the 1997 issues of the MMWR, there are some 30,000 to 50,000 cases of viral meningitis per year in the United States alone. That’s where all those 30,000 – 50,000 cases of polio disappeared after the introduction of mass vaccination”—Viera Scheibner

“Today, various other forms of the the word “polio” are still used to describe the effects of poisoning, though usually with regard to paralysis in animals. A search of Medline (“polio” and “poison”) finds about 45 contemporary articles where poisoning causality is attributed to polio. The terminology found was: “polioencephalomalacia”, “poliomyelomalacia”, “polyradiculoneuritis”, “neurological picture similar to that of poliomyelitis”, “polioencephalomyelomalacia”, “lumbal poliomyelomalacia”, “cerebrocortical necrosis (polioencephalomalacia)”, “Lead poisoning in grey-headed fruit bats (Pteropus poliocephalus)”, “multifocal-poliomyelomalacia”, “spinal poliomalacia”, “Polio and high-sulfate diets”, “Atypical porcine enterovirus encephalomyelitis: possible interraction between enteroviruses and arsenicals”, “Polioencephalomalacia and photosensitization associated with Kochia scoparia consumption in range cattle”, “bovine polioencephalomalacia”. —Jim West, Health and Research Publications, http://www.geocities.com/harpub/

“The United States Public Health Bureau is extremely reticent about reporting diseases caused by vaccination but the report from 1922 to 1931 admitted that there had been 85 cases of post-vaccinal encephalitis, which DeKruif states “is the twin of infantile paralysis.””–Eleanor McBean

“Paralytic cases were not distinguished from non-paralytic cases until a recommendation was made by the Dominion Council of Health in 1949- The LCDC figures provided from 1952 and onward represent this administrative change: recording only those cases adhering to the requirements for a diagnosis of paralytic poliomyelitis. In a report released in June of 1959, another adminis­trative change was recommended by the Dominion Council of Health, further altering the way in which apparent cases of poliomyelitis would be reported. All non-paralytic cases of poliomyelitis were to be henceforth recorded as “meningitis, viral or aseptic,” a disease which itself only became reportable in 1952.” These two administrative changes effectively reduced the apparent incidence of poliomyelitis. In particular, since the latter change is temporally correlative to the introduction of the polio vaccines, the vaccines appear to have been responsible for a reduction in poliomyelitis cases when it is entirely possible that the administrative changes are primarily responsible.”–Catherine Diodati MA (Immunization History, Ethics, Law and Health p116)

Statistics on polio were manipulated. One such way was to redefine the disease, renaming it “viral or aseptic meningitis” or “cocksackie virus”. In one US county, for example, in July 1955 there were 273 cases of polio reported for 50 cases of asceptic meningitis, compared to 5 cases of polio in 1966 and 256 cases of aseptic meningitis. These new diagnostic guideline’s were issued by the CDC. If you object to polio vaccination, and you get polio–it is usually called “polio.” If you have been vaccinated and you get “polio”, it is called meningitis.

Beddow Bayly, author of the book “The Case Against Vaccination” said: “After vaccination was introduced, cases of aseptic meningitis were more often reported as a separate disease from polio, but such cases were counted as polio before the vaccine was introduced. The Ministry of Health admitted that the vaccine status of the individual is a guiding factor in diagnosis. If a person who is vaccinated contracts the disease, the disease is simply recorded under a different name.”

Coxsackievirus and echoviruses can cause paralytic syndromes that are clinically indistinguishable from paralytic poliomyelitis. (John H. Menkes, Textbook Of Child Neurology, 5th ed., page 420) http://www3.bcity.com/harpub/

The definition of ‘epidemic’ was changed from 20 cases/1000,000 to 35 cases/100,000. Pre-vaccination, cocksackie virus and aseptic meningitis were classified as polio; post-vaccination they were classified separately. In addition, non-paralytic polio cases were now reported as viral or aseptic meningitis.

“Ralf R. Scobey, M.D., president of the Poliomyelitis Research Institute. Inc. Syracuse, New York (in the Archives of Pediatrics, Sept. 1950) lists 170 diseases of polio-like symptoms and effects but with different names such as: epidemic cholera, cholera morbus, spinal meningitis, spinal apoplexy, inhibitory palsy, intermittent fever, famine fever, worm fever, bilious remittent fever, ergotism, etc. There are also such common nutritional deficiency diseases as beriberi, scurvy, Asiatic plague, pellagra, prison edema, acidosis etc.”–E. McBean

“Dr. Thomas Francis did not mention in his key evaluation of the 1954 Salk field trials that those who contracted polio after their first innoculation and before their second inoculation were placed in the “not-inoculated” list.’ (Maurice B. Bayly, The Story Of The Salk Anti-poliomyelitis Vaccine, 1956).

Dr. Buchwald responds that prior to the introduction of polio vaccinations in Germany, anyone was counted as having polio, even if they only had the virus in their feces. It is known, he goes on, that there are people who are healthy but who evacuate polio viruses when they go to the bathroom. Based on this criteria, the number of cases was approximately 4,000 per year. After the introduction of the vaccine, statistics included only those polio cases of people who were paralyzed for at least six weeks.–Testimony of Dr Buchwald MD

A former public health officer, Dr Ratner, reported that just before the introduction of the first polio vaccine the National Foundation For Infant Paralysis was paying physicians $25 for each reported diagnosis. “A patient would walk into a doctors office with a limp from an accident. He’d say he had a fever a few days ago…and guess what the diagnosis would be?” It was well known Paralytic polio cured itself 50% of the time within 60 days. After the Salk vaccine was introduced, the definition of polio was changed by the CDC. Now, in order to have paralytic polio, you had to have it longer than 60 days.

Because the Salk vaccine was promoted as being incapable of causing polio, cases that occurred following administration of the vaccine were denied, and excluded from the Vaccine injury table.

Dr. Bernard Greenberg, a biostatistics expert, was chairman of the Committee on Evaluation and Standards of the American Public Health Association during the 1950s. He testified at a panel discussion that was used as evidence for the congressional hearings on polio vaccine in 1962. During these hearings he elaborated on the problems associated with polio statistics and disputed claims for the vaccine’s effectiveness. He attributed the dramatic decline in polio cases to a change in reporting practices by physicians. Less cases were identified as polio after the vaccination for very specific reasons.
“Prior to 1954 any physician who reported paralytic poliomyelitis was doing his patient a service by way of subsidizing the cost of hospitalization and was being community-minded in reporting a communicable disease. The criterion of diagnosis at that time in most health departments followed the World Health Organization definition: “Spinal paralytic poliomyelitis: signs and symptoms of nonparalytic poliomyelitis with the addition of partial or complete paralysis of one or more muscle groups, detected on two examinations at least 24 hours apart.” Note that “two examinations at least 24 hours apart” was all that was required. Laboratory confirmation and presence of residual paralysis was not required.
In 1955 the criteria were changed to conform more closely to the definition used in the 1954 field trials: residual paralysis was determined 10 to 20 days after onset of illness and again 50 to 70 days after onset…. This change in definition meant that in 1955 we started reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer-lasting paralysis. Furthermore, diagnostic procedures have continued to be refined. Coxsackie virus infections and aseptic meningitis have been distinguished from paralytic poliomyelitis. Prior to 1954 large numbers of these cases undoubtedly were mislabeled as paralytic poliomyelitis. Thus, simply by changes in diagnostic criteria, the number of paralytic cases was predetermined to decrease in 1955-1957, whether or not any vaccine was used.

Health officials convinced the Chinese to rename the bulk of their polio to Guillaine Barre Syndrome (GBS). A study found that the new disorder (Chinese Paralytic syndrome) and the GBS was really polio . After mass vaccination in 1971, reports of polio went down but GBS increased about 10 fold…….In the WHO polio vaccine eradication in the Americas, there were 930 cases of paralytic disease—all called polio. Five years later, at the end of the campaign, roughly 2000 cases of paralytic disease occurred—but only 6 of them were called polio (41). The rate of paralytic disease doubled, but the disease definition changed so drastically that hardly any of it was called polio any more.”—Greg Beattie

“They started vaccinating in 1985 (in the Americas). Within 4 months they had 350 cases…They caused a substantial, huge outbreak of polio but they started ‘discarding’ most of the cases (put as flaccid paralysis).”—Viera Scheibner, Ph.D.

Chronic Fatigue: A polio by another name http://www.sonic.net/melissk/polio1.html

CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME: THE HIDDEN POLIO EPIDEMIC by Dr. William Campbell Douglas

Bruno RL, et al. Parallels between post-polio fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome: a common pathophysiology? Am J Med. 1998 Sep 28;105(3A):66S-73S. PMID: 9790485; UI: 99005146.
Similarity of polio to pellagra, beriberi, and other deficiency diseases–Eleanor McBean

See:

http://www.whale.to/vaccine/polio1.html

Mike V hits it out of the park again. I did not realize the cosmetically offensive weapon wielded in AZ was brought by a black man. I am certain the collectivist media were aghast that this would happen but only because they don’t realize the original disarmament laws in this country were aimed at black folks defending themselves against depredations by those with guns. Tip of the iceberg, indeed… -BB

Jonathan Martin of the Politico.com profiles a Florida “blue dog” as he conducts town hall meetings on health care in the Panhandle here.

Some snippets:

Rep Allen Boyd (D-Fla.) is a skilled politician who has pretty much seen it all — a Deep South Democrat who’s managed to dispatch all opponents in his conservative-leaning Panhandle district since winning election in 1996. But as he fended off gnats buzzing through the August humidity after a morning fending off angry constituents at a town hall meeting here, Boyd confided that the depth of the unease spurred by the health care debate had caught him by surprise.

“They may be in a minority, but they are a larger minority than we’ve seen in the 20-plus years that I’ve been doing this,” said Boyd of the standing-room-only crowds who have been showing up to shout, boo, mutter and, in one case, hand him an actual stack of pink slips since he returned home for recess. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” . . . But for all the cries of Astroturf fakery and ginned-up crowds, a ground zero view in a district like Boyd’s underlines that a very real sense of anger and frustration is bubbling over as summer wanes. . .

“People are scared,” Boyd said twice, trying to explain what would drive his constituents away from home and work and out into the broiling Florida sun in the middle of the week to see their congressman.

I’ve been interviewed by a lot of reporters working on stories this past week and all of them are variations on a theme: “Why are (substitute convenient label here: gun owners, right-wingers, conservatives) so ANGRY?” And by angry they mean angry enough to train with weapons, go to a town hall armed, shout down their elected congressman, any of a thousand things that they see but cannot understand because it is not within their world view. They simply cannot comprehend.

I guess they ask me because I’m viewed as the quintessential “angry white male,” although why escapes me.

I try to explain, speaking slowly and using small words. It goes something like this:

Part of the interest in revitalizing the armed citizenry idea comes in part from the political threat to all our liberties, not just our firearms rights. The other motivation is the perception of an existential threat to the society, the nation and even to the civilization. I point out that when you have a government that engages in printing money and monetizing the debt, it is clear to anyone who knows a little history and economics that societies which have engaged in that suicidal behavior before have been plunged into chaos and tyranny. Can you say Weimar Republic? I knew you could.

And yes, this perception creates fear. It is a fear born of the realization that for a very long time, feckless, grasping leaders of both political parties have been paddling our nation’s canoe toward the falls as fast as they could go, with no thought for what lies at the bottom.

So those concerned with garden variety issues like the health care reform are motivated not just be worry over medical treatments or who’s going to pay for their medications. They see in it two very different competing visions of how society and government are supposed to work. And the Obamacare plan looks like tyranny to them. And worse, it looks like economically unsustainable tyranny.

Mussolini made the Italian people happy, or at least, less unhappy, about giving up their liberty because he made the trains run on time. Obama’s actions so far promise not only tyranny but inefficiency. Not just less freedom but more chaos. Where is the trade-off? There is none. It is as if Dumb and Dumber are running the show with iron fists (“AND YOU DAMN WELL BETTER TAKE IT IF YOU KNOW WHAT”S GOOD FOR YOU”).

Their actions violate both the rules of economics AND, more critically, the rule of law. When Obama takes over the auto industry, firing executives and stiffing creditors in violation of the rule of law, why, gunowners and ordinary people ask themselves, should we expect to be treated any differently?

Too, I said, this is the culmination of almost three decades of government misbehavior, over the reign of at least four imperial Presidents, and people have been paying attention. In the 70s and 80s, gun owners didn’t pay much attention to the militarization of the police and the excesses of the war on drugs, because those miscarriages of justice happened mostly in the cities, where the victims were black and poor. “Too bad,” we would say, “but they shouldn’t live in neighborhoods infested by criminals.”

Then came Ruby Ridge, Waco and a host of other lesser outrages and all of a sudden gun owners discovered what it was like to be poor and black. In the eyes of the Clintonistas WE were now the criminals. Just as a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a libertarian is a conservative whose rights have been violated by a predatory state, making him realize that maybe the ACLU had the germ of a good idea anyway — rights are for all, and if we want to be protected in our homes, our property and our liberty then maybe we ought to start watching out for the other guy’s rights, too.

This was why folks in the Constitutional Militia movement were among the loudest voices during the Bush years against both illegal immigration — which we viewed as horribly corrosive to the rule of law — and the ill-named PATRIOT Act. We knew, that just as the bad laws of the Weimar Republic laid the predicate for Hitler, Bush was preparing the way for whatever tyrant wannabe came after him. (We expected Hillary, we got Obama. Go figure.) There were some folks then who thought that waterboarding was just for Islamofascists. Now they have a different take on it.

(I’m just waiting for John Ashcroft to be drug off under the PATRIOT Act, shouting the whole way, “It doesn’t mean this! I helped write it, it wasn’t meant for this!”)

The Founders understood (at least after the Alien and Sedition Acts) that you should never pass a law that you wouldn’t be willing to see your own worst enemy enforce upon you.

The rule of constitutional law protects us all. Diminishment of the rule of law threatens us all. The Obamanoids are hacking root and branch at the rule of law, ergo, people are concerned, frightened and angry at the offenders. They want them, most of all, to stop.

And they are frightened by the dangerous hubris of any man who would say, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Here, the reporter always pipes up, “But isn’t it partly because Obama is black?”

I sigh, and ask, “Why is it all about race with you guys? Liberals are more obsessed about race than a Nazi Gauleiter.”

(This is where they always pipe up and tell me they’re not political. I invariably laugh.)

Look, I tell them. I mean really LOOK. Look who Obama has surrounded himself with. They’re Clintonistas, or worse. Personnel is policy. And the worst of these in our mind is not Rahm Emanuel — that faux tough guy from Chicago who thinks he’s got everyone by the balls, and will, until someone sticks a .45 in his face and he’s one expletive away from his brains being blown out, at which time he will break down in tears and whimper like a little girl — but rather Eric Holder, the nation’s new “top cop,” a term that makes us want to laugh and puke at the same time.

Look at HIS resume, I tell them. Look at it from our point of view. Holder participated at all levels of the Clinton cover-up machine, most especially Waco.

And Waco was the original sin. We saw what happened there. We noticed most especially that no one was held to account for mass murder but the victims themselves. We noticed, and we remember.

We understand that Waco Rules still apply. And we understand that it will be Eric Holder who does the applying.

Which is why we have put him, and them, on notice. There will be no more free Wacos.

This is what the political class, the elites of the country, do not give us credit for. We actually have the intelligence and the memory, to recognize patterns of governance over time, from decade to decade, AND have discussed these things, absorbed the lessons and made . . . let’s call them adjustments, in our thinking and our preparations.

Like I said, there will be no more free Wacos.

Contrary to our “better’s” sneers, people are actually smart. But most are so busy with their daily lives, that they don’t pay attention to politics, which they see as sordid and unworthy. But when people lose their jobs, and they see a crisis, then they pay attention. And when they pay attention, and they understand what is happening, they start flocking to town halls. And writing letters to the editors. And, some of the,. clean their rifles and await events.

It is ironic, I tell these reporters, that the same politicians who only yesterday were bemoaning that citizens weren’t involved, now cannot run away fast enough now that citizens ARE involved.

But give the people, our people, credit, I tell the reporters, they are not stupid. Angry? Yes. Afraid? Rightfully so. But not stupid.

“Our people,” the reporters always ask, picking up on the nuance, not “the people?”

No, I yell them. We are now two peoples, sharing a national border and a common laguage but little else. We are a divided nation, perhaps even more than in 1861. For example, if we cannot agree on the sanctity of life, does it matter that we agree on trivial stuff?

One people have a world-view that tells them that it is government from whom all blessings flow. For the other it is God and hard work and not necessarily in that order. One side wants the ability to tell the other side what to do and tries incessantly to get the government to do it. The other side simply wants to be left alone, for government to get out of the way of private enterprise, uphold the rule of law, and the right to life, liberty and property, and to otherwise keep its long nose stuck firmly on its ugly face and out of plain sight.

These are irreconcilable visions, I tell them. One or the other is going to win. It cannot be both.

You know, I point out, they call us gun nuts, fanatics, all manner of insulting things, dehumanizing things. And they call us racists. Why? I mean, the black guy in Phoenix was toting an AR and the media goes out of its way to crop the image so it is harder to tell he;s black. Why? Because their world view is able to grasp that theme, that narrative. No one who disagrees with them can possibly be rational because they believe themselves to be the ultimate rational people. And what does a “rational” society do with “irrational people?” They put them in an asylum. And if they are perceived to be armed and dangerous enough, they are killed.

Do you see no hope of avoiding conflict? they always ask. Yes, I say, if the other side sees the unintended consequences of their actions and backs down. This is a slim possibility, I tell them, but it is a possibility. It has, I point out, happened before.

Really, they ask skeptically, when?

In the 1960s with the advent of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, I tell them. Martin Luther king and others in the “non-violent” civil rights movement despaired of getting the federal government to enforce the laws it had passed. But then came the Deacons and the prospect of armed conflict with the local governments conrolled by the Klan and the White Citizens Councils. When the Deacons picked up their guns, it wasn’t just about the Klan beating heads with the cooperation of local police that they controlled anymore. Now the Deacons were going to shoot back. And, “well, would ya lookit that,” then the Feds decided they needed to get between and enforce those laws. Gandhi had NOTHING to do with it.

The Deacons said, “If you ain’t gonna do something about these murderous racist crackers, we will.” And the Feds said, “Well, if you feel that way about it . . .” and went in and did it.

Now, with people exercising their rights, going armed to public gatherings and town hall meetings, we see something we have not seen in a long time. I understand how liberals are astonished about it. I’m a little astonished myself. I didn’t know if we still had it in us to ACT like free people. Now it seems we do. So our hope is that they will back off. But will they?

You are looking at, I tell them, the tip of the iceberg. The people that the administration will find most troublesome as they go farther down this lawless, tyrannical road are not those who blog, or go to town meetings or write letters to the editor. If these folks get angered by events, they reassure themselves of their skills to handle what will come by going to the range and making sure their rifle is still sighted in or by putting back some more ammo or by teaching their teenage sons (and daughters) how to shoot, move and communicate.

In the unlikely event that the government is successful enough to imprison, silence or kill the last demonstrator, blogger and radio talk show host, it will be these people who emerge from the crowd, put a bullet in some henchman’s eye, and fade back again.

These people understand that having been “out-voted,” they can still vote. They are the rest of the iceberg upon which the great ship Leviathan, like Titanic, will of its own forward movement, rip out her hull below the waterline and sink to the bottom of history.

So, I tell them, the anger you see is not one tenth of the anger that’s out there. And that other none-tenths you will not see until it’s too late. So back off, I say, leave us the hell alone, and we won’t have to go down this bloody road.

I usually sum up the Three Percent doctrine this way:

We will not disarm.

You cannot convince us.

You cannot intimidate us.

You can try to kill us, if you think you can.

But remember, we’ll shoot back.

Your move.

— Mike
III

If you want to comment on this post, go here:

http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2009/08/ive-never-seen-anything-like-this-let.html

Former Governor Lutrin was hard to find. Having served out his single term after shepherding Idaho from the corrupt and tyrannical claws of the rulers in DC and their agents throughout the land, he had quietly retired to his ranch near Sandpoint, ID in the northern panhandle in Year One of the Free State Alliance (FSA). The Alliance had expanded to embrace the former states of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Eastern Washington, Nevada and British Columbia joined two years later by Saskatchewan, Alberta, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. The Alaskan Republic maintained very close ties with the FSA. Utah had gone her own way and established a Mormon theocracy. The West Coast states formed Pacifica but the Green Coalition which maintained tight control on the economy caused a brain-drain and economic collapse that splintered the coalition.

Since the break-up of these united States, all of California south of San Francisco had become part of the pan-Mexican rump state in Atzlan along with most of the American Southwest. Mexico has splintered into approximately ten separate states with alliances between the various 31 states that comprised Mexico ebbing and flowing on a daily basis. The decriminalization of drug laws in Pacifica and the Free State Alliance significantly weakened the strength of the Mexican drug cartels to finance their activities and the pan-Mexican economy started to flourish after nearly a century of economic and monetary penury.

Pacifica remained in force in the major cities like Portland and Seattle but had lost total control of the countryside in what had formerly been Washington and Oregon. The Dakotas finally allied with the Midwestern Alliance.

The American South had settled into an uneasy alliance with the United States Socialist Republic (USSR) which maintained their capital in the District of Columbia. Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire eventually broke away from the USSR to establish a system of Swiss-style cantons which the USSR battered for the first two years but eventually exhausted their ability to fight once the USSR economy collapsed into a miserable shambles that made Cuba look like 1990s Hong Kong.

Premiere Obama conceded defeat in an indirect fashion after assumption of his lifelong appointment at the circus-like Constitutional Convention in the USSR in 2012. The massive government intervention and adoption of total central planning had predictable results: the world’s first 100% marginal tax rate on the top fifty percent of earners had only surprised the Premiere’s Economic Council but no one else with the results. Tax receipts were down by 80% in the first year and disappeared in the second. Paul Krugman, the chairman of the council, was quoted as saying “[that] greed would be eliminated and a new man would emerge from the bold experiment.” The only thing that emerged were the tens of miles of refugees attempting to flee the USSR in the first year after which the borders were sealed and all the government’s guns were trained inward to prevent the citizens from escaping the latest economic nostrum – permanent employment in a government job assigned to you whether you liked it or not.

It is difficult to gauge how bad conditions are in the USSR. Like the Soviet Union during the twentieth century and Cuba afterwards, rumors were rampant. Gulags, reeducation camps, mass disappearances, famine and disease outbreaks were apparently the order of the day. Some of the crueler pundits referred to the Premiere as Kim Jong Obama and Barak Mugabe. Like the former northern part of the Koreas, it remains a rather strong military power but an economic basket case.

Fears of meddling on the part of China, Russia and Middle Eastern states proved to be unfounded as those nations grapple with their own economic and social collapse difficulties. While all manner of economic nonsense like Keynes and Marx were the “wave of the future” in the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is seeing a veritable renaissance in the works of Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard and Bastiat.

“It is almost as if the entire human race has finally awakened from the fever dream of the government supremacists who have inoculated them against freedom for five millennia and opened their eyes to the new possibilities” Mr. Lutrin insists as we gaze out over the huge forested valley outside his home near Sandpoint. He is fit and tanned and still participates in what some would term adrenal sports. He remains a devout Senior Instructor on the Appleseed Trail for the Revolutionary War Veterans Association teaching weekend marksmanship clinics throughout the FSA when he is not globetrotting. We are comfortably seated in a veranda near his workshop. Since retirement he has found lucrative work as a consultant around the world “deprogramming and devolving state industries into private hands” with his new venture firm, The Spooner Group. Asked if he misses being the governor of a state, he merely smirks and claims he would rather work for a living.

“Mr. Lutrin (he insists he not be referred to as governor), five years have passed since the first crisis which set the nation asunder and broke up the most powerful nation on the globe. On reflection, would you have done anything different?”

“No, my only regret is that I was left with a task that should have been done ten or a hundred years before me. I was asked recently who my favorite President was during the twentieth century and the only one I could come up with was Coolidge and possibly Harding. No one else even came close. The rest of the rascals were simply well-dressed pirates. Barry, a close economist friend of mine, claimed there was no such thing as governments, only interests…there is plenty of truth to that.”

“…but the bloodshed and misery which followed the wholesale destruction of the former Union when secession spread like wildfire…”

“Hold on, I am not the author of the naked aggression and sheer lunacy that emanated from the Federal government for most of its history after the War Between the States in the 1860s. What happened five years ago was inevitability and just so happened to occur on my watch. I take umbrage at your comparison because you are quite literally insisting that if a man sees a serial killer discharging his duties, I have an obligation to cower instead of cowboy up and stop it. Look, I come from five generations of Westerners who not only earned their living the hard way but tended to be resentful of any authority outside of the family. You could almost surmise that my Celtic blood gave me a predisposition to anti-authoritarianism. There are lines in the sand…”

“So you are justifying the civil war which broke out across the country?”

“I am an old-school libertarian, not a pacifist. I believe in the non-aggression axiom. No man has the right to start a fight but the aggrieved party damn sure has the right to put a stop to any visited upon him. You see, that may be one of the worst pathogens or memes the political class and its apologists has convinced people to believe – that they are utterly incapable of helping themselves unless they surrender their rights to a violent elite. John Wayne said it best if I recall: ‘I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.’”

“That is rather simple…”

“I would like you to consider something. Imagine a society in which everyone took that to be the way proper folks behave. But think that there may be people who would ask themselves how they could take advantage of that. I am not talking about the entrepreneur or small business owner, I’m talking about the natural cross-section of humanity in which you have a certain group of folks for whom criminality and even psychopathy is simply the way they are wired or nurtured. Now some of those men would ask themselves how can I minimize risk and maximize gain? Here’s a pop quiz: what is the only group of criminals who have consistently evaded responsibility for their misbehavior, garnered tremendous rewards in money and prestige and, excepting rare instances like Nicolae Ceausescu, die abed fat and happy?

“I don’t…”

“Politicians. Throughout history with rare exceptions, they have been the decadent and greedy agents of death and destruction on humanity. 262 million corpses outside of warfare alone in the twentieth century stacked up as a paean to the Cult of the Politician. Hundreds of millions of humans hoodwinked into thinking that if only they would remit their fates to enlightened strangers, all the roads would be paved with gold and manna from heaven would provide succor for eternity. I think you would have to be a sociopath in the first place to want to rule over others.”

“But you were a politician. You were the governor of a state. Isn’t that rather hypocritical?”

“To a certain extent you are right. I compromised with the system and thought the only way to change it would be to wreck it from the inside. I did not enter office with the intention of secession and starting the whole ball of wax. Frankly, once I was in office, I could almost feel the sickness creeping over me. The feeling that maybe I could make a positive difference by punishing my fellow citizens to influence their behavior or using carrots and sticks on them as if they lab rats, as if I had the right to do so in the first place. Shame on me.

I had a constituent come to me one day and he and I had coffee together. Old and weather-beaten rancher who had seen the hard side of seventy years who put salt in his coffee. He was quite articulate and related a story to me. He asked me if I had ever had a difficult family member: alcohol or drug abuse, mentally retarded or a Down’s syndrome child. We both agreed we had. He made a very simple point: he said he would move heaven and earth to help his blood kin but even then a solution may not be available. In the end, no cure for Down’s or the son is not willing to give up his drink. No solution. Yet the politician’s siren song is that a group of disinterested strangers in a far-off castle will cure all these ills if the rancher would simply surrender a sizable portion of his wealth at gunpoint and be sanctioned by tens of thousands of laws he would have to obey on pain of death ultimately. Yet in the end, the politicians always make you worse off.”

“Certainly food for thought…”

“Look, we may be entering a new age here hundreds of years before I envisioned it possible. Men and women all over the globe may be waking up to the simple observation that empowering others to engage in violence or the threat of violence over their family and neighbors may be a distinctly unhealthy way to live.”

“Thank you, Governor Lutrin…”

“Please, call me Mr. Lutrin.”

See:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/buppert/buppert28.1.html

Doug Casey provides easy one-stop shopping to deliver the antivenin to any remaining Grand Old Politburo (GOP) friends you may still hang around with.    Just explain to them that you have no preference for evil when they posit that a lesser evil is always better.  -BB

Is it possible that Bush was actually the worst president ever? I’d say he’s a strong contender. He started out with a gigantic lie – that he would cut the size of government, reduce taxes, and stay out of foreign wars – and things got much worse from there. Let’s look at just some of the highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime created.

No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department of Education. Bush made the federal government a much more intrusive and costly part of local schools.

Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts the 2nd Amendment, like 20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws before it.

Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ and will cost the already bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.

Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive change to the securities laws since the ’30s. A major reason why companies will either stay private or go public outside the U.S.

Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement, featuring martial law.

Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current financial crisis lies in Bush’s encouragement of easy credit to everybody and inflating the housing market.

Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created, he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far the largest bailouts in U.S. history (until OBAMA!).

Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war protesters away when Bush appeared on camera, they’re now used to herd in opponents.

The Patriot Act. This 132-page bill, presented for passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how is it possible to write something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects. Warrantless searches. All kinds of communications monitoring. Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.

The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which Bush also expanded) is exceeded only by the war on nobody in particular but on a tactic. It’s become a cause of mass hysteria and an excuse for the government doing anything.

Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush started two completely pointless, counterproductive, and immensely expensive wars, neither of which has any prospect of ending anytime soon.

Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous of all agencies, now with its own gigantic campus in Washington, DC. It will never go away and centralizes the functions of a police state.

Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them (like the Uighurs recently in the news) guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for years. A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an “enemy combatant” to be completely deprived of any rights at all.

Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands of foreign nationals, Bush made it a U.S. policy to use torture to extract information, based on a suspicion or nothing but a guard’s whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things to the reputation of the U.S. ever. It says to the world, “We stand for nothing.”

The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the names of over a million people on this list, and it’s still growing at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other purposes in the future…

The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000 middle-aged people who were willing to go through their fellow citizens’ dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously. God forbid you’re not polite to them…

Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis of the free market. Rather than trying to abolish or cut them back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.

Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress did than any other president in history.

See:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/casey/casey16.1.html

Tom Woods hits it out of the park again.   The state sovereignty movement is a good start. America is an occupied nation and until we understand that basic predicament, we will continue to muddle about as our rights and liberties are stripped away wholesale.  -BB

Thomas Woods avers: “Many more examples of the ongoing relevance of the Principles of ’98 could be cited. In the midst of a dispute with the federal government over the Second Bank of the United States, the Ohio legislature voted to affirm the Principles of ’98. In 1825, Kentucky’s governor said: “When the general government encroaches upon the rights of the State, is it a safe principle to admit that a portion of the encroaching power shall have the right to determine finally whether an encroachment has been made or not? In fact, most of the encroachments made by the general government flow through the Supreme Court itself, the very tribunal which claims to be the final arbiter of all such disputes. What chance for justice have the States when the usurpers of their rights are made their judges? Just as much as individuals when judged by their oppressors. It is therefore believed to be the right, as it may hereafter become the duty of the State governments, to protect themselves from encroachments, and their citizens from oppression, by refusing obedience to the unconstitutional mandates of the federal judges.”

These are facts. They are facts that constitute a central part of antebellum American history. Yet to say that the standard American history text does not trace the influence of the Principles of ’98 over the course of the ensuing years, as I have done all too briefly here, would be the understatement of the century. The profession at large has essentially ignored the issue; other than Bill Watkins’ excellent study, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single book-length treatment of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 over the past hundred years.”

Please see the rest at

http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2009/03/04/the-states-rights-tradition-nobody-knows/

I love Mike V’s blog and recommend you visit it daily. I share his vision of the Three Percenter and think that assignation may be the bulwark to stand athwart the Marxoid invasion of America which has reached its apotheosis with Maobama. I am pleasantly surprised at the outrage that is cascading across America with the attempted completion of the government takeover of health provision (it started in the 1960’s).  -BB

(Author’s Note [Mike V]: My thanks to Big Mike Barlow for suggesting the idea.)

Scene the First
13 December 2012

Chuck fumbled with the keys, dropped them, snatched them up and, finally, got the door open. The hospice nurse, alerted by the noise, was already up and standing in the middle of the front room. One look at her careworn face told the story.

“I’m sorry Mr. Daniels,” she said anyway. “She’s gone.”

Chuck dropped his keys on the table as he always did, cognizant only of the thought that nothing would ever be the same again.

Theresa was dead, then. Killed by health care rationing.

They had known this was the way it was going to be. Theresa had even stood in the town meeting, oh, how long ago, and told the congressman that if the Health Care Bill passed as written that it would come to this. They never thought it would be her. But she had been right. Government health care killed her. Too late diagnosed. Finally treated, too little, too late. And then, at the last, the “gate keepers” refused to pay for an experimental treatment that had shown great promise. Too “unproven,” they said.

Now she was gone.

What was there left to say?

Maybe, just maybe, there was one thing.

Scene the Second
21 December 2012

The congressman was alone as he finished cleaning out the desk drawers in his local office. He’d laid off the rest of his staff, and even his secretary and part-time bed partner had gone, seeking other employment.

He had been defeated last month, by the revulsion and backlash created by the government-run health care system he had worked all his life to pass. Well, there was one thing he could hold onto. Like every other entitlement program ever made into law, they’d never repeal this one. Health care for all, the crown jewel of his legislative record, would never be repealed. The country was stuck with it now, and there was damn all his opponents could do about it.

The congressmen smiled, if bitterly. It was cold comfort for losing all those perks he had for so many years. But it was comfort.

The door to his office opened, and suddenly a man stood there. What the hell? I know I locked the front door.

“Who the hell are you?” the congressman demanded.

The man looked inoffensive enough. He had a beaten air about him. A sadness.

“I’m Theresa’s husband.”

“Who’s Teresa?” The congressman balked, wondering if this was a jealous husband. He never could remember names.

“Not Teresa, The-resa,” the man corrected.

“OK, who is she?”

“Just a woman you killed.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I never killed anybody. Who the hell are YOU?”

Chuck Daniels smiled then, and it was a smile that frightened the congressman to his core.

“Why, don’t you know? I’m your gate keeper.”

“Gate keeper? What the he . . .” His voice stopped, as he involuntarily sucked in air at the sight of the pistol.

Where had that come from? the congressman wondered dully. Looking at his death, he could think of nothing to say.

“And congressman?”

The congressman just looked at him.

“Application denied.”

The shot seemed impossibly loud, even in the palatial room.

Postscript: This little drama is currently being scripted by Nancy Pelosi and her pals in the Imperial City of DC. The dramatic license taken for its future possible unintended consequences is my own. Feel free to spread this as far and wide as you like. Just do it in its entirety, unedited, with the information below. Oh, and be sure to send one copy to your congress-critter. It is only fiction, after all. Certainly nothing could ever happen like this. You think?

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com
sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com

My friend, Chris M, happens to be an astute observer of many things, amongst which is the intrigue in Russia and beyond. He sent me this article with the comments that follow. I would simply say that the Greater Depression is going to find the Obamabots and their fellow-travelers in the War Party sniffing out another conflict to further the intrusion of the state into our lives. It is a sign of the times when Russian reporting may be more reliable than American. -BB

This article looks like it could be disinformation, but if true, would have many implications in the low-level intelligence coming out as of late. I theorized that all of this was initially about Israel gaining control of Caspian crude via the Ashkelon pipeline and essentially having their hand on the valve before it went to the Asian markets. Both as a means of controlling price and availability (and probably to source their own war machine as well). The response clearly indicated by Russia immediately shutting down the pipeline moving in, as well as, moving its largest carrier fleet and establishing its sole permanent warm-water port at Poti, as well as, position medium-range launchers in Syria, in effort to counter Amero-Israeli proxy-aggression. Essentially, “Don’t move, or the hostage gets it!”.

It looks as if either the entire stint was engineered to produce such a response so that the plan can advance to Phase Two or, the Russian response was underestimated so now the region is being reconfigured into yet another proxy war. This could be an attempt to create a Russian-military bloodletting (such as Afghanistan), or, perhaps the grand prize, WWIV. It seems to me that ultimately, WWIV is a mile-marker goal, and would be consistent with your concept of perpetual war being both good and necessary for the parasite to thrive in such times.  -CM

Thursday, August 6, 2009

A soldier who deserted the Georgian army and has now fled to Russia says US instructors are currently training Georgian soldiers for a war – just as they did before Georgia’s assault last year on South Ossetia.

Eduard Korotkov also spoke about Georgia’s military provocations against Russian peacekeepers prior to the Georgia-South Ossetia conflict, the weapons that the US supplied to Georgia, and Georgians’ shooting of POWs during the conflict.

Below is the transcript of what he said:

Eduard Korotkov: My name is Korotkov Eduard Igorevich, born on July 27, 1981. From August 2007 I served in the 4th brigade of the 42nd battalion in the Georgian army as head of my unit, with the rank of junior sergeant.

Question: Did you take part in any actions?

Eduard Korotkov: No, I did not. I had deserted earlier.

Question: You must have served in [Georgian] peacekeeping forces stationed in the Georgian–Ossetian conflict zone, just prior to the war. Please tell about that.

Eduard Korotkov: We were stationed in an area of the Ossetian village of Tsinuri – our entire company. We were training to carry out inspections of vehicles, ID documents and belongings, as well as how to stand on duty and use handguns and assault rifles – we had a whole arsenal there. We had a lot of weaponry.

We went to the top of a mountain to guard the village of Avreli. I recall an episode in December [2007] – don’t remember the exact date – we were told that something was starting in Abkhazia. In the place where our unit was stationed – on the mountain – there were Russian peacekeeping forces.

So we were trained how – during night time – should something come up, to quickly get out and be ahead of the Russians. Our mobile phones were taken away from everyone in the company and in the whole of the battalion amid talk of a war starting. We were prepared – additional ammunition was issued to us. We put additional bandages and medical supplies into our backpacks. So we were prepared.

Question: Against the Russians?

Eduard Korotkov: Against the Russians, because besides us there were only peacekeepers from Russia deployed there. No Ossetians.

A month later we were transferred to Nikozi [sic] from where we clandestinely moved to Igneti where an outpost of the Russian peacekeeping forces recorded the number of personnel and our weaponry. We stood there at night, along with Georgian interior special forces, amid the cold weather. They also had all kinds of weapons, the same as us – a whole arsenal sufficient for a battalion.

Question: Did they stage provocations?

Eduard Korotkov: Oh, yeah, they did. They [Georgian special forces] staged provocations, saying “Come on, shoot, shoot!”, “Don’t fear!” Exactly there and then, on the road we were on, which was later confirmed by our guys, it was from there they went.

Question: Started advancing on the village?

Eduard Korotkov: Yes.

Question: What can you recount particularly about the events of August 2008?

Eduard Korotkov: After the war I met my friends there – from Kakhteti. They said to me: “After you deserted the unit, American instructors came and conducted training for two months.” Various kinds of weapons were brought from the USA, including M-16 rifles that were distributed. There were also Hummer vehicles, containers. So, they [my friends] said, it was likely preparation for war.

And we were all saying – that no battalion was standing like ours, in those villages. That’s why we were sent first – to capture the villages of Nunitana and Nitaguli. After which we entered Tskhinval.

Question: Please tell us what you know about Russian pilots.

Eduard Korotkov: I don’t know much about Russian pilots, but I do know something. For instance, the one captured by the Georgian peacekeeping forces who was wounded. He was guarded by my friend who works in the Justice Department. In a hospital.

We heard about the second one, too. He was [captured] alive but was shot to death and buried somewhere – I don’t know where exactly. They tried not to leave traces, in order to avoid claims by the Russians. What I know is the one who was alive, was shot to death and buried. The other one was later exchanged for someone from the Georgian peacekeeping forces who was here in hospital.

Question: What are your plans for the future?

Eduard Korotkov: First, I think that I won’t be able to live in Georgia anymore. I want to ask the president of the Russian Federation to grant me Russian citizenship. I want to lead a normal life. I won’t return to Georgia anymore. And I am not going to. Let them take me there dead rather than get me to live there. They are all preoccupied with war preparations, training.

Question: For a war?

Eduard Korotkov: Yes, for a war. Instructors keep arriving for training in how to wage a war – to handle all kinds of weapons. There was a ship that arrived in Batumi with some weapons – tanks. There is talk all over the country that there will be a war again – Saakashvili is engaged in preparations. I don’t want to live there.

See: http://www.russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-08-06/georgia-deserted-soldier-war.html

As most of you know, I have been writing about secession for years as the only means of liberation from DC. Now the entire chain of ideas of secession is becoming mainstream. Talk to your neighbors, friends and family and get the idea in people’s heads because the end is nigh and a bright new fabric of fissures is not going to tear America apart but renew it in a devolved, just and decentralized system of smaller nations and microstates.. I am thankful for Obamunism everyday because he brings us closer and closer to a new beginning. BB

Let’s say there’s an American revolution—who leaves first? Once the feds “start imposing just huge taxes,” Schiff says, the states that have to pay more in than they’re getting back out will pull their stars off the flag. Schiff lists Texas and California as potential pull-out candidates, whereas “Florida probably wants to stay because of all the Social Security money.”

If taxation doesn’t cause a mass revolt, economic polarization could yank everything apart. “The Sun Belt states and the interior West are growing faster than the Midwest,” says secession scholar Jason Sorens. “If they get rich enough, they might see their membership in the U.S. as burdensome if they have to support dying industries in Ohio and New York.” (Sorens apparently hasn’t considered the possibility that Cleveland and Buffalo will become America’s oases thanks to global warming.)

A place like Texas has the means to support itself as an independent country. What it needs is an ideological spark. Northern Italy’s Lega Nord could be a potential model. Rather than emphasize a linguistic or ethnic difference, the political party has espoused independence for economic reasons. In Italy’s 1996 general elections, the political party won 10 percent of the vote nationwide by calling on rich, conservative northerners to go it alone in a state called Padania. In the last eight years, Lega Nord has moderated its separatist rhetoric as it’s become a part of Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition government. (Still, the party is regularly accused of xenophobia.)

For secession to tear the United States to pieces, somebody has to jump first. “As states leave, more states want to leave,” Schiff says, “which is why the government will try to say you can’t leave, or we’ll invade you.” The Second Vermont Republic’s Thomas Naylor agrees that someone has to set a secessionist example. But Naylor doesn’t believe that the U.S. would try to “enslave free Vermont.” (His farcical suggestion: “They could burn all the maples and destroy all the black-and-white Holsteins.”) If American troops did invade Montpelier, he says, it would destroy America’s moral authority just as attempts to stamp out anti-Communist movements in the Soviet Bloc eventually undercut the USSR.

See the rest: http://www.slate.com/id/2224104