I support any policeman who knows his ACTUAL duty. Which is to protect the rights of the people, NOT to enforce the laws. Those laws may be (and in this case, in ALL cases of victimless crimes) unjust and wrong. I salute this guy. He deserves the support of every American who’s sick to death of having our rights stripped away from us.
Is this STILL not enough yet? WTF is it going to take for people to wake the hell up and put a STOP to this shit!?
I tired to vote on election day. I always try to (even tho I seriously doubt it does any good). Since I knew I would be at work on the ship, I filed for an absentee ballot. I sent it in. I even checked off the box for EMAIL. I had some slim hopes that the mail would deliver my ballot in time for me to vote in this election.
It seems they can’t get an envelope from Texas to Angola in 3 weeks, never mind that I never would have been able to mail it back to them in order to be counted before it was too late. So, NO, I did NOT get to vote in this election. 🙁
I am very disappointed, mostly because in contrast to the people who constantly tell me I’m wasting my vote by choosing to vote Libertarian, I am NOT wasting my vote at all. In fact, my vote counts 100 times more than theirs will.
By voting 3rd party, I am making my voice heard. I am emphatically stating that the way things have been going for the last 100 years is NOT acceptable!!!
I try not to pay any attention to politics. My friends will probably disagree with that statement. Especially since it may seem like that’s all they ever see me posting about on Facebook.
Sometimes I get carried away with it in personal discussions. Some have even accused me of ‘ranting’ on certain issues.
Yes, I have to admit, it’s almost impossible to avoid the politics any more in the USA. I have come to envy certain people. I really don’t know how they manage to do it. To completely ignore everything that’s going on in the world around them.
They’re happy to just live in their own little world and ignore all the continual and constant additional rules and regulations being piled upon us every day. The constant violations of our ‘god-given’, or as I prefer to call them, natural rights.
It helps to be retired, or otherwise not concerned with a job. It helps to not have to leave the house. I think even if I could live that way I would still be bothered just by the fact that any time they want, the government could choose to destroy you personally (KILL YOU on a WHIM, read up on the PATRIOT ACT and/or NDAA) and everything you’ve ever worked for in your life (Google asset forfeiture).
I’ll never understand how so many people just continue to totally ignore that fact and just go on with their lives like everything is perfectly fine.
It’s NOT. 🙁
An EXCELLENT post from the Culture Monk! Hopefully he is starting a conversation that we all really ought to be having. I completely agree with his comments about the news media (mainstream news media) and I am SO glad we now have the internet to help us learn the truth about what’s going on in the world and to bypass the lies the psychopaths in power wish us to believe.
I have been promoting the libertarian outlook for a long time. I think they deserve at LEAST the opportunity to have their views known in the public forum. The mainstream news media does all it can to discredit their views and label any politician who espouses them as a ‘nutjob’!
Who’s nuts” Someone who believes in freedom and liberty. or someone who prefers to use FORCE on every issue?
I hate to say it, but I screwed up. I had heard of this event a couple of weeks ago and meant to get involved a whole lot more than I managed to do. I actually heard of it the first time from a post by Gene’O at the Sourcerer Blog. He had a great page on his blog all made up especially for this event (and of course it’ll be an ongoing fight, so check it out and follow it to keep informed).
I wanted to do something to help promote this event. I wanted to rouse people up to take a stand and get involved. I meant to make at least a post of my own (and hopefully a page) about it, but I’ve been so busy lately, the best I could manage to do was to sign the petition, email my congressmen, and post on my Twitter and Facebook pages. I hope at least a couple of people noticed it yesterday and took some action. 🙂
Today I got an email from the ‘Campaign to Stop Government Spying’, ’cause’ I signed up for it a while back. They sent me an update on how things went yesterday and a reminder that the fight is far from over. Here’s what’s they reported…
The numbers were astonishing. The Day We Fight Back was featured on over 5,000 websites, generated 84,000 calls, and 172,000 were emails sent while our petition here on Causes reached over 25,000 signatures!
In addition to the tremendous online success Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has filed suit against the NSA in what will surly become a landmark case against mass surveillance.
It’s a good start, but obviously not good enough since the congress is not yet willing to completely throw out the NSA (and TSA, and the PATRIOT ACT, and Obamacare, etc) and get back to Constitutional government!
Personally, I wish I could throw out (with appropriate punishment) every one of those politicians who allowed this to happen in the first place. Every single one of them who voted to support the NSA in ANY way.
The NSA is an affront to every principle this country was founded on. Its entire purpose is at war with the 4th amendment (and the 5th)(and all the rest of them too!).
I can hardly believe how far we have come in just MY lifetime. We’ve moved from a place where most of us could all live our lives in (relative) peace and prosperity, almost like in the TV shows “Leave it to Beaver” or Andy Griffiths Mayberry,…
To now we’ve somehow wound up in George Orwells 1984, or Huxleys Brave New World. Maybe a mixture of those 2 with a big bunch of Kafkas Metomorphosis thrown in. In all reality, we’ve far surpassed even the worst nightmares of those visionary authors.
The NSA (along with the TSA and a bunch of other alphabet agencies) are a BIG part of what’s wrong with America.
I don’t agree with those who say we’ve got the government we ‘deserve’. I don’t believe ANYONE ‘deserves’ a government like this. One that treats us as criminals. One that thinks it has the right to track and CONTROL EVERY aspect of our lives.
Why in the world would ANYONE think anybody deserves that? It reminds me of the self righteous hypocrites who think everyone but themselves are sinners and belong in hell. They get a huge enjoyment out of feeling so smug and superior. But no one is perfect (including them), so they deserve to go to hell (and will) too.
The people who think we deserve this are just the same. So, we deserve this suck ass government we have because of what, exactly?
We’re ALL in the same boat! We need to figure that out and stand together to do something to save ourselves from sinking. We need to throw overboard the ones who are bashing holes in our hull and sabotaging our pumps!
Maybe then we can save ourselves and find a way to repair our country to one that will help better our lives again instead of the opposite.
This campaign was called “the Day We Fight Back”. We don’t need A day we fight back, we need to fight back EVERY DAY until they get off our backs and give us back our freedom!
Illegal government spy programs are not the ONLY things we need to fight. We can START with that, then take on the next. We need to keep going until we have ALL of our freedom back.
I hope I can see that someday. I hope I can even see a serious START to it. I know I’m not the one, but there must be SOMEONE out there who can come up with something effective, some way to make some progress, some way to wake people up to what’s REALLY going on and get them to take an interest…
Anyone?
Ike Warned Us About This Guy | Laissez-Faire Bookstore.
OK, I gave you guys a break, I’ve tried to lay off the politics for the holidays. 😉
I can’t hold back any longer. Here’s a good one from Douglas French at Laissez-Faire.
He starts out his article with a quote from H.L. Menken which I really like. I’m going to say it again right here since I think it’s so pertinent to what’s going on today. Here you go…
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
I wonder, just how many people REALLY believe all these scenarios we have been dealing with constantly since 9/11 are serious threats?
I can’t even begin to count how many ‘crisis’ we have had thrust into our consciousness by the mainstream media. How many times have we been told our only option was to panic and allow those who know better than us to step up to the plate and take over.
I hope it’s only an American thing. I hope the rest of the world has not fallen for the idea that they must give up their freedom in trade for a (false) sense of security. I hope the rest of the world has not chosen to live in fear like we have in America.
I say “chosen”, but should I really use that word? When most of the people here have just been lied to so much that they can’t even imagine the truth any more. Of course, the truth has been purposely concealed, just so it makes it harder for people to see that they’re being tricked.
So is it really a choice when you’ve been lied to, tricked, deceived? Or is it really a form of coercion (meaning manipulation and violence)?
I read ‘1984’ years ago. Written by George Orwell, it was/is such a powerful novel, it made me think then and it still resonates today. I see what is happening around me today and I think to myself, “1984 has been so far surpassed by our government today, our reality is far worse than Orwells’ worst nightmares”.
‘1984’ was supposed to be a warning, not a roadmap!
In my travels to various places around the world, I see a huge difference in reactions to the idea that we are all living under constant deadly threats. Some countries like the US and Great Britain take it to ridiculous extremes and insist we live in a national prison state, just so we can pretend that somehow now we are ‘safe’.
It makes the people FEEL better, so therefore it must be worth it.
The screws just keep on tightening. The water just keeps on getting warmer. One degree at a time. Our once free countries have turned into police states before our eyes and no one seems to notice (or care).
Other places, people just seem to take it all with a grain of salt and go on enjoying their lives as best they can without adding the misery of a police state on top of whatever problems they may already have.
I have been to plenty of places in the last few years where they do NOT insist on asking for “your papers please” everywhere you go. Plenty of places don’t insist on subjecting you to a virtual strip search before your flight to visit grandma. Plenty of places don’t think it’s so overwhelmingly important to spy on everything a person does, everywhere they go, everything they say or watch or buy or read, or visit, etc.
How many people REALLY think the things we are doing to ourselves in the USA are REALLY necessary to keep us safe? How many people really think there IS any such thing as perfect safety? How many people would REALLY like to live in a world where ‘our leaders’ are allowed to do whatever they think they need to make us safe?
For those who think they really WOULD like to live in a state like that, where everything is done to make us ‘safe’, take a look at any maximum security prison. There, everyone is spied on constantly, everyone is searched constantly, everyone is identified as belonging, and so everyone is ‘safe’. Riiiiiiigggght