Category Archives: Family

Uncle Sam: ‘The Greatest Purveyor Of Violence In The World’

America, BAB's A List, Family, Government, Individual Rights, Justice, Law, Military, Pop-Culture, Race, Terrorism, War

BAB contributor MYRON PAULI agrees with MLK, who said: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today–my own government.”

‘The Greatest Purveyor Of Violence In The World’
By Myron Pauli

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government” is the revered Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior saw America. Well, we are now a country where millions go to the movies to applaud “terrorists” being tortured by the CIA which, apparently, enabled us to lynch Osama bin Laden (the “terrorists” do not deserve to be put on trial since our government tells us they are “guilty” and it is none of our business to ever question the government but just to shut up and applaud). We have a secret and unaccountable organization, the CIA (instead of our own military which has more accountability) conducting secret undeclared wars all over the planet. Some people objected when Nixon did this in Cambodia – rather that Nixon be hailed as a Prophet of what was to come. Gadhafi comes clean on his nuclear program so WE OVERTHROW HIM and scatter his forces into Mali where …. – “Good Golly Miss Molly” – now the “terrorists” are destabilizing Mali – send in the French and troops and airplanes and drones. Like a proverbial tube of toothpaste, it will probably spread to Niger or Mauritania or who-knows… – remember when Cambodia was a quiet neutral ignored country until the US and the Vietnamese Communists decided to use it as a battleground and 2,000,000 Cambodians later died?! Collateral damage!

Meanwhile, the Washington Post of January 11 told of how foreign governments and our own are cracking down on parents who want to adopt orphans from overseas. Yes, ostensibly there are rules to prevent foreign kidnappings – but 2 hours of investigation by a reputable orphanage should be sufficient. A couple spent $45,000 over 5 years and came up with no child! The Homeland Security Department made them submit their fingerprints twice because the first set of fingerprints “expired”! And the foreign governments use the children rotting in their orphanages as fodder for their own corrupt political aims. Any cretin can give birth, and any other cretin can have an abortion, but G-d help us from those evil people trying to adopt babies. They are now on the lookout for single parents, the obese, elderly, divorced parents, gays, or whatever. Imagine a kid being adopted by a single old fat divorced lesbian – call out the drones. Perhaps we should be thankful for abortion since it prevents these kids from being adopted?!

Nowadays, 55% of black American developing children get aborted, and 70% of the rest are born out of wedlock. Whites are lagging behind but gradually catching up. Naturally, we will be subjected to the 40th Anniversary “discussion” of that random exercise of Harry Blackmun’s stream-of-consciousness, “Roe v. Wade,” in spite of its irrelevance. Even if Utah could outlaw abortion, a woman could hop on the Greyhound bus to Nevada to dispose of her developing child. Additionally, it is highly dubious that a jury of 12 in any jurisdiction would ever convict when 65% view abortion as less morally objectionable than burping at the dinner table. Heck – just announce that the fetus is part of “Al Qaeda” and the audience will cheer! Kill, kill, kill!

But perhaps the aborted babies are not missing much. Any child born in America comes into the world owing $50,000 of national debt and about ten times that in promised obligations to current Americans. Government grows in secrecy while Americans are regularly spied upon. Prosecutors threaten a jerk like Aaron Schwartz with 180 years in jail for computer “crimes”, e-mails are read, due process of law is disposed of entirely, laws are passed without being read and subject to arbitrary “interpretations” by the executive. We can celebrate Martin Luther King day because instead of Lyndon Johnson conducting idiotic wars in far-flung places, we now have a half-African origin President conducting new idiotic wars in far-flung places. We can celebrate because thanks to technological advances, we can conduct new idiotic wars with less American casualties.

America has advanced to the point that a dark skinned American can now be “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and even do it “on the cheap” – out of view from the public which focuses more on the phony girlfriend of some Notre Dame football player than our trillion-dollar war budget and the dozen or so ongoing perpetual wars.

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

UPDATED: Guns Are Good For Me, But Not For Thee

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, Family, Feminism, Gender, GUNS, Individual Rights, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Regulation

A coterie of creepy kids converged today on DC. These modern-day freaks, the products of progressive parenting and pedagogy, put on a show worthy of the miniature reality show stars they are. (Watch Dance Moms to get a feel for the pathological, repulsive vernacular America’s kids are acquiring from the formative figures in their lives.)

The hallmark of an infantile society whose members lack an adult life: the canonization of The Kids.

Soon, the estrogen brigade on TV—right and left; Megyn Kelly and her slobbering sister on the other news stations—began beating on breast. The kids, the kids, you can’t use the “nation’s” little Buddhas—our demigods, our future (NOT)—in such a manner.

The participation of creepy kids—at the urging of their weepy, corpulent parents—in the celebration of 23 imperial orders in furtherance of federal tyranny was conflated by TV’s estrogen brigade with the NRA’s factual allusion to The Kids in this perfectly good NRA ad. It declares, “Protection for their kids, gun-free zones for ours:

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the ad’s narrator asks. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their schools? Mr. Obama demands the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.”

UPDATE: I am all for child labor. But kids should be seen and not heard. (Humor alert, FB Friends.)

UPDATED: Meanness Shines Through The Shock

America, Etiquette, Family, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

This is one of those things one gets into trouble for noticing and pointing out. So I’ll go ahead and point it out, ’cause—boy!—did I notice it.

Gene Rosen, “a 69-year-old retired psychologist… took … four girls and two boys” from the Sandy Hook Elementary school into his home near the school, shortly after the shooting.

Rosen said he had heard the staccato sound of gunfire about 15 minutes earlier but dismissed it as an obnoxious hunter in the nearby woods.
“I had no idea what had happened,” Rosen said. “I couldn’t take that in.”
He walked the children past his small goldfish pond with its running waterfall, and the garden he made with his two grandchildren, into the small yellow house he shares with his wife.
He ran upstairs and grabbed an armful of stuffed animals. He gave those to the children, along with some fruit juice, and sat with them as the two boys described seeing their teacher being shot.

But this good Samaritan’s offering did not quite meet the standards of one of his small guests. The boy responded with a comment Rosen thought so adorable, he “wanted to tell him, `I love you. I love you.'”

“This little boy turns around, and composes himself, and he looks at me like he had just removed himself from the carnage and he says, `Just saying, your house is very small.'”

Is that not a rude and unkind quip?

Just saying.

UPDATE (1/11): Everyone on Facebook ducked the issue of how badly behaved kids have become. Myron Pauli at least responded by changing the subject. But pretending the problem doesn’t exist is becoming harder. Fox and experts are catching up with a topic I’ve been covering since the early 2000s and before. “We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists.”

UPDATED: Multiculturalism & ‘The 18th-Century Levantine Mindset’

Family, Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Middle East, Multiculturalism, Trade

As hard as it is to believe, the “18th-century cities of the Levant” were liberal, libertine and prosperous. The secret to the successful, vibrant life in the Levant is detailed in a book by Philip Mansel, which traces “the story of how first Smyrna (modern Izmir), then Alexandria and then Beirut emerged to prominence, and how they waxed in wealth, power, beauty and influence over the 19th and 20th centuries.”

The Levant then was without the top-down, punitive, forced integration which is the hallmark of the 19th-century nation-state. Enforced across the Anglo-American and European spheres, this integration compels the founding peoples to prostrate themselves before minorities, each and every one of whom is said to suffer from historical wounds and claims to match their eternally suppurating wounds:

The reviewer reveals a thing or two about multiculturalism in these cities.

“The cities of the Levant were never a melting pot of peoples, rather a grid of self-governing communities, enforced by separate schools, places of worship, hospitals, burial grounds, clubs, charities, newspapers and libraries. Internal schisms – between Catholic and Orthodox, between Nestorian and Monophysite, between Sunni and Shia, between Ashkenazi and Sephardim further subdivided the urban tribes of Greeks, Jews, Syrians, Armenians, Turks, Franks and Egyptians. Trade, fame and the pursuit of pleasure alone brought the citizens together, and with it came a natural multi lingualism, so that it was not uncommon for a Levantine family to be fluent in half a dozen languages and scripts, or to use ‘farabish’ a slang-like fusion of Arabic, Italian, English and French. And because the divisions between the communities were so absolute there was a remarkable spirit of tolerance within a Levantine city. Noone felt that their children were in danger of being submerged by another culture and so there was a propensity for sharing, knowing and acknowledging the various festivals and rituals of the different faiths. This arose not out of any interest in a multi-faith fusion, but as neighbours with a taste for being amused by different dishes, street processions, dances and tunes.”

Levantine loyalty structures started with family, then progressed out to ethnic community with a light gilding of urban pride before drifting on outwards via thin personal connections (however faint or imaginary) to other trading cities and the court of the ruling dynasty. Nationalism was startling absent from the 18th-century Levantine mindset, as was any concern, kinship or sense of responsibility for the parochial hinterland. The laboriously constructed contract of 19th-century nationalism – duty, obedience and sacrifice (duty to pay tax, obedience to the heirachy of state servants and readiness to fight for the fatherland) was in almost comic opposition to the Levantine mindset. For the Levantine was a natural free-trader, if not a smuggler, a deal-maker, a tipper of minor officials and a hoarder – who would migrate rather than fight for a distant state, but also perish rather than witness the break-up of family. Mansel creates a mantra to help us translate the smiles of welcome, the immaculate tailoring, the charm and the intoxicating scents of the Levantine: Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics.

UPDATE: “Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics”: This quote from the review above is especially germane for those of us who champion the locality as the proper repository of conservative loyalties.