Category Archives: Fascism

Facebook Forced To Fawn Over Beltway Bosses

Barack Obama, Business, Democrats, Fascism, Government, Regulation, Republicans, The State

Had Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook—which we all use to such great advantage—neglected to schmooze Washington, one of this or the next administration’s top dogs (Republicans are no better than Democrats in persecuting business) would pick-up the scent and give chase. Why? Because we labor under a system “in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation.” So wrote the Tannehills in The Market for Liberty.

Fascism, in short.

Duly, Facebook now has a new Washington office. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

“… Facebook is still trying to find a path to Washington, where the company has only a fledgling lobbying operation, even though it finds its privacy policies under increasing scrutiny and is trying to navigate a politically sensitive expansion into China.

In seven years, Facebook has risen from a tiny start-up to an Internet power with a potential market value estimated at more than $50 billion. Now an online forum with more than 600 million users, Facebook faces growing pressure from lawmakers and regulators concerned about the way it uses personal information shared by its users. [Yeah, right; the Big Bosses only want what’s best for us.]

At the same time, the company is confronting questions about how it will handle its role as a global public square for dissidents if it enters China and other countries with little tolerance for dissent. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal about its approach abroad, Facebook officials in Washington suggested the company might be willing to play by China’s rules—a stance that could raise hackles in Congress.

Until lately, Facebook has spent very little money in Washington, even by Silicon Valley’s frugal standards. The company’s outlays on lobbying totaled $351,000 last year, federal records show. That’s a fraction of the amount spent by other technology giants, including Google Inc.’s $5.2 million and Microsoft Corp.’s $6.9 million.”

[SNIP]

Any serious student of economics knows that regulation hinders wealth creation, often forcing the entrepreneur to replace viable, voluntary trades and transactions with bureaucratic, politicized decision making. Rather than concentrate on satisfying and protecting his users on Facebook, Zuckerberg, is now compelled to divert resources from customer service and technical innovation into navigating the bureaucrat’s tax and regulatory laws.

TSA Screening Aims To Subdue Citizenry

Fascism, Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Terrorism, The State

If there was ever any doubt in your mind that the TSA and its home grown terrorists aim to cow the population into submission, not to protect it, read on:

“Arrogant complaining about airport security is one indicator Transportation Security Administration officers consider when looking for possible criminals and terrorists, CNN has learned exclusively. And, when combined with other behavioral indicators, it could result in a traveler facing additional scrutiny.

CNN has obtained a list of roughly 70 ‘behavioral indicators’ that TSA behavior detection officers use to identify potentially ‘high risk’ passengers at the nation’s airports.

Many of the indicators, as characterized in open government reports, are behaviors and appearances that may be indicative of stress, fear or deception. None of them, as the TSA has long said, refer to or suggest race, religion or ethnicity.

But one addresses passengers’ attitudes towards security, and how they express those attitudes.

It reads: ‘Very arrogant and expresses contempt against airport passenger procedures.'”

[SNIP]

Remember when a secret Missouri State police report, “entitled ‘The Modern Militia Movement,’ and dated February 20, 2009,” warned about subversives like … me? Apparently, this scribe has the makings of a militia member, and then some. One of the incriminating telltale signs the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) was on the look out for were Ron Paul stickers. (I have one on my car. It reads: “Don’t blame me, I supported Ron Paul.”) Also deemed a sign of subversion was the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag (which has snaked across the front page of this website, where my seditious work is stored, since 2008). Everyone was supposed to keep their eyes peeled for “paraphernalia” associated with the patriot movement.

Now our oppressors have added another sign of insurrection: protesting the roger-and radiate routine at the nation’s airports. This is far more perverse than the aforementioned clues because verbal protests over the violations of individual rights are now equated with sedition.

UPDATE II: Bouncing Off the Walls In Arizona (Barack & ‘The Big Lie’)

Barack Obama, Communism, Crime, Fascism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

If The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf were indeed Jared Lee Loughner’s preferred pamphlets—then we also know this about the young man responsible for shooting six people to death and wounding 12 “outside of a Tucson, Arizona, grocery store”: He is consistent on matters ideological.

Left-liberals like the former White House communications director Anita Dunn (of the Mao Moment) will tell you that their communist heroes share nothing with fascism’s icons. Not true.

“For many decades,” wrote Ayn Rand, “The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property.”

On the other hand, Loughner, who shot US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, through the head, also liked some good stuff: Animal Farm and We The Living.

And Loughner’s penchant for this YouTube Disturbia portends anger, alienation, even pain.

UPDATE I: SHAPING THE NARRATIVE. Intoning on CNN, Donna Lemon was keen to shape this crime as a function of the hot-bed of political hatred that Arizona has allegedly become. Pima County AZ Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has furnished the necessary hyperbole:

“But again I’d just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I believe has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Expect this impetus to gather momentum. “Our Overlords Who Art in DC” are worried sick about their own asses. To wit, Speaker John Boehner has suspended the people’s business: a vote to repeal the hulking healthcare bill. Instead, our sovereigns are likely to follow this crime with a rash of laws guaranteeing their safety against The Great Unwashed—at a great cost to said Unwashed.

The Great Unwashed will go along. Fishermen brave treacherous seas to do a job that is the most dangerous on earth, bar that of farmer (Boer) in South Africa. But, no, our elected representatives must be shielded from the vagaries of their relatively easy jobs. Sacred Cows.

Murder is the ultimate evil. Using the political process to steal from some subjects and give to others is also evil. Let us not discount that moral imperative.

What else to expect:

• Draconian security around The Sacred Cows. If one of them deigns to grace the local store again, it will be with a security detail that’ll shut down the store and the suburbs around it.

• Some kind of harm to law-abiding gun owners. No crime against an official can go without doing damage to citizens’ right of self-defense.

• A renewed war on all things Arizona, including on the eminently reasonable immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070.

UPDATE II (Jan. 9): “THE LEFT CRANKS OUT THE BIG LIE.” Via Larry Auster:

Remember when President Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? Remember when conservatives were blamed for the supposed rash of black church burnings in the late 1990s? Now conservatives and supporters of enforcing U.S. immigration laws are being blamed for the mass murder in Tucson yesterday.
This is the Big Lie, which Hitler, one of its top practitioners, defined as a lie so colossal that “no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” And here is the particular form that the Big Lie takes in the current instance: falsely blaming one’s target for the very thing that you are doing to him.
The left, through its wild charge that “conservative hatred” is responsible for the Tucson mass murder, is spreading hatred of conservatives. The left is actually doing to conservatives what it falsely accuses conservatives of doing to liberals. That is the Big Lie.

AND:

“The media have not bothered to mention some of the more ‘rude and crude’ comments our esteemed ‘Genius in Chief’ Barry has made over the past couple of years. Lines such as, ‘If they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun,’ or, ‘We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back,’ [‘Rosa Parks could not be reached for comment’], or his remark that middle-class white Americans ‘cling to guns and religion and dislike of people who are different,’ or, most recently, his shocking comment to Hispanics that they should look at Republicans who oppose amnesty as their ‘enemies’ whom they should ‘punish.’ Naturally, the media do not suggest that Obama has been planting hatred of white conservatives in the hearts of liberals and minorities.”

UPDATED: Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed’ (More Gloom)

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Debt, Democrats, Fascism, Homeland Security, Liberty, Paleoconservatism, Political Economy, Republicans, The State

The following excerpt is from “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” my new WND.COM column:

“Last week, this column explained the divide between Americans and their ‘Overlords Who Art in D.C.’ I asked that you quit invoking words too weak to describe that divide. ‘Disconnect,’ ‘disrespect’: These are soft designations; they don’t begin to bridge the moat that separates you from your sovereigns.

Proper metaphors for the relationship between The Great Unwashed and the government that literally has them by the genitals is that of ruled and ruler, Rome and its provinces, Imperial China and its peasants.

If you’re a tax payer — at least 50 percent of Americans are tax consumers — you are the Beltway’s bitch.

So stop beseeching sinecured statists for ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ They will never know what it’s like to slum it in your neighborhoods. They’ll never experience the effects of inflation and rising prices as you will; they’ve voted themselves salaries twice as high as yours and pensions in perpetuity. You’re paying.

Think of yourself as a servant, your nose pressed against your master’s mansion windows. That’s how I felt as I drove through the suburbs of Northern Virginia, in October of this year. I saw what Peggy Noonan lushly described in her Wall Street Journal column, excerpted by John Derbyshire in his full and fair assessment of the tottering American experiment, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism …

The complete column is “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” now on WND.COM.

Avail yourself of my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, on Kindle.

Merry Xmas to all,
ILANA

UPDATE (Dec. 25): “IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME” (as the Beatles lyrics go). The Powers that Be thought “Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim” (and also happens to have “the equivalent of a pacemaker”), needed a reminder of her ordeal.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.
“I turned to the police officer and said, ‘I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'” and they said, ‘No, you have to do this,'” she said.
Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.
“I told them, ‘No, I’m not going to have my breasts felt,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you are,'” said Hirschkind.
When Hirschkind refused, she says that “the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security.”
An ABIA spokesman says it is TSA policy that anyone activating a security alarm has two options. One is to opt out and not fly, and the other option is to subject themselves to an enhanced pat down. Hirschkind refused both and was arrested.

Hey, what do you know: A noisy, irate, flying public has changed the behavior of their sovereigns not a whit. Who would have thunk? (See “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed.”)

And what do memebers of the sheep herd say about a middle aged, ill American lady being mauled by rabid TSA dogs?

“I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it,” said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

It matters not a bit that “less than three percent of travelers get a pat-down.” This practice is a matter of policy, not happenstance. Theoretically, everyone could be molested, very many are. No freedom loving individual should be consoled by the repulsive, “rare-occurrence” excuse.