Category Archives: Government

On Health Care & ‘Homo Economicus,’ And The Spoils Of Entrapment & Political Predation

Economy, Government, Healthcare, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism

Health Care & ‘Homo Economicus. Even the pro-Obama socialist youth of America act as “Homo Economicus”: they know they are young and healthy and unlikely to fall ill. Why should they partake in a scheme that financially punishes them for this natural advantage? Millennials want us to pay for them, not the reverse.

“Federal Health Care Enrollees: Older Outnumber Younger”:

.. more than 2 million people who have signed up for private [it’s not private: “A healthcare cauldron of Obama’s creation, government-run exchanges constitute a planned economy, not a market economy”] health insurance through the exchanges set up by the federal government. … Of those who signed up in the first three months, 55 percent are age 45 to 64, officials said. Only 24 percent of those choosing a health insurance plan are 18 to 34, a group that is usually healthier and needs fewer costly medical services. People 55 to 64 – just below the age at which people qualify for Medicare — represented the largest group, at 33 percent.”

Speaking of the Dah Factor, or of the news newsmen were not anticipating (but you were):

“Review Of Terrorism Cases Finds NSA Spying Helped Very Little”:

Surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency helped very little when it came to cases brought against individuals the United States says were linked to al-Qaida. …

A great deal of efforts of our spymaster “protectors” go into entrapment; concocting elaborate traps to ensnare potential “evil doers”; “setting swarthy simpletons up and then nabbing them in a so-called terrorism sting.”

More non-news:

“Majority In Congress Are Millionaires”: Of course, the reporter doesn’t tell us how the predatory political class has acquired wealth, for he doesn’t think that it’s important, nevertheless:

For the first time in history, more than half the members of Congress are millionaires, according to a new analysis of financial disclosure reports conducted by the non-partisan .
Of the 534 current members of the House and Senate, 268 had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012 – up from 257 members in 2011. The median net worth for members of the House and Senate was $1,008,767.

Rep. Darrell Issa notwithstanding—he made his fortune, if I am not mistaken, in business, before joining the parasites in Congress—“The political class and its sycophants utilize the political means to earn their keep. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard reminded, these ‘are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory…but oh so very effective.'”

UPDATED: Quacking Over Ducksters As Freedoms Go POOF

Constitution, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Government, Homeland Security, Law, Race, Racism, Regulation

“Quacking Over Ducksters, As Freedoms Go POOF” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“While the nation fretted over the ouster of one Duckster from the parallel reality of a TV reality show, more of the protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution evaporated.

Just after Christmas, district-court Judge William Pauley ruled that the privacy protections afforded by the Constitution were relative freedoms, not absolutes ones. As such, Fourth-Amendment rights had to be calibrated against a government’s need to maintain a database of records that would (putatively) prevent future terrorist attacks. …

… This is the inglorious history of American freedom and federalism. In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along (as nicely as plaything Justice John G. Roberts did for ObamaCare)—there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, “independent” regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.

A “civil liberties officer,” for example.

The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another. The idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government was worse than naive.

As “luck” would have it, legislation that flouts the Fourth Amendment was previously in place to provide Pauley with all the positive-law backing the judge needed to justify an anti-constitutional ruling. To wit, the grounds upon which the New York jurist dismissed this ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) case against the NSA were, primarily, “that bulk collection was [already] authorized under existing laws allowing ‘relevant’ data collection to be authorized by secret US courts.”

Here you have the essence of modern-day, Managerial-State America. Natural law, common-law and Constitution have been nullified; buried under the rubble of legislation, statute, precedent, ad infinitum, rights having long-since been outsourced to the “better” judgment of bureaucrats and hired “experts.”

In this case, to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. …

Read the complete column. “Quacking Over Ducksters, As Freedoms Go POOF” is on WND.

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UPDATE (1/3): Someone is guilty of a performative contradiction. In any event, I’m glad I have not lost the reader who claims he is lost to me. From the COMMENTS @ WMD:

Nys Parkie
• 12 hours ago

Mercer lost me. Was a fan. Now her libertarian squeamish mish-mash of words only offend me. Her article on hunting cut the cord. I, as a conservative libertarian only have this response. Let me live as I choose and don’t demonize me for it. Maybe you (Her) is some type of PETA Vegan in disguise, I don’t know. Hate your mirror and not me.

Reply
Spyker May Nys Parkie
• 10 hours ago

Nys..,

You cannot chastise Ilana for your lack of command of the national language of the USA. She uses no words not from a good dictionary – the only “mish-mash” is the pancake between your ears.

As far as being ‘offended’ – kindly consider carefully what is ostensibly ‘arrogance’ and what is de facto personal insecurities.

To follow Ms Mercer demands no greater effort than reading through ATLAS SHRUGGED in a week…

UPDATED: The TAO Of Tyranny (The Israeli Difference)

Government, Homeland Security, Israel, Technology, Terrorism, The State

The TAO of tyranny was devised in 1997. In the USA.

The German weekly Der Spiegel has performed the service the British Guardian performed before it. Once again it falls to the serious foreign press to expose the machinations of the U.S. state apparatus; in this case, the works of The Office of Tailored Access Operations, or Tao.

“… TAO … is the National Security Agency’s top operative unit — something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.” So writes Der Spiegel.

According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO’s area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become — and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks. …

… one former TAO chief wrote … that TAO “needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations,” and that it must “support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations.” To succeed in this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire “pervasive, persistent access on the global network.” An internal description of TAO’s responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit’s tasks. In other words, the NSA’s hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries — nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.

Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry’s BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a “sustained TAO operation,” one document states.

This TAO unit is born of the Internet — created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world’s population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency. Their task was clear from the beginning — to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic.

… The TAO workers authorized to access the special, secure floor on which the unit is located are for the most part considerably younger than the average NSA staff member. Their job is breaking into, manipulating and exploiting computer networks, making them hackers and civil servants in one. Many resemble geeks — and act the part, too.

Their leader: the dangerous NSA Director, Keith Alexander.

Read on about “‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE), the goal [of which] is to “subvert endpoint devices,” according to an internal NSA presentation that SPIEGEL has viewed. The presentation goes on to list nearly all the types of devices that run our digital lives — ‘servers, workstations, firewalls, routers, handsets, phone switches, SCADA systems, etc.’ SCADAs are industrial control systems used in factories, as well as in power plants. Anyone who can bring these systems under their control has the potential to knock out parts of a country’s critical infrastructure.”

The most well-known and notorious use of this type of attack was the development of Stuxnet, the computer worm whose existence was discovered in June 2010. The virus was developed jointly by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and successfully so.

AND READ HOW TAO techies are “Having Fun at Microsoft’s Expense”—and at ours, since so many of us use Microsoft’s Windows.

UPDATED (12/31): The Israeli Difference, in reply to the Facebook Thread:

Israel possesses this capability, Don Darkes. But Israel seems far more prone to using these “tools” to do what they believe, and most of Israelis believe, is in the interest of national survival. The US state, however, turns on its own people, seldom acting in their interest. I mean, if Uncle Sam is so smart, and is spying on Mexico, why give drug dealers weapons to kill Americans and innocent Mexicans? A lot of people hate Israel. But a lot of what the state does (and I do not necessarily support these intrusions) is executed by a leadership that perceives its interest to be one with the people it represents. In other words, when Israelis release a cyber-virus on Iran, it is b/c Mosad members are not emigrating (they can’t; no one will have them). They want to secure the future of their own kind.

Woodrow The Worst

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government, History, Military, Neoconservatism, War

WOODROW THE WORST
By Myron Robert Pauli, WHO DAMNS THE 28TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE DAY HE WAS BORN: DECEMBER 28.

AS Woodrow Wilson’s birthday approaches, I would like to place his name in nomination as our worst significant President. Perhaps Franklin Pierce was drunk during much of his 4 years in power but what did he particularly do, drunk or sober, besides the Gadsden Purchase? Woodrow, however, was a man of “accomplishments” – almost all bad. Obviously, other libertarians dislike other consolidators of power such as Lincoln or FDR, but they had a few mitigating features: fighting against slavery or Nazism, dying before they could botch the victory, and a keen sense of humor.

The only example of Wilsonian humor was when he was holed up in the White House after his stroke and finally a congressional delegation came to see him. When told that the country was “praying for you,” the paranoid Wilson responded “which way?” This was the same Wilson who got up and danced when he heard Theodore Roosevelt had died, who refused to pardon his political opponent, Eugene Debs. Sigmund Freud wrote an entire book on Wilson’s psyche including an abusive father, a doting mother, 14 nervous breakdowns, and a paranoid Messianic complex. The famous psycho-historian James Barber characterized him and Nixon as classical “active-negative” Presidents.

In Civil Liberties, Wilson brought in the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Bureau of Information (promoting young J. Edgar Hoover), the Red Scare and deportations, and, as mentioned, he refused to pardon Debs (a leader of the labor movement who opposed going to war), even after World War I ended.

Wilson gave us our first anti-drug law (Harrison Narcotics Act) and then Prohibition making our cities safe for urban mafia and gangsters and destroying civil liberties for nearly 100 years. Our modern day paramilitary SWAT teams had their origins in Wilsonian Progressivism.

In racial matters, Wilson segregated the federal government and promoted “Birth of a Nation” (originally “The Clansman”), written by his friend Thomas Dixon. The Klan was reborn and was influential enough that supporters of his son-in-law McAdoo turned down a motion to repudiate the Klan at the 1924.

Wilson’s “domestic reforms” included the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve System, and the Internal Revenue Service. So much has been written about the latter two as essential elements of the modern Leviathan state that I will go on to other Wilsonian mischief but they are certainly worthwhile trophies in his nominee for “Worst President”.

But perhaps Wilson’s most insidious legacies were in foreign policy. He acted sanctimoniously neutral during World War I, while simultaneously egging Britain on, covering up our bias, and trying to sabotage efforts at peace by Pope Benedict XV through the Catholic warring states. As the war kept on, nations collapsed and communists took over Russia. Wilson’s armed interference with Mexico’s sovereignty ironically encouraged the idiotic Zimmerman telegram. Then, when we plunged into the war, he instituted wartime socialism management of industry, and his fanatical supporters went after German language teaching and “German music” like Beethoven.

Germany asked for an Armistice under the so-called “Peace Without Victory” ideas of his Fourteen Points. What they got was a starvation blockade, bankrupting reparations, and a hypocritical vindictive peace. The Wilsonian concept of “ethnic self-determination” started out with silly disputes between Poland and Lithuania and ended up with Nazism and The Holocaust. Non-Europeans who listened to Wilson were quickly turned away when their ideas conflicted with Japanese, French, and English imperialists – hence Mao and Ho drifted into communism in response to Wilsonian hypocrisy. Finally, he was so inflexible as a politician as to sabotage Senate adoption of his own Treaty of Versailles.

Much of the foreign policy disasters of the last century stemmed from the Wilsonian cause of America “making the world safe for democracy.” We have since been “spreading democracy” into Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Haiti, Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, etc. Our troops have been are remain in hundreds of countries, since, with both political parties leading the battle cry.

If, in the words of Jefferson, the purpose of government is to “secure our rights” – then it appears that Wilson did the direct opposite. From Drug Laws to Sedition Laws to the IRS to the Federal Reserve to our Permanent Empire, Wilson gets my nod for the Worst. A century later, his pathetic legacy, unfortunately, lives on.

******
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.