He has a history of hurting himself” is how Shepard Smith (Fox News) dismissed a man who stabbed himself “outside the Rockefeller Center studios of NBC’s ‘Today’ show,” yelling “the IRS is watching me.”
The Internal Revenue Service has a history of hurting people too, Shep. That too is irrefutably.
At the risk of alerting more surveillance to myself, Joseph Stack’s attack on an office building in Austin, Texas, that housed IRS offices: Do you get it?
The “august” NYT EDITORIAL BOARD has finally taken a slightly less reverential, more cynical tone toward its godhead Obama, in light of “the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation.”
Wow. And what next? Will the NYT acknowledge that centralized power everywhere and always leads to tyranny?
Nah. Rest assured, the Grey Lady might have shaken off a flea or two, but the New York Times will continue to lie down with dogs (with apologies to dogs).
By the way, I already told you weeks back that there was absolutely nothing new about state snooping. “From Sexting To Snooping In Surveillance-State USA”:
A pesky detail has eluded all those invincibly stupid special interests who’re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans. Have the various tele-lawyers, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and protesting members of the House Judiciary Committee forgotten the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, whose provisions were extended until December 31, 2017, by the people’s representatives?
There is nothing new about warrantless wiretapping—other than that the American people haven’t been particularly exercised about them. They’ve trusted Uncle Sam to go about this activity judiciously. Peeping Sam had promised, after all, that covert surveillance would never be executed against “United States persons.” Were a “United States person” to fall under suspicion, he or she would not be subjected to surveillance without “judicial and congressional oversight,” puled the same perverts.
It’s not as if the National Security Agency (NSA) under George Bush was not accused of bypassing the courts to spy on the 43rd president’s many critics. It was! Sideshow “O,” however, has done Bush one better. Obama is using the FISA provisions against “friendlies.”
Democracy, Ethics, Etiquette, Individual Rights, Morality, South-Africa
Miguel write:
Mrs Mercer:
I purchased your book Into the Cannibal’s Pot and have just started reading it.
From your book and other sources on your website, I understand that you and your family (particularly your father) held an anti-apartheid stance.
Your book however, describes the current situation in SA, particularly after the multi-racial, democratic elections of 1994, as having resulted in a borderline lawless state.
My question to you is: Did you believe, prior to 1994, that the an end to the apartheid regime would bring a more beneficial political and quality of life process to SA.
Thanking you advance
It goes without saying that I make a point of replying to almost all letters I get, provide they’re polite. Thousands, since I began writing. As George Will once wrote, “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”
I’ll address in a future post the issue of what failing to answer your mail says about you. For now, here’s my reply to Miguel:
Hello Miguel,
Thank you for reading Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.
I believe that nowhere in my book do I state the belief below. Moreover, from the fact that I oppose state-enforced apartheid—it does not follow that I support what I call in The Cannibal, a “raw, ripe democracy.”
By the end of the book, you will better understand this perspective. My involvement in SA as a young woman was humanitarian, not political.
You are correct in your assessment of my father’s thinking.
ILANA Mercer
Free Markets, Individual Rights, Republicans, Ron Paul, Taxation
One of the reasons the Internal Revenue Service will only ever accrete in size and scope is the thugs that man it. Watch this YouTube clip of a representative cross-section of the IRS workforce, no doubt, at a “training conference.” Look at these ugly, off-putting beasts getting their freak-on at your expense. They dress and look like crap, butts and crotches wiggling all over the place, and they sound like crap.
You don’t imagine that such a gross-out of a group—repulsive both physically and mentally—could add value to a company that is vying for the consumer’s voluntary vote, do you? “Give me a break.”
Although no Ron Paul in his understanding of American liberty, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and not Sen. Rand Paul, has come closest to articulating the solution to the agency of legalized thuggery called the IRS.
The IRS ought to be abolished. Working Americans ought to be liberated from its deforming and deadly clutches.