Affects of Anti GM

Lecture to Oxford Farming Conference, 3 January 2013

3 January 2013 532 comments

[Comments are now closed - it was getting impossible to manage them given the volume.]

NEW! German translation… Spanish translation… French translation… Vietnamese translation (shortened)… Italian version (also shortened)

 http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/

07 Mark Lynas from Oxford Farming Conference on Vimeo.

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     Finally some one who finds the truth and gets away from the politics, money and power.

     I still wonder if some things are going too fast.  I still want things to be studied, and tested. 

     The general people do not realize that the  old fashion terminator gene is just naturally there in hybrids, such as mating a horse with a donkey and the resultant hybrid offspring will not breed on ! !, as also  a cross between a sheep and a  goat.

     I still do think that some matches for so called gene modification is too far and so strict quarantine, impartial independent testing and time to study would be very important 

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I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.

These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.

This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.

For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes.

So I had to back up the story of my trip to Alaska with satellite data on sea ice, and I had to justify my pictures of disappearing glaciers in the Andes with long-term records of mass balance of mountain glaciers. That meant I had to learn how to read scientific papers, understand basic statistics and become literate in very different fields from oceanography to paleoclimate, none of which my degree in politics and modern history helped me with a great deal.

I found myself arguing constantly with people who I considered to be incorrigibly anti-science, because they wouldn’t listen to the climatologists and denied the scientific reality of climate change. So I lectured them about the value of peer-review, about the importance of scientific consensus and how the only facts that mattered were the ones published in the most distinguished scholarly journals.

My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.

Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?

So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.

I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.

I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.

befriend creates : narcissists ??

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/08/are-raising-generation-deluded-narcissists/

We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists

By Dr. Keith Ablow

Published January 08, 2013

FoxNews.com

• 
  
• • Are we raising a generation of deluded narcissists?
  • 

    Survey: College students think they're 'greatest...

  • 

    The 'Hooked up' Generation

A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
These data are not unexpected.  I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.

On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”

We must beware of the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.

Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.

Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters.  And while they can turn off their Wii and Xbox machines and remember they are really in dens and playrooms on side streets and in triple deckers around America, that is after their hearts have raced and heads have swelled with false pride for “being” something they are not.

On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.

These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century and they are getting our sons and daughters very sick, indeed.

As if to keep up with the unreality of media and technology, in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades, energy drinks in giant, colorful cans take over the soft drink market, and psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.  

All the while, these adolescents, teens and young adults are watching a Congress that can’t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending, a president that can’t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business, a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and—here no surprise—a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.

That’s really the unavoidable end, by the way. False pride can never be sustained. The bubble of narcissism is always at risk of bursting.  That’s why young people are higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more, tattooed more, pierced more and having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier, raising babies before they can do it well, because it makes them feel special, for a while.  They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.

Distractions, however, are temporary, and the truth is eternal. Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicidality, not to mention homicidality, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface.  I see it happening and, no doubt, many of you do, too.   

We had better get a plan together to combat this greatest epidemic as it takes shape.  Because it will dwarf the toll of any epidemic we have ever known. And it will be the hardest to defeat. Because, by the time we see the scope and destructiveness of this enemy clearly, we will also realize, as the saying goes, that it is us.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team. Dr. Ablow can be reached at info@keithablow.com.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/08/are-raising-generation-deluded-narcissists/#ixzz2I0PPQ8OW

Generous/mercy/social/gospel/biblical:- justice

http://freedomtorch.com/blogs/3/2762/tim-keller-and-social-justice
the original source I found is above

http://www.trevorloudon.com/2011/04/is-%E2%80%98social-justice%E2%80%99-a-christian-virtue/

I think this is a more full version and includes comments
http://www.trevorloudon.com/2011/04/is-%E2%80%98social-justice%E2%80%99-a-christian-virtue/#comment-260292

Socialists and Progressives pushing for Communist societies use this phrase most enthusiastically.  They use it to agitate the people and motivate them to revolution.  And it can’t be overlooked that it is today’s Communists and radical liberals who constantly use this phrase to make us feel that things here in the most just society on earth – are horribly unjust.  (If you doubt this just check out the Communist party website  http://cpusa.org – and search on “social justice”).

In fact, this quote from the CPUSA site would be perfectly consistent with Keller’s take on “social justice”:  “We fight for the daily needs of working people … as a matter of social justice…”  (http://cpusa.org/club-educational-study-guide-reflections-on-socialism/) No, I’m not calling Tim Keller a Communist!  I am only pointing out that his use of the term “social justice” has a historical context and that context is decidedly on the far Left of the political spectrum.

With that history behind the term “social justice”, there really is nothing for conservatives to “reclaim” or claim at all!  It has never meant anything else.  When Keller says ‘conservatives have suspicions about the term’ – he’s right, we do – and for well-founded historical reasons.

“Just” Confusion

Why does Keller call what have traditionally been ministries or acts of mercy – “justice”?  Throughout his book I was confused on why he was using the term “justice” when it seemed “mercy” or “compassion” would be more appropriate.  Possibly it is because “mercy” and “compassion” are something more along the lines of what individuals can do and apparently Keller wants to look beyond individuals to the entire society.  This would be in keeping with his belief that “the primary purpose of salvation is cultural renewal.”  But when you talk about “justice” you’re talking about societal structures.  A single individual cannot effect society-wide justice.  Justice is a function of public policy and politics.

Rob Haskell who is the Director of Senderis – a teaching mission to Latin American pastors, wrote in a blog post last year the following about “justice”:

“Why not look to the Bible, if we really want to find out what “justice” means?  The first operational definition I can find is in Exodus 23: “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit.”

When people talk about “justice” in context above, they typically mean “good works.” Yet the Bible seems to be completely devoid of any such meaning. Instead, as in the verse above, “justice” refers (unsurprisingly) to a judicial context: giving someone what they are legally entitled to.

Note that where (social) “justice” usually means reflexively siding with whomever seems to be weakest, the Bible’s first word on the matter is to call such a tendency a perversion of justice, based on a tendency to want to fit in with others. (We shouldn’t do the same with the rich either, mind you — see verse 6 and Lev 19:15).

To use such a term for handing out food, charity, etc. implies that people are legally entitled to such. Yet the bible calls this “mercy”. For example, when hurting Jews approached Jesus asking for healing, they did not ask for “justice”, they asked for “mercy” (see Matthew 9:27, Luke 10:37, the parable of the good Samaritan).

So why do we want to call “justice” what God calls “mercy”?  What is this language doing to our conceptions?

Mercy implies unwarranted favor, justice implies you deserve it. So mercy is eliminated by “justice”, since no one should be grateful to receive what they’re owed.

Further, anyone can show mercy, but only a judge can hand out justice. So this formulation makes us believe we must sit in the seat of the judge (running society, deciding who really gets what) before we can begin to deal with the poor and downtrodden as we’ve been commanded.

To Understand "social justice,"

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13978

FrontPageMag Article  Write Comment  1 Comment and 0 Reactions Printable Article Email Article Font:                                      10pt                                     12pt                                     14pt                                     16pt                                     18pt                                     20pt                                     22pt                                  Social Justice: Code for CommunismBy: Barry Loberfeld FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 27, 2004 The signature of modern leftist rhetoric is the deployment of terminology that simply cannot fail to command assent. As Orwell himself recognized, even slavery could be sold if labeled "freedom." In this vein, who could ever conscientiously oppose the pursuit of "social justice," -- i.e., a just society? To understand "social justice," we must contrast it with the earlier view of justice against which it was conceived -- one that arose as a revolt against political absolutism. With a government (e.g., a monarchy) that is granted absolute power, it is impossible to speak of any injustice on its part. If it can do anything, it can't do anything "wrong." Justice as a political/legal term can begin only when limitations are placed upon the sovereign, i.e., when men define what is unjust for government to do. The historical realization traces from the Roman senate to Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution to the 19th century. It was now a matter of "justice" that government not arrest citizens arbitrarily, sanction their bondage by others, persecute them for their religion or speech, seize their property, or prevent their travel. This culmination of centuries of ideas and struggles became known as liberalism. And it was precisely in opposition to this liberalism -- not feudalism or theocracy or the ancien régime, much less 20th century fascism -- that Karl Marx formed and detailed the popular concept of "social justice," (which has become a kind of "new and improved" substitute for a storeful of other terms -- Marxism, socialism, collectivism -- that, in the wake of Communism's history and collapse, are now unsellable). "The history of all existing society," he and Engels declared, "is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf ... oppressor and oppressed, stood in sharp opposition to each other." They were quite right to note the political castes and resulting clashes of the pre-liberal era. The expositors of liberalism (Spencer, Maine) saw their ethic, by establishing the political equality of all (e.g., the abolition of slavery, serfdom, and inequality of rights), as moving mankind from a "society of status" to a "society of contract." Alas, Marx the Prophet could not accept that the classless millenium had arrived before he did. Thus, he revealed to a benighted humanity that liberalism was in fact merely another stage of History's class struggle -- "capitalism" -- with its own combatants: the "proletariat" and the "bourgeoisie." The former were manual laborers, the latter professionals and business owners. Marx's "classes" were not political castes but occupations. Today the terms have broadened to mean essentially income brackets. If Smith can make a nice living from his writing, he's a bourgeois; if Jones is reciting poetry for coins in a subway terminal, he's a proletarian. But the freedoms of speech and enterprise that they share equally are "nothing but lies and falsehoods so long as" their differences in affluence and influence persist (Luxemburg).

Born alive Born Dead

Charles Bukowski first published “Dinosauria, We” in 1991:

We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

Independent Tom • 21 hours ago

• −

We are not born equal, we will never be equal. You cannot redistribute attractiveness to the ugly, intelligence to the stupid, and ambition to the lazy... which, of course, makes plenty of liberals murderously angry.

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Sex and more free free sex, and the price ? ? ?

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kincaid/121211

"Why are they so committed to imposing same-sex marriage on us all?" the group asks, in an article about the push for homosexual marriage in Britain and the U.S. "Our leaders in the UK and the US share much in common — and this includes a 1960's utopianism which assumes that the sexual rights agenda will make the world a better place....This great 'sexual experiment' has produced the most rotten fruit — an avalanche of divorces, fatherless families, sexually transmitted infections and infertility, unwanted pregnancies, abortions and post abortion traumas, the degrading of women, the breaking of social bonds, the stolen innocence of childhood, pornography addictions and the sex trade."

I have slotted below in here as in a way it still relates to culture and may have a part of the cure/hope

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/51673

The left’s cultural infrastructure is wired to feed its programming to an audience that sits there waiting to receive it and is willing to even pay top dollar for the privilege. Like every Iago, it has no idea what to do if Othello not only doesn’t pay for the privilege of going to its schools and movies, but actively tunes it out and forms a community that makes its own entertainment and education.

Forget physical secession for the moment and think cultural secession. Physical secession, even if it were achieved, would do little good without putting cultural secession first. And if you cannot manage cultural secession, then how will you ever achieve physical secession?

Cultural secession means cutting away the educational and entertainment culture of the left out of your home. It means creating your own alternative education and entertainment and grouping in communities that act as a support structure for traditional values. Is it easy? No. It involves sacrifice. But groups such as the Amish and Orthodox Jews have done it and have thrived doing it.

Some wars are settled by guns, but cultural wars are settled by the schoolbook and the movie. They are settled by the family.

The progressive agenda is to destroy the family, to undermine it, ridicule it, economically disadvantage it and burden it until it falls apart and is replaced by the Big Brother of the State. The traditional agenda is to maintain the family and pass along traditional values across the generations. That is what this cultural war is really about; whether the family or the state will the defining unit of human experience.

The progressives are out to break the family, to slice it up in a thousand ways from the ghetto to the Castro. Everything they do is aimed at eliminating any rival to the state. The traditionalist goal has to be to form communities that are capable of preserving the family despite the power of the state. This is not easy and will become harder as time goes on. But it is what has to be done to reclaim the country.

Raising children within a traditional community is a revolutionary activity. It is an act of cultural and demographic defiance against the progressive state. The traditional community is becoming the new underground of progressive countries. It is the place where parents pass on subversive ideas to their children and teach them to pass on those same subversive ideas to their children.

Progressives want every child to grow up to be a slave of the state, thinking the same empty thoughts, laughing at the same things and trotting tamely along to the slaughterhouse. What they fear most is a future where the majority of children do not worship the state, do not accept their premises or parrot their propaganda. What they fear most is a demographic revolution.

Are We Just a little bit Ruled

December 10, 2012
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/vernon/121210

Orwell's world in the 21st century?

By Wes Vernon

Americans may think that in casting their ballots, as millions of us did last month, they have given the winning candidates policy directions that will be respected. Maybe.

John Fonte, a noted author with a world history PHD, outlines in remarkable detail the powerful forces at work to render our Constitution meaningless as we become just another of many nations on a planet under the thumb of the tight control of a global authority.

The pressure

The forces nudging us in that direction include Western universities, Nongovernmental Organizations (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc.), American Foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, etc.), International organizations (UN, International Court of Justice, etc.), and global corporations.

Dr. Fonte covers in detail this entire picture in Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or be Ruled by Others? The author wears his scholar's hat all the way. No hyperbole is necessary. The facts he lays out are scary enough. That may be why he eschews the term "world government," let alone "world dictatorship." The reader surely may be forgiven for interpreting the author's scenario as accurately reflecting a possible future that fits either description.

Why?

The effort to morph America into a mere appendage to a global authority is engineered piecemeal by some people who believe they have decent and harmless motives.

Many others (both here and abroad) know exactly what they're doing, including those who think America is too rich, too powerful, and needs to be brought down a few pegs.

For others, it is corporate interest, as per the chairman of Colgate Palmolive, quoted as saying the United States does not have first call on his company's resources. Many of the 20th century U.S.-based corporations considered their first loyalty to their home country. Not necessarily so in the 21st Century.

Beyond the money motives and misplaced "compassion," external and internal forces pressuring the U.S. to abandon its sovereignty (again not overnight), have little use for this country's laws, its Constitution, its traditions, its entrepreneurial spirit, its holidays.

They believe passionately in global governance of some kind. Author John Fonte cites Harold Koh, Legal Adviser to the State Department, as writing favorably of "law that is 'downloaded' from international law into domestic law."

Of course, we are reminded inSovereignty or Oppression that American law is supposed to be made by the elected representatives of the people in Congress, signed by the president, and that it must comport with the Constitution. That is Civics 101, but the global authority movement, alas, has helped lead to the de-emphasizing or elimination of American history/civics in our schools. What else does one expect when a member of the Communist Party USA — the late Howard Zinn — authored much of the history taught in American schools (kindergarten through higher ed) for generations?

"Respectable" lawyers

The targeting of America's sovereignty has also cast a troubling pall over much of America's legal profession. More than a few American judges, including justices of the Supreme Court, have taken to citing foreign laws and overseas judicial interpretations as a rationale for decisions in American courts. Judicial "downloading?" Yes, and "respectable" pressure leans on our judges to get with it.

Illegal immigration

The agenda toward a global authority, of course, includes (but is not restricted to) the "open borders" movement. Included on its agenda are voting in foreign languages in U.S. elections; dual citizenship; multicultural education favoring ethnic identity over American citizenship; and affirmative action (reverse discrimination).

To quote Dr. Fonte: "All these measures work against the formation of an American national identity in newcomers as envisioned by American leaders from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt and supported by Latino leaders like Juan Rangel in Chicago. Instead they promote [the kind of] ethnic group consciousness that tends to view the American mainstream in an adversarial way."

Assimilation

That latter example (viewing the American mainstream "in an adversarial way") prompted author John Fonte to sum up in one simple paragraph what this column has attempted to convey in thousands of words:

"Anti-Islamist American Muslims point out that most of the average Mosque-going Muslims in the United States are not Islamists and are uncomfortable with the Islamist propaganda and pressure tactics. But this 'silent majority' of American Muslims is unorganized and lacks the media savvy, political skills, resources (Saudi funding) and intensity of the Islamists who dominate Muslim institutions in America. Thus forging an anti-Islamist American Islam will be extremely difficult."

That goes to the issue of "assimilation" which — along with other forms of patriotism and love of country — will be emphatically discouraged by any global authority.

Every move you make...

There is no end to the drumbeat amongst international elites to delve deeply into personal behavior and family life issues, all under positive-sounding labels that ignore unintended consequences:

...America is asked to drop its "reservation [the First Amendment]" and outlaw "hate speech" as defined by an international committee.

...Such internationalists — under UN rubric — have demanded that Germany explain why fathers are so reluctant to take parental leave.

...They have called out the U.S. because 90% of its telephone operators are women and (gasp!) 99% of auto mechanics are men. Personal choices? That would reinforce old stereotypes.

...Slovenia was cited for this "shortcoming": only 30% its children were in daycare centers. Too many (ready for this?) were being raised by their parents (scandalous!). But their parents wanted to raise their own children? Poor excuse. Reinforces old stereotypes.

...The UN bodies have a list of exactly how family responsibilities are to be divided within the home.

Recent example

The U.S. has refused to sign on to some of this intrusion, though the pressure never stops. The U.S. Senate has just defeated an attempt to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CPRD). It would have negated state laws on the subject and required federal law be revised to conform to the treaty.

CPRD would have enshrined abortion; denied parents healthcare and education choices for their special needs children; and required all homeowners to make their own private homes accessible to the disabled. The measure was endorsed by 61 senators (short of the required two-thirds majority), 38 senators voting it down.

Co-existence

Fonte reminds us the late Walter Cronkite proposed a world government, with an executive, legislature, and judiciary. The author also quotes political philosopher Leo Strauss as arguing that such a supposedly "homogenous world state" would ultimately end up in a "a reign of tyranny," whose "Final Tyrant" would be forced to suppress every activity that throws his legitimacy into doubt. "The political refugee would have nowhere to go."

The author neglects to mention by name George Soros, a powerful "one-worlder" to the core, or the 2006 proposed (U.S.-Canada-Mexico) "NAFTA highway," with some issues resembling those of the European Union (EU) viewed as a model for a future global authority.

Reservations aside, the book is a must for Americans who want America to be America for their children and grandchildren.

© Wes Vernon

Will the money run out

By Janet Daley

9:00PM GMT 08 Dec 2012

1846 Comments

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/georgeosborne/9730434/The-West-is-signing-its-own-death-sentence.html

When the Edward Gibbon of the 22nd century comes to write his History of the Decline and Fall of the West, who will feature in his monumental study of the collapse of the most successful economic experiment in human history? In this saga of the mass suicide of the richest nations on earth, there may be particular reference to those national leaders who chose to deny the reality that was, from the vantage point of our future chronicler, so obviously looming. Or maybe the leadership of our day in Washington, London and Brussels will appear to have been swept helplessly along by irresistible forces that originated before their time.

But for us, right here, right now, it matters that Barack Obama and George Osborne are playing small-time strategic games with their toy-town enemies while the unutterable economic truth stares them in the face. (The political leadership of the EU seems to have passed through the looking glass into a world where the rules of economics do not apply, so their statements and actions are beyond analysis.) Mr Obama is locked in an eye-balling contest with a Republican Congress to see who can end up with more ignominy when the United States goes over the fiscal cliff. It is clear now that the president will be quite happy to bring about this apocalypse – which would pull most of the developed world into interminable recession – if he could be sure that it would result in long-term electoral damage to his opponents.

Meanwhile, Mr Osborne takes teeny-tiny steps in the direction which is the only plausible one: little bitty reductions in the welfare programme to “make work pay” which are barely enough to push those who are actually working in the black economy off the unemployment rolls, and fiddly adjustments (almost too small to notice in day-to-day life) to lessen the burden of tax that bears down on people who are scarcely self-sustaining, let alone prosperous. Supposedly from opposite sides of the political divide, the US president and the British Chancellor come to a surprisingly similar conclusion: it is not feasible to speak the truth, let alone act on it. The truth being, as this column has often said, that present levels of public spending and government intervention in the US, Britain and Europe are unsustainable. The proportion of GDP which is now being spent by the governments of what used to be called the “free world” vastly exceeds what it is possible to raise through taxation without destroying any possibility of creating wealth, and therefore requires either an intolerable degree of national debt or the endless printing of progressively more meaningless money – or both.

How on earth did we get here? As every sane political leader knows by now, this is not just a temporary emergency created by a bizarre fit of reckless lending: the crash of 2008 simply blew the lid off the real scandal of western economic governance. Having won the Cold War and succeeded in settling the great ideological argument of the 20th century in favour of free-market economics, the nations of the West managed to bankrupt themselves by insisting that they could fund a lukewarm form of socialism with the proceeds of capitalism.

What the West took from its defeat of the East was that it must accept the model of the state as social engineer in order to avert any future threat to freedom. Capitalism would only be tolerated if government distributed its wealth evenly across society. The original concept of social security and welfare provision – that no one should be allowed to sink into destitution or real want – had to be revisited. The new ideal was that there should not be inequalities of wealth. The roaring success of the free market created such unprecedented levels of mass prosperity that absolute poverty became virtually extinct in western democracies, so it had to be replaced as a social evil by “relative poverty”. It was not enough that no one should be genuinely poor (hungry and without basic necessities): what was demanded now was that no one should be much worse (or better) off than anyone else. The job of government was to create a society in which there were no significant disparities in earnings or standards of living. So it was not just the unemployed who were given assistance: the low paid had their wages supplemented by working tax credits and in-work benefits so that their earnings could be brought up to the arbitrary level which the state had decided constituted not-poverty.

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  06 Dec 2012
• Osborne defends Autumn Statement 
  06 Dec 2012

The paradoxical effect of this is that the only politically acceptable condition is to be earning just enough to maintain independent life – and not a penny more. Everybody is steered by the penalties of the tax system or the gradual withdrawal of benefits into that small space in the middle between being “rich” (earning over about £40,000 a year) and being (relatively) poor. As detailed analysis has made clear, the only group spared by Mr Osborne’s tinkering last week were standard rate tax payers. Neither rich nor unemployed, these paragons are perfect exemplars of “fairness”: surviving on an income which makes life just about bearable but remaining careful always not to allow their aspirations to propel them beyond their station and its acceptable earnings level.

This picture of the perfect society – in which disparities of wealth are eradicated and economic equality is maintained through a vastly complex and expensive system of state intervention – has been the explicit goal of the EU virtually since its inception. It had an on-again, off-again history in Britain until it was locked firmly into the political infrastructure by Gordon Brown. More unexpectedly, it has now taken root in the American political culture, where Mr Obama seems determined to exploit it in his blood-curdling contest with the Republicans. Once ensconced, this concept undermines the logic of the free-market economy which funds it.

Capitalism is, by its nature, dynamic: it creates transitory disparities of wealth constantly as it reinvents itself. Fortunes are made and lost and, as old industries are replaced by new, the earnings that they create rise and fall. Punishing those who exceed some momentary average income and artificially subsidising those who fall below it – as well as providing for a universal standard of living which bears no relation to merit or even to need – has now reached the unavoidable, unaffordable end of the line.

So who will tell the truth – and then act on it? Who will say not just that welfare must be cut, but that in future the NHS will need to rely on a system of co-payments? That people will have to provide for their own retirement because the state pension will be frozen? That without a radical reduction in government intervention, the free and prosperous West will have been a brief historical aberration?

Spitting on vietnam vets

http://www.swiftvets.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20976  
I have copied paste the most noticeable  that caught my attention from this site with the above link  and also have a link at the end to a major rebuttal to Mr Jerry Lembcke by Mr Jim Lendgren, after the jump break 

 from the DEBUNKING corner

The MYTH people say this urban legend started in the 1980s?

Hmm this article, from the Reno Evening Gazette was published June 9, 1971

Courtesy of SBD who originally posted it on this thread 
if link broken...thumbnail added, please click to view...


transcribed...para 1,2 

Quote:

“How’s it feel to be a murderer?” asked the faculty advisor of Al Zellar who was mustering out after a year’s infantry service in Vietnam. Jim Minarik, another infantry veteran of that war walked out of doors in his uniform and was twice spat upon, was denied restaurant service, and called a "war criminal” all before he had time to buy a civilian suit. Jim Kerns pulled down a Vietcong flag here and spent nine hours in jail before Judge Halleck dismissed his case. Veterans are advised, one of them said, not to mention Vietnam service when making applications. But it wasn’t these indignities, these evidences of an American world turned upside down that caused some 5000 proud-of their-country former servicemen to organize as Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. It was the sight and sound of John Kerry, the most publicized sinner since Judas Iscariot, spilling his guts with sickening frequency for the TV cameras.

last sentence 

Quote:

But the Americans we also need to hear from are those who don’t revile and spit on our fighting men, and who in their hearts are ashamed of those who do.

hmm wonder if Lexis seaches could turn up more articles like this? anyone? 
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one of..... We The People 

Last edited by kate on Fri May 02, 2008 9:55 pm; edited 2 times in total

Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:33 am    Post subject:
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Debunker ! The Agony of the U.S. Army By L. JAMES BINDER. New York Times . New York, N.Y.: Nov 30, 1971. pg. 45, 1 pgs Document types: article Dateline: WASHINGTON ISSN/ISBN: 03624331 Text Word Count 885 Abstract (Document Summary) Quote: WASHINGTON -- To many of our people the Army is a controversial issue. It is not easy to think of that apolitical, proud old body of citizen soldiers in that way. Wars can be controversial and so can generals and weapons, but not the Army. The fact is, however, that the service and many of the things it stands for are taking a bad beating these days. The uniform of its soldiers is spat upon in the streets and its wearers are denounced in public places as "war criminals".  Take that Mr Jerry Lembcke ... your so-called Urban Myth started around 1980?? hat tip > justoneminute _________________ . ========================================================== More Debunking from ole skerry and the left would of course consider him a reliable source West Wing John Kerry’s chances for the White House BostonPhoenix.com  Quote: With the 30th anniversary of his testimony before Congress approaching, the Phoenix asked him to talk about his wartime experiences and how he feels about them now. He agreed. KERRY RETURNED from Vietnam opposed to the war, and he wanted to do something about it. But first he had to finish out his military service, which he did by working for an admiral in New York City. It was in New York that he confronted the animosity of the left for the first time. Kerry remembers dirty looks and harsh language from others opposed to the war. “There were hippie protesters here and there who objected to people in uniform,” he says. “On a couple of occasions I heard people say ‘baby killer.’” Friends of his, Kerry says, were even spat on by antiwar types.  Despite the scorn he encountered, when the Navy mustered Kerry out of active service he planned to run for Congress from Massachusetts as a protest candidate against Representative Phil Philbin, a pro-war hawk. But state Democrats thought Boston College Law School dean Robert Drinan, a liberal Jesuit priest, was a better choice, so Kerry backed Drinan and joined up with the nascent VVAW. Their first action was the Winter Soldier Hearings in Detroit, which publicized American atrocities.  _________________ .

How easily bought are we?

The Working Class and the Government Class

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 23 Comments

First we must understand, so then we can look and understand where and what influences our principles and ethics, as often enough we use other priorities, relevancy and reasons, to move on the slippery slope. Then to change and keep to the true principles, often easier said than done. Are I hear, what are the true principles ? ?

http://sultanknish.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/the-working-class-and-government-class.html

Forget all the talk about whether we will or won't go over the fiscal cliff. We ourselves are the fiscal cliff and have been for some time now. The real fiscal cliff is not the point at which we run out of money, our credit rating sinks lower than Enron and or everyone is fighting over jars of cat food at Wal-Mart. The real fiscal cliff is when even the dumbest person in the country is no longer able to deny what the packs of robbers and thieves he appointed to steal for him have perpetrated for their own benefit in his name. And that fiscal cliff may never come.

Soviet leaders used to promise their people that one day they would live under true Communism. Under our hybrid system, many Americans already live under Communism. And the rest of the country pays for it. As the number of people living under Communism grows and the number of people subsidizing Communism shrinks, the fiscal cliffs begin coming in faster than Wile E. Coyote on jet-powered rocket skates.

Our class warfare is not determined by paycheck size. The United States has only two classes. The working class and the government class.

The working class extends through the lower class, the middle class and the upper class, and everyone of every income level who derives their income from gainful employment. The government class similarly extends from the poor to the middle class to the rich, and consists of those whose chief source of income is the government; whether it's welfare checks, government jobs or crony capitalism.

Not everyone in the working class is a saint and not everyone in the government class is a parasite. There are plenty of corporations who care only about short term profit and create social problems that the rest of the country has to live with. Immigration is a classic example. And there are also plenty of government employees who perform vital and even heroic functions. Your local firefighter and member of the armed services are obvious examples.

The government class is dependent on the working class, deriving its income from their income. The government class turns from the symbiotic to the parasitic to the extent that its demands on the working class become unsustainable and exploitative, that its functions grow bloated, its spending programs reek of corruption and its government contracts emerge out of backdoor deals with friendly politicians.

The government class can never be productive, because it is not a creative force, it only provides secondary non-innovative services to the working class, but it is legitimate to the extent that it performs vital functions on behalf of the working class with their consent and in an economically sustainable fashion. When it violates these principles, then it becomes a parasite sucking the life out of the working class.

It is not just the government employee who is a member of the government class. The welfare class is a subgroup of the government class. And the welfare class is not only parasitic, it is the axis around which an entire parasitic constellation of the government class revolves around.

The classic welfare family has become the income generating center of the government class. They are the "wealth creators" for an entire infrastructure of social services built around them from the government officials who process their aid forms to the social workers who provide them with benefit counseling to the employees of those clinics who provide them with health care, and the extra teachers hired to help raise standards at their perpetually failing schools, the drug counselors who help them get clean and the police officers who break up their fights.

All or almost all of these people are members of unions. Those unions have their own employees. Those union employees have their own politicians. The politicians provide grants to the community social welfare infrastructure and generous benefits for union contracts. All this money and influence spins around the welfare family, but they only benefit from a minute fraction of it.

Around their dungheap, fly community groups and a horde of other private non-profits, "advocating" for them while operating on government grants. The buildings they live in are affordable housing projects built for them by the government, and cleaned, managed and repaired for them by government employees.

When they go to the supermarket, they buy food with money from the government. When they go to the pharmacy, they get free medication from the government. The web of clinics, supermarkets and pharmacies are not part of the working class, they are subsidized by government money and prosper by feeding off that government class.

The seven members of the classic welfare family, Grandma, Ma and her five kids, are the axis around which thousands of government professionals revolve. Their dysfunctional state keeps an entire state of government employees, employed. And it is in the interest of those government employees to seek out and create such dysfunctional families by championing social policies that break up families and keep them down, under the pretense of helping them because those families are the cash cows of the government class.

Communism, at least conceptually, argued for shifting power from those who perform intellectual labor to those who perform manual labor. Modern liberalism exists only to shift wealth from workers to non-workers, taking from the working class on behalf of the non-working class and pocketing the money for the employees of the government class.

In a hybrid economy, the differences between the government class and the working class aren’t always as obvious. There are any number of businesses, large and small, that are members of the government class, and derive the bulk of their income from the government.

The fundamental difference between the government class business and the working class business is that the government class business is an instrument of government policy. While its owner may derive value from it, the government class business only exists because it fulfills an objective of government policy. And that makes the government class business indistinguishable from the policy it represents.

As the government class expands, the number of individuals and businesses in the government class grows because joining the government class, whether as a welfare recipient, government employee or crony capitalist company is a better strategy than staying in the working class. Planned economies are easier to profit from in the short term, whether it's by getting free stuff, early retirement or contracts on generous terms, because their centralization makes them predictable and influence-able. The only problem is that they have no future.

American society has been reshaped to seek short cuts, whether it's through lottery tickets, credit cards or corporate mergers, at the expense of long-term profits through hard work. Corporations don't look past the next quarter and many people don't look past the next interest payment. And joining the government class is the ultimate shortcut. It wrecks families, trashes the economy and robs the country of its future, while providing limited short-term benefits to members of the government class.

Cities and towns are going bankrupt because government class unions asked for and got financially unsustainable benefit packages. Those small implosions are a metaphor for the tremendous harm that the government class is inflicting on the working class, and also, in the long term, on itself. In the long run, parasitism is not sustainable. In the short term, there's a great party. In the long term, the parasite dies.

The major development of the last decade has been the government's class disinterest in the economic sustainability of its demands. Call it the Californization of America under a government class that is both determined and doomed.

Obama has emerged as the champion of the government class, his complete disregard for the fiscal consequences of his actions, allows him to act as the champion of a predatory government class that lies and bludgeons its way through all obstacles like a horde of Black Friday shoppers, grabbing everything in sight, without caring about what will happen tomorrow.

Some might call this a cunning strategy, but it's not as if the government class has anywhere to advance to. Pulling the same trick in 1932 might have led to government control of industry and agriculture, but in 2012, this is a country that lives off service industries, not manufacturing. Going Full Communist is not an option, because there is hardly any manufacturing sector left and national agriculture is already so government controlled that there might as well be actual Commissars in charge of it.

Trying to nationalize chain stores, dot coms and the rest of the modern economy is not only hopeless, but it won't produce any income worth mentioning from an economy that is based more on marketing and price cutting, than on production. There are already plenty of government class businesses turning out government subsidized windmills and solar panels. There's no point to nationalizing them because they already serve as instruments of government policy, their owners are politically connected and they are already failing nearly as fast as they would if the government were running them.

The government class needs the working class. But it is acting as if it doesn't. Like a dumb predator, it keeps eating and eating on instinct, swallowing up its ideological enemies in the hopes of gaining a total control that it would not know what to do with.

The parasite has gotten so big that it believes that it is the host and that the host is the parasite. It is completely sincere about its attacks on the host and that makes it even more dangerous. Under the influence of its own propaganda, the government class has come to think of itself as productive and creative, and of the working class as a parasitic blot, holding on to the money that rightfully belongs to the government class. But just as parasites cannot survive without hosts, governments cannot survive without people to do the actual work.

The government class has shown that it is unwilling and unable to make the responsible decisions that need to be made. It is being led by liars and fools who see it as a lever for upending and taking over a working class society, and replacing it with a parasite's paradise of academics making laws, unions setting their own terms and a government that is always expanding and never contracting.

A host and a parasite of equal size cannot both survive for long. Either both the host and the parasite will die. Or the parasite will die and the host will live.