And I mean LOUD.

All the folks 'round you at work can go like "What?!"

http://youtu.be/tnpYTMreJY4

I don't recall vomiting violently on our shoes for about 9 hours and then running away being a standard part of the script previously. Someone needs to look in to that code.

Back in the early 1990s, when CD Roms were first invented, on major use of them was for the conspiracy dial up bulletin board system. With a CD Rom online on your bulletin board, you could "host" a CD full of downloadable text files on everything from government cover-ups to UFOs.

I was into such things at the time, and read many of these files.

Fast forward to today- and Pope Francis gives us a conspiracy theory: that rich first world nations are promoting war in the third world as a prop to economics. All over the first world Catholic blogosphere, there is outrage- how dare the Pope tell us capitalism is supported by warfare?

Of course, Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving the U.S. Presidency said the same thing,- warned us about the military industrial complex.

But I seem to remember a "secret" document passed around those old BBSs from the Vietnam Era that basically said the same thing, only actually recommending it as a policy. Does anybody else remember this document? Can you remember something I can google on? I'm coming up empty.

The Counter-Revolution of 1776
Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
Gerald Horne

363 pages
April, 2014
ISBN: 9781479893409

The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then residing in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with London. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt.

In the prelude to 1776, more and more Africans were joining the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were chasing Europeans to the mainland. Unlike their counterparts in London, the European colonists overwhelmingly associated enslaved Africans with subversion and hostility to the status quo. For European colonists, the major threat to security in North America was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. And as 1776 approached, London-imposed abolition throughout the colonies was a very real and threatening possibilityâ"a possibility the founding fathers feared could bring the slave rebellions of Jamaica and Antigua to the thirteen colonies. To forestall it, they went to war.

The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave othersâ"and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Counter-Revolution-1776-Resistance-Origins/dp/1479893404

Today Donetsk, tomorrow Detroit.

A leaked memo attributed to RAND corporation think tank suggests the Ukrainian govt should engage in an all-out war in the east, including shutting down all communications, putting citizens in internment camps and killing all who resist such actions.

    In the shocking letter, which has been leaked to online media, the advice offers a step by step brutal guide in how to deal with the population in eastern Ukraine. The authenticity of the document which bears the RAND corporation logo, however, could not be independently verified.

    The RAND Corporation is non-profit global think tank which offers
    research and analysis to the US armed forces.

http://rt.com/news/170572-rand-east-ukraine-plan/

I just lost a long post explaining why, suffice it say that two sources of modern liberalism, the creole revolutions in the US and Spanish colonies and JS Mill's philosophy, are central to imperialist ideology.

Liberalism appeared "progressive" among other reasons because it sought the transfer of power from European monarchs to colonists. Often, as in the US where the War of Independence was led by a land speculator who risked losing tens of thousands of acres of illegally "purchased" land, the basic issues had to do with the fate of aboriginals. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, banning the purchase of Indian land except by the Crown and preventing colonists from crossing the Alleghany mountains, was a major grievance. In Spanish colonies there were similar issues. Colonists wanted the liberty to plunder-and enslave- on their own account without restraint from Europe.

As to Mill, who was a key figure in the East Indian Company's rule of India, he was an ideologist of both imperialism and representative democracy. The Liberals shared a contempt for non-European cultures with a cynical and ruthless justification of the employment of military force in order to bring foreigners under imperial rule. Their attitude towards workers was equally contemptuous.

Then there was the great French liberal de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America and one of the leaders in colonising Algeria, a fervent defender of the theft of North African land and the enslavement of muslims.

Conservatives often opposed imperial adventures, Burke being a prime example, while liberals wrecked civilisations, and caused untold millions of deaths, by tearing down, for example, China's government in order to impose liberal trade policies. In China among the disasters was the imposition of opium on a government which rightly feared mass drug addiction. This was a policy carried out under the direction of one of Bentham's executors and disciples. In India the demolition of controls over grain storage and distribution, and a refusal to allow famine relief, born of market monomania, were policies imposed by liberals, often liberals of the highest distinction. Macaulay, for example, who held the view that a shelf of English literature was worth all the books ever written in Asia- a judgement of astonishing ignorance but the founding principle of an educational system which still exists.

  All those American college professors who joined the CIA in the late forties were real inheritors of the liberal tradition. Their ideology lives on in Samantha Power, Obama and those vast swathes of the Democratic party's leading cadres who cannot get their heads around the notion that imperial wars are never justifiable and that imperialism is, and always has been, a force for evil, dyed with the blood of those it has wiped out in serial genocides.

Of course there is much more to it, as their always is, but my assertion, far from being bullshit is hard to deny: Liberalism is the wellspring of western imperialist ideology.

Posted by: bevin | Jul 3, 2014 9:32:10 PM | 71

I must offer cryptic laughter at the peevishness on display. You stay beautiful, child.
Alternately, you could grow up.

Check out what entry-level salaries at Walmart look like in a state without a minimum wage
What a blasphemous affront to Holy Progress.

It means, in the end that corporations, at least until they are sold out to the stock market, have to actually be ethical and live by the ethics of the entrepreneurs who created them.

Aw, yeah:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5346379&cid=47358261

From some FA on the Hobby Lobby ruling:

Earlier this month we learned that the FAA decrees that it's legal to use drones for fun, but not for profit.

Why do I lose rights in America simply by virtue of trying to make money on my own time, or with my own association with others?

Good article:

Read the whole thing.
I know there are some on here who like to equate this oligarchy with "conservative" politics, though I disagree with that entirely.
Past all that, though, what matters is what we're going to DO about it.
If Mississippi teaches us anything, I submit that http://conventionofstates.com/ is the way to go. Forget DC, and its Progressive overlords.

The two rulings are not a big surprise considering who is on the bench. The downstream repercussions of the Hobby Lobby ruling will be interesting to see played out, however.

In particular, if no insurance company wants to offer a plan that excludes every imaginable type of "contraception", then what would happen? Will Hobby Lobby take them to court to force them to offer a plan that meets their particular belief system?

http://xkcd.com/1386/

I use mine as an ashtray. What do you guys do with yours?

A better model of the human condition:

Anybody who buys the con that "government" == "virtue" is a fool.