What a stupid headline. Government thrives on fear and hatred. Of course the terror risk goes up. If he lives, it goes up, if he dies it goes up.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says Osama bin Laden’s death has raised the risk of anti-American violence worldwide.
The State Department said in a global travel warning Tuesday that Americans should take precaution and maintain vigilance about terrorist threats, demonstrations and the possibility of violence against U.S. citizens.
It said al-Qaida and other groups are planning terrorist attacks against U.S. interests in Europe, Asia, Africa and Middle East. (Read more from yahoo.com)
I heard this question posed today by a university professor as if it was profound. I don’t find it so.
My niece makes glitter and glue paintings in her pre-school which have huge significance to her mother, my sister.
Her glitter paintings won’t appear in art books for the same reason propaganda art doesn’t. It’s crappy art. In the case of my niece, it has significance because of the mother-child relationship. In the case of propaganda art, it has significance because so many people are caught up in the mass delusion the art supports, whether it be Aryan purity, the creation of a workers’ paradise, making the world safe for democracy, hope and change, freeing the Cuban slaves, or whatever the slogan of the day.
Once the bubble bursts on the collectivist madness, we are left with crappy art plus a feeling of embarrassment on the part of whoever awoke from the mass delusion.
Why is it crappy?
Propaganda art doesn’t (and can’t) reflect the richness and complexity of the human experience. It looks at the world through a straw and sacrifices everything that makes us human in a vain, perverted attempt to constrain human activity and imagination for any one of the many false collectivist gods.
Paul Krugman takes the broken window fallacy to a entire new level. Following today’s earthquake Krugman writes:
People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.
“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”
(View the Bloomberg interactive graphic to chart the Fed’s financial bailout.)
Foreign Borrowers
It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees. (Read more from bloomberg.com)
In case you missed it, on July 21st 2011 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a 266 page partial audit of the Federal Reserve (FED).
Here is the punch line: The Federal Reserve secretly kept the Phony-Fiat-Money-System afloat by “lending” out $16 Trillion Dollars to various corporations and banks, many of which were foreign, non-U.S. entities like The Bank of Scotland, UBS (Switzerland), Deutche Bank (Germany) and Societe Generale SA (France) between December 1, 2007 through July 21, 2010 (read this as: Created-Out-Of-Thin-Air and had refused to tell us). The details are on page 133 which you can read here.
How big is $16 Trillion Dollars? Well, to get a basic idea please review this excellent presentation. Here are some other ways to try to get your head around this astounding number:
The entire U.S. GDP is $14.8 Trillion Dollars. That is what everybody: you, me, everybody, including all Government spent in 2010.
The entire U.S. Debt over the past 200 years is $14.5 Trillion Dollars. It used to take time to dig a whole this deep….no more! (Read more from lewrockwell.com)
Apparently, it isn’t so fun to get downgraded. Earlier this month, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the U.S., which caused a domino effect and pushed down the ratings of bonds issued by other entities implicitly guaranteed by the U.S like some municipalities. The retaliation appears to have begun.
This week, we’re learning that some of those local governments are dropping the agency from the group it pays to rate its debt. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is reportedly investigating S&P for its mortgage bond rating mistakes. (Read more from theatlantic.com)
Doctor protests accompanied Canada’s first imposition of government control in Saskatchewan, and the initial nationalization in 1962. The socialists overcame the protests by buying off doctors who, in protest, had closed their offices for 23 days.
The eugenecists who promoted it.
Thomas Douglas, who nationalized Canada’s healthcare, advocated moral and psycological screenings for marriage and sterilization for unfit individuals. There was a sterilization statute in Saskatchewan in the 1930s.
Canadian system remains overwhelmingly popular.
Since it is illegal to use prices to reduce demand. The only available system for rationing is queue-ing. Median wait time between referral by general practioner to treatment in 2010 was 18.2 weeks. It varied by specialty and province.
The longest was for orthopedic surgery was 36.7 weeks.
In New Brunswick, the worst offender, median was 24.6 weeks.
The Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged the wait for knee replacements is often over a year, and that many patients die on waiting lists for cardiac care.
Physicians get paid according to how many patients they see. As a result, is common to double and triple book.
The average wait times for human access to
ultra sound — 31 days
ct scan — 30 days
mri — 69 days
pet scans — completely unavailable
The average wait times for animal access to
ct scans — a few hours
mri — a few hours
In 2008, Forbes magazine: there were more MRIs in Pittsburg than in Canada.
Despite this, there was opposition to a group of doctors attempting to set up private MRI clinics because they didn’t want anybody “jumping the queue.”
After the first private MRI clinic opened in 1993, Prime Minister Jean Chretien vowed to end funding to any province which allowed such private clinics to continue existing. Thomas Douglas’s CCF and the union of public employees led the opposition.
More seriously ill patients have a harder time finding an acute care hospital bed in Canada than moderately ill patients because of perverted incentives which put emphasis on cost.
To control costs, government attempts to restrict the number of Canadian doctors contributing to the doctor shortage.
Despite this, their system remains popular. Substantial propaganda contributes to this.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says Osama bin Laden’s death has raised the risk of anti-American violence worldwide.
(Read more from yahoo.com)