The IRS and other federales really care a lot

........about themselves and their own deranged obsessions.

http://www.independentsentinel.com/irs-makes-it-illegal-for-small-businesses-to-help-employees-with-healthcare-premiums/
IRS Makes It Illegal For Small Businesses to Help Employees Pay Healthcare Premiums

We live in a very caring society today. Health care is a topmost priority for the intelligentsia. They work on night and day ow to finagle things just right. More from the invaluable sender of the above item:

http://www.blacklistednews.com/New_SWAT_Documents_Give_Snapshot_of_Ugly_Militarization_of_U.S._Police/44989/0/38/38/Y/M.html
NEW SWAT DOCUMENTS GIVE SNAPSHOT OF UGLY MILITARIZATION OF U.S. POLICE
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/07/new-swat-documents-give-snapshot-ugly-militarization-u-s-police/

Like ancient Israel in Palestine, America was supposed to be a land of unwalled villages. And it was, for centuries -- until, in the late 20th century, numerous suburban neighborhoods realized they had to wall and gate themselves to ward off the results of socialism from their midst. Our country was supposed to be truly the latest, greatest thing anywhere -- and it was, until the late 20th century, when police routinely started wearing body and face armor.

That is a sign you're headed straight back to the middle ages, and with a lot of the gliberal (?) thinking and emoting heard in this state lately, life feels positively feels positively pre-literate anymore.

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"Portugal's Experiment in Drug Decriminalization Has Been a Success"

What is the solution in the drug "war"? We've talked about this at PN meetings. An expatriation personality in Uruguay says recreational drugs have been legalized in his native UK, but it's hard getting any documentation on that. 

In my favorite discussion forum, two stories just in: 

http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=179110&Disp=0

Cartel Land Trailer (2015) Documentary Movie HD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkYBbBK0qoM

and that of today's post title:

http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/36406/Mark-Thornton-Portugals-Experiment-in-Drug-Decriminalization-Has-Been-a-Success/?uuid=6F7FEBBA-5056-9627-3CD68EED0512AF67  

This month, Portugal celebrates fourteen years of drug decriminalization. The grand experiment is now considered a happy success considering it was adopted out of desperation and in the face of dire warnings from proponents of the global drug war. 

What Led to Decriminalization 

During the mid-twentieth century, Portugal experienced fifty years of military dictatorship, and when leftist democratic control was reestablished in 1974, many expatriate Portuguese returned to Portugal from its colonies. Of course, many of these people were dissidents, outsiders, and outcasts, and many of them used illegal drugs. 

Over the next twenty-five years, there was a surge in drug use, drug abuse, addiction, overdoses, and eventually a very substantial prevalence of HIV/AIDS and other dirty-needle-related diseases. At the peak of this drug epidemic the rate of drug addiction and HIV/AIDS infection was "considerably higher" than the rest of Europe according to Dr. João Goulão, the longtime drug czar of Portugal. 

Goulão was on the eleven member anti-drug commission that formulated law 30/2000 which decriminalized all drugs starting July 1, 2001. 

The "grand experiment" seems to be the result of two factors. The first is that Portugal is a relatively poor European country and was unable to fight the war on drugs on every front. 

The second factor is that the commission was relatively non-partisan and simply adopted the common sense notion that drug abuse and addiction are not criminal problems for the police to solve. Drug abuse and addiction are medical and psychological problems that are better solved by the individual with the help of professionals and social pressures..........

The film linked first is high drama and no doubt great cinema, but how much of the cartel trouble ameriKa and Mexico have shared is actually in any way necessary? I think countries (us in this case, not them) create drama because it superficially seems to give them validity. Governments definitely go to war, any kind of war, in order to look macho to the citizens. 

IMHO, the ONLY reason ameriKa has ANY drug problems is because politicians and their cronies in business are making fantastic profits off them and it's easier to push around a doped population. 

It should matter to the powers that be that their policies and neuroses bring great, totally needless harm to millions of innocent people, but their consciences are clearly seared with a hot iron. 

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National Infrastructure Week -- the ironies

I certainly appreciate anybody who wants to draw public attention to the deplorable state of public infrastructure in this country. But I also pity them as long as this "100-year war on terror" garbage is holding sway!

https://hbr.org/2015/05/what-it-will-take-to-fix-americas-crumbling-infrastructure
May 11-15 is national Infrastructure Week in the U.S., but don’t get out the party hats. It’s not a celebration. It’s more like a cry for help. Bridges are crumbling, buses are past their prime, roads badly need repair, airports look shabby, trains can’t reach high speeds, and traffic congestion plagues every city. How could an advanced country, once the model for the world’s most modern transportation innovations, slip so badly?.........

Takes me back to a protest against this "war" that we held some years ago. A guy on a motorcycle paused at the light and smirked at me. "I was just over in Iraq building bridges and schools,"
he said, obviously trying to cancel all pro-peace argument with this revelation. I managed not to say "I guess we don't need those things here, huh?" but only because I'm trying to be good in these latter years.

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The power to tax is the power to destroy...... Greek pensioners

In a country like ours, people regard taxes as a nuisance, even a plague -- but not yet as destruction as in my ancestor John Marshall's famous phrase. Taxes are destruction in Amerika, but people have yet to recognize it. Whether they ever will (even as taxes, open borders and whatnot hasten Amerika's demise) remains to be seen.

In Greece all hell's breaking loose, and people there have fewer blinders on.

http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=178363&Disp=0
SYRIZA Sellout Triggers Internal Party Revolt

They're even starting to call fees and other little government gouges what they really are -- taxes, cannibalistic taxes from hell!

Greece is in a tough position. Because of the world's passion for sports cultism, Greece bit the bait to host the 2004 Olympics. This involved building a monumentally expensive facility. The festival lasted 16 days, but the buildings are forever -- and were put up for just this one very fleeting purpose.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-08-02/how-the-2004-olympics-triggered-greeces-decline
How the 2004 Olympics Triggered Greece's Decline

Maybe somewhere a few quadrillion light years from here there's a planet where people want and do what actually works instead of lurching from one raging, irrational passion to another like us earthlings. There I would imagine they do whatever it takes to maintain real social, financial, moral stability first, and develop entertainments only after making sure the crucially important things are in place.

Greece is where "democracy" started, even before the idea caught on in Rome. It would be a lovely thing if that noble country were to live to tell its tale past this century despite the lies and betrayals of its filthy rotten evil politicians.

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New "little" items at News of the Weird revealing as any newscast

Aren't their little headings cool?

Unclear on the Concept

About three-fourths of the 1,580 IRS workers found to have deliberately attempted to evade federal income tax during the last 10 years have nonetheless retained their jobs, according to a May report by the agency's inspector general. Some even received promotions and performance bonuses (although an internal rule, adopted last year, now forbids such bonuses to one adjudged to owe back taxes). [Associated Press via Yahoo.com, 5-6-2015]

Is This a Great Country or What?

Lightly regulated investors' "hedge funds" (the province of wealthy people and large institutions) failed in 2014 (for the sixth straight year) to outearn ordinary stock index funds following the S&P 500. However, at hedge funds, underperformance seems unpunishable -- as the top 25 fund managers still collectively earned $11.62 billion in fees and salaries (an average of over $464 million each). The best-paid hedge fund manager earned $1.3 billion -- more than 48 times what the highest-paid major league baseball player earned. [New York Times, 5-5-2015]

Lead Story
Silicon Valley code-writers and engineers work long hours -- with apparently little time for "food" as we know it. Eating is "time wasted," in the words of celebrity inventor Elon Musk, and normal meals a "marketing facade," said another valley bigwig. The New York Times reported in May that techies are eagerly scarfing down generic (but nutrient-laden) liquids like Schmilk and People Chow, largely for ease of preparation, to speed their return to work. The Times food editor described one product as "oat flour" washed down with "the worst glass of milk ever." "Pancake batter," according to a Times reporter. (That supermarket staple Ensure? According to the food editor, it's "fine wine" compared to Schmilk.) [New York Times, 5-25-2015]

The Continuing Crisis

If Only There Was Somewhere He Could Have Turned for Moral Guidance: Suspended Catholic Monsignor Kevin Wallin, 63, was sentenced in May to more than five years in prison for running a meth distribution ring from Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he also operated a sex shop to launder the drug profits. (Though he faced a 10-year sentence, he had a history of charity work and submitted more than 80 letters of support from high-ranking clergy.) [Associated Press via WTIC-TV (Hartford), 5-7-2015]

The Continuing Crisis

-- America (sometimes called a land of "second chances") gave stockbroker Jerry Cicolani Jr., 69 such chances, before he pleaded guilty in May to selling unregistered securities -- setting up his first overt punishment despite a history of 60-some client complaints made to his then-employer, Merrill Lynch, between 1991 and 2010. The stockbrokers' self-regulating arm (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) has finally revoked his license, but issued a statement acknowledging that it needed to improve its monitoring. [New York Times, 5-19-2015]

A News of the Weird Classic (March 2011)

Tombstone, Arizona, which was the site of the legendary 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (commemorated in a 1957 movie), is about 70 miles from the Tucson shopping center where U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others were shot in January (2011). A Los Angeles Times dispatch later that month noted that the "Wild West" of 1881 Tombstone had far stricter gun control than 2011 Arizona. The historic gunfight occurred when the marshal (Virgil Earp, brother of Wyatt) tried to enforce the town's no-carry law against local thugs. Today, however, with few restrictions and no licenses required, virtually any Arizonan 18 or older can carry a handgun openly. [Los Angeles Times, 1-23-2011]

Incidentally, we have strong suspicions that the Giffords case was merely more Kabuki theater aimed at destroying the Second Amendment. Suspect it of this new affair in Charleston until proven we know otherwise, OK?

It's just too convenient -- cui bono to the nth degree.

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Superb short performance in a police encounter

I almost don't want to post this because lots of people walking down the street carrying a gun perhaps need to be questioned by police. The world is full of crazies and getting more so by systematic design of the System. But the protagonist here is so sharp with his chapter and verse you'll no doubt enjoy the lesson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNpYe0N_T6Y
MUST SEE! Police gets owned by law student

How many details of law and strategy can you tally in the course of these three minutes-plus?

Wow! Anymore, a "Black Guy with Dreads owns racist ass Cop in Texas!!!" Filthy language warning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6j-jbZokUQ

Merely quoting the title. Not endorsing its spin. Remember, filming these interchanges is crucial. Ideally I suppose we should all be whipping out the cell camera whenever we're near a police action. Of course, they're still totally unpredictable. As the second video followed the first in Youtube, the next one after that appears rather bloody.

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Crucial American tax history via Canada

Stefan Molyneux is an unusual fellow. He has gained an international following simply by doing up Youtubes of himself speaking on issues of the day easily racking up 30, 40, 50 or 90 thousand views. (I feel certain one is in the high six figures but can't find it.)

His material is not all sane by any means, but is generally populist and right-on. Here's a marathon on the "father of our country" by this Canadian that I urge you to view, or at least hear in the background of your work day. Get ready to lose a lot of respect for our first official president -- at least temporarily. Think of it as a visit to a strange, faraway world -- in a sense, it is, that of unvarnished reality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkwZDRB3tZo
The Truth About George Washington

Before digits, you'd have to pay some professor in an expensive university to dole this exact same information and sourcing out in 50-minute intervals, then torture out of you by testing what you've retained of it. Thanks to the net, you get the same exact material (and much, MUCH better) free of charge in whatever dose you wish, any hour of the day or night. Yes, there are trainloads of lies, misinfo and disinfo out there but any adult whose absorbed formal schooling will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

As you know if you've been following my modest punditry, most of the "common knowledge" on things is IMHO upside-down and backwards. There have been rumors and whisperings of George Washington's evils forever. Knowing the human condition and mentality I've had no trouble believing they could be well-founded.

A particular revelation came some years ago with the discovery (via internet, natch!) that the Whiskey Rebellion was in fact huge grab for power and money by Washington (the man and the capitol). The good news there was that the real rebellion was on the part of individual brewers across the land and in particular rural Dixie. They simply refused to knuckle under to the federal assault, and kept doing business the way they always had. I wrote this up for a chronicle I was doing at the time for the Nationalist Times print newspaper (still in existence).

In the present video, Molyneux traces among many other things how excessive taxation, the thing over which our ancestors revolted, grew with little resistance in the course of Washington's life and work. The killer is around the 2:30 mark where our speaker starts summing up how the failure of citizens to burn these weeds off the political landscape morphed into the Federal Reserve 114 years after Washington's death and how this expressly led to America's involvement in World War I, since the former enabled the printing of money to finance the latter.

Don't feel too glum as Stefan's going after the slave issue, however -- "our" Northern states were also ghoulishly slave-driven. Slavery was indeed probably more brutal up there than down here. The African Burial Ground National Monument is in New York City, not Richmond or Birmingham. Don't be fooled by the name -- it's an actual potter's field of slave bones, many of them showing pitiful signs of physical abuse and neglect during life! And this was nothing isolated -- Connecticut, New Jersey and other states realms were rife with black slave plantations.

Stefan is still emerging from a PC consciousness (aren't we all) so he probably has no idea of all that yet. Only God knows how much of this talk of his is factual; if much, let's rejoice that amerika is still as functional as it is, insofar as this can be said. After so much voodoo and vampirism by our admired heroes, it's a wonder that groceries are passably affordable and we have the freedom to read and write all this.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Burial_Ground_National_Monument