How Do You Spell Bollocks?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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If you are a bureaucrat in the US government you spell bollocks ‘F-R-E-E-D-O-M’.

Then you stick that name on a new act and you sit down, confident that most of the politicians elected to represent the people are too dumb to realize what they are voting for. They were, the US Senate passed the USA Freedom Act by 67 votes for to 32 against.

Then you hope that most of the people are also too dumb to realize they’ve been conned again. And, sadly, most of them are. They listen to con men like Obama who lies to them, saying things like, “Glad the Senate finally passed the USA Freedom Act. It protects civil liberties and our national security. I’ll sign it as soon as I get it.”

In business there are rules for blatantly misleading consumers with false statements. If you run a pet shop, for example, you can’t sell a kitten as a puppy. There should be similar rules for governments. But unfortunately there aren’t. In politics you can sell the people as many pups as you like. That’s how Obama and the rest have got away with another scam.

Not that they would ever lie, of course. Take the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who in a briefing under oath swore that the NSA wasn’t collecting data on millions of innocent American citizens. He said this pre-Snowden’s well publicized whistleblowing.

Even after the Snowden revelations about the horrific extent of the government’s snooping, Clapper insisted he told the truth. It was a bit like Bill or Hilary Clinton’s ‘truth’, because apparently in Clapper’s head if you store data but don’t look at it, it’s not the same thing as collecting it.

That leaves me wondering if I robbed Clapper’s house but didn’t look at anything I took, would I have really stolen anything? I’m not going to try it to find out because I think I know what the result for me would be.

Getting back to this new legislation, on the face of it “Freedom” sounds great.

The bureaucrats knew that it would. They deliberately choose the word to deceive the American people. The ‘USA FREEDOM’ bit in the USA Freedom Act is supposed to mean “Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring”.

‘Supposed to’, being the key words.

Let me be quite blunt.

If you believe the USA Freedom Act is ‘Strengthening and Uniting America’ then you are a fool.

If you think it is ‘Fulfilling Rights’ then you are a bigger fool.

And if you think it will ensure ‘Effective Discipline Over Monitoring’, then you are out of your frigging mind.

The only mitigating factor in your defense is that you have been brainwashed by the unthinking media who have swallowed hook, line and sinker all the government’s ‘spin’ on this new piece of legislation, and repeated it ad nauseam. Misleading headlines such as the Washington Post’s “NSA phone program doomed as Senate passes USA Freedom Act”, or USA Today’s equally ridiculous, “NSA data collection ended” are examples of lazy and bad journalism and a complete failure to properly assess the impact of this new Act.

They all want you to think what the government wants you to think, and that is that the USA Freedom Act is a victory for civil liberty.

It is not. In fact it is quite the opposite.

For example, the USA Freedom Act only slightly modified one small part of a single NSA data collection program. Now, instead of the NSA directly capturing and holding the metadata for every American citizen’s cellphone conversation – i.e., your phone number, the numbers you call, the length of your phone calls, etc – the telecommunication companies must hold on to it for the NSA, and give it access to it through the federal court system any time it wants it. Basically the USA Freedom Act just saves the NSA from having to store the information itself.

Meantime the NSA can still monitor and collect anything it wants from the Internet. It will continue to snoop on your medical records, emails, business deals, where you are and practically anything else, which is far more valuable than cellphone calls.

And as General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, has said, it doesn’t take much metadata to specifically identify and track anyone. “We kill people based on metadata,” he said.

See, this Freedom Act makes you so safe again.

So that is my take on the USA Freedom Act. Another piece of government deceit. And another attack on the Constitutional rights of Americans. For a country that for so many years has taken pride in its freedom, it’s allowing it to be taken away with very little comprehension or fight.

The true fact is that the United States of America, which has more controls on government data collection than any other country in the world – including the USA Freedom Act just passed – spends more on intelligence collection and analysis than the rest of the world combined.

But at least now you know how to spell ‘bollocks’.

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Playing With Statistics

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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It’s Sunday so time for another Sunday Sermon.

There’s a famous quote from US President Abraham Lincoln that goes something like, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time”.

On the face of it Lincoln’s words seem rather clever and profound – and true. And so they are.

Up to a point.

But what Lincoln didn’t say (and he was a politician after all) is that you don’t have to fool ALL of the people ALL of the time.

What you have to do is fool them long enough to do what you need to do – for example, in the case of a politician, to get yourself elected.  

 

Which brings me to statistics.

Because the best people in the world at playing with statistics are politicians and governments.

Some people believe everything they are told. Others call the figures governments produce ‘disingenuous’ which is being very kind. And some don’t believe a word or a number that they produce. (Take a wild guess at which camp I am in.)

Government statistical results are in effect lies. You can’t call them that – although I just did – because they can find figures to back up what they say, it’s just that they choose the figures that tell the story they want to promote and ignore all the rest that tell a different story.

For example, to get on to one of my favorite rant subjects, there is a thing which I am sure most of you have never heard of called the ‘Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program’ or ‘SIGTARP’ for short.

When the government is challenged about what is has been doing to bring to justice the banksters, who stole and recklessly gambled away our money, they can quote you a statistic or two saying that over the last few years, SIGTARP has put over 100 senior bank executives in jail, each of whom was convicted of stealing from taxpayers.

Although that fact is ‘technically’ or ‘statistically’ true, what they don’t tell you is that the people they have gone after and convicted are all small time crooks, guilty of small time frauds that are seldom above $1m or $1.5 million in value.

All the super crooks who embezzled hundreds of $ billions and almost brought down the entire financial system aren’t even being seriously pursued. More than six years into the SIGTARP investigations there are literally still hundreds of billions of outstanding ‘loans’, from banks including Citi, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

They can quote figures all day long to try to mislead the people and make themselves look good, but a few small time crooks thrown in jail for stealing a million or two dollars here and there isn’t ever going to make much of a dent in the $ billions that were stolen. The politicians know that as well as anyone.

Perhaps Mark Twain’s “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” might have been a better quote!

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What Happened To This Thing Called ‘Democracy’ Anyhow?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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The Sunday Sermon

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Some people have asked me why, when I am so scathing about politicians, I still have an interest in politics.

It is a good question because one thing is for sure, I do have little or no time for the politicians who in general I consider to be stupid, self-serving, untruthful, devious party-before-country hacks seldom, if ever, working for the best interests of the people they are suppose to represent. The exceptions to that statement are VERY rare!

But that’s my assessment of the politicians.

Politics as a subject is important because it sets the rules and standards that we all have to live by.

One of those standards that we have chosen to live by is the principle of ‘democracy’.

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I used to think that I knew what that meant.

I used to think that in a ‘democracy’ the adult population got a chance to vote for candidates and policies that, based on the arguments and evidence provided, they thought were most in line with their own thinking and therefore best for the country as a whole.

I used to think that when a candidate said something during an election campaign he or she would stick by those pledges once elected.

I even used to think that ‘democracy’ meant that the country would be governed by the policies that the majority of people voted for.

I don’t think like that any more. Indeed I haven’t thought that way for some considerable time.

And I don’t think that way any more because the ‘democracy’ that we once knew has long since disappeared.

Nowadays ‘democracy’ is no longer a matter of principle, but rather a matter of political expediency. Nowadays ‘democracy’ means pandering to the vested interests of those who can donate millions to the obscene amounts spent on political campaigns. Nowadays politicians will say whatever they have to say to get elected and forget every promise they have made the minute the polls close.

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President Obama was elected by a ‘democratic’ vote.

President Obama is a member of the ‘Democratic’ Party.  

Yet President Obama is and will continue to try to ride roughshod over that ‘democracy’ by starting another war, or wars, that the vast majority of the American people do not want and did not vote for.

Wars that will eventually cost the lives of yet more young brave Americans in a foreign land – no matter how Obama and his minions like failed Presidential candidate Kerry try to spin it (i.e. lie about it).

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It may even cost the lives of those within America itself should these foolhardy misadventures spawn retaliatory terrorist attacks on the homeland.

Sadly, people have short memories.

Politicians rely on that.

None more so at the moment than President Obama and his sidekick Joe Biden.

Hardly anyone remembers that during the presidential election last year Biden attacked Mitt Romney for being “ready to go to war” in Syria. (York, Pennsylvania, Sept. 2, 2012)

In the previous campaign Biden also said that the nation could only be taken to military action with the approval of Congress, except where it was necessary to stop an “imminent attack” on the United States itself.

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He was supported in this ‘principle’ by the then ‘Senator’ Obama, who said that the President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

“The Constitution is clear”, Biden declared. “And so am I.”

I wonder where all that ‘clarity’ has gone today?

Maybe it’s in a White House cupboard somewhere, on a shelf along with ‘democracy’.

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Sunni or Shiite?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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You could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the title indicated that today’s post is about the weather, but it isn’t. Instead I’m doing a Sunday Sermon (otherwise known as a rant) about things Middle Eastern.

It is a part of the world about which most of us know very little, but a place that has affected, and will affect, all our lives dramatically.

If you listen to CNN or ABC or any of the other media outlets you would be left with the impression that what has been happening in the Middle East and the terrorist offshoots that it has spawned is solely a religious crusade by Muslims against all other religions, particularly the Christians and the Jews.

Granted that type of hatred does exist and is being fomented by demented Islamic clerics within the Muslim community both at home and abroad, but it is by no means the whole picture.

Just as there are many different sects within, for example, the Christian faith, there are different denominations within the Muslim faith also.

The latter consists of two main factions, the Sunnis and the Shiites, and a lot of what has been, and is happening in the Middle East has its roots in a sectarian conflict and power struggle between these two factions of Islam.

It’s always difficult, and a little bit dangerous, to try to sum up a long standing conflict in a couple of paragraphs, but basically what happened was that after the death of the Prophet Muhammad his followers split into two factions, those who accepted Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, as the rightful successor (the Sunnis) and those who believed that Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, should be successor (the Shiites).

Rather than find common ground over the centuries the differences and bitterness remained and are still being played out throughout the Middle East today.

Syria, where the politicians seem hell bent on involving us next, is a prime example of this sectarian conflict. The Assads, who have been in power for over forty years, are Alawaites which is a branch of Shia Islam. Currently there is an attempt to overthrow the Assad regime by opposing forces that come from the Sunni faction.

The Sunnis comprise around three-quarters of the Syrian population, as opposed to about 12% to 15% for the Shias, and that will be used as justification for siding with the forces trying to overthrow Assad. The fact that Syria under Assad participated in the US-led Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in the 1990-91 Operation Desert Storm will be quietly forgotten, as will the fact that Hamas, regarded as a terrorist organization by most Western states including the US, Canada, and the EU, supports the Syrian Opposition.

However, the real reason that America and her allies will side with the Sunni faction has nothing to do with the lofty goal of establishing democracy in Syria. In fact it has very little to do with Syria at all, but everything to do with Saudi Arabia.

The ruling Sheiks and the vast majority of the population in Saudi Arabia are Sunni, but there is also a significant Shia population in the country and it contains Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities of Islam, which are a focal point for all Muslims.

Are you getting the picture?

If by chance Assad’s regime were to survive and perhaps emerge stronger than ever, some Western nations are afraid that it would give encouragement to those Shia and fundamentalist factions within Saudi Arabia to also create unrest there too, which in turn would have a devastating effect on oil supplies and oil prices and further damage the already weak economies in the West. 

It won’t work out as planned though. These things never do. Eventually there will be some kind of disruption within Saudi Arabia and the economic consequences will be felt worldwide.

But in the meantime that’s what Syria is really all about, according to me anyway. And until someone can come up with a better explanation I for one will not believe the claptrap from the politicians and their tame media front men.

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Gandolfo, And Step On It!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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No, this post has nothing to do with The Lord Of The Rings, this is about Papal rings and the fact that the general public are, yet again, being fed a string of lies and deceit by the powers that be.

Don’t you hate it when people lie to you, and you know they are lying to you, and they continue to lie anyway?

Pope Benedict has resigned right enough, that part seems to be true, but not because of ill health or because he is senile or any of the other excuses offered to the public.

In fact since the shock resignation announcement the truth has seldom if ever raise it’s little head.

Until now.

Now we are finding out that Benedict’s resignation really has to do with a frantic power struggle within the Vatican, and about scandals related to money-laundering via the Vatican’s IOR bank, and a gay sex ring among the Cardinals.

Can a younger man do what Benedict couldn’t and sort out the obvious mess that exists? Only time will tell. But it makes for an interesting election and tough time ahead for whoever gets the white smoke.

In the meantime the Holy See it seems is all at sea. 

Pope Benedict’s retreat, Castel Gandolfo, about 15 miles southest of Rome in the Alban Hills.

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Death Of A Senator

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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I suppose this being an election year and all it would be remiss not to make some sort of comment on things political. I have to admit that I am not a great supporter of the democratic system as it currently exists.

I say this for a number of reasons. Here are four.

One, we never get to vote for the best candidate, only the candidates who can raise the most money, and who are selected by the party faithful.

Two, most people are so welded to the Republicans or Democrats that an independent candidate, even if he were by far the best of the bunch, has such an uphill struggle it is virtually impossible for him or her to get elected.

Three, our democracy does not require the voter (or the candidate I suppose) to be qualified in any way. The intellectual and the moron have an equal vote, even though the former has the ability to vote for the best qualified candidate with the most sensible policies, whilst the latter will vote for the one who wore the nicest tie in a TV debate.

And four, because whether we have Republicans or Democrats in power, or a white or colored President, they continue to allow the same sycophants and morons to populate all the important parts of government and crucial elements like the banking sector.  

“Yes we can?”

No we can’t.

Not with the present system. The current incumbent has proved that one beyond all reasonable doubt.

So what does all this mean? Well, it means probably that whoever gets elected, things will go on much the same.

But hopefully some people will actually think about who they are voting for and why. And try to cut through the electioneering promises and hype and think about what is practical and doable.

The following might help to clarify things a little.

Enjoy.

 

Death Of A Senator 

A powerful senator dies after a prolonged illness.

His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance.

“Welcome to Heaven,” says St. Peter. “Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we’re not sure what to do with you.”

“No problem, just let me in,” says the senator.

“Well, I’d like to but I have orders from higher up. What we’ll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity.”

“Really, I’ve made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven,” says the senator.

“I’m sorry but we have our rules.”

And with that, St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell.

The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a club and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him, everyone is very happy and in evening attire.

They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people.

They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar.

Also present is the Devil, who really is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes.

They are having such a good time that, before he realizes it, it is time to go.

Everyone gives him a big hug and waves while the elevator rises.

The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him.

“Now it’s time to visit Heaven.”

So 24 hours pass with the senator joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing.

They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns.

“Well then, you’ve spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now choose your eternity.”

He reflects for a minute, then the senator answers, “Well, I would never have said it, I mean Heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in Hell.”

So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell.

Now the doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage.

He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and all sorts of other disgusting things and putting them in black bags.

The Devil comes over to him and lays his arm on his neck.

“I…I…I… don’t understand,” stammers the senator. “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and a club house, and we ate lobster and caviar, and danced and had a great time. Now all there is, is a wasteland full of garbage and awful stuff and my friends all look miserable.”

The Devil looks at him, smiles and says,

“Yesterday we were campaigning…

Today you voted for us!”

PLEASE VOTE WISELY THIS COMING ELECTION!!