Bibi Ups The Ante

Bibi Ups The Ante
Posted by Christopher Manion on March 11, 2011 11:12 AM

Bibi Netanyahu is accustomed to getting his way with Americans. I recall an instance where he was unsuccessful: General Vernon Walters, U.S. Ambassador at the UN at the time, wouldn't let him use the secure telephone in the US Mission's at the U.N. (the staffer politely explained that it could be used only by American citizens). Bibi erupted and stormed out of the office.

So now Bibi announces that failed presidential candidate John McCain supports the release of Jonathan Pollard, a fellow from my hometown who is in prison for spying for the Israeli government.

An innocuous phrase in the AP story notes that "Netanyahu said in a statement that McCain pledged his support in a phone conversation Thursday." May we assume that McCain called Bibi to make this extraordinary pledge about which Americans care little, but Bibi cares beaucoup? Or should we assume that Bibi is calling every GOP presidential candidate demanding that they make such a pledge, or risk losing the support of Bibi's friends in the U.S.? After all, a gaggle of Republican presidentials, most of whom know zip about foreign affairs, have been trying to outdo each other in proclaiming their support for Israel. Isn't it likely that Bibi would ask (or demand) that they prove it?

Perhaps the question should be put to every one of them on the campaign trail: Did Bibi ask them for "The Pledge"? Did they give it?

Meanwhile, the GOP Big Money Machine might underwrite sending a copy of George Washington's Farewell Address for each of the presidentials, with this passage underlined: "Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

Homeschooling For Freedom

Homeschooling For Freedom
by Bill Buppert
March 9th, 2011




I would like to dedicate this essay to my wife, Lilo, who has home-schooled four children and inspired the homeschooling of countless others.

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."  -- Bertrand de Jouvenel

There are many reasons people choose to home-school that run the gamut of the political spectrum from the Left to Right.  I would daresay that most homeschoolers are Christian.  I suspect that far more people homeschool and hail from a right leaning perspective.   We are in the minority as secular homeschoolers who teach from a curriculum of traditional canons in whole texts and mastery of Latin.  We are in an even smaller minority in that we are not neoconservative Republicans cheering on the crusade to make war on the world to make it safe for whatever we have in store for it as a country.

As a family, we don't seek to replicate government school at home but use the advantage of one on one tutorship to advance learning and make the children more self taught and able to master their own compass in where they want to be in their school career.  While we are sympathetic to certain aspects of unschooling, we remain completely unconvinced that children are competent and capable to know what life skills and learning they require to become free moral agents in adulthood able to captain their own destinies.

While I would certainly characterize our family as philosophically anarchist, we cast a skeptical eye at those libertarians who consider parenthood a form of child abuse and that all childrens' rights should match those of seasoned adults.  Any responsible parent knows this is a flirtation with disaster.

How compatible is home-schooling with the advancement of a liberty embracing philosophy?  There is no other way it will happen.  Hitler is reputed to have said that if I have your child from age seven, I will have him for life.  I recall watching the brilliant Ang Lee film, Ride With the Devil, and one of the protagonists insists that the Yankee insistence on opening schools immediately after occupation during the War of Northern Aggression  is the beginning of the end.  One could suppose that without government domination of schools from pre-school to post-graduate studies in America; our political landscape would look considerably different.  K-12, quite simply, is a mind laundry to convince the hapless students that the government is the sine qua non of all civilizational advancement and no other view will be tolerated punctuated with the sound of periodic Pavlovian bells so they shamble to the next exercise in statist adulation.

Need evidence?  Spend the day with your child in a government school and have the misfortune of perusing the stacks in the library.  Talk to the teachers and the staff.  It will prove to you that an education degree is probably one of the most useless degrees granted in the history of university education next to the degree programs that give doctorates to the likes of Paul Krugman.  Government has truly turned the education of students at all levels into a university instead of a hetero-versity that respects different conclusions and opinions outside of the accepted government supremacism discourse.  It breeds one outcome – obedience to the state.

If we seek to create a society that is based on decentralized anarchist principles embracing the notions of voluntarism, persuasion, peaceful interchange, free markets and adherence to a non-aggression principle then homeschooling or deregulated community schools catering to these vagaries is a vital part of the program to rebuild our societies.

You cannot build a house of freedom if all the workers are slaves.

Spontaneous order cannot be centrally planned.  The entire education structure in America is based on a Soviet-style model of central planning laced with political objectives that prize compliance and obedience above learning first and foremost.  This system can never be changed and must be abolished.  Historically, the modern school system is a little over a century old and it has proven to be perfectly compatible with creating subjects and absolutely deadly to thinkers.  Students in university systems here succeed in spite of the obstacles put in front of them pedagogically and cognitively.  The hurdles are enormous.

There a number of formidable obstacles to homeschooling outside of the need for a single income stream from one working parent and the additional burden of still paying property taxes that are freighted with the costs of the government "gun-run" schools in your district.  The commitment is huge on the part of the parent who remains home to teach and to do so for the fourteen years we have is even more difficult.  It is worth it because if the idea of teaching your children well is the goal of good parenting, then the government schools will always run a distant second.  The gun-run schools are literally turning your children into the mindless and shambling drones you run into every day at the mall, in town or in a restaurant bordering on illiteracy and innumeracy making them vulnerable to the statist swan-song of surrendering their liberty for security.  This is drummed in to them every waking hour.

Homeschooling is one of the ways to pave the way for a free society; otherwise, you have not only surrendered your responsibility to your children but have forfeited any future chance at freedom they may have.

"The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive [sic] citizens." -- H. L. Mencken

Copyright © 2011 by zerogov.com

http://zerogov.com/?p=1667

Family values and the Newt Gingrich question

"Frum is in his own way as loathsome as Gingrich, but he has a point:

"It's not the infidelity. It's the arrogance, hypocrisy, and – most horrifying to women voters – the cruelty. Anyone can dump one sick wife. Gingrich dumped two""

-- William N. Grigg


Family values and the Newt Gingrich question
David Frum  March 9, 2011 – 10:47 am

Newt Gingrich attends a Faith & Freedom Coalition event in Iowa. Should Family Values candidates actually adhere to family values?

Pete Wehner tries to assess how much past marital infidelity will hurt Newt Gingrich's presidential chances.

Many of the rest of us are on a continuum when it comes to deciding how much infidelity should matter in the selection of a president. Facts and circumstances are crucial. Was the infidelity an isolated instance or a chronic pattern? Were the transgressions long ago or recent? What levels of deception and cover-up were involved? What was the position of authority the person held when the infidelity occurred? Was there an alarming degree of recklessness on display? What evidence is there that this person has changed his ways? Has this person shown other worrisome signs when it comes to character and trustworthiness?

These are all fair and interesting points, but they do not address the reason that Gingrich's personal life has been – and will be – so politically lethal.

It's not the infidelity. It's the arrogance, hypocrisy, and – most horrifying to women voters – the cruelty.

Anyone can dump one sick wife. Gingrich dumped two.

And that second dumped wife is talking to the media. From the Esquire magazine profile of Newt Gingrich published in September 2010:

After going to the doctor for a mysterious tingling in her hand, [Marianne Gingrich] was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Early in May 1999, she went out to Ohio for her mother's birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn't return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her.

"About what?"

He wanted to talk in person, he said.

"I said, 'No, we need to talk now.' "

He went quiet.

"There's somebody else, isn't there?"

She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. "'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I want is a Chevrolet.' "

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

He'd just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he'd given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.

The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, "How do you give that speech and do what you're doing?"

"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered. "People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live."

Who needs oppo research with quotes like those on the record?

National Post


Author and columnist David Frum is editor of FrumForum.com, where this originally appeared


http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/03/09/david-frum-family-values-and-the-newt-gingrich-question/

"Mission No. 77": U.S.- Funded False Flag Terrorism in Egypt

Thursday, March 10, 2011
"Mission No. 77": U.S.- Funded False Flag Terrorism in Egypt
William Grigg




Shortly after midnight on the morning of New Year's Day, a green Skoda automobile pulled up outside the Saints Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria, Egypt. The vehicle decanted two men, one of whom was seen speaking tersely into a mobile phone as they walked briskly from the scene.

A few minutes later a 100 kilogram bomb detonated inside the car, sending its densely packed, lethal payload of nails, glass and iron balls into the sanctuary. The explosion, which was powerful enough to shatter every window in the neighborhood, killed more than twenty worshipers gathered for New Year's mass. Nearly a hundred more were seriously wounded. Body parts were propelled into the fourth floor of the church building and onto a neighboring mosque.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=crykxt6A-zQ

An hour before the bomb went off,  government security personnel assigned to guard the church quietly withdrew, despite official assurances that the force would be on hand until the end of the worship service. No explanation was given for this oddly timed dereliction of duty. After the bombing, a group of Muslim radicals quickly materialized to taunt the terrified and infuriated Christian victims with chants of "Allah akbar." Armored riot police arrived shortly thereafter, firing rubber bullets and tear gas grenades to disperse the crowd.


The immediate official story was that "foreign elements" -- either al-Qaeda or the Israeli Mossad -- were responsible for the atrocity. This explanation was immediately challenged by surviving eyewitnesses who had seen the security force withdrawn and the unidentified vehicle park in a cordoned-off "secure" area. Spokesmen for the long-suffering Coptic Christian population pointed out that on January 6, 2010, security had been withdrawn from a Coptic church in Nag Hammadi shortly before a drive-by shooting. Six Coptic Christians attending Christmas Eve mass, along with a Muslim security guard, were killed in the attack, and nine others were wounded.


Suspects in the Nag Hammadi shooting.
 
Three suspects were arrested by the police a few days after the atrocity in Nag Hammadi. The alleged ringleader, a career criminal named Mohammad Kammouni, was sentenced to death earlier this year by a special "state security" tribunal established under the post-1981 emergency law.

Under that streamlined procedure, the verdict cannot be appealed, and -- once the Grand Mufti ratifies the death sentence -- Kammouni can be disposed of quickly and cleanly. This is a very tidy way to dispose of a Patsy.


By the time of the New Year's Eve bombing in Alexandria, a growing number of Egyptians -- both Christian and Muslim -- began to suspect that Mubarak's U.S.-supported police state had cultivated a large pool of patsies to carry out false flag operations intended to foment sectarian conflict. If that was the design, things were working out as planned.

Funerals of Coptic terrorism victims were becoming commonplace, and quickly turning into confrontations between Christians and Muslims. This kept the riot police busy and gave State Security (SS) officials a pretext to round up scores of young Copts as a "preventive" measure. The biggest benefit to the regime was the emergence of a deep and increasingly violent sectarian rift in the Egyptian population.



"Clashes between Muslims and Christians have grown increasingly common in recent years, especially in Upper Egypt, where there is a large Christian population and a strong culture of vendetta killings," reported the New York Times following the Nag Hammadi murders. "Those killings typically spring from unexceptional disputes that spiral into full-blown conflicts that have to be settled by security forces."


"Egyptians have been united historically by a strong sense of national identity, allowing the Muslim majority and Coptic Christian minority to live in peace, for the most part," continued the report. "But the recent rise in religious fervor, especially among Muslims, has strained relations and increased reported episodes of religiously inspired violence."





"There is a prevailing atmosphere of sectarianism and religious incitement which has led to this behavior," complained Gamal Asaad, a Coptic Christian and former member of the Egyptian parliament. "People deal with each other now as Muslims or Christians, not as Egyptians."


During the past two decades, according to Egyptian-American human rights activist Magdi Khalil, Egyptian Copts suffered more than 1,500 attacks that killed hundreds and inflicted millions of dollars' worth of property damage. He describes those incidents as "state crimes" perpetrated by the Mubarak regime, which used the Christian minority as as scapegoat "to redirect public anger from its own corruption."


Khalil points out that while the Mubarak regime fomented Islamist terrorist attacks on Christians in the service of its domestic agenda, it exploited the violence for external consumption by blaming it on the apparently all-powerful Muslim Brotherhood. The specter of the much-discussed but little-understood Brotherhood, Khalil points out, was used by Mubarak "as a pretext vis-a-vis the West to justify his autocratic regime."


Tragically, the removal of Mubarak and the resignation (for whatever it's worth) of Omar Suleiman, the Beria-esque head of the Egyptian secret police, didn't entirely extinguish the inter-communal conflict that had been so lovingly nurtured by the regime for the past thirty years. However, during the past year a growing number of young Egyptians -- their perceptions sharpened by the ongoing economic collapse -- have come to understand how they were being manipulated.


"We live together, or die together": Egyptian Muslims rally to defend Christian neighbors.
 
Rejecting the artificial collectivist divisions being promoted by the regime (and subsidized by its unfathomably evil patron in Washington), Egyptians began to communicate and collaborate across religious lines in the interest of saving their country from the government ruling it.


Last January, in defiance of the divide-and-conquer script being followed by the Regime,  thousands of Muslims volunteered to attend Coptic Christmas worship services to act as "human shields" protecting their Christian neighbors. During the peaceful anti-government demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Copts returned the favor by forming a human chain protecting their Muslim neighbors during prayers. In seeking to bring down the police state ruling them, those brave and principled people practiced the most effective form of subversion: Loving their neighbors as themselves.


On March 5th, hundreds of Egyptian pro-liberty activists, after learning that State Security officials were destroying documentary evidence of their crimes,  laid siege to SS headquarters near Cairo. Although tons of critical documents had been reduced to confetti, thousands of others were seized, many of which have been published on the Web. Some of the material describes the pervasive surveillance of freedom activists by the SS; other documents provide details of official corruption, such as the rigging of local elections by Mubarak's National Democratic Party. Medical reports lay out in terrifying detail numerous cases in which innocent people were tortured to death.


The most significant find, however, was a group of eight documents discussing attacks on Christian churches. Nestled in that batch was a December 2, 2010 memo to the Egyptian Interior Minister outlining "Mission No. 77," an operation in which a jailed Islamist would organize the plot to bomb the Saints Coptic Church in Alexandria during New Year's Eve mass.


Oh, sure -- some bien-pensants are suggesting that the incriminating documents are cunningly cobbled forgeries. This would mean that the Egyptian SS didn't stage a false-flag operation, but that for some reason somebody in that agency created a false file suggesting as much after the fact.

Given that every spy agency is a roomful of funhouse mirrors, it's possible that the "Mission No. 77" document was manufactured as part of some too-clever-by-half disinformation scheme. In any case, it's worth remembering that the Egyptian SS was trained and funded by the same U.S. government responsible for creating the Operation Northwoods proposal decades ago, which outlined several possible false-flag terrorism campaigns in which Americans would suffer injury or death in order to manipulate public opinion.

In recent years, the Regime in Washington, using what it unblushingly calls terrorism "facilitators," has staged a series of ersatz terrorist plots intended to create the impression that America is under siege by implacable Jihadist enemies.

Whatever the eventual outcome of the uprising in Egypt, this much is worth celebrating: Millions of Egyptians who suffered under Mubarak's police state understand how this game is played, and are refusing to play along any longer. What's our excuse?

http://www.freedominourtime.blogspot.com/

RE: EU Leaders And Libya - Gaddafi

Clearly European Union leaders need to consider what they themselves
would do if confronted with the same type of situation as Colonel
Gaddafi. Would they surrender power, step down quietly, give up
government, to extremist influenced insurgents who favor an extreme
ideological position, in that instance religion driven, contrary to
the constitutional principles that sustain Europe's social and
political order ? I do not believe, for one small instant, that EU
leaders would simply give up, and give in, to insurgency. I believe
that they would take up arms, and use military power, to suppress that
insurgency, to maintain power. They must, necessarily, consider what
they would themselves do, in their own nations, if they had the same
thing happen as is happening in Libya. Otherwise the precedent
continues to be built that any group, anywhere, can take the path of
action favored by communist guerilla fighters (nowadays mostly Maoist
insurgents), Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other violent, terrorist,
insurgent groups that have arisen or might arise in the near future,
to simply militate crowds, take up weapons, and overturn the political
order, anywhere, anytime, by any means that they choose. Clearly that
is not an acceptable solution to the Libya problem. If it were
acceptable then one day it would happen in London, in Berlin, In
Paris, in Rome. Anywhere.

We, and particularly our political leaders, need to think about which
principles we believe worth fighting for. Separation of religion and
the political order would seem to be one of those. Most of our nations
uphold separation of church and state. Similarly with other principles
as to what assures the good of the many, against the actions of
relatively few, knowing that a few can rally large irrational, emotion
driven crowds, contrary to the best interests of a nation, its people,
and its future. Keeping in mind that a mob can be driven solely by
terror of a few, and that reason is not what drives them, only terror.
We live in a world where that type of insurgency, driven by terror
rather than reason, will be more prevalent, and will need a decisive
response without the obstacle of international censure when terror and
the power of the terror driven mob, emotion driven to extremes,
threatens to overturn the existing order. Such events do not favor
genuine, rational, democracy. They lead to totalitarianism and the
destruction of democracy, replacing it with retrogressive extremes,
imperiling human progress.

--
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