Immortality III

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
--John Kenneth Galbraith

Proper

"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads."
--Ayn Rand (1905-1982) Author

California Propositions 30 and 32

CORRECTION: The second Proposition referred to is 38, not 32.  Prop 32 concerns withholding from paychecks for political purposes.  Of course, the motive behind that is to drain power from unions.  In fact, if you're a member of a union and don't want any of your wages used for political purposes, all you have to do is give the word and you get that portion back.  Note there's nothing in Prop 32 to stop corporations from taking monies/profits that would otherwise go to shareholders and use those funds for "political purposes".  Prop 32 has nothing to do with free choice, and everything to do with going after unions.  (Another day for a discussion of how much of the union movement has been co-opted and corrupted.  Better to leave the tools available should good people take back their power).

As for the "Courage Campaign", it takes no courage to be superficially pro-union.  To ask why Britt Harris, CIO, Teacher Retirement System of Texas, attended Bilderberg 2012, ah, there we get into interesting questions about what is being done TO the working class by those ostensibly working to protect them. 

TLC

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There's a new ad out on the internet that's truly Orwellian.  But most things coming out of the "Courage Campaign", which I have long termed the "Gutless Campaign", are.

California Propositions 30 and 32 are California "Initiatives" to jack up taxes.  Both claim to provide more money for the schools. 

Pretending for a moment that the additional taxes go toward "public schools", the Deathislature will simply provide less funding to the "public schools" from the General Fund, then blow the savings on their pet projects.  Like CalTrans, which continues to be nicely financed so that our public highways can eventually be turned over to private investors.  Oops, I guess I should have cautioned, "Spoiler Alert".  It's classic "Bait & Switch".

Neither "Initiative" does a darned thing toward having the "public schools" provide more of a genuine *education*.  More taxes, same crap, same indoctrination, same dumbing-down, same destruction of initiative and creativity.

Neither "Initiative" does a darned thing to reform California's corrupt tax system, nothing to eliminate tax loopholes.  If you've managed to buy off the Feds and get your income shielded from taxation, California will continue to go right along.

TLC

Bridled

"I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."
--Richard Rumbold (?-1685)
British Colonel

Source: His final words on the scaffold before he was hanged in 1685.
Douglass ADAIR, Rumbold's Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson's Last Words on Democracy, 1826 [Notes and Documents], in: William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 9, 1952, p. 521

Name

"I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator and name it after the IRS."
--Robert Bakker, paleontologist

Crocodiles II

"Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm."
--Malayan Proverb

Stop

"If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
--Will Rogers
(1879-1935) American humorist

Usurped

"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in ... the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing it’s noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. ...when all government... in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1821

Liberate

"We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves."

--Marilyn Ferguson (1938- ) American author
Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy

Decayed

"[W]e have seen a decayed and frightened liberalism, and on the other hand, the insecure and ruthless fury of political gangsters"
--C. Wright Mills, "The Power Elite"

Good III

"It's good to know who hates you, and it's good to be hated by the right people."
--Johnny Cash

RIP George McGovern

RIP George McGovern, who Passed earlier this morning.

His 1972 DNC Acceptance Speech is a good way of remembering him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orx63ix1y-o

Precedent

"The government expands at will, based on what might be charitably called flimsy constitutional reasoning and less charitably and more accurately called arrogant judicial tyranny. Government authority these days rarely comes from the Constitution as written but from the last carefully crafted misinterpretation of it. This is called legal precedent."

--Linda Bowles (1952-2003) Columnist
Source: Enlarging government's power a step at a time,
CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE, May 1, 1996.

Might III

"Laugh and the whole world laughs with you; cry and you just might get a hung jury."

--Charles Gulledge

Reverse

"The freemen of America will remember, that it is very easy to change a free government into an arbitrary, despotic, or military one: but it is very difficult, almost impossible to reverse the matter -- very difficult to regain freedom once lost."
--Freeman’s Journal
Source: Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia), March 5, 1788

Compassion

"Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors."
--Andrew Boyd

Graft

"The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft."
-- Philip Wylie
Source: Generation of Vipers, 1942

Guards

"Who will stand guard to the guards themselves?"
--Juvenal
[Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet

Passion II

"Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark."
--Henri Frederic Amiel

Princes

"... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ..."
-- Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: before the Constitutional Convention, June 2, 1787.

Direct

"According to Gestapo records... they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them."

--Kort E. Patterson
Source: Port of Call, August/September 1999

Censorship

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
--Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

Retiring

"Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark."
--Samuel Johnson

Diabolical

"It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrine of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am.


The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in _this_ Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation). That Individuals of them may have done it, or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned."

--George Washington
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country,' Freemason
Source: letter to George Washington Snyder, October 24, 1798, Mount Vernon. Washington acknowledged that the Illuminati had begun actively recruiting members from within the American lodges of Freemasonry.

Drums

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so."
--Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927)
American historian, United States Senator from Indiana

Redemption

"I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance."

--Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.,
retort to a heckler asking him to state his beliefs,
Time, November 1, 1963

Fulfill

"When we're through with this earth and all these problems, we don't have to come back. But as long as we're here we have a job to do and a purpose to fulfill and that means dealing with the circumstances around us."

--Rolling Thunder (Cherokee)

Empire

"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations."


--George S. Boutwell (1818-1905)
American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury under President Ulysses S. Grant, Governor of Massachusetts, Senator and Representative from Massachusetts and the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue under President Abraham Lincoln.)

Secret

"That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another...."
--Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown

Proposal

"The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
--Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Scottish philosopher and economist

Overrun

"The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were (the good) deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become a prey to the strong."

--Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: 1 Writings Of Thomas Paine 56 (M. Conway ed. 1894); 1776, Thoughts on a Defensive War.

Well II

"There are moments when everything goes well, but don't be frightened."

--Jules Renard

Sometimes II

"Sometimes I think that, had things gone just a little differently for Gallagher, he might have become the Unabomber instead of becoming a famous comedian. And the world would be a better place, my friend."
--Bob Van Voris