Posts Tagged ‘Freedom’

Great video with Bill Whittle.

I support free speech, but…

 

…here’s a lesson for the masses on Socialism. This comes to you courtesy of WWII Hollywood.

 

…good read here.

Freedom is at stake. Thankfully, we have folks that know it and are doing something about it.

Charles Koch: I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society

I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives. It is those principles—the principles of a free society—that have shaped my life, my family, our company and America itself.

Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. I have been doing so for more than 50 years, primarily through educational efforts. It was only in the past decade that I realized the need to also engage in the political process.

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that this could happen. “The natural progress of things,” Jefferson wrote, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” He knew that no government could possibly run citizens’ lives for the better. The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.

via Charles Koch: I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society – WSJ.com.

This is one hell of a quote:

Our government is too big. It is too inefficient. It is too intrusive. It needs to do less, and it needs to do a considerably better job of executing those functions it does carry out. The struggle to take us from where we are today to a future in which a leaner, flatter government allows its citizens to truly live free, is the defining battle of our time. Nothing less than the definition of what it means to be “an American” is at stake.

This comes from this piece here:

WHERE’S SAM WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

…is a worthy cause that could use your support.

Freedom in Internet Blog Reporting Excellence

A site to identify, promote and reward those internet bloggers that put themselves on the front lines to keep the rest of us informed about questionable and illegal actions of our would be “rulers”.

Freedom in Internet Blog Reporting Excellence.

 

FIBRE AWARD

 

Freedom in Internet Blog Reporting Excellence

It’s been 34 plus years since my first attempt to use a computer. A “trash 80″ that had no internal memory to speak of. It used a 7 1/4” “floppy” disk with limited abilities. In the early ’90’s I first found the internet, but didn’t use it to any extent until later in the decade and early in the new millennium. Today my life and most everyone else in the first world would be lost without our computers, in whatever form they may take, and the internet.

Something that most of us have come to expect, rely upon, enjoy, love and hate is the internet blogger.

What the heck is a blogger? Well, the term blogger comes from Weblog. A weblog is the combination of web and log. The internet being referred to as the web, web of internet connections, and the log is the continuing input of information into a website location. A blogger is a person who uses a website location to discuss whatever is his interest.

A bloggers interests may be personal or pertaining to intersexual relations or politics. Essentially, whatever one can think of is covered or discussed or referenced on the internet at some bloggers blog site.

Freedom in Internet Blog Reporting Excellence.

…a JFK speech very much worth hearing. It is relevant to toady’s scandals and political head fakes.

…and debunking the liberal moron politician that doesn’t know shit about guns, or American history.
Share this with your friends. Hell, share it with your enemies too.

H/T Bob Owens

This story was written by a journalist that was killed in a car accident. Story here. I’m not posting this because of that, just noting his passing and sharing his last story.

The excuse for wiretapping, etc., that it’s to stop terrorism is a bunch of bullshit. All these people in government want is control. 

Control of every aspect of your life and that means that liberty cannot survive if they are to reach their goal.

Why is DHS arming itself to the teeth?

Why are the Dems so hot and bothered on the Second Amendment?

They wiretap millions of people in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

They go after journalists that break stories that are detrimental to them.

They go after conservative groups through the IRS and other agencies to stop any group against the Administration.

Why did Congress draft and the President sign the National Defense Authorization Act with language that summarily removes all of your rights to council and can lock you up without charges indefinitely?

This Administration has done more to curtail our freedom by chipping away at the Constitution than any other, and they do it with a smile on their face, a lie on their lips and and a head fake to keep you guessing.

Up until this point the media has done nothing to stop this man and his allies from running roughshod over this country until they were targeted themselves. But even that hasn’t stopped them from sucking up to this Administration. Obvious lies and obfuscation go unchallenged.

Enough is enough with these people.

Impeach Obama and his cronies.

Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans

Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide.

By Michael Hastings

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.

Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.

“Everyone should just calm down,” Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly.

That’s right: don’t panic.

The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems — including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.

via Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans.

…are we living Orwell, or Kafka? Either way, it’s freedom that is lost.

The Eyes Watching You

1984 and the Surveillance State

by SARAH SKWIRE

George Orwell. 1984. New York: Plume, [1949] 2003. 323 pages.In the kind of horrifying coincidence that surely would have prompted one of his more acerbic essays, the news that various U.S. government surveillance agencies have been gathering data from millions of citizens’ phones, email accounts, and web searches broke during the week of the 64th publication anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984. As the news reports poured in, and as sales of 1984 surged by an astonishing 6,884 percent, a friend asked me whether the PRISM story strikes me as more Orwellian or more Kafkaesque.

My response? We’d better hope it’s Kafkaesque.

No one wants to inhabit a Franz Kafka novel. But the surveillance states he describes do have one thing going for them—incompetence. In Kafka’s stories, important forms get lost, permits are unattainable, and bureaucrats fail to do their jobs. Like the main character in Kafka’s unfinished story, “The Castle,” if you were trapped in Kafka’s world you could live your whole life doing nothing but waiting for a permit. But at least you could live. Incompetence creates a little space.

What is terrifying about Orwell’s 1984 is the complete competence of the surveillance state. Winston Smith begins the novel by believing he is in an awful, but Kafkaesque world where there is still some slippage in the state’s absolute control, and still some room for private action. Winston says that Oceania’s world of telescreens and Thought Police means that there are “always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape.” But he follows that by saying, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” He also believes that while the diary he keeps will inevitably be discovered, the small alcove in his apartment where he writes his diary puts him “out of the range of the telescreen.”

via The Eyes Watching You : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education.

…in the United States of America.

What happened to my country?

Since 9-11-01 we have been subjected to more and more loss of freedom through the government’s intrusion into our lives.

These intrusions are done in the name of security. There be terrorists here and there and everywhere.

How many terrorist attacks have occurred in the USA since 9-11?

The number is pretty low. And it has nothing to do with the NSA, or the FBI’s surveillance of Americans.

The scandals that keep coming out of Washington are proof that their agenda is to kill liberty in this country.

Didn’t Obama say that the “war on terrorism is over” in one of his hundreds of speeches? If the war on terrorism is over, then there is absolutely no reason for the government’s overreach into our lives.

Remember candidate Obama in 2007? The then candidate gave a foreign policy speech denouncing exactly what this Administration has done. In fact, they’ve expanded the liberty crushing agenda that Bush pulled with the Patriot Act.  Here’s what he said then:

I guess the joke’s on us.

Power corrupts absolutely.

Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the government has expanded its powers immensely. The TSA is the most overbearing and useless organization ever created in this country. They violate our Fourth Amendment rights every time we get into an airport to board a plane. They search 90 year old ladies in wheelchairs under the guise of not profiling Muslims. Guess what morons? Muslim men and women in the age group of 20-40 are the threat. Not some old lady in a wheelchair.

Now we find the IRS targeting certain groups that call themselves the Tea Party, along with other conservative groups against big government, or just wanting to teach the Constitution. Why is that? What end does this government seek?

Control.

This Administration has gone after the First Amendment by targeting the Tea Party and other Conservative groups through the IRS. They have tapped the phones of Americans violating the Fourth Amendment, and they have been going after guns in a vain attempt at taking away our divine right to life, and liberty, by attacking the Second Amendment.

It’s about controlling the masses so that they can enrich themselves and screw the rest of us.

All under the guise of security, or to “protect the children” from harm. If they really wanted to protect the children, then there would be no more gun free zones, and every school in America would have armed staff to stop any idiot that tried to harm them.

Fighting terrorism in America, what a false flag that is.

They keep the stupid people scared in order to run roughshod over the rest of us that know better.

Here’s an interesting article from the NY Times, the fish wrap of record, but they changed it so it wouldn’t be so damning to their messiah.

Via The Daily Caller:

The editorial originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act.

The media has been complicit in this whole charade with their idolizing of Obama and their complete lack of integrity. If they had been doing their job from the start, then Obama probably wouldn’t have been elected in the first place, never mind a second time.

I apologize for being all over the map on this, but it really pisses me off.

At any rate, it’s still a decent article for this rag.

President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

via President Obama’s Dragnet – NYTimes.com.