Posted in religion on October 13th, 2009 by admin – Comments Off
The free exercise of religion — as protected by the United States Constitution — is under attack, an LDS leader says, and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are being called upon to rally in its defense.
“There is a battle over the meaning of that freedom,” said Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve. “The contest is of eternal importance, and it is your generation that must understand the issues and make the efforts to prevail.”
He listed several examples of such current controversies regarding religious freedom — laws governing marriage and adoption, laws regulating activities of church-related organizations in furthering their religious missions, and laws prohibiting discrimination in employment circumstances against people with unpopular religious beliefs or practices.
The former University of Chicago law professor, Brigham Young University president and Utah Supreme Court justice acknowledged during his devotional talk Tuesday afternoon at BYU-Idaho’s Hart Auditorium that, thanks to the Internet age, his message would be received by an even wider, more diverse audience.
Christian principles of human worth and dignity made possible the Constitution’s formation more than 200 years ago, and only those principles in the hearts of a majority of a diverse American population can sustain the Constitution today, he said.
“Religious values and political realities are so interlinked in the origin and perpetuation of this nation that we cannot lose the influence of Christianity in the public square without seriously jeopardizing our freedoms,” he said.
“I maintain that this is a political fact, well qualified for argument in the public square by religious people whose freedom to believe and act must always be protected by what is properly called our ‘First Freedom,’ the free exercise of religion.”
The Constitution’s fundamental principle of popular sovereignty, which implies popular responsibility, allows individuals to act according to their moral agency and to be held accountable for those actions.
“In other words, the most desirable condition for the effective exercise of God-given moral agency is a condition of maximum freedom and responsibility — the opposite of slavery or political oppression,” Elder Oaks said.
The Constitution contains a prohibition against “an establishment of religion,” intended to prohibit a government-established church and avoid the types of national churches still found in Europe. The free “exercise” of religion, he added, involves rights to choose religious beliefs and affiliations and to practice those beliefs.
“The inherent conflict between the precious religious freedom of the people and the legitimate regulatory responsibilities of the government is the central issue of religious freedom,” Elder Oaks said.
Elder Oaks described several threats to be faced and confronted in the future, one being the threat of denying of free speech and religious freedom.
He underscored recent changes in religious devotion nationally, including a rising intolerance of Christianity, the rejection of God’s existence or authority, the growing hostility of atheism and the intimidation of those with religious-based views from influencing or making state or federal laws.
“A second threat to religious freedom,” he said, “is from those who perceive it to be in conflict with the newly alleged ‘civil right’ of same-gender couples to enjoy the privileges of marriage.”
Elder Oaks referred to the aftermath of the majority-approved Proposition 8 state constitutional amendment in California’s 2008 election, defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Opponents criticized the LDS Church and its members, saying they were “denying” or “stripping” other of the “rights.”
“In fact, the Proposition 8 battle was not about civil rights, but about what equal rights demand and what religious rights protect,” he said. “At no time did anyone question or jeopardize the civil right of Proposition 8 opponents to vote or speak their views.
“The real issue in the Proposition 8 debate — an issue that will not go away in years to come and for whose resolution it is critical that we protect everyone’s freedom of speech and the equally important freedom to stand for religious beliefs — is whether the opponents of Proposition 8 should be allowed to change the vital institution of marriage itself.”
With traditional marriage the teaching of Judeo-Christian scriptures and the Western cultures’ core legal definition and practice for thousands of years, those seeking to change the foundation of marriage should not be allowed to pretend that those defending it are trampling on civil rights, Elder Oaks said.
“The supporters of Proposition 8 were exercising their constitutional right to defend the institution of marriage — an institution of transcendent importance that they, along with countless others of many persuasions, feel conscientiously obliged to protect,” he said.
“Any such effort to have governments invade religion to override religious doctrines or practices should be resisted by all believers.”
Elder Dallin H. Oaks offered five points of counsel to LDS members on how their conduct can enhance religious freedom in times of turmoil and challenge.
1. Speak with love, always showing patience, understanding and compassion toward adversaries.
2. Don’t be deterred or coerced into silence by intimidation, but instead insist on the constitutional right and duty to exercise one’s religion, to vote one’s conscience on public issues, and to participate in elections and debates.
And that should be accompanied by “a right to expect freedom from retaliation,” Elder Oaks said, listing the post-Proposition 8 reactions of vandalism, retaliation and harassments — including firings and boycotts — against LDS Church members and supporters from other faiths.
Noting that while such aggressive intimidation from the outrage against those who disagreed with the gay-rights position was directed at religious individuals and symbols, the incidents of violence and intimidation “are not so much anti-religious as anti-democratic,” he added.
3. Insist on the freedom to preach the doctrines of the LDS faith.
4. Be wise in one’s political participation, including the framing of arguments and positions in respectful ways.
5. Be careful never to support or act upon the idea that a person must subscribe to some particular set of religious beliefs in order to qualify for a public office.
Posted in economy on October 13th, 2009 by admin – Comments Off
“The Royal Scam” by Anonymous Correspondent
August 3, 2009
Are we at the end? These massive insolvable problems: where can they lead? The inattentive political class, too selfish to care. The corrupt and venal insiders, what can they do?
Here’s the chart, and this deflation head-fake has happened elsewhere, such as Weimar. See how Mish is right and there is REAL Deflation here? He’s not kidding. CPI is minus 1% to 3%, while Case-Shiller CPI is minus 6%:
Nevertheless, 3 months after Deflation begins in Argentina, Inflation rises to 120%. The Peso is devalued 73%
The bond market collapses:
And a few months later, Argentina defaults on sovereign debt, for a multi-billion dollar loss to foreign creditors. A mere two years later, the country is without debt, working hard, and booming.
Hmm…
Work with me here. Suppose, just suppose, that mathematically, the US Fiat system has a very certain, very predictable end date, easily seen even by such non-monetary critics such as Martenson’s “Crash Course”.
This certain end date is roughly when the parabolic curve goes vertical as mapped using the average interest rate of all national transactions—6% perhaps. And suppose, just suppose, that being no dummy and working with money as your sole object, clawing your way to the top of the Billionaire’s club, you could see this coming. In fact, everyone can—all your peers who clawed through the same training, saw through the same veil, and are now in positions of unimaginable influence, having friends who are Presidents, Diplomats, nation-shaking Hedge Funds, and IMF/BIS bankers. And they all looked at each other and said: “This is bad, dahlink” and: “It’s mathematically certain, mate,” then everyone together: “So what do we do?”
Well, no one knows what to do. Nothing like this has never been tried before. The financial world has never had ALL baseless currencies before, and never has a country as large as the US been brought down except during a war that exhausted all nations together. The risks are too high just to guess what will happen if we pull lever X instead of lever Y when the end comes. So you pick a country a lot like America. Productive, hardworking, modern, agricultural, having a corrupt, spendthrift political class and an uninvolved, unassuming, spendthrift-but-hardworking middle class—a country the most like America. And you run a little experiment.
What happens to a country when it does exactly what we’re about to do? You influence leaders here, fund populist movements there, then get your friends to invest in this nation, knowing all along what’s going to happen, and knowing that—because we know, we’re making it happen—no one important will lose their money playing along. A nation like, oh, Argentina.
You push foreign investment through banking and diplomatic channels from the top, while as in “Economic Hit Man” no one below the 1st level need know, and you over-invest in the country, buying the leaders and giving them every assurance that things are fine, they’re not too far along, the world believes in them, and the IMF is right there to catch them.
Until one day, you don’t. Once they’ve gone too far to pull back, you spread some rumors, cause a run on some investments, then have your banking friends step back a bit. Then a bit more. Then at the 11th hour, despite daily promises all along the way, the IMF also leaves them in the lurch, cutting off their last foreign credit. What do they do? What do the people do? What does it take to keep them under control in this transition? Where are the pressures? Do they give in to interminable debt slavery to the IMF, or do they default on foreign investors? And what happens when they do? Does the world punish them or two years later is it like nothing happened?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, with another placid, productive, agricultural, English-speaking country with a strong middle class and rule of law, also most like America, you try the other direction: unlimited inflation. In Zimbabwe, three eggs cost 100 billion dollars…back in 2008, before things got really bad.
What happens there? Which way was better, for power, influence, and control in world affairs? Which way do the important people remain in power with less bother?
Just a thought, mind you. I’m sure no one would actually do such a thing.
Here’s what happened in Argentina: the political leaders are dysfunctional and infighting, paying out to their home provinces, uncaring of the enormous debt and with no reason to care so long as foreign money could be borrowed. Meanwhile the economy began to rest more and more on bubbles and speculation funded by this foreign borrowing. When the balloon went up, the insiders saw which way it was headed and got their money offshore, something like Cheney and Halliburton did the other year. Then as things devolved, ever-increasing capital controls were put in place, just like now with the US investigating “off-shore havens” and profits one might have made overseas using the premise of money laundering to chain the firedoors shut one by one.
Finally, they enforced the official “corrilito”, and soon after had an extended Bank Holiday for the 5 months it took to devalue the Peso by 73%–far faster than anyone not forewarned could adjust and react. Once every exit was chained tight, they firebombed the casino, trapping everyone inside. Even if you had thousands in stocks, bonds, and savings accounts, with the market frozen and the monthly bank withdrawal limit set at $300/mo, the little people could not pay rent or even eat, becoming “Cartoneros” garbage-picking architects and engineers, wandering the streets with their children at midnight as the nation devolved into a chaos that did not topple the ruling class.
Once all the assets in the country had been discounted a minimum of 73%, the insiders then repatriated their money and bought their neighbor’s fortunes for pennies on the dollar, finding cheap, hungry, competitive labor, ready to compete with even 3rd world wages. The prudent, hard-working, and savers (the wrong people) were wiped out, and the money was transferred to the speculators and insiders (the right people). Massive capital like land and factories can not be expatriated, but are always worth their USE value and did not fall as much, or even rose afterwards as with falling debt ratios and low wages these working assets became competitive again. It’s not so much a “collapse” as a redistribution, from the middle class and the working to the capital class and the connected. …And the genius is, they could blame it all on foreigners, “incompetent” leaders, and careless, debt-happy citizens themselves.
Now I’m no genius here, but couldn’t the United States do the very same thing?
What you need to do is–and bear with me here–send your best Wall St. salesmen and diplomats to China and sell them a bill of goods about how they can “modernize” with our help. The Cold War is over. Capitalism reins. You know us Wall St. types! It’s all about the dollar! Have the radio scream the President sold out and sign them up to the WTO as you suck Asia into massive overcapacity and a deep, unbreakable reliance on the US and G-8 as customers while paving over the national independence of their life-giving water and farmland. Then, once they’ve tasted freedom and affluence, once they’re unable to support themselves independently, you pull the plug not on them but YOURSELF. Implode your own middle class as above. Kill the bond markets, cause a run on your own currency, and default on the debts you owe them. Hey, it’s the only thing you could do, right? Americans are just stupid, right? Wall Street is just greedy. It’s all an accident, an act of God really. No one’s to blame. It’s classic Judo.
In a single stroke you:
a) lose the burden of external debt
b) by devaluation lose your internal debt
c) make the nation competitive as a manufacturing power.
d) scare the people back into compliance, even exultation with their low wages.
e) with the renewal of manufacturing, re-cast the power that your military rests on
f) during a time of Peak Oil, radically reduce unnecessary consumption while insuring strategic (military) supply.
g) by doing that, suck in the oil powers of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela enough to knock them off-base, first with high prices, then low prices.
h) club China into submission to the G-8 money powers again
and best of all:
i) enrich insiders beyond their wildest dreams, insuring their dominance for a generation to come.
All the right people win, all the wrong people lose.
Seeing the monetary parabola looming dead ahead after the near-miss of the Tech collapse, what do you need to insure this happens on a very tight schedule?
First, knowing this will happen, you suck in your own people by demanding—straight from the top—that bankers loosen lending standards so low even the dumbest financier couldn’t believe it was prudent, then refuse to prosecute even the most blatant corruptions by mortgage originators, fraudulent borrowers, and other “outsiders”. Suspecting this will all blow up, pay yourself today in bonuses instead of later in investments.
Then, knowing you’ll never repay, you jack up national spending beyond anything anybody’s ever seen and go do what you want all over the world, in any country you want, with impunity.
Then you have a scare that gives you cover to set up conduits that insure all the right people have lifeboats, even if it costs $23-30 Trillion, and even if the Hoi Polloi scream bloody murder. It’ll all be over soon anyway.
It was only a 3% GDP deficit that sank Argentina:
But the US$ is not the Peso. You need to make sure it goes down on demand. You aim straight for $2+ Trillion yearly deficits for 70 years and threaten more if necessary.
Hey, is this enough to insure a collapse, even of the world’s reserve currency?
Is this enough to force China to cut us off and play the role of the bad guy we have planned for them? Funny how convenient that is, no? When every economist is screaming, “Mr. President, don’t do this, why are you doing this?” Why indeed.
Hit health care as a way to make the people dependent on the government–innate independence is America’s resistance to the plan—and a way of tracking and controlling them. Computerized medical records were the first thing they brought up, the highest priority, and have been attempted regularly over the years. (1993, 2004, 2009…)
Use the 5 owners of nearly all media to keep up the drumbeat of the “other”: left, right, black, white, famous, religious, atheist, straight, gay, immigrant, commie, Muslim–whatever the people will buy–to insure confusion and infighting when the time comes.
And here we are. Eye of the storm, explosives primed, waiting to pull the detonator.
Any reason the US could not do this, and that everything these incredibly smart, ruthless, immeasurably connected people have been doing is actually not stupid but smart? And what if they believe what they’re doing is all for the good of the country and are willing to take any measure, any action no matter how awful or unprincipled, because it will put America back on top again? And if they get richer than Croseus in the process, well, who’s fault is it anyway? It’s hard work after all.
Like I said, just a thought.
The real magic of a good Con is not to get the money. It’s to do it in such a way that the Mark thinks he knows what happened, thinks he saw the Con you’re pulling, when in fact, the real Con is somewhere else. There’s a saying: “Before the scam, you have the dream and they have the money; while afterwards, you have the money and they have the dream.” If you want to know the real Con, when it’s all over, find out who walked away with the money. Before then, you won’t know.
These Billionaires are the smartest, most unprincipled, double-thinking gamesmen in the world, playing the biggest, most dangerous games in the world, on a field where whole nations are at stake. They didn’t get to where they are by being stupid, taking chances, and making mistakes. You can be sure they’re not making them now. They have immense control in media, finance, military, government, business, and while every plan has risk and it might still get away from them, it sure won’t be for lack of trying. And that goes for the gamesters in China and every other country worldwide who are try every day to do the exact same thing to back to them. It’s the big boy’s game, and when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.
So when you’re reading the news about how randomly careless and stupid everybody was, just remember the Argentine plan: all the right people win, all the wrong people lose, and the good people never knew what hit them. The Royal Scam.
The Debian Project is planning a FreeBSD kernel of its disto that’ll help fine tune its Linux for web sites and critical network-based deployments.
Project members said Wednesday the next version of Debian, called Squeeze, will see a port to the FreeBSD kernel – the first time Debian has been put on FreeBSD.
The port, called kFreeBSD, will target AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures and receive top billing in Debian’s development efforts.
Project leaders said in statement: “Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical.”
FreeBSD is known for a number of advanced networking, performance, security features, and its ability to support large numbers of simultaneous users. It’s used widely on mail and web appliances, time servers, routers, storage devices and wireless access points.
According to the FreeBSD site: “FreeBSD makes an ideal internet or intranet server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response times for thousands of simultaneous user processes.”
Debian said the FreeBSD port would provide broader choice of kernels and features, such as the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) drivers in the mainline kernel.
The OpenBSD packet filter helps normalize and condition TCP/IP traffic, with bandwidth control and packet prioritization. NDIS, meanwhile, hides the underlying complexity of the NIC hardware and provides an interface for level 3 network protocol drivers and the hardware level MAC drivers. ®
Police guard the North entrance of Cobo Hall as thousands look on
An estimated 50,000 residents of Detroit filed into Cobo Hall convention center on Wednesday seeking assistance to pay utility bills and keep from being evicted from their homes. City officials, who expected around 3,000 people to apply for the aid, were overwhelmed by the turnout.
In a scene reminiscent of the crowds of jobless workers who lined up for free soup during the Great Depression, a queue of tens of thousands of workers and unemployed people wound around the downtown arena. Young mothers pushing baby carriages, disabled workers in wheelchairs, senior citizens and throngs of young workers and youth stood for hours waiting. Many had slept on the streets the previous evening to be the first served.
Several people fainted during the wait and were treated by medical personnel on the scene. By 11:30 a.m., Detroit’s mayor, David Bing, made a public appeal for citizens to stop coming to Cobo Hall. Hundreds of police, including officers from Detroit’s special Gang Unit, stood guard at the entrances to hold back the crowd.
Several people were reportedly injured in the rush to enter the building after the police finally opened the doors around noon. Those in line were funneled through the glass doors and quickly sped toward a table where they were handed applications and told they had to fill them out and deposit them in boxes before a 2 p.m. deadline.
Wednesday was the last day for residents to apply for the city’s Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP). The program, funded by a $15.2 million grant from the Obama administration’s stimulus program, will provide assistance to only about 3,400 people, according to Constance Bell, a spokesperson for the program. In addition to the 50,000 applications given out Wednesday, an additional 30,000 were distributed previously, Bell said. This means that only about one out of 23 people who applied will see any money.
The large turnout was based on fast-spreading rumors that the city was providing $3,000 to low-income families in need of aid. Such is the level of economic desperation in the city—where the official jobless rate is 29 percent and more than one-third of the population lives below the official poverty line—that tens of thousands showed up.
The vast majority will not qualify for the aid, the city spokesperson admitted. The HPRP program only provides temporary assistance to pay utility bills for those who are already homeless or facing pending evictions or foreclosures. Moreover, it will be paid only to those who are able to keep up their housing payments after receiving the aid. No money will be used to make mortgage payments.
People wait outside the North entrance of Cobo Hall
Rather than informing those who showed up that their efforts were likely to be in vain, city officials continued to hand out and collect applications for the program. Their overwhelming concern was to prevent an angry outburst from people who had suffered the indignity of waiting for hours and being manhandled by the cops.
The lack of preparation and disorganization at the event is an indication of how distant government officials are from the reality confronting the working class and the extent of the social crisis. The 80,000 households that applied for assistance represent roughly a third of the city’s population.
The real jobless rate in Detroit is much higher than the official figure of 29 percent, due to the tens of thousands who have given up looking for nonexistent jobs. This crisis has been exacerbated by the forced bankruptcies and restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler by the Obama administration, which, with the support of the United Auto Workers, destroyed thousands of jobs and slashed the wages and benefits of auto workers and retirees.
Particularly striking were the thousands of young workers lining up for assistance. Thirty years ago, a large number of these young people would have been employed in city’s many auto factories. Since 1970, however, the city has lost three-quarters of its manufacturing jobs, wiping out the jobs of 250,000 workers. Today, there is nothing but low-paying jobs for young workers, without the slightest economic security.
Last month, tens of thousands of workers lined up at the state fair grounds in Detroit after the regional gas and electric company, DTE Energy, announced it was offering help to distressed homeowners and renters. According to a report last month in the Detroit News, Michigan’s two largest power companies, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, last year cut off heating to a total of 181,000 customers. DTE has already shut off energy to 115,000 households, a pace that will far surpass last year’s 142,000 cutoffs.
Detroit—which used to boast one of the highest rates of home ownership in the nation–had the top home foreclosure rate in 2006 and 2007, and still ranks among the highest in the US.
Detroit’s economic decline has been long in the making. The living standards won by auto workers gave the Motor City the highest per capita income in the nation in the 1950s. The last three decades, beginning with the Chrysler bailout of 1979-80, has seen an unrelenting assault on the working class by big business and the government, culminating in Obama’s restructuring of GM and Chrysler. The deindustrialization of Detroit was symbolic of the shift by American capitalism from manufacturing to the most parasitic forms of financial speculation.
At 15.2 percent, the state of Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the US. Over the past decade, as the auto industry was downsized, Michigan lost 870,000 jobs. The number is expected to rise to one million by late next year.
Even as the demand for social services increases, state and city governments are slashing spending for housing, education and health care to cope with large budget deficits. The Obama administration, which handed trillions to Wall Street, has offered no similar bailout to the states or the estimated 15 million people who are now unemployed.
The state of Michigan—facing a $2.8 billion deficit—is slashing programs across the board. On the same day that thousands lined up for housing assistance, Detroit’s Democratic Mayor David Bing, a multi-millionaire businessman, announced a “turnaround” plan to cut $500 million over the next two years by permanently shrinking city government, selling off public assets, privatizing and cutting services, and laying off more than 1,000 city workers.
The economic crisis is bringing much of the rest of the country to similar straits as in Detroit and Michigan. Scenes of economic desperation are increasingly common throughout the country, with free clinics attracting crowds of thousands in California, Texas and other states, and thousands of people lining up for a handful of available jobs.
The US is experiencing a social crisis unparalleled since the 1930s. In the face of this crisis, the Obama administration is offering no serious relief to the tens of millions of working people who face economic ruin.
The tragic scene that unfolded Wednesday in Detroit underscores the derisory character of Obama’s so-called “stimulus” and “recovery” schemes. The White House has rejected out of hand any public works program to put the unemployed to work. Instead, all of its policies—from the Wall Street bailout, to the attack on auto workers, to its plans to slash health care costs—are designed to protect the wealth and power of the financial elite.
Over the past day, Everyonehasbeenreporting about the arrest last month of Elliot Madison for twittering about police movements to protesters during the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, PA.
The reason this is being reported on now is because on last Thursday, the FBI also raided Mr. Madison’s home in Queens, NY, followed on Friday by Mr. Madison’s filing of a motion in the Eastern District of New York federal court in Brooklyn for the return of his seized property.
In reviewing all the stories, we saw lots of quotes from Mr. Madison’s legal filings and from the Pennsylvania state criminal complaint against him, but no links to the legal papers themselves. As a resource to journalists and interested readers, we are posting Mr. Madison’s motion and his lawyer’s supporting declaration; attached to the declaration are copies of the search warrant, an inventory of the seized items, and the original criminal complaint.
