We lost one of the great ones this week – Peter Bergman, the greatest comic most of you have never heard of. Peter was a member of Firesign Theatre, a four man troupe that created some of the funniest, strangest, and best comedy of the late sixties and early seventies. Although they’ve continued to release new material sporadically they’re best known for their earlier albums, including, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him”, “How Can You Be Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All,” “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers” and “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.”
Good comedy makes you laugh. There’s lots of it out there and it’s easy to find. Great comedy is rarer. It makes you laugh, and think, then, sometimes, change what you think. Phenomenal comedy, the rarest kind, makes you laugh and then, sometimes, changes the way you think. Firesign Theatre had that effect on a lot of us. As Richard Metzger puts it:
“I don’t think there is ANYTHING that defines who I was in high school more than being that kid listening to Firesign Theatre on headphones stoned out of my gourd. I think the way I think because of the Firesign Theatre. I phrase things the way I do because of the Firesign Theatre.  I look at the world the way I do because of them.”
Some of the humor was so subtle and obscure just getting it made you feel smart. It took dozens of listens to catch everything. For instance, it wasn’t until my 12th or 15th listening of “Nick Danger, Third Eye” that I got the joke: “They’d never believe me now. My story had more holes in it than Albert Hall.” I felt triumphant for figuring it out and simultaneously stupid that it took me so long. (Note to younger generations – you have to listen to The Beatles to get it. In fact, you’ve got to listen to The Beatles to get a lot of the references in Nick Danger.)
They paid attention to the tiny details, even the fact we were listening to them on flat vinyl records. On side one of “How Can You Be Two Places at Once…” they say, “She’s no fun, she fell right over.” On side two:
NANCY: The whole world is spinning!
NICK: That’s lucky for us! If it were flat, all the Chinese would fall off!
(We hear the sound of Nancy falling to the floor.)
NICK: She’s no fun, she fell right over. Wait a minute…didn’t I say that on the other side of the record. Where am I? I better check…
(We hear a snippet from side one, played backwards.)
NICK: Oh, it’s OK, they’re speaking Chinese..
First, we laugh at the joke. Then we realize we’re listing to a flat record. Then it strikes us that it’s spinning. But there is yet another layer. One day, on the umpteenth listen, I wondered… I checked the position of the tone arm at that moment. I flipped the record and moved the tone arm in the same position. Sure enough, the part they’d played backwards on side two exactly matched its position on side one.
“How Can You Be Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All” is not only one of my favorite albums of all time, it features one of my favorite album covers:
It’s been ripped off dozens of times, by dozens of people. Shortly after the fall of the USSR Abkhaz, a tiny disputed territory no one cared about, tried to raise money by printing worthless sheets of “collectable” stamps. For only $12.95 you could be the proud owner of a sheet of these:
Evidently the artist was in a hurry and no one checked his work. That peace symbol behind Lennon’s head? Yeah, it’s really a Mercedes Benz logo.
They peddled their stamps via full page ads, including one in the TV Guide. Their ad was on the right hand page. There was a story on the facing page about the series Red Dwarf being canceled. The headline was “Don’t Crush That Dwarf.” It was a beautiful jab at the rip-off – something few people would notice – a perfect Firesign style joke.
If you’re from my generation (commonly known Generation Old Farts) you probably know and love Firesign. The rest of you are in for the treat of discovering them for the first time. You can find most of their albums on GrooveShark. I’d recommend starting with Nick Danger, Third Eye. Â Listen to it once to enjoy the obvious jokes, the ones you get right away. Then listen to it again and again to get what you missed. The more you listen, the better it gets.
Richard Metzger’s Tribute to Bergman  At the end of the article there’s a great compilation of commercials they did for a local Volkswagen dealer. And yes, they were real commercials.
Amateur evil villains construct elaborate plans that require dozens of complex capers to work flawlessly. The best evil villains are far more subtle. They reach their goal with one single action, one domino they flick, almost casually, before sitting back to watch events inevitably tumble into completing their master plan.
Perhaps it was just luck, but I suspect Obama knew exactly what he was doing when he tipped a single domino: a federal demand that employer’s health insurance cover birth control. It’s triggered a series of events that makes the GOP look evil, which plays into his master plan of another four years to grow government and reduce liberty. (As opposed to the GOPs master plan to do the same thing.)
Covering birth control is a requirement that already exists in 28 states where Catholic businesses have complied without their world ending. But making it a federal mandate provided them with a platform to bitch and moan about being forced to act in a way that’s contrary to their morals.
They have no argument. The Catholic Church can not make any claims about their morals, because they have none. They ran the world’s largest and most successful pedophile ring for at least a half a century, and when it was exposed they responded by protecting (and sometimes rewarding) the perpetrator’s and vilifying the victims. Let’s be blunt – their priests literally fucked little children, over and over and over, tens of thousands of times, and the church still has not accepted the responsibility for their actions. Therefore, any claims they make about morality should be laughed at and then ignored.
Although this legislation feels good, I can’t find any clause in the constitution that says people should get free birth control, and I don’t like government mandates of any kind. So I have to say it’s a bad idea, no matter how much I enjoy pissing off the Catholic Church.
The left has made ridiculous claims about the price of birth control. I’ve heard claims that it cost $3,000 a year. Nonsense. Condoms are a dollar each. Using a diaphragm costs a few bucks a month. The Pill, depending on the type, costs between fifteen and fifty dollars a month. No one priced out of buying contraception.
On the other hand, it makes economic sense for health insurance companies to encourage birth control. Providing it is far, far cheaper than paying for a delivery of a kid that will also end up on the insurance plan.
This issue has served as a springboard to highlight other conservative attacks on women. For years I’ve been harping that the actual difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is trivial, but the GOP seems determined to prove me wrong on at least one set of issues: they hate women. At least, women who don’t stay home and squirt out babies for them.
There is legislation pending in some of the toothless states that will mandate rape for women who seek early term abortions. The law will require that their doctors rape them with medical instruments. How sick is that?
Almost as sick as Rick Santorum’s view of women. Not only does he preach that birth control between married people is wrong, he thinks that if a woman gets pregnant from rape, that fetus is a gift from god. I know his god is a dick, but come on.
The capper to this caper was Rush Limbaugh running is mouth and slandering a woman who merely wanted to testify in favor of this regulation. You’ve all heard what he spewed, spew that was over the top even for him. It resulted in a massive boycott movement against his sponsors. As of this writing seven major sponsors have pulled their ads from his show. Rush has responded with a lukewarm non-apology apology.
Lefties are delighted, convinced this is the beginning of the end of Rush. Silly people. His fifteen million fans are impervious to logic, reason or compassion for anyone other than Rush himself. Consider that while he was celebrating the War on Some Drugs and preaching the evils of drug use, he was sucking down so much hillbilly heroin he blew out his own hearing. His fans responded to his hypocrisy with…sympathy, mostly.
This entire series of events creates a picture of the Republicans as the party that despises women, a picture that’s difficult to dispel, especially when fresh examples keep hitting the front pages. And somewhere, sitting in the shadows of a darkened room in the White House, smoking a clandestine cigarette and perhaps petting a white cat, Obama is laughing a loud, evil laugh. “Muh Haw Haw Haw Haw Haw!” His plan is working perfectly.
Many years ago some of us were sounding the warning that once the Nicotine Nazis mastered their blueprint for vilifying and marginalizing smokers, other nannies, with different agendas, would use that blueprint to force compliance with their cause. Those predictions have come true, and now the country’s foremost nanny movement wants to control our diets.
Before reading the rest of this article, please take a few minutes to read this column.
Done? If you’re Smartenized, your bullshit meter is smoking.
When Ronda Storms, a Republican state senator in Florida, is accused of nanny-state-ism for her efforts on behalf of a sane diet, it’s worth noting.
Note his choice of words: “A sane diet.” By implication anyone who disagrees must be insane.
And as someone who has called for the defunding of an educational Planned Parenthood program and banning library book displays supporting Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, she is hardly in her party’s left wing.
Trying to pin her to the left or right is a distraction, a complete waste of time and a perfect illustration of the false dichotomy driving American politics. She’s not right wing or left wing. She’s a Big Government, Big Nanny Statist. (I keep repeating this in hopes that it will sink in: We need to stop arguing about left vs. right. The discussion should be about government vs. liberty.)
Yet she makes sense. “It’s just bad public policy to allow unfettered access to all kinds of food,†she told me over the phone.
Let that sink in for a minute. Unfettered access to a variety of foods is bad public policy.  She wants  public policy (which is a nice way of saying Big Brother) to limit our choices to foods that meet her approval.
Mr. Bittman thinks that makes sense.
The argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy.
Ah yes, the old “we’ve always done it this way” argument. That’s compelling if you’re a statist, but not if you’re a grown up who wants to make their own decisions.
All of this is part of the bigger question: How do we regulate the consumption of dangerous foods?
He’s not asking if we should regulate our choices. Â He assumes we must. His only concern is finding the most efficient way to do it.
There is no such thing as dangerous food. Danger comes from over consumption of otherwise harmless food. No matter how much fat or calories or other scary bogymen are lurking in a plate of Fetechini Alfredo or a Big Mac, occasionally indulging in them is harmless.
Last year a brigade of parents stood watch outside a corner store in North Philadelphia in an attempt to prevent their kids from buying junk food.
A group of adults, dressed as authority figures, stood outside a convenient store and intimidated children to keep them from buying candy, and chastise them if they did.  How would you feel if your children had been subject to such harassment?
Mr. Bittman finds this praiseworthy.
We need the government on our side.
There it is. The demand for Big Brother to step in and make all this mandatory.
It must acknowledge the dangers caused by the most unhealthy aspects of our diet and figure out how to help us cope with them, because this is the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.
The kind and benevolent government must step in and “help us cope.” Not just provide information or encourage us to make the “right” choices, but “help” us cope with the horrible burden of choosing what we eat. Let us bask in the warmth of the helpful, loving hand of Big Brother, and pretend it never turns into a fist.
This battle isn’t just starting, folks.  It’s in full swing and gaining momentum. Studies that equate sugar with crack cocaine have been published. Cities like LA are preventing fast food restaurants from opening or operating. The FDA has conducted an armed raid, guns drawn, on the Amish for the horrible crime of selling fresh, healthy raw milk to willing customers. Mars Inc. has just given into Michelle Obama’s arm twisting and is not only reducing the size of regular candy bars, but also completely eliminating king size bars.
All of us need to wake up, learn about these weasels and their cause, and fight and oppose and discredit them at every opportunity. Unless, of course, you want bureaucrats writing and regulating every menu in the country.
…this is the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.
And people like him are the one of biggest challenges to liberty in a free world. They must be stopped.
Other Info
F. Paul Wilson’s short story Lipidleggin’Â predicted the current mess way back in ’78. Â I recorded it as a Quick Hitts podcast, with Wilson’s permission.
My kids inherited my dislike of getting up in the morning. When they were little getting them out of bed for school was a daily battle. It started with me opening their bedroom doors and telling them to get out of bed. It usually ended with everyone yelling at each other.
Then I accidentally created the Water Of Love Method which left me amused and them merely annoyed. And out of bed. And slightly moist.
One morning, after asking them to get up failed, I took a glass of water into one of their rooms. I dipped my fingers in it and sprinkled water on my daughter while singing Dire Straits’ “Water Of Love.” She reacted as if I was flinging acid on her. I just dipped and flipped, dipped and flipped, while singing and telling her I’d stop as soon as she was standing up. She put her feet on the floor and said “I’m up.”
“Nope,” I said as I administered another sprinkle. “You have to be standing.” She stood up and I stopped immediately, then went to her sister’s room and repeated the process.
On the first day it took about two minutes each for them to get out of bed, which was quite an improvement over fifteen minutes of yelling and threats. The second day it took about a minute.
Five days into the experiment I started walking up the stairs with my glass of water, singing “Water of Love.” They were at the top of the stairs before I was, both saying “daaaaaaaaaad!”
From then on all I had to do was sing that song, often from the bottom of the stairs, and they’d be out of bed in seconds.
When I shared this with some other parents they said they tried it and it didn’t work. It turned out they were just dumping an entire glass of water on their kid. That left them out of ammo, and the kid knew it. The result was a drenched kid who was still curled up under the covers.
The sprinkling method works much better, is more fun to do, and you end up with a kid who is merely damp.
For instance, if someone is trying to write or perform a blues song, they have stay within some rather strict constraints. Working within them is like dancing in a room – you have to change direction before you hit the wall, but have a great deal of freedom within the room’s constraints. Stray outside the boundaries of what defines the blues and suddenly you’re not playing the blues any more. You’re playing something else, maybe something good, but it ain’t the blues.*
Listen to Dave Brubeck’s “Time Out” – the whole album, not just “Take Five.” Brubeck was experimenting with uncommon time signatures. The musicians working within those constraints created something amazing. Without those constraints they probably would have created Just Another Jazz Album, something that was good, but not a masterpiece.
Unconstrained writing is, unfortunately, frequently presented on forums and social media sites. Entire long messages are written in texting style: “OMG, Im goin 2go2 my bros 2c my rents 4 xmas. LOL.” If you have the audacity to comment on their “style” they’ll usually respond with something like: “B cool bro, ts is the wa I rite. UR 2 old to 2B tellin me how 2 rite. Go eat sum dog food or sumptin LOL” Their insistence on avoiding constraints annoys most readers and gives them the impression the writer is not too bright. That impression is correct 96.4% of the time.
Before I started the Quick Hitts Podcast in 2005 I listened to a lot of other podcasts, taking careful note of things I didn’t like. I thought most shows were too long. The content was good, the production and presentation was fine, but the author/performer spent on way too much time talking about their subject. Knowing I was likely to make the same mistake I imposed my own constraint: every Quick Hitts would be ten minutes or less. I can easily ramble on forever about any subject that interests me. The time limit forces me to boil down my thoughts into a demi-glace. I often break this rule, sometimes going as long as fifteen minutes, but attempting to stay within that constraint is what keeps the show pithy.
(To the folks who have been asking when the next episode will come out: No, I haven’t podfaded, not entirely. I have a few ideas in the queue and will get to them sooner or later. Probably later.)
If you feel that your writing or your music isn’t as good as it could be because you’re bound by convention and restraints, try turning that thought around. What can you do to impose more restraints or tighter restraints? Give it a try, and you may find that well of creativity you’ve been searching for.
I built my first website in the mid 90’s. It was a single page containing a list of local dial-up BBSs, with mine, Electric Avenue, at the top of the list. (Ponder the awesomeness of that business model – advertising a dial-up BBS on a web page. Ugh.) Before building it I sought out the worst sites on the internet. I needed to learn what to avoid, and realized that the first rule of designing a web site was “don’t annoy people.” Yesterday, for the first time ever, I intentionally broke that rule.
If you visited then, you found every click on every link brought you to the same page, the Stop Sopa page. You simply couldn’t go anywhere else on the site. It was designed to frustrate you, annoy you and piss you off.
I did it knowing most of you would be smartenized enough to direct your anger where it belonged – not at me, but at the legislators who are trying to break the internet. And with the thousands of other sites participating, it’s likely you’d be annoyed more than once that day.
The BBS I was advertising on my first website consisted of 21 modems blinking in my office. They were connected to a couple of computers that provided chat rooms, message boards, games and CDs full of files to download. The internet was available when I built it and I knew more and more people would be getting on it, but I wasn’t worried. It was useful, but complicated and clumsy. I figured people would use it for research while relying on local BBSs for socializing and keeping in touch with friends.
I built it, they came. At its peak 200 people were paying six to ten dollars a month to play and hang out. It was the catalyst for a couple of marriages and a couple of divorces. There were meets – parties – every weekend. Lots of people were getting laid. Profitability was in sight.
Then Netscape happened. Browsers went from a curiosity to the preferred way to use the internet in just a few months. The ASCII graphic interface of Electric Avenue was no match for spinning flaming logos and links that would zip you from place to place with one click. Just as the BBS was about to become profitable people started leaving. Pretty soon I could no longer afford the phone bills and I had to shut it down. The internet killed my business.
As I was disconnecting CD drives and putting modems and digiboards on e-bay it never even occurred to me that the best response would be to break the internet. Â But that’s exactly what the RIAA and the MPAA intend to do. They are going to protect their ones and zeros and their tired old broken business models by breaking the internet. Â Their income is more important then our ability to share and create.
Congress weasels, who have received tens of millions of dollars from the entertainment industry, are eager to pass SOPA and PIPA, even though the language of the bills proves they don’t understand how the internet works. Intense pressure from people who do has resulted in them pulling back a bit, just a bit, on SOPA, but that’s all theatrics designed to fool the unsmartenized. These bills are still alive and still a very real threat.
One of my congress weasels, Kirsten Gillibrand, is a co-sponsor of PIPA. Despite receiving thousands of calls and e-mails, she’s still committed to the bill. She claims she wants to “fix” it, while every thinking person who isn’t owned by the entertainment industry wants to see it killed, completely. Nearly 400 comments on her Facebook page are unanimous, but that’s unimportant to her. It doesn’t compare to the nearly two million dollars she’s received from the entertainment industry.
I’m sure a few links on this site point to content that would, under the ambiguous wording of these laws, make me a copyright infringer. A simple complaint could get this place shut down before I had time to respond, and fighting it would require more resources than I have. Twelve years worth of articles and recordings would disappear in a heartbeat. Thousands of hours of work creating that content would be flushed down the drain. The Facts would vanish from the internet. The Quick Hitts Podcast would be gone. The old Hittman Chronicle would disappear. This blog would be history.
It could happen to any one of your favorite internet sites. I will happen to a lot of them, perhaps most of them, unless you add your voice to the clamor and make so much noise your congress weasels won’t be able to ignore it.
Are you doing anything important right now, as you’re reading this? Didn’t think so. Take a half hour, right now, and do something about this. Find your weasels e-mail and phone numbers, and use them. Then, tomorrow, do it again. Make it a goal to do it at least three times a week until these bills are dead.
And then, stay alert. If we manage to get these bills killed, new ones will be created in the next session of congress. And if those fail, in the congress after that. This is not a single battle. This is a skirmish in a war between well-funded special interests and all of the rest of us.
After being more or less ignored by the masses during his last two presidential bids, Ron Paul is now getting some real traction, which scares a lot of people. He scares lefties, who love Big Huge Government. He scares the right-wingers who, despite their claims to the contrary, also love Big Huge Government. He scares the military-industrial complex because he’d put an end to their extremely profitable war mongering. He scares the mass media, who love the status quo, especially the governmental barriers to entry that protect them from competition. Everyone who benefits from being in bed with the government finds him a very scary guy.
Although he has a long track record of speaking his mind, leaving no doubt where he stands on every issue, the smear merchants are working overtime to discredit him. They take things out of context, exaggerate his positions, and often resort to outright lies. Their desperation is almost entertaining.
The Ugly
The ugliest claims against him are without merit.
The Newsletters – The left has pulled out the race card, because they always pull out the race card. In this case they’ve dug up a few nasty statements made in newsletters from twenty five years ago and insist that makes him a horrible racist. Even some right wingers have joined in on this normally lefty trick.
He didn’t write those things, and has disavowed them, but facts never stop the desperate. They ignore the fact that in the thousands of interviews since then he’s never made a racist statement. They ignore the fact that one of the reasons he’s changed his mind on the death penalty is that it disproportionately affects blacks. They ignore the numerous times he’s pointed out the horrible effect of the War on Some Drugs on the black community. Forget his long track record on race issues – it’s those old newsletters that matter, you see.
Pointing out such facts to a Paul hater is like presenting biology facts to a creationist. Facts don’t matter. The haters will just continue to spew their nonsense, at which point it’s best to just say “have a good day” and move on.
Nasty People Like Him – This isn’t unique to Paul; it’s a standard operating procedure used by nearly every candidate against their opponents.
Everyone in the public eye attracts the approval of people they’d rather have nothing to do with. Paul is no exception. Just like every other candidate (in every national election) he has been endorsed by a few dirt bag individuals and scummy organizations. On occasions he’s even been photographed standing next to dirt bags without punching them in the face. The RP haters gleefully present such photos and endorsements to condemn Dr. Paul with the old “guilt by association” trick.
It’s is a tired, old and lame tactic that won’t fool anyone with more than a dozen functioning brain cells.
The Bad
Evolution – He doesn’t believe in it. This is disappointing, but hardly unique in American politics.
Abortion – I disagree with him on this issue more than any other. He wants to return the abortion decision to the states. This would mean women in the toothless states would have fewer rights than those elsewhere.
I did some volunteer work for his last presidential campaign, and discovered, much to my dismay, that about a quarter of the people our local group were there solely for the abortion issue. They were ecstatic about the prospect of having 50 new battlegrounds, 50 new opportunities for their endless war on a woman’s right to choose. I found this sub-group annoying and a bit creepy.
Separation of Church and State – Ron buys into “The US was Founded as a Christan Nation” myth. He hasn’t gone as far as some of the hard core fundies who have vowed to make tearing down the wall of separation a top priority, but it’s still something worth being concerned about.
The Good
Education – Ron wants to shut down the federal Department of Education and return decisions about education to the states, where they belong.
The Department of Ed has a current budget of about 70 billion dollars. It’s accomplishments include shutting down hundreds of college athletic programs under Title IX, the No Child Left Behind program (ask any teacher about that one) and now the Race To The Top. Their goal is to homogenize education so it’s exactly the same everywhere, impeding innovation and experimentation. Under the DoE guidance, performance by American students has remained embarrassingly abysmal.
Eliminating this department would not only save us tens of billions of dollars each year, but would instantly create 50 different real life experimental platforms for primary education. Some states would stay with the status quo. Some would experiment a little, others would experiment a lot. Â We’d see, first hand and in real time, what worked and what didn’t. Primary education would have to get better without the Department of Ed, because it can’t get much worse.
War and Foreign Policy – Obama, like most presidents before him, promised peace. Instead, he got us into yet another war. It was a piddling little half-a-war, but a war, none the less. Although we’re withdrawing from Iraq on Bush’s schedule, there appears to be no end to our involvement in Afghanistan, and now we’re rattling sabers at Iraq.
Dr. Paul believes the job of the military to protect America’s borders, and little else. They’re not there to get involved in every petty little squabble, or even major altercations between other nations. He wants to bring the troops back home from every where, and leave other nations to fend for themselves.
This has been mis-characterized as isolationism, but it’s not – he also wants free and open trade with virtually everyone.
Our endless intervention in other nations affairs benefits no one except for the government itself and the huge war industry. We spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice the lives and limbs of some of our best people, resulting in the world hating us.
Dr. Paul believes we should should only participate in wars declared by congress, as the constitution mandates. We haven’t declared war since WWII, ignoring the Constitution and getting involved in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and dozens of other smaller skirmishes and battles. Every one has cost us money, lives, and in most cases, the goodwill and friendship of other nations, including those we were allegedly helping.
He’d close most foreign military bases and bring the military back home, where they belong, to defend our borders. This would reduce our military costs to a fraction of what we spend now.
He’d eliminate all foreign aid, which he describes as taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries.
The War on Some Drugs – When alcohol prohibition ended the government immediately started The War on Some Drugs so the enforcement officers could keep their jobs. The result has been a disaster on every level. We now have a higher percentage of our population in prison than any other country; most are there for non-violent drug “crimes.” We’ve militarized our police force. Early morning raids on peaceful people’s homes are now common. These raids often result in the death of citizens, and occasionally the police. The phenomenal profits of the black market make police corruption inevitable, and asset forfeiture laws provide an incentive for cops go after anyone for even the most trivial drug offense. Street gangs finance their violence from drug sales. The forth amendment has been gutted. Mexico and Central America are war zones. The War on Some Drugs has ruined and ended far more lives than drugs ever did.
Ron wants to end this war entirely, to get rid of the federal government’s involvement at every level. States will be left to make their own decisions on the matter. While differing laws in different states will result in some chaos, it will be a vast improvement over the mess we have now.
The Economy – Dr. Paul wants to end the Federal Reserve, a system that was not authorized in the constitution, and return the responsibility for the money supply to the federal government, where it belongs. He’d like to bring us back to the gold standard (which is probably impossible at this point) so there will be something of value behind every dollar. Most importantly, he wants to get the government out of the way of businesses, so entrepreneurs can actually do things without bureaucrats interfering with every decision and bogging down every project.
He’s predicted several economic booms and busts, including this most recent one, which was initiated by the government’s instance that everyone with a pulse should be able to buy a house, regardless of their ability to pay for it. He rejects the Keynesian economics that have created and exacerbated our current mess and embraces Austrian economics, which embraces individual freedom over government intervention. Â He’s no mere dabbler in this subject – he’s written several books on it.
Corporatism – One of the biggest problems in the US is the fact that our government is controlled, almost completely, by corporations. Here’s Ron’s take on that:
Gay Marriage – Like most people in his age group, he’s not comfortable with homosexuality. But he wants to get the federal government out of the marriage business completely, solving the problem by ignoring it at the federal level.
Out of 27 house republicans Ron Paul was the only one who voted against The Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. He voted to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Activist Dan Savage sums up Paul’s position well: “Ron may not like gay people, and may not want to hang out with us or use our toilets, but he’s content to leave us the fuck alone and recognizes that gay citizens are entitled to the same rights as all other citizens.”
Civil Rights – Obama just signed a bill that allows American citizens to be detained forever without trial or access to a lawyer or any other civil rights. All it takes is for one cop or bureaucrat to say “he’s a terror suspect” and he’s gone, vanished, disappeared.
That’s pretty much all you need to know about Obama and civil rights.
Dr. Paul was among the few people who voted against this.
The feds have been chipping away at civil rights for as long as I can remember. Much of it was done to make The War on Some Drugs easier. Now the emphasis has changed to The War On Terror, an even better excuse for removing the few civil rights we have left.
 —
If you’re not familiar with Dr. Paul I urge you to do your own research. Put fresh batteries in your bullshit meter and turn the sensitivity knob to MAX, then go searching. Paul scares a lot of people, and those people, who either directly benefit from Big Huge Government or simply love it for some unfathomable reason, will spew an enormous amount of misinformation, disinformation, half truths and outright lies at you. You’ve got to be smartenized enough to dig down through all that crap before you can find the pony.
Be alert to sins of omission as well. The MSM not only lies about Paul, but often simply leaves him out of the picture. You can see this in action right now. Romney and Santorum tied in the IOWA caucus, with Ron just two points behind them, but anyone who gets all their news from the MSM wouldn’t even know he was in the race – they’re simply ignoring him.
He’s not the perfect candidate. He’s not even the best candidate. (But Gary Johnson has no chance now.) But he is the best candidate with any a chance of winning.
If you like our moribund economy, our endless wars on nations abroad and citizens at home, federal rules and regulations making every decision for you, the rapidly growing and increasingly violent police state, the relentless attack on the few freedoms we have left, the government being run entirely by corporations, severe censorship of the Internet (coming soon), and all the other things that come with Big Huge Government, vote for Obama/Romney/whoever else. They’re all the same and are as interchangeable as lego bricks. If you’d like to see some real change, not just a slogan on a poster but real change, work to get Ron in place.
The United States is rapidly approaching the point of no return. Once we become a bankrupt and completely totalitarian state it will be nearly impossible to retrieve our freedom and our wealth. Consider applying the brakes before we slide off that cliff. Consider supporting Ron Paul.
