June 2008

While we’re still caught up in a presidential primary, soldiers are still not getting the support they deserve. Please click on the link below and help sign the petition for the GI Bill 2008.

http://www.gibill2008.org

I must tell you that I’ve always thought that the US approach towards drugs is almost childish. From the beginning of the “just say no” campaign put to life by former president Ronald Reagon’s wife Nancy Reagon I’ve always mocked anti drug programs. As you can see here she admits herself that “just saying no” to drugs seems like a rather simple message. Not only is it a simple message, it’s a naive message. Only in America could you have campaigns such as “DARE to keep kids off drugs”. It’s such a ludicrous message on a society as over medicated as ours. I’ll give you an example of how utterly stupid our system is. If I go down to dark parts of the city and acquire some crystal meth and get caught, I’m pretty sure I’m in rather deep trouble, depending on my skin color of course. However if I go to my Doctor and simply ask for some prescription speed, I’m OK. Now I’m sure you can’t get anything comparable to crystal meth from the Doctor, but the point is that both items are drugs.

Let’s take another example, pain killers. We all know that hypocritical idiots such as Rush Limbaugh have shown us, that there is a market for prescription drugs. The drugs he was discovered to have been taking, were heroin. You can all it Oxy-whatever, but the bottom line is that those type of pills are derivatives of heroin and nothing else. Is Rush Limbaugh still on the air? Of course he is. The funny part of course is that he said on the air that drug addicts were supposed to be “sent down the river” as far as he was concerned.

We have spent billions on the war on drugs and the bottom line is that it has failed, it’s a farce and it costs us man power that could easily be used for other more sensible things. Projects that would actually be of some type of value to society. I’m not saying drug trafficking and other things shouldn’t be controlled in some type of fashion, however there are much more effective ways of combating the problem. If the government was really interested in winning the drug war, they would stem it at its source. How do you squelch the problem of a black market? Get into the market yourself! Instead of fighting the problem, we could just try to get in on the business. Quite frankly I’m hoping that some businessman will come along one day and realize that our current policies are simply hampering economic development.

If the government controlled all sales of controlled substances, there wouldn’t be a need for fighting the war on drugs, because we would simply have all the drugs. Sure there would be a certain extent of drugs will being made on the black market but “consumers” but soon prefer the “clean” drugs, over the stuff on the streets - just like people by Johnny Walker from the liquor store, and not from some backstreet dealer.

As a resident of Florida this issue is of course very important to me. I’ve been doing my own research about the fact that the state of Florida is looking at a serious disaster type scenario, if proper actions aren’t taken very soon and I came across this article that shows clearly what the problems are we’re facing and what the history of events has been that has lead up to this.

It’s all the more alarming and yet not a great surprise to me that Republican presidential nominee John McCain shows that he cares very little about the environment.

If you listen to the details of the report, the part McCain has a problem with is out of control spending and the reason he supposedly opposed the passing of the bill was because too many ear marks were attached to it. The only problem with the reasoning there is the fact that the part of the bill that includes the actual spending had nothing to do with the initial passage.

This, among others is another reason why another Republican president will undoubtedly cause more havoc for the environment, an issue many Republicans seem to care about so very little.

I must admit I’m very surprised of the move Barack made yesterday. He announced that the Democratic National Committee was no longer accepting lobbyists money.

I personally think that’s one of the biggest pieces of news I’ve heard in a long time considering that Washington is run by lobbyists. It will be interesting to see how far he can go with the change he wants to implement. One must not forget that Lobbies aren’t a Republican or Democratic thing - they’re a Washington thing and and everyone in D.C. is getting money from someone as can be seen here.

The fact that Obama was successful in running a campaign that was largely funded by very small donations does give some hope though. I’ve always said that it doesn’t really matter who gets elected, due to the heavily financed campaign process and of course ultimately the influence of Lobbyists in Washington. Obama was able to get as far as he got without big corporate donations and I think it sets a good signal for going forward.

Historically I think it’s very interesting to note though, that the Kennedy’s were assassinated for their drastic goals. In Robert F. Kennedy’s final commentary before being killed, he spoke of under privileged Blacks and Mexicans and considering that was 40 years ago, it can definitely be called visionary. Yesterday Obama announced his stance on Lobbies and let’s not forget how this country works. A great book to read in regards to what crooks run this country is “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”. It’s a book written by a former member of the economic elite of this country and he describes in detail how many of the things we do as a country, are solely driven by economic interests. The War In Iraq, which technically is an Occupation and not a war was sold to us as “bringing Democracy to Iraq” though Iraq never asked for Democracy. The Marines that entered the country really only had one mission - secure the Oil fields. It’s the large corporations and ultimately the military industrial complex who are going to be very upset what Obama said. I just hope this country doesn’t get its opportunity to change ripped away from it, again.

I mean you do have to give these crooks some credit for the way they have run their propaganda machine.Latest reports on how far the Military is embedded in the media as so called Military Analysts reveal that over 4,500 appearances were made on various topics. It’s important to realize what they accomplished by doing this. In the 24 hour news cycle we’re used to, it’s very common that news shows will call on experts to chime in on whatever topic it is they’re talking to death since the anchors themselves are barely qualified to open their mouths as it is. Where the basic concept of this makes sense, we can’t overlook what’s really going on.

As we all know what we see on TV influences us. I personally watch about 10 minutes of TV at home per day, which is just about enough to give me background noise while I’m eating. I have no scientific proof of this but I’m pretty sure I’m not really influenced by TV, it least not very much. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the case for the general population. I remember when the first reports came out before we occupied Iraq and my Mom, who I consider a very intelligent individual was telling me how Saddam Hussein was a threat to this country. I was rather outraged by this statement, not because she said it but more because I knew where it stemmed from. They had been talking about it on some morning show and they probably had on some military analysts that helped push the message, giving many unsuspecting citizens the idea that we were actually in danger of being attacked by a Dictator who really couldn’t have attacked us if he wanted to. To support this argument, you can watch the video below, where Rice and Powell tell us that Saddam is no threat at all to this country.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1X-I-38lrU[/youtube]

Unfortunately it seems that the common memory of events is closely tied to what they see on TV so once the tone changed in the media, the population went along with it. What came next was a rather genius implementation of what I can only call Goebbel style propaganda for the new millennium. For those of you that don’t know, Goebbels was in charge of state run propaganda. Needless to say there was no Youtube during WWII so the only source of moving pictures, were those available in the theaters. The Fascist government that reigned from 1933-1945 had the keen ability to able to lull the country into a state that was only losely tied to reality. Hitler and Goebbels both kept holding speeches, which consistently instilled fear into the citizien of Germany and even when almost all German men had either been killed, wounded or taken prisoners, the German government still pushed for people to join the army.

One of the reasons the fascist regime was so successful is because it knew how to play to the fears of the people and what I’m finding today is that the Bush government with all its crooks and liars is following the Nazi play book on how to deceive a nation. “Keep repeating it and people will believe it” is a very common phrase and I’m pretty sure these type of tactics stem from Nazi greats such as Goebbels. Karl Rove and others in the administration are basically doing the same thing the Nazis were. They’re changing the type of media you see and where they might not control everything you see, they surely are able to inject themselves into anything they want to influence. Embedded journalists are a good example of this. We thought they were giving is the close up view of what was going in Iraq but of course we know by now that these journalists were not close up at all, they were dependent on what the commanding officer told them they could do. The footage I saw from the Vietnam War was surely a lot different and I believe that Rove and others learned from history. They learned not to show the actual War to the people, because at the end of the day, everyone hates war and if we were shown how gruesome it really is, very few would still be in support of it.

I hope that we can break the current media conglomerate. Everyone now and then I take a minute and look up the bio for which ever news anchor I’m watching and today I looked up Andrea Mitchell - who I knew little about. She’s married to Alan Greenspan - yes that guy. I find that a rather great conflict of interest, but in this country, so many things are out of the norm that this doesn’t even surprise me anymore either.

Another great compilation from BraveNewFilms:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gqaw5UnHA4[/youtube]

Ok so here we are. Obama looks like he’s going to be the Democratic Presidential nominee and quite frankly I’m rather surprised. Months ago friends of mine in Europe asked me what was going on in the Presidential primaries and they mentioned Hillary and Barack at the time and pessimistically I said that I don’t think either one of them stood much of a chance against the Republican slime machine. As the months have gone by, it seems that what’s really happened at least to a certain extent is the fact that Republican Party is finally coming to complete ruin.

Rather than going on with such negativity as I have in the past I want to look forward and that’s where everything back fires again. If you look forward there are a lot of things on the horizon that each on their own, would qualify as a major disaster. Nobody’s mentioning the fact that if the truckers strike, our system might break down. Everything you touch during the day was most likely delivered to where you live by truck. I’m not sure whether you’ve noticed, but Diesel fuel is even more expensive than regular gas and that’s what trucks use to power their semi trailers. The other big issues is drinking water - yes drinking water. Nobody’s going to care how expensive gas is once usable fresh water becomes a rarity. When researching this topic I cam across this website which seems to deliver a lot of solid information. I haven’t verified the information nor do I really feel that I need to, because I’ve talked with various people myself that have supported this theory. As a matter of fact one of the people I talked with was an engineer who worked for the state and was responsible for water analysis in the state of Florida and he told me a while ago that the amount of fresh water in Florida is coming to an abrupt end. What’s worse, this information is readily available to the public but as with so many issues, politicians chose to focus on topics that get them elected, and not topics that could actually help the state.

The reason I went into detail as to the Water situation is because I live in Florida. I knew it wasn’t the smartest idea to move down here from NY state, but the area I lived in up there had just about zero opportunities for people like me. The water situation in Florida is one of very many issues that are going to face who ever wins the Presidential election.

We’re engaged in a War that has caused us over 4,000 dead and the country we supposedly “liberated” has seen hundreds of thousands of people die, and it’s not over. Our economy is so screwed up that it won’t be long that we will be seeing major changes in people’s lives. We don’t have any alternatives to driving cars, as public transportation has never been regarded a necessity. Soon we will realize that what the Bush administration has set us up for, is sheer disaster.

I can only hope that we get a Democratic President but even if we do, considering the pile of crap they’re going to inherit I don’t see how they will be successful, no matter how much change they want to implement. The change we need has to be so drastic in order to have an effect, that I doubt very highly that any President will be able to accomplish that, unless he and everyone else in his cabinet truly realize what trouble we’re in.

Wow. It’s been nearly a week since this happened - I’ve been trying to communicate it here, however due technical problems this wasn’t possible. As it turns out the machine that hosts this sites sits in a data center in Texas that was affected by a sever outage over the last weekend. Essentially over 9,000 servers went offline.

Were were fortunate enough to have the site back within two days, however it seems that they were experiencing DNS problems until today. I had spent a good part of the last night trying to get this blog fixed, until I realized it had nothing to do with the database, or any of the backups I had made - instead it had to do with the fact that the server wasn’t able to resolve domains, which in turn caused the blog to become so slow you could barely use it.

So, where I thought this site was fubar I’m happy to say that I’ve escaped near disaster and I think I’m back to normal here.

Thank you for your continued interest.

Arno Ramke