JustThinking.us

Sandy R. sent us this 2006 editorial by Grant Lilly, originally published by AmericanDiplomacy.org.

It's a little longer than middling, but provides a fairly concise recent history of American views on political assassination.

Click anywhere on the excerpt to link up to the piece.

For thirty years, a presidential directive has barred American military leaders and intelligence officials from targeting particular individuals for elimination. The executive order that banned the practice of assassination, “targeted killing,” may have tamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), dubbed a "rouge elephant" by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), but it also impeded the agency's and the military's ability to protect the United States.

Executive Order 11905, issued in 1976 by President Gerald Ford, reads: "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." This mandate grew out of the 1975 session of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, tasked by the Senate to review records of CIA involvement in assassination attempts on Fidel Castro of Cuba, Salvador Allende of Chile, and others. This body, also known as the Church Committee, after its chairman, described assassination as “unacceptable in our society” and called for an end to the practice.

We got muppets today Ladies and Gentlemens, Boys and Girls.

If you gotta ask, you probably don't care anyway.

You can visit Bryan at his fine site MGoBlog for all the details.

The muppets were his find, not ours.

We'll rejoice anyway, while giving him all the the credit.

Temptation

And because you can't have one without the other.

The Hawaiian War Chant

And ......... just to makes things perfectly perfect.

Slippery Rock 30 - Cheyney 0

The Global Competitiveness Report has been released for 2010-11.

Real good stuff.  Maybe a little tough.

The rankings with regards to property rights are a real eye opener.

Click the map below to get to the report site, there are 5 or 6 tabs each of which offer lots of interactive views.

Business Insider Clusterstock also has a "Chart of the Day" which like the other "Chart of the Day that we post here from time to time also could be more accurately called 'The Chart of Whenever We See Fit To Send It To You".

Still, the charts I've received have been mostly worthwhile.

The chart below links up to a short little piece that tells you that growth in the price of stocks has little to do with growth within the economy.

Presently your Uncle Roany is more likely to subscribe to the Richard Russell school of thought.

"The major movements of the stock market are meaningful.

The stock market is made up of the hopes, worries, research and aspirations of millions of people in every sector of life.

As such, the stock market possesses a strange, almost eerie, ability to discount the future.

To put it another way, everybody knows more than any one person or any group of people."

 Notwithstanding the possibility of a change of mind if the damn thing doesn't start lining up a little more in accordance with my world view.

"Once you take the mental leap to recognize markets are self-regulating and the economy itself would not erupt into chaos absent government regulation, it’s easy to see other huge problems with today’s regulatory system that are so often overlooked.

Glossing over the fact that the system is clearly unconstitutional, two biggies are that heavy regulation favors big business at the expense of small business and the moral hazard created by the blind trust people put in regulations and regulators.

On these matters I’d like to quote Dr. Ron Paul:

"'It is important to understand that regulators are not omniscient.

 It is not feasible for them to anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong with whatever industry or activity they are regulating.

They are making their best guesses when formulating rules.

It is often difficult for those being regulated to understand the many complex rules they are expected to follow.

Very wealthy corporations hire attorneys who may discover a myriad of loopholes to exploit and render the spirit of the regulations null and void.

For this reason, heavy regulation favors big business against those small businesses who cannot afford high-priced attorneys.'"

"'The other problem is the trust that people blindly put in regulations, and the moral hazard this creates.

Too many people trust government regulators so completely that they abdicate their own common sense to these government bureaucrats.

They trust that if something violates no law, it must be safe.

How many scams have 'It’s perfectly legal' as a hypnotic selling point, luring in the gullible?

Many people did not understand the financial house of cards that are derivatives, but since they were legal and promised a great return, people invested.

It is much the same in any area rife with government involvement.

Many feel that just because their children are getting good grades at a government school, they are getting a good education.

After all, they are passing the government-mandated litmus test.

But, this does not guarantee educational excellence.

Neither is it always the case that a child who does NOT achieve good marks in school is going to be unsuccessful in life.

Is your drinking water safe, just because the government says it is?

Is the internet going to magically become safer for your children if the government approves regulations on it?

I would caution any parent against believing this would be the case.

Nothing should take the place of your own common sense and due diligence.'"

Chris Wood, Casey's Daily Dispatch, 08-26-10

Bureaucrats by their very nature are not risk takers nor creative in an entrepreneurial way.

This means they are attempting to regulate something and someone they do not understand, plus are at core alien to in a basic psychological way.

Plus, bureaucrats tend to crisis manage, not anticipate, sell out to special interests, and overreact, in addition to being security oriented, self-protective and building their self- and financial- worth in a parasitic bureaucratic empire.

I am increasingly viewing centralized civil government bureaucracy the same way I view a virus in a computer.

The older the bureaucracy, the more layers in the bureaucracy, the more people in the bureaucracy, the richer the bureaucracy, the more widespread the bureaucracy is geographically, the great the likelihood the bureaucracy is a virulent virus that encourages immaturity and irresponsibility among the general population.

Renown author M. Scott Peck referred to bureaucrats as "people of the lie".

Bureaucrats have no moral conscience or accountability when in the bureaucracy, like the order-obeying Nazi soldiers in Hitler's death camps, like the bureaucrats that operate the MQ-9 Reapers out of the safe and sterile environment of the Pentagon, killing 10 civilians for every suspected "terrorist", and then driving blissfully home to coach their little girl's 10-year old US softball team.

"Bureaucracy is the greatest collective manifestation of human evil."

R.E. MacMaster 9/9/2010

The following is a letter from Paul R. Wisgerhof to the Wall Street Journal dated 9/7/2010.

If burning the Qu'ran is bad in the United States, how does that square with the banning of the Christian and Jewish Bibles in Saudi Arabia and much of the rest of the Islamic world?

At least we have copies of the Qu'ran to burn; hard to find bibles to burn in most of Islam.

However, that is the fate prescribed for them by Islamic law.

We rightly tolerate the practice of religion in this country.

That includes the pastor in Florida.

What we should not tolerate is an attempt to subvert and overthrow the U.S. Constitution and our government by a "religion" which preaches world totalitarianism.

The Cardinal Cross pattern of 2010 is finally breaking up.

We're beginning our attempt to evaluate what, if any were it's effects.

Dougy F. equates the whole thing to "palm reading".

Uncle Roany keeps wondering what they think in Pakistan.

In the interest of full disclosure, we rigged this chart just a little for effect.

Chicago remains the site for which the chart was cast, we moved the time from noon to 6 am in order to view for the last time the grand cross.

The Moon moves fast relative to the rest of the chart, and as such it's relationships within patterns are fleeting by comparison.

I skulk through Jesse's Cafe' Americain once or twice a week.

Sometimes his analysis is a little deeper than I am tall.

But I keep coming back probably, mostly because I almost always agree with him when I can figure out just what the hell he's talking about.

Among the most time honored chart patterns identified by technical analysts of stock and commodity pricing is the "cup and handle" pattern.

This Gold daily chart offers about as good an example of the "cup and handle" pattern as any you are likely to see.

From The Economist, A History of World GDP.

Click anywhere on the chart to call up the site, if you have the time go through the comments, you'll find some thoughtful stuff.

Thanks to Gary V. for sending this in.