BradSpangler.com

As if the public education cum indoctrination system and the whorish mainstream media weren’t enough to foster adequate government indoctrination and control, the last several years have seen growth of the encouragement of widespread over-prescription of psychiatric medications — with the net effect of keeping the populace more docile and easy to control.

Laugh at them. Make fun of the absurdity of the system. Otherwise, you may need to take Panexa.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION
PLEASE READ THIS SUMMARY CAREFULLY, THEN ASK YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT PANEXA AND HOW TO PROVIDE YOU WITH LARGE QUANTITIES. THIS ADVERTISEMENT DOES NOT TAKE THE PLACE OF ADVICE FROM YOUR DOCTOR; RATHER, IT PROVIDES YOU WITH NEW INFORMATION ABOUT NEW DRUGS YOU COULD BE USING.

PANEXA is a prescription drug that should only be taken by patients experiencing one of the following disorders: metabolism, binocular vision, digestion (solid and liquid), circulation, menstruation, cognition, osculation, extremes of emotion. For patients with coronary heart condition (CHC) or two separate feet (2SF), the dosage of PANEXA should be doubled to ensure that twice the number of pills are being consumed. PANEXA can also be utilized to decrease the risk of death caused by not taking PANEXA, being beaten to death by oscelots, or death relating from complications arising from seeing too much of the color lavender. Epileptic patients should take care to ensure tight, careful grips on containers of PANEXA, in order to secure their contents in the event of a seizure, caused by PANEXA or otherwise.

Tags: Cultural Notes, Humor, Politics by Brad Spangler
1 Comment »

My old friend Reactionary Bob writes in response to news of the French riots:

Having a generous immigration policy gets a country this sort of problem. The immigrants don’t appreciate being taken in….they only become disgruntled and become a problem.

Bob and others — if people are disgruntled, chances are they have reasons to be disgruntled and the immigration policy isn’t as generous as you imagine.

The illegals aren’t legally allowed to work. There’s no way to survive in that case except welfare and crime. The only people who really have a stake in the welfare system are the bureaucrats who administer it. For everyone else, it’s a trap that might as well have been designed to keep people down.

Also, Euro-socialism makes jobs scarcer than they naturally would be on a free market — so little real chance exists even for the people who are there legally and not sans papier. French policies might as well have been planned to create a welfare dependent and/or violent criminal underclass.

Many or most French cops, like here in the US, are ex-military. You may remember that this modern wave of immigration started right after France wound down their colonial presence in North Africa. The Algerian independence struggle, in particular, was one of the nastiest. French
soldiers quickly learned to not trust anybody with tan or brown skin in that war. So, you’ve now got people you’ve given little choice but to live outside the law — and you’re enforcing the law with PTSD-shocked vets who now often have a grudge against everybody with tan or brown skin. That’s what set the tone for the decades leading up to this. It’s hard to imagine a set of circumstances better calculated to result in routine police brutality.

Is all that an excuse to destroy property and hurt innocent people? Of course not. Still, if you beat a dog enough, he’ll eventually start biting everybody that comes in reach — not just you. Are men dogs? No, but the larger point remains generally true.

People respond to incentives. I do not think that government should provide positive incentives — the way statist liberals do. The implementation of such attempts is inevitably twisted to benefit the elite at the expense of the common man. I’m just pointing out that the French government has been providing some powerful negative incentives to those folks for a long time.

If the French government wants people to behave, they may want to stop screwing them over.

On the other hand, it may be to late for that. How reasonable would you be if your mother and sister had their ladies Sunday school class at church tear-gassed and then, as they ran out choking and gagging, got roughed up and called “whore” and “bitch” by the cops?

You think you might be a little disgruntled in that case? I do.

The French government has been waging a war against the poor for a long time. A backlash was inevitable. My only regret is that the rioters don’t pick their targets better. The French government has been the source of their woes. I would not be able to criticise them if they were only attacking government targets.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
1 Comment »

With the continuing nonsensical claims by reactionary forces that the Paris riots are supposedly caused by “Muslim extremism” and immigration, I feel compelled to keep pointing out that, actually, the Paris riots have been caused by statism. As I said before:

The modern nation state requires, and typically creates, a violent urban underclass. The growth of that underclass is a result of state socialist / state capitalist / fascist public policy. The existence of that underclass provides a low-grade internal threat to the middle-class that serves to bolster the mythology the State promulgates to apologize for its own existence.

Some of the reactions to that around the net have included the predictable reactionary myths — claims like:

• I’m supposedly making excuses for black Africans who fail to successfully compete with white Europeans. That misses the point entirely, because the essense of my critique is that market-distorting governmental obstacles to competition serve to keep the oppressed down artificially. I mean, “Hello?” They’re not allowed to legally work in the case of many immigrants. You think that might be some kind of monkeywrench in the process of building a productive, middle-class life? I do.
• Some claim the riots are over lower-class greed — that welfare payments are not seen as big enough and that this is an unethical lust for unearned wealth. That claim, though, perhaps willfully misses the point. The grains of truth in conservative critiques of the welfare state, which are in turn mere pale echoes of the more rigorous libertarian critiques of it, ought to be informing those who say this sort of thing. After all, they are somewhat likely to consider themselves “conservatives”. So, let’s review. The social democratic welfare state is bad for the poor precisely because the welfare system is a trap. So, then, why not remove the things that hold people back, instead of whining about how ungrateful they are when they denounce what meager rations your kind has allotted them in lieu of allowing them to produce for themselves? The answer I say, and which you won’t admit, is this — the welfare system is a cornerstone of the power of the elite. It will not be removed by reform. It will have to be circumvented by revolution.
• Some say that pointing to poverty and injustice is mere making of excuses for thugs. That’s not true at all. Widespread poverty and injustice are actively manufactured by the State. It’s not excusing thuggery to point out that reactionary policies create perverse incentives to become a thug.

Some final words of wisdom:

“There is nothing — nothing — that illegal immigrants can do to a county like America that is one percent as bad as what legislation persecuting illegal immigrants can do to it.” — A Herring of a Different Color, by L. Neil Smith

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
4 Comments »

Kevin Carson has a new post up: The Creative Crime of Thrift. The quotes he gives illustrate well one reason that State Capitalism is not a free market, for public policy introduces market distortions that provide perverse incentives to the working class, discouraging them from accumulating capital. This serves to keep workers cowed and dependent on employers.

A libertarian socialist would call this situation capitalism. An anarcho-capitalist would call it socialism. Both would be partially right and partially wrong — because each has differing definitions of “capitalism” and “socialism”. Both would, or at least ought to, agree on this point, though — it is class oppression and not a truly free market.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
No Comments »

The new hot topic is, of course, the Paris riots. Reactionary forces, predictably, blame “Muslim extremism” and immigration.

While the religious differences are a factor, the riots in Paris have far more in common with the recent riots in Toledo (or in Watts a generation earlier) than they do with events in the Middle East.

The prevailing social democratic model of the nation state, embraced by both conservatives and liberals in the US and France alike, is fundamentally flawed.

Even merely nominally free-market conservatives have long paid homage to Bastiat. Here’s some of what Bastiat had to say about the nature of the State:

“The oppressor no longer acts directly by his own force on the oppressed. No, our conscience has become too fastidious for that. There are still, to be sure, the oppressor and his victim, but between them is placed an intermediary, the state, that is, the law itself.”

The modern nation state requires, and typically creates, a violent urban underclass. The growth of that underclass is a result of state socialist / state capitalist / fascist public policy. The existence of that underclass provides a low-grade internal threat to the middle-class that serves to bolster the mythology the State promulgates to apologize for its own existence.

While I don’t believe Muslim extremism is the cause of the Paris riots, it may very well end up being its beneficiary. The inherent instability of the status quo makes that status quo no longer an option. The world is at a crossroads — one path leads to an orderly, peaceful, prosperous and free stateless society. The other leads to a new global caliphate.

Relevant links:
“Riots in Paris: The continuing crises of statism”
“Here is what is REALLY happening in France!”

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
3 Comments »

Get the real story from Infoshop: Here is what is REALLY happening in France!

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
No Comments »

Capitol Hill Blue: Bush’s Increasing Mental Lapses and Temper Tantrums Worry White House Aides

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
No Comments »

Compare this:

When Marx called the French government “a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth” on behalf of the bourgeois elite and at the expense of production and commerce (”Class Struggles in France“), he was only echoing what libertarians had been saying for decades.

…with background info on causes of the recent Paris riots:

Eric, a 22-year-old in Clichy-sous-Bois born in France to Moroccan parents, said police target young people with dark skin. He said he has been unable to find full-time work for two years and that the riots were a demonstration of suburban solidarity.

“People are joining together to say we’ve had enough,” he said. He refused to give his surname, saying that talking to reporters was poorly regarded in his neighbourhood.

“We live in ghettos,” he added. “Everyone lives in fear.”

Because tyranny is so at odds with human nature, statism is more unstable than a mature anarchist society would be. Statism creates its own crises. It is self-destructive as it is, by definition, violence. Violent backlashes, such as we see in Paris, are its natural consequence.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
2 Comments »

Curious Muse speculates about the potential reasons for the ongoing bird flu brouhaha:

1). To take control of the political debate in the country that he has lost
2). To benefit drug companies
3). There is really a health concern.

It’s not impossible that all three might be true to varying degrees. Which, more so than others, is the hard part to determine.

The political debate certainly has been going badly for the Bush administration and it would, in my opinion, be naive to say they wouldn’t exploit what they can.

Drug companies certainly would benefit from an over-reaction. Specifically, Gilead Sciences Incorporated — the third largest biotechnology firm in the country and exclusive “intellectual property holders” (monopoly grantees) of the only known treatment for bird flu, the drug tamiflu. Notable is that the former Chairman of the Board of Gilead, and continuing major stockholder, is a certain “Mr. Donald Rumsfeld”. I hear he has a day job somewhere in DC. In fairness, though, I should point out that Rumsfeld has recused himself from policy matters having to do with bird flu / tamiflu.

Certainly the disease DOES exist. However, it has not, to the best of my knowledge, been shown to spread from human to human. If one doesn’t ingest infected poultry to contract the disease, then one would need to have frequent, lingering contact with such birds, in ways that most Americans never would. Chickens are certainly cute, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them attractive. Fears of the disease are all predicated on concerns about what might happen if the virus mutates to be able to spread from human to human.

So what conclusions does that point us to? The lessons I’m taking from it are:

1. Don’t panic.
2. Don’t believe the hype.
3. Eat more fish. It’s better for you anyway.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
1 Comment »