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History tells of how the ancient Romans devised a plan in 140 B.C. to win the votes of the poor; by giving out cheap food and entertaintainment, as a way to gain popularity and thereby buy their votes in elections, Spanish intellectuals between the 19th and 20th centuries complained about the similar pan y toros ("bread and bullfights"). It appears similarly in Russian as хлеба и зрелищ ("bread and spectacle").. The Roman poet Juvenal called this phenomenon "bread and circuses," meaning that as long as the senators provided the mass with the essentials (bread) for human survival and gave them entertainment (circuses) to distract them from more important things in life, the clever leaders in power could manipulate and use the people for their own selfish ends, without no one ever noticing it.
This was a clever tactic pulled by the senators, but most of all, it's an interesting study of the human nature and the relation between the people and the State. Even though modern democracy says we're all capable of making decisions for a country, reality tells us a different story. As long as people have a work and a family, are able to pay their bills and watch TV, the rest of the outside world matters little. Their concerns are always primarily those that relate to their own immediate existence, and that is also how they vote in elections.
When the Romans manipulated people with "bread and circuses," they tried to pacify the people with things they knew would satisfy their basic urges. Much like our people in power today use TV and social acceptance to keep us in check and make sure no one tries to find out the truth about what is going on, the Romans realized that people essentially aren't interested in actual politics. For the mass, it's all just a soap opera and a struggle for how much land or money they will end up with, regardless of how the system operates internally. Therefore we hear people today vote on who they think will lower the taxes and offer them a higher standard of living, discussing Bush and Kerry much like discussing the love affair in their favourite TV show. Politics today isn't about finding the right idea, but finding the most popular one, and advertising that to people whom only grasp the symbolic process.
So why did Juvenal attack his contemporaries like he did? Partly we understand that corrupt senators were able to get away with selfishness, as they had efficiently silenced the people and made politics uninteresting. But what Juvenal most likely saw as most threatening, was the declining spirit and awareness of the people. Contrary to popular belief, fascism and fascist States are not systems that want to pacify people into numb robots - they actively force their citizens to engage in culture and activism, based on their individual capability. Rome managed to build an unbelievably vast empire simply because it had such a strong consensus that made each Roman citizen feeling as if being a vital part of the Roman Empire as a whole. Without the people, Rome was nothing, as seen with the numerous revolts that occurred now and then when the people felt betrayed or treated unjust by the senators.
When consensus and spirit broke down, the senators realized that the only way to keep the power together was to oppress people at their own conditions. Similarly, our modern societies today lack any form of consensus or motivational force, outside producing and consuming products and services, hence why our leaders constantly have to repeat political slogans and dogmatic messages via TV, radio and newspapers. Bread and circuses replace consensus, and like all short term fixes, it lasts as long as convenient and then collapse completely. Without the external control, and without the opium of the masses in the form of entertainment and selfish pleasures, people will run amok and revolt against the corrupt leadership.
More than two thousand years later, and nothing has essentially changed. Most people still don't know nor care, about what is really going on behind the smokescreen of all good-sounding profit making in the name of freedom and democracy. Do we believe them? Not necessarily, but as the Romans knew, it doesn't ultimately matter. As long as people are able to feed and enjoy themselves, they request no more, no matter how corrupt the current system is. Partly they're afraid of what they'll find, partly they feel attached to a system that satisfies their basic urges.
Beyond that lies idealism, or the motivation to find and aspire towards higher ideals, even if it means criticizing the system you currently live in. Not all people can do this. But those who can, those few and brave, are always out there and giving voice to their ideas. That is why we the people of the Tea Party Movements are so important right now, it's our calling to change history.
By now, it should be pretty apparent Obama has no intention of a bi-partisan reconciliation on his non-existent [health care] 'Plan' or the House plan or the Senate plan. We all know it's a trap to hog the mike, which is not exactly a meeting. As we speak, Pelosi is scheming a new way to shove her plan through, so why the meeting, when he plans to ram it through anyway? This is another showboating appearance to look 'presidential', when the past year has shown he is anything but. No president would tell you to borrow money to expand your payroll. No president would call his military corpsemen ... multiple times. Jimminy Christmas!
GOP'S HEALTHCARE MOMENT
Hi Everyone,
I just joined up a few minutes ago so I’m new to the TeaParty.org website. The main reason that I have joined up is because I would like to see this movement force the House and Senate to pass term limits. Has this been discussed in detail on here, and if so, what’s the consensus? I’m for two terms in the Senate and Five in the House.... What say you? I think this is a vital step in getting rid of the career politicians.
Brandon
Over the past 18 months, I have learned more than I ever thought possible, and done things completely outside my little private lifestyle, as have hundreds of thousands -- no millions -- have done. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. What we saw happening got us out of our comfort zone, to become engaged in unknown territory, because the very definition of Conservatives is non-combative, who works hard to earn a decent living, and take care of family.
DEMOCRATS, MEET YOUR BIGGEST NIGHTMARE.
I can almost hear our Founders saying, "Ya done good!"
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Last Friday, my son’s ninth grade class was required to read a four page excerpt from “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson, a far leftwing environmentalist whack-o. This totally fictional book was one of the main reasons DDT was banned - - - and hundreds of millions of people around the world have died of malaria, typhus and several other diseases. I helped my son write a factual report about DDT and how the ban came about; if your child encounters the same propaganda in school as mine did, please feel free to use the report below in any way you like to clarify matters.
DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane)
DDT: This compound was originally made in 1873 by an Austrian student, but did not receive much attention until it was developed in 1939 to protect U.S. soldiers from typhus and malaria during World War II. In 1948, Paul Hermann Müller received the Nobel Laureate in Medicine for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods, including plague carrying fleas. The bug-killer is also highly effective in killing mosquitoes and is largely responsible for wiping out malaria in the United States, Canada and Northern Europe.
In the fourteenth century, the Bubonic Plague, carried by fleas, killed one fourth of the people living in Europe and two thirds of the people in Great Brittan. Before DDT and the discovery that it was carried by mosquitoes, yellow fever killed millions and more than one hundred epidemics of typhus, a lethal fever spread by lice, have ravaged Europe and Asia with death rates as high as 70%! However, the biggest killer of all was malaria.
On July 2, 2001, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker: It is hard to overestimate the impact that DDT's early success had on the world of public health. In the nineteen-forties, there was still malaria in the American South. There was malaria throughout Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. In India alone, malaria killed eight hundred thousand people a year; now, —none there die of the disease.
Silent Spring: In 1962 environmentalist and extremist Rachel Carson published her book, “Silent Spring.” Even she claimed the book as fiction and stated that nothing in it really happened, but she was very much against all pesticides, DDT in particular, and structured her book to alarm the public falsely.
There was an article published in: 21st Century Science & Technology Magazine in 1992 titled: “The Lies of Rachel Carson” by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards — “A well-known entomologist documents some of the misstatements in Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book that poisoned public opinion against DDT and other pesticides.” The author, Dr. Edwards, points out many ways in which Carson deliberately tries to deceive readers; here are some of his examples and comments:
As I neared the middle of the book, the feeling grew in my mind that Rachel Carson was really playing loose with the facts and was also deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them. She was carefully omitting everything that failed to support her thesis that pesticides were bad, that industry was bad, and that any scientists who did not support her views were bad.
Dedication: A Lie! In the front of the book, Carson dedicates Silent Spring as follows: “To Albert Schweitzer who said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.’”
This appears to indicate that the great man opposed the use of insecticides. However, in his autobiography Schweitzer writes on page 262: “How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us ... but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.” Upon reading his book, it is clear that Schweitzer was worried about nuclear warfare, —not about the hazards from DDT!
The implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse affects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that “in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.” The World Health Organization stated that DDT had “killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.” A leading British scientist pointed out that “If the pressure groups had succeeded, if there had been a world ban on DDT, then Rachel Carson and Silent Spring would now be killing more people in a single year than Hitler killed in his whole holocaust.”
Extensive hearings on DDT before an EPA administrative law judge occurred during 1971-1972. The EPA hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, concluded that "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
Overruling the EPA hearing examiner, EPA administrator Ruckelshaus, a member of the Audubon Society, banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT. Ruckelshaus' aides reported he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT.
After reversing the EPA hearing examiner's decision, Ruckelshaus refused to release materials upon which his ban was based. Ruckelshaus rebuffed USDA efforts to obtain those materials through the Freedom of Information Act, claiming that they were just "internal memos." Scientists were therefore prevented from refuting the false allegations in the Ruckelshaus' "Opinion and Order on DDT." (Note: Ruckelshaus is a Registered Republican who endorsed Obama for the presidency.)
In 2002, The American Council on Science and Health announced that between three-hundred and five-hundred million people suffer from malaria each year, 90% are in Africa and it is the leading cause of death of African children.
In 2006, the World Health Organization reversed years of policy and backed the use of DDT to control malaria outbreaks.
Orlando, Florida Helped Save Countless U.S. Soldiers: In 1942, the J.R. Geigy company of Switzerland sent a hundred kilograms of DDT, the miracle powder, to its New York office. The package lay around, undisturbed, until a chemist, Victor Froelicher, happened to translate the extraordinary claims for DDT into English, and then passed on a sample to the Department of Agriculture, which then passed it on to its entomology research station, in Orlando, Florida. The Orlando laboratory had been charged by the Army to develop new pesticides, because the military, by this point in the war, was desperate for a better way to protect its troops against insect-borne disease. Typhus, —the lethal fever spread by lice had killed millions of people during and after the First World War and was still in the war zones. Worse, in almost every theatre of operations, malaria-carrying mosquitoes were causing illness. As Robert Rice said in this magazine almost fifty years ago, the First Marine Division had to be pulled from combat in 1942 and sent to Melbourne to recuperate because, out of seventeen thousand men, ten thousand were incapacitated with malarial headaches, fevers, and chills. Malaria hit 85% of the men holding onto Bataan. In fact, at any one time in the early stages of the war, according to General Douglas MacArthur, 2/3 of his troops in the South Pacific were sick with malaria. Thousands of candidate insecticides were tested at Orlando, and DDT was by far the best.
Sources:
http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicrotophos/ddt-ext.html,
Liberty and Tyranny by Mark R. Levin,
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1948/muller-bio.html
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html
I don't think so. anyone who would make such a statement has never read the Bible. We are ancient greece and rome all over again. Fallen to greed and lust of every kind. when the Federal supreme court declared Pornography as art they legalized prostitution. any hooker with a digital camera can take a pic of her act and call it art. These people called the Supreme court are just as insane with corruption as the fegeral, state, and local goverments. Corruption is the way of life in our once free country, but since there are so many who can be bought and sold, it,I'm afraid is lost to its own demise. Since the fed started regulating our educational system, it has gone down the tubes. Kids aren't learning anything about our Constitution and the price that was paid for these freedoms and hollywood is striving hard to do away with it. Isn't it funny how those wanting Socialism have never lived in it. It is oppressive to all but the so-called leaders of such countries.
I'm afraid the only way we can save and keeep America free is what George Washington said needed to bedone. tear it down and start over. If not the Chinese will be our next government. If we keep our constitution and freedoms established by it then we can always have another election and elect real people, not the bought and paid for pundits that keep destroying freedom for their self gain.
Today, most that are joining our military are joining for job security without even knowing the value of the oath they take when they join. Just like the presidents, senators, and representatives who take the same oath. To them it's just a formality, they don't mean a word of it. Before long we will be the United corporations of the world, not the United States of america.
Miccrosoft and google are part of the Bilderberger society in the effort to rule the world through electronics. do the research yourselves to find the real truth about where we are going as a nation. Obama bin Laden had his seat in the Bilderbergers 6 months prior to the election, as did Bush and Clinton. Our nation is being sold out by the corruption of the government. There is only one way to stop it and that is post Tea Party.
If the shoe fits........ Since Obama's State of the Union address is almost identical to his Joint Session of Congress speech a year ago, after astounding defeats in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, of course he's not an ideologue. Wonder why he felt compelled to profess this in another speech before the recent Republican Conference. Straw man! Jeeze, when does this man 'preside'?
THE ELECTORATE vs. OBAMA'S AGENDA.
For liberals, the observation that "the peasants are revolting" is a pun.
was the Keynote Speaker at the "National Tea Party Convention" in Nashville, Tennessee. The CNN, Fox Cable News and MSNBC all broadcast her speech live on Super Bowl Sunday weekend Saturday night, live as she electrified the 1,100 Tea Party attendees.
Early in her speech Sarah Palin said that the "Republican Party should embrace the Tea Parties..." to the enthusiastic applause of the audience.
Earlier in the day an organiser of another Tennessee Tea Party group, who did not attend the Convention workshops, was interviewed by the Media and said that the Tea Party was independent of any political party.
We have been chronicling the, Click Link: Tea Parties Since Tax Day
obama’s elitist persona has been the subject of many insightful articles since he realized that he, in his words, “had game” andcould play at the federal political level.
obama’s body language has revealed signs of arrogance, egoism, and deception.
Aside from his silly obama-isms (and you thought Bush was the only one could whip out a zinger), his words have only strengthened theseimages while also revealing his attitude toward the average citizen.
The common working man has been a jocular target of obama’s.
During the 2008 campaign he spoke of the people of Pennsylvania and “small towns” throughout the Midwest as “clinging to their guns andreligion,” about their being “bitter” and using “anti-immigrant…antipathetic” sentiments to excuse their own failures.
obama traveled to Massachusetts to lend his over-hyped, over-estimated clout to the senate election campaign of Martha Coakley andwhile there he publicly mocked opponent Scott Brown’s use of a pickup truck totravel between campaign stops…
…sort of like al gore mocking owners of SUVs for their gas guzzling, energy burning ways while he himself traveled by private jet or a with a parade of non-greenfriendly vehicles.
While criticizing the executives of the bailed out banks, he implied that it is common for Americans to run to Vegas and blow the rent ortuition money while imagining we were Phil Ivey.
According to obama before he came along Americans feared the coming end of America.
During his inaugural address, obama said we had no “confidence” in America, and we believed that “America’s decline wasinevitable.”
We were a lost people within a lost country and only obama saved us from ourselves.
During the 2009 State of the Union speech, obama said that anyone who was against obama-care, which was a majority of the populationoutside the Democratic Caucus, was stupid.
He said that he hadn’t explained it well enough for us to understand the plan.
In other words, we do not know what we know unless obama has had an opportunity to tell us what we know.
obama also used his annual message to the nation to take cheap, classless, political, potshots at the Supreme Court and thus atdemocracy itself.
As a supposed former community agitator, or organizer, obama hypocritically mocked the “teabaggers” for their grass-roots efforts, sayingthey were merely “playing games…waving their little tea bags around.”
The word “little” is such a condescending little word.
Again, this type of democratic activity roils the elitism in obama.
obama admittedly stands before a black audience and belittles, insults them for what he sees as a their cultural ignorance.
He said that he “often speaks a language that is foreign to them,” thus, he has to change his speaking style, his diction, to suit theblack audiences he faces.
He also pigeon holes whites as he recounted how he felt that his mother “was like most white people” who feel uneasy when they encounterblack strangers.
obama has made light of the mentally handicapped while on Jay Leno and has said that doctors are more interested in making money thancuring the patient .
obama told us that “words matter.”
Thus, his words matter.
His words show that to him the average American matters little.
I just joined and have to interject something here. Do you remember what happened after the first Tea Party? It was WAR, where Americans died for the rights we are losing on a daily basis. Most of the founding fathers died in dire poverty for our freedom from oppression. Obama wasn't elected, he was purchased by a group known as the Bilderbergers, the richest peopele in the world who have been orchestrating "the New World Order' for more than 80 years now. A handful of billionaires whose whole value system is based on subjugating the world for their self gain. Bush, Clinton, and Obama all are on that board of maggots.
These people want to put all of us in our places so they have complete control of the world. maybe that sounds like fantasy, but if you are honest about our recent history, everything the federal government touches turns to feces for us and fills their pockets to overflowing.
My question is, when the tea party is over, who will take up arms to save our nation and our Constitution from tyranny be sought by all living Presidents. They have all violated their oath of office, save maybe 3 or 4 senators.
Our freedom cannot be saved with words and protests. The so-called security agencies and not patriots or they wouldn't be working for the corrupt government agaisnt the people. Traitors all are they.
