Ghost Buses and Waterless Urinals

I took a little trip down the highway to the big city the other day finally got pictures of some oddities.  Above is what I call a "ghost bus,"  almost every seat but the driver's is empty and that is typical whenever one sees these buses.  They have other classes of empty buses too and digging up the ridership numbers might be a good exercise in picking truth from bullshit.  Note the motto on the bus.

Update 5 JUN 2012: Took another trip down the highway to the big city and spotted these cutsie buses for the college students:

 Two passengers, one driver.

Below is another strange sight:

In a hospital they have reverted to a fancy version of an outhouse.  The plaque boasts of "saving" 40,000 gallons of fresh water, by eliminating the flush.  Meanwhile, a major river flows tens of yards from this spot.

National Socialism, FDR Style

This topic was addressed earlier here.

In this short clip, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the US Department of Energy tell us how the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration treated private property.  Don't let the war fool you.  FDR and his gang could not care less about private property rights before or during World War II.

View the High Definition version at: http://youtu.be/Iwgg_YsYTKA
Video from the Y-12, A Nuclear Family series is fair use, Title 17, Section 107, United States Code.

Note from the video, and historian D. Ray Smith, that Cades Cove was made a part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and people were moved.  What is not mentioned is that Cades Cove was a 1934 big government project to turn a wilderness with a few people living within its boundaries into a big giant happy park, with nobody but federal employees (Parks Service) living within its boundaries.  At least they didn't name the place after a politician.  It was so darn important to the world, that FDR stopped by to "dedicate" the place in 1940, six years after he had the residents dragged out.

Then FDR had another brilliant idea to build hydroelectric dams all over the countryside.  Some were in the Tennessee River Valley, others were in the west.  The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) evicted families, by force if needed, out of the Clinch river valley that formed the Norris Dam reservoir.  Norris Dam is a monument to government named after George W. Norris, a U.S. Senator from Nebraska.

Some of those people who were booted from Cades Cove by FDR and then booted from "Norris" by FDR settled in Bear Creek Valley, and were booted from there by FDR for the Manhattan Project.

A good tutoirial on the Temperance Movement contained here

Goldberg's Critics are Maddening

Okay folks, I need to quit doing things like this, but I don't think this post will be the last one like it.

Via a post by Jonah Goldberg about one of his critics, I found this big pile of crap at the History News Network: Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions by Matthew Feldman
After a paragraph about Feldman's credentials, he opens with this:

"Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and the economic sphere," proclaimed Mussolini in his co-written The Doctrine of Fascism from 1932, for this is the century of authority, a century tending to the "right", a Fascist century. If the nineteenth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the State. It is quite logical for a new doctrine to make use of the still vital elements of other doctrines.

"But what did he know? Had Mussolini's co-author been a pugilistic journalist like Jonah Goldberg rather than a fascist intellectual like Giovanni Gentile, that keystone of texts on fascist ideology would have sounded more like this . . ."- Dr. Matthew Feldman

And he goes on and on calling Jonah Goldberg a dimwit for daring to notice that Mussolini would be called a Liberal and a Leftist today.  The people Mussolini was "right" of were Stalin, Hitler and Trotsky.  He might have been barely left of FDR, which is open to debate.

Perhaps the fine man of letters, an Oxford Research Fellow no less, did not make it all the way through the passage he quoted.  This seems like a key bit: If the nineteenth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the State. It is quite logical for a new doctrine to make use of the still vital elements of other doctrines.

Update 11 June 2012: Even Wikipedia has this correct -

The term classical liberalism was applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from the newer social liberalism.[10] Libertarianism has been used in modern times as a substitute for the phrase "neo-classical liberalism", leading to some confusion. The identification of libertarianism with neo-classical liberalism primarily occurs in the United States,[11] where some conservatives and right-libertarians use the term classical liberalism to describe their belief in the primacy of economic freedom and minimal government.[12][13][14]

What is the modern Liberal (Leftist) all about today?  Collectivism!  In the 19th century "Liberal" was about the individual, now every Liberal west of Iceland and east of the International Date Line calls for big government control of every aspect of our lives.  Show me one American Liberal who wants to abolish the minimum wage and if you find one in the wild, go search for one in the United States Congress.  They are all for legalizing marijuana as long as nobody makes a buck off of it, in stark contrast to the Liberty embracing libertarians who don't care if you grow it, smoke it, buy it, sell it, or use it.  If you can manage to make a living from it, so be it.

Update II: 11 June 2012: How the Oxford English Dictionary defines the political Liberal  (no entry for Classical Liberal) - Pronunciation: /ˈlɪb(ə)r(ə)l/

adjective
     1 willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas: 

• (in a political context) favouring individual liberty, free trade, and moderate political and social reform: a liberal democratic state

Yes, Mussolini was squarely against that and so are the current self-identifying American Leftists (self labeled Liberals).  In the USA, where Goldberg is from and his books are published, a British Liberal is known as a Classical Liberal.  As David Horowitz says about people who call themselves Liberal in the USA, "The only things they are liberal about are hard drugs and sex."  They have no tolerance for individual liberty and mentioning free trade to them is like feeding garlic to a vampire, just like Mussolini was his entire life.

American Liberals are Leftists and Statists.  The current crop of American Liberals running the federal government are as corporatist as Mussolini.  Just witness their General Motors antics and two terms, with a party swap, of showering car companies, 'green energy' firms, banks, investment firms, and insurance companies with bailouts.  Real ones, not the 1979 Chrysler variety.

For evidence of Mussolini's consistency  on Fascism being the opposite of individualism, see my page about Liberalism that includes the Fascist Manifesto.

All Four Episodes of Frontline Series: Money, Power And Wall Street

Frontline Series: Money, Power And Wall Street
All four episodes at the link, with a few comments by me.

If I Crash My Airplane in the Desert, does it make News?

If it is my airplane and my desert, why is it the US government's business what I do with either?

Video courtesy of NBC's Today Show.

The Discovery Channel crashed an airplane in a Mexican desert.  They are not accused of stealing the airplane.  They are not accused of scaring unsuspecting passengers and onlookers.  They are not even accused of defiling Gaea. No, they are being taken to task for not getting US federal bureaucrat permission.

Another set of gripes from NBC are that the feds and Boeing were not invited to the Discovery Channel Desert Classic (not to be confused with the Jimmy Carter Desert Classic), leading them to the conclusion that it was a "stunt."  If anybody knows stunt journalism, it is NBC for sure.  Did NBC invite any General Motors engineers to watch them rig a pickup truck with a bomb to make it explode on cue?  Does not sound like it.  If you think the truck blowing up incident is ancient history, NBC has more recent experience with news stunt editing.  Some may say that this is systemic to the NBC news culture.

So now NBC is all in a huff about a competitor creating video for a show (their product) without even seeing the final product.  The story implies the Federal Aviation Administration and other government busybodies are concerned about this experiment, but they can't manage to find any current bureaucrats to go on camera and gripe.

At what point does private property matter to these people?

Below is my annotated version to the above video (HD version on YouTube), with some bonus footage of real terror by real terrorist in a Jordan desert on September 12, 1970 (corrected a spelling error of mine):

May Day Post

Mac OS used a bomb image similar to the Haymarket bomb

The Festivus of Communists and other Socialists is today.  I'll be adding to it as the day wears on.  In true commie fashion, the roots of May Day are not from May 1st, but from May 4th when a group of "anarchists" (socialists under a different name) tossed an iron cased dynamite bomb into a Chicago crowd.  Those who call it the "Haymarket affair" are typically socialists. Those who call it the Haymarket massacre or riot are describing it properly.  Every stripe of socialist views the event as a triumph of "workers" over evil employers.

Related: About That New Obama Slogan

By Michael Walsh
April 30, 2012 3:17 P.M.

“Forward,” that is. I knew that sounded awfully familiar. From Wikipedia:

Vorwärts (“Forward”) was the central organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany published daily in Berlin from 1891 to 1933 by decision of the party’s Halle Congress, as the successor of Berliner Volksblatt, founded in 1884.

Friedrich Engels and Kurt Tucholsky both wrote for Vorwärts. It backed the Russian Marxist economists and then, after the split in the Party, the Mensheviks. It published articles by Leon Trotsky, but would not publish any by Vladimir Lenin. . .

Vorwaerts lives on today as the house organ of Germany’s leftist SPD; you can read all about its illustrious history here (in German).

And if you don’t think David Axelrod doesn’t know this, you really ought to think again.

Okay, just one more link. Occutard supporting Huffington Post coverage:
This May Day Could Be One to Remember

One more, a collection of things National Review discovered, Occupy Wall Street Violence at ‘Wildcat March’  plus some video:
"Anarchy isn't easy"

Sorry, can't close out this post without a link to video of Big Government 'Anarchists'  who may or may not have wanted to blow up an Ohio bridge,