RE: POLITICAL: Obama's Agricultural Sec Vilsack

October 20, 2009

This is the last reply to you. I could care less if you or they are offended.

I know what happened, i know what the Germans told me, etc. I did not live on

the base i lived on the economy (= in German neighborhoods 30 minutes or more

from the post) and found out many things directly from the Germans and others i

lived around. I already stated this in one of my other replies. When i heard

certain things i would then check with the authorities who were over me to see

if they were true or not in regard to the law. When hearing, reading, seeing on

the news strange stories i asked my German friends directly who were not in the

military, as well as some who were married to soldiers. So the Germans you know

now are saying not true but the ones i lived around said they were. I feel you

are speaking dbl talk. You are saying what you saw and hear is fact, but not

me, it is only my perception, narrowed by living on post, which i did not. This

is yet one of the reasons i hardly post on this forum because people like

yourself act like you are the ultimate authority on issues that you can't prove

either. You can't prove your hear say but act as if i should have to or am not

allowed to speak about the things i learned and observed from being there.

Your holier than thou attitude and covered insults are offensive to me. I am

totally entitled to my opinion and have a right to liken it to dictatorship,

just as you have your right to hold it up as the picture of perfection and what

all of America or it's health care should be like. As i stated before maybe it

is a difference in states, etc. Or maybe you are right and all the professional

and non professional Germans i spoke with were lying. So i guess it was one big

conspiracy to freak the American girl out. If that were the case and they are

liars as you have said, that does not say much for your friends either then,

because either things are different or Germans happen to have a higher level or

story stretchers than i realized, and if so then that tells me i can't trust

your comments from the Germans you know cause they could be liars too. It was my

German OB who had nothing to do with the military who told me that only men

could have the professor status at the hospital = be in charge, not a woman.

I never said our schools were better, i said one family specifically was

debating on leaving there so her daughter(s) could choose her own career path.

I did say that at the time they also ranked the lowest in the EU reports, that

was in the news/newspaper not anything i made up. If they asp arents feel their

school system is not up to speed and want to homeschool it is their right. We

do it because our kids do not get a good enough education especially in history.

So just because their students are better educated than here does not mean they

are poor compared to other countries nor that the parents there should be denied

their rights to provide their children with a better one at home.

As far as i know many countries and our own states have homeschooling legal in

their own constitutions that were made prior to the " zealous " parents activism

to make it legal. Many of the original settlers were home schooled and home

schooled their kids so this is not something modern or new. Where as taking

away parental rights to home school in our country and others is modern, info on

the home school issues i brought up can be read here

http://tinyurl.com/yf8qgh5

I have also read about things on personal websites and blogs of German

" underground " homeschoolers. I believe they said it is one of the only enforced

Nazi laws, that prior to Hitler it was legal to home school. But hey you can

research that one yourself. AS for rooting out the homeschoolers you ask them

how they feel about it. I am sure they do feel it is Reno style especially when

they are being fined with such hefty fines they are facing the reality of losing

their home, imprisonment after, and losing their kids.

As for great access to raw milk and whole natural foods did you not read that

there was only 1 store in our entire town to get organic foods from and even the

store owners said raw milk was illegal when i asked if they knew where to get

some. We found one farmer who told us we HAD to " cook the milk " to make it safe.

When we asked if she drank the same milk she said but " only cooked " . I find it

far easier here to find all that i want in regards to WAPF in my own home town.

in fact i could not even begin to get totally strict with our WAPF diet until

leaving there because most things were not accessible. I had to mail order it

from the US. Their farmers sprayed pesticides too. 2 of the houses i lived in

the German landlords warned to stay inside and keep the doors closed when

spraying came because it was " bad for you " . You could buy round up there too at

any home and garden store. It was far from this idealist picture perfect

scenario you paint. Especially in regards to food. Yeah fresh food at weekly

farmers markets but when you asked do you use pesticides/sprays they would laugh

and say " well yes! " The only thing i found true to the healthy food claim was

they are fearful of GMO and hormones in animals.

Back to you saying they are just telling me what i want to hear or pulling one

over on me, i guess not only was the various Germans i associated with

liars/kidders but their media (which after knowing about ours, i guess so). Boy

they sure had to cover their bases from the neighbor to the OB and the news and

all those inbetween to really pull one over on the American girl. Sorry i did

not think to save the online news articles from German newspapers regarding some

of the other issues. If i had foresight to know that some know-it-all was going

to rake me over the coals for my own observations, experiences, to keep it in

case i was accused of lying or twisting facts etc. i would have saved all the

articles regarding some of the cases just for your personally. And again i echo

my experiences were very off post talking to people who worked in stores i

shopped at, German neighbors in my German neighborhood, professionals like the

doctors i saw during PG as military does not provide for that on some posts,

etc. It was not jsut military people and even if so they knew far more than you

realize. Many have lived there 5 - 20 yrs and are very aware of German culture

and politics, who felt it was home away from home and these are the people i ran

questions by. Not ignorant people who never left post.

I will not reply further to you because of your constant insinuation i am lying

and purposely skewing info and experiences for my own agenda.

Thank you though Bill for the unfriendly reminder to avoid pots by people like

you who act as though you, only you, and only your ideas, experiences, etc. are

accurate.

> > >

> > > East Germans had their career path set--that's why they were happy to be

reunited, to get rid of it and go to the Western model. This description does

not match the reality over there at all. I can only imagine that someone was

having a little fun with you. They have more of an active democracy and

practical freedom than over here. It's not the middle ages any more and no one

fines you if you work on the sabbath. Some people might be conservative and set

in their ways but others are extremely libertine. The laws are, on the whole,

very much less confining than here. It just doesn't sound like a description of

Germany at all.

> > >

> > > Bill

> > >

> >

>

October 20, 2009

--- In , " slbooks4me " <beauty4ashesisaiah61@...>

wrote:

> Your holier than thou attitude and covered insults are offensive to me. I am

totally entitled to my opinion and have a right to liken it to dictatorship,

Either they are a dictatorship or not--the form of government a state has is not

an opinion. I did my best to draw out the distortions in your factual

information that you have blown up to make it appear Germany is like the Soviet

Union. It is a profoundly distorted picture, objectively so, in part because you

deny that other cultures are allowed to make their own decisions about how they

run their society without running afoul of your very narrow and self-satisfied

definition of what universal human rights entails. Anything that is a difference

from us (home-schooling, vitamins, etc.) is a sign of a fundamental denial of

human rights.

This is the kind of nonsense that leads to aggressive wars to " spread our

god-given way of life " and it's why Americans are called " ugly Americans "

wherever we go. Its arrogant and refuses to understand different points of view

by ruling them out of court in advance. You began by viciously insulting an

entire country as a dictatorship that has taken remarkable efforts to overcome

the period in their history when they had a real dictatorship. It's a cheap and

insulting take on a modern, vibrant, democratic country (like calling the French

cowards for losing to the Germans in WWII when many exhibited extreme courage in

the Underground). You don't just state that you would prefer to live in a

country where you can get megadoses of vitamins and home schooling, but that any

country that does not allow for these is an oppressive dictatorship. Then when I

try to disentangle your mix of cherry-picked facts and cultural prejudices, you

throw a fit and shout " it's just my opinion! "

Bill

October 20, 2009

>

> Hi,

>

> I don't know anything about Germany but I wanted to touch on some things.

>

There is a group here

> in the USA trying to oppose the signing and implementation of these so

> called Child's Rights. I get updates from them all the time about this

> insanity. If Germany has signed onto this treaty then what is being said

> here is no surprise at all and would be pretty recent. How long have your

> friends been out of Germany, Bill? Parents Rights Group

> http://www.parentalrights.org/

I have no particular opinion about whether it would be a good idea to implement

this treaty, but I just want to point out that the alleged imposed changes in

our way of life are precisely the kind of thing that happens when you impose one

definition of what basic human rights entails on another society without

considering that society's views on the matter. To put it as clearly as

possible, many Germans may see home-schooling as child abuse where the state

steps in to protect the child, while we may see it as a right that the state

must respect. We can and should argue about this, but both views are motivated

by the question of human rights and considered views about the appropriate role

of the state.

>

> 2) This is an interesting article on centralized education which takes

> the position that it is NOT to create more educated people for a democratic

> society to function. that's just the spin they put on it. Instead it is a

> mode for the state to control and mold our children and from my experience

> in public schools that's exactly what they do.

I don't think it is an either/or question--the emergence of modern democracies

with universal suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a state

project and the state gets something out of it. Modern democracies are tied to

the growth in the size and power of the state, no doubt about it.

>

> 3) Also I did a lot of reading an research on German schooling system

> and the method they have set up does require a testing exam and that

> determines if you go on to higher education or a vocational school. It says

> it varies state by state on the actual rules and in East Germany things are

> still stuck in a lot of ways in the past practices.

I mentioned this exam--doesn't seem different to me than the SATs and ACTs,

which are generally required for admission to college. The U.S. historically has

done a better job than most at access to higher education, but that is

changing--we are massively cutting back on funding for education. The biases in

the system in the U.S. are also disguised by the fact that there are different

tiers of colleges that will get you to different stations in life. Going to

community college and the local university will not get you even considered at

the places that hire Harvard MBAs, for instance. And we track our students in a

very vicious, but disguised way--local funding for schools results in vastly

inferior public schools for poor and minorities.

> But I wouldn't totally

> negate what she is saying and say she's wrong or been misled.

> Discrimination still happens here in the USA all the time but not across the

> board and it might surprise someone who is not experiencing it themselves.

> I am subjected to it on a daily basis.

Certainly I agree there is still widespread gender discrimination in both the

U.S. and Germany. The German state seems to have many protections in this

regard, but discrimination doesn't go away that easily. In fact, formal equality

came to West Germans in the decade or so after WWII, combined with stay-at-home

mothers much the same as the U.S., and has changed in the same way that it has

in the U.S.--a slow, fitful cultural change accompanied by political and legal

demands. The East Germans actually had more female participation and advancement

in the work force, actually reflecting their authoritarian state's ability to

demand it despite traditional resistance. In general, the participation in the

workplace and the status of women is comparable to the U.S., though I'm sure it

varies from region to region.

>

> 5) Here when on unemployment if there is a job available and you do not

> apply for it you can lose the unemployment insurance benefits. No matter if

> that job is distasteful or difficult for you. If prostitution were legal

> employment.. Well, it's always possible. I know in Nevada where it is legal

> it is licensed so you can't get a job doing it legally without the license I

> would assume. Perhaps it was a job working at a place of prostitution as a

> clerk or cashier or whatever which many people would still have serious

> moral objections too. I worked for a credit card company and the things

> they had us doing to customers. made me hate myself.

I have not been able to find references to the case she mentioned, but I assume

there was something and that Germans were suitably scandalized by it. This is an

anomaly, not the norm, like the judge in the south who recently denied a

marriage license to a mixed-race couple. Usually Americans complain about the

German welfare system because they can stay on unemployment indefinitely, not

because they are kicked off of it and forced to take unpleasant jobs. The social

protections that Germans see as rights include this kind of extensive

unemployment protection, requirements for six weeks of vacation for all kinds of

jobs, and the like.

There are periodic efforts by business leaders to change to the American model

to drive down the unemployment rate and force people to take lower wage jobs. It

is up to you to decide which system you prefer--all I'll note is that we'd react

badly in this country to attempts to enforce this system on the U.S. in the name

of human rights, though that is exactly how most people around the world think

about it. Shows you the dangerous game that would result from cherry-picking

individual policies of other countries and demanding that they conform to our

own in the name of human rights. (I'm not denying that there should be human

rights across the board, simply stating the obvious--there is disagreement about

what ought to be included in these rights and how much they ought to impact

specific policies, rather than the general orientation, of individual

countries.)

Bill

October 22, 2009

> Analysis and reporting is not the same as advocating. By your

> standards below you could be accused of promoting eugenics yourself

> just by writing an e-mail post about it. You seem to be set on

> demonizing this man and no amount of evidence will persuade you

> otherwise, it appears, so I'll waste no more time on it.

You haven't presented any evidence other than a partisan pundit sticking up

for his party's man.

Keep in mind that this is the same man that proposed geo-engineering to the

current administration as a means of cooling the planet. In other words,

he's suggested possibly using extreme measures, such as shooting toxic

pollutants into earth's atmosphere to reflect some of the sunlight to

protect against global warming. Some say this is the chem trailing that's

already going on. I don't know, but this author of Eco Science seems to have

a history of suggesting extreme and harmful (and totalitarian) measures

whenever the powers that be decide that any given issue has become " dire " .

Never mind whether that issue is politically generated or real.

Oh yeh, and don't forget that Holdren and his Republican co-authors were

*wrong* about the population " bomb " . The 21st century has arrived and we are

still here and the planet is still here.

Suze

October 29, 2009

It's all well and good to talk about the evil of totalitarian governments...but

what about totalitarian religious figures and groups? The Spanish Inquisition,

the Salem witch trials...churches have at least as bad a history as governments,

do they not?

mike

>

> >

> > Does the fact that these governments were so brutal prove that Marx

> > was wrong? I'm not sure how that works. (not a Marxist, but can't

> > stand glib pontificating like this)

> >

>

October 29, 2009

Religious abuse of power is well documented, but it's important to realize that

the church and the state were much more intertwined during the abuses you

mention below. Imagine the U.S. Department of Catholocism. And you paid " church

tax " (which is still collected in some European countries). And it was against

the law to not be baptized at birth or not attend church. And your parish priest

had arrest powers and trail powers. This is how it used to be. My point is that

when the church had more governmental power, they abused it just like any other

government.

The truly sad thing is that we will still have the power, they haven't taken

that away from us yet. We're just not using it. Like why do we have TV again?

And we can fill hundreds of massive arenas every weekend for sports, yet voter

turn out is pathetic.

Can you imagine a world where people watched their politicians as much as TV and

had a 30 week " political season " where every weekend there was a 4 hour rally

for you favorite political party in a 100,000 seat arena. Human nature just

doesn't work this way. Or when it does it's called N. Korea.

> >

> > >

> > > Does the fact that these governments were so brutal prove that Marx

> > > was wrong? I'm not sure how that works. (not a Marxist, but can't

> > > stand glib pontificating like this)

> > >

> >

October 29, 2009

I agree with this point about power corrupting, but my understanding is that

Marx did not think the dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to be an

actual dictatorship, that this was a hyperbolic expression since the proletariat

was supposed to be the majority, so the expression was essentially saying that

there should be a " dictatorship of the majority, " meaning that the vast majority

of people would use the state to defeat wealthy capitalists. Of course, the

proletariat were not the majority in Russia, the proletariat themselves did not

exercise governmental control after the Bolsheviks took over the soviets and

refused to allow elections (soviet or otherwise), and even governmental coercion

on behalf of the majority can be a very ugly thing without protections for the

minority, whether bad guys or not. Marx's conception of the dictatorship of the

proletariat was pretty close to what was done in the Paris Commune, which was

more democratic than any government in existence, though he called for more

" organization " (hence the debates about the legacy of the Paris Commune among

anarchists and marxists).

Bill

>

> >

> > Does the fact that these governments were so brutal prove that Marx

> > was wrong? I'm not sure how that works. (not a Marxist, but can't

> > stand glib pontificating like this)

> >

>

November 4, 2009

Switzerland is not an oligarchy (except perhaps in the sense that modern

democracies devolve to oligarchical control in practice, subverting democratic

constitutions, as argues for the U.S.). Here's the wikipedia summary:

" Politics of Switzerland takes place in the framework of a multi-party federal

parliamentary democratic republic, whereby the Federal Council of Switzerland is

the head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government and the

federal administration. Federal legislative power is vested in both the

government and the two chambers of the Federal Assembly of Switzerland. The

judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. For any change in

the constitution, a referendum is mandatory; for any change in a law, a

referendum can be requested. Through referenda, citizens may challenge any law

voted by federal parliament and through initiatives introduce amendments to the

federal constitution, making Switzerland the closest state in the world to a

direct democracy. "

Why do you trust old men so much? Elected politicians are not old men? When

people use words like benevolent and enlightened to describe oligarchical or

monarchical political systems, they are putting a pretty gloss on ugly

power--it's not a job requirement. What do you have against democracy?

Bill

>

> I wouldn't call these statesman that have been running our country

" enlightened " . I think money can become a burden to rich men influences them to

make greedy decisions at times. Look up the terms enlightened and benevolent,

they don't match how you are placing them. Benevolent terms those that do

things for the greater good. Enlightened refers to a heightened state of highly

positive awareness. You must mean to say manevolent and forceful. You are

definately twisting my words around.

>

> It will be interesting to read these books to learn more about the " NWO " . You

have not answered my question of how you would remedy the dillema of our current

population problems and of the reality that we may run out of resources...

>

> It's not hard to imagine that they used science to control the masses.

Science, psychology, and nutrition in farming are all backwards in their current

approaches. All it takes though is our people to fight and raise awareness of

quality produce and for people to buy it. Ultimately it's supply and demand

that wins over dark agendas, and that's how people should fight.

>

> Because it's the job of the judicial branch to interpret laws and not to meet

the demands of corrupt elites they are less corrupt. They too may do wrong at

times, but because it's not their job to do so they likely are doing that nearly

at the same rate a politician is. They are also all older men so they what

motivates them is far different than what motivates a politician. And so would

be the same nature of the Oligarchy branch. They would likely be older men with

years of experience who are not affiliated with corruption. There may be issues

of corruption, but they have to hold themselves accountable if they get caught.

Their job would be to make decisions that are better for the country. Perhaps

it would be better to communicate with them rather than politicians for what we

need because the politicians and the presidents are too busy following there

agendas. The Oligarchy council on the other hand would not. It would be their

job to serve

> the people. Like the judiciary branch, if the common man calls to be heard,

he can make it public and get his point across. It's the Oligarchy's job to

listen. If you had actually read my description this Oligarchy would be

different than a cabinet or whatever you may be terming an Oligarchy. In the

description of this Oligarchy it is said that these men in particular aren't

affiliated with the rich select few or corruption. Go and study Switzerland's

Oligarchy before comparing it to the NWO which I have never heard in the same

sentence until talking to you.

>

November 5, 2009

That's a very funny movie. You do know it's fiction, right? Step away from the

ledge, it'll be all right...

>

> Just look at the signs of the times. Look where we are headed. I'd rather

kill myself off than to produce such a future:

>

> http://tiny.cc/6loAE

>

> ________________________________

> From: Holt <danthemanholt@...>

>

> Sent: Wed, November 4, 2009 11:09:35 AM

> Subject: Re: Re: POLITICAL: Obama's Agricultural Sec Vilsack

>

> Not democracy, but the lack of organization our government has because the

politicians are too distracted by fulfilling the goals of their affiliates.

That the there's not enough communication with the Government and the people of

what needs to be done. There's no plan. Nothing. The best idea the Government

has is to make money off of the swine flu.

>

> ____________ _________ _________ __

> From: Bill <lynchwtgmail (DOT) com>

>

> Sent: Wed, November 4, 2009 5:26:59 AM

> Subject: Re: POLITICAL: Obama's Agricultural Sec Vilsack

>

> Switzerland is not an oligarchy (except perhaps in the sense that modern

democracies devolve to oligarchical control in practice, subverting democratic

constitutions, as argues for the U.S.). Here's the wikipedia summary:

> " Politics of Switzerland takes place in the framework of a multi-party federal