DaveTown

Thank you Don Pardo.

The category is “Current Events” . . .

And the answer is: WATERBOARDING

What is “Stuff that couldn’t persuade me to watch one second of either the Democratic or Republican National Conventions”?

A doubleheader today, both from the always excellent Positivity Blog

“The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.”

– Ram Dass.

Pain is unavoidable in life. Suffering is however optional.

– Henrik Edberg

This time on the economy, from Lew Rockwell at the Mises Institute.

Money quote:

Sometimes the bad news is the good news. So it is with the report
that retail sales are down by 0.1 percent in July, the sharpest drop in
many months.

Why good news? It means that consumers are starting to cut back.
They could be going into less debt. They might be saving more. They are
being more careful about long-term plans pending short-term trends.

These are all preconditions for recovery. It’s only bad news if one
adopts the crude theory that economies are sustained by consumer
spending.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a ‘born contrarian’, but, to be sure, life has conspired to make contrarianism (if there is such an adjective) second nature to me. So, when I started reading the accounts of the “Russian Invasion of Georgia”, I wondered what the real story was. I mean, come on now, I’m a fairly well-educated man (for an American), but I’d never heard of either South Ossetia or Abkhazia before; why are they all the sudden front and center on the world stage?

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Vladimir Putin, nor of his puppet Medvedev. I don’t condone rolling tanks across borders and bombing foreign cities. But, since we’re only getting one side of the story, by and large, I wanted to know more. This being the Internet age, naturally, there are more sources to avoid than there are to seek out, but I think Justin Raimondo’s take on the situation is a good start.

Essentially, Mr. Raimondo names Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili as the one who has been waging war against South Ossetia and Abkhazia for years, and denying those to areas the freedom and independence Georgia was able to gain from Russia after the fall of Communism. He also points out that Mr. Saakashvili’s tactics are more in line with Soviet-era leadership than with 21st century democracy: jailing political opponents, shutting down opposition press, banning dissenting political parties . . . you know, all that good Stalinist stuff.

Keep in mind, also, that Mr. Raimondo is no reporter. He is an advocate, and makes no apologies for that. But, at least he admits he is an advocate, which is more than the Mainstream Media are willing to do (as I think the fact that the National Enquirer had to break the John Edwards story, while papers like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times went out of their way to ignore it, illustrates quite nicely).

Anyway, as I said, don’t paint me as a Pro-Putin Russia apologist, but let’s not pretend that we’re getting the whole story from the “news”, either.