I have written on why I think drones are unethical, here. I spelled out a scenario:

Let us imagine I have a repair guy come over to fix my furnace. It turns out he is moonlighting as a terrorist. Homeland Security has recently identified him as a terrorist. They have just figured out the vehicle he drives and the license number. Because drones are perfectly fine to use in the war on terror. Homeland Security has one over St. Louis looking for him.

The drone spots the van outside our house and sees the man entering our home. So the drone pilot pulls the trigger and fires a hellfire missile at the house…

But let’s change up the scenario. Let’s say that Seal Team 6 raided my house instead. In that case, they would be trespassing, since they would be entering with weapons before they had time to explain the situation to any of us. And there would be dangers of an accidental shooting. But, if people were doing the assassination then it is quite possible the warriors would shoot the terrorist and leave the rest of us alive and even uninjured.

Supposedly, Seal Team 6 went to Pakistan and killed Osama Bin Laden. We have absolutely no evidence that they did so, but several contradictory stories say they did, so let’s go with it:

If drones are so great, why did they use Seal Team 6? Why not just fly a drone overhead and fire a predator missile? No version of the story has claimed that Osama was holding a hostage whom the Seals wanted to rescue. So what was their reason for not using a drone?

I think we all know why the stories all need Seal Team 6. In order to win a real and certain victory, we need people who serve both as soldiers and witnesses to do things right. Leaving a house in a rubble heap will not provide a confirmed kill. There will be doubts. But a person with a gun can provide a much more certain outcome.

And that shows you what the drones are: throwaway death that we toss at relatively unimportant targets.

“Are we sure that’s him?”

“Who cares–it’s not like we’re risking anyone.”

Drones aren’t for important targets that must be killed. They’re busy-work that has more advantage in providing money for drone manufacturers and terrorizing all the people in a region where the drones are heard flying overhead. When someone really important is targeted, we don’t use them. We send real people.

(Cross-posted at Christendom Unbound)<>online mobismm smo

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In one of the many good articles on Obama’s international (and domestic?) appetite for violence, Micah Zenko writes for Foreign Policy,

“During his second inaugural address, President Obama offered two aspirational statements that struck many observers as incongruous with administration policies: ‘A decade of war is now ending’ and ‘We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.’ We should question these observations, not least because of the string of U.S. government plans and activities that increasingly blur the conventional definition of war.”

As far as I can tell, if Obama believes his rhetoric, then he thinks pulling back on American military personnel counts as “ending war.” Of course, he tried to stay in Iraq with multiple bases and he plans to never really leave Afghanistan. But even though they will get combat pay those troops in Afghanistan will be “advisors” or whatever other term is considered pacific enough.

But if Obama believes his rhetoric then he is fooling himself. Just because we do not have troops invading a country at the moment, it is false to say we are not engaged in ongoing warfare. The drones are expanding their killing reach into North Africa. And we have more or less openly made Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliates our proxy mercenary army in Libya and now in Syria. (In Obama’s defense, this plan was already developed late in Bush’s second term.)

Thus, Obama has “ended” war by establishing that war is now the same as everyday life—as “peacetime.” We will never go to war again because we will be forever killing people in every nation whom we designate as threats to “national security”—which will, of course, include threats to whatever international apparatus or system of relationships that we designate as “vital” to national security.

So the executive branch will never need to go to Congress for a declaration of war again. A declaration of war pretends that there is some such thing as peacetime that must be temporarily disrupted until peace can be reestablished. But now peace and war will be simply the same. Really, we’ve fulfilled the Orwellian prophecy: It is now official that war IS peace.

And the whole distinction between economic interest and national security interests is inevitably smudged out of existence in this new warpeacetime. Currency wars and drone wars will all be just tools available for the perpetuation of US hegemony.

Of course, Obama’s not going to push US hegemony by name the way Bush did. But that doesn’t matter. The hegemony he strives for (like Bush) really means simply the hegemony of a cartel of people holding office in some nation states and international organizations and some international corporations who will be forever lining their pockets as they convince themselves that they are doing what is best for “the planet”—which is a goal conveniently wide to justify killing terrorists, sponsoring terrorists, starting industry, or dismantling industry. Recall Bush’s attempt to give port security to UAE, or the fact that Henry Kissinger decided not to chair the 9-11 commission after being reminded that to accept the position would mean he would have to reveal if any of the Bin Laden family were included in his client list.

This is the world our children are growing up in, one where War Is Peace and everyone knows we have always been allied to Eurasian and at war with Eastasia, or the other way around.

(Cross-posted at Christendom Unbound)<>коэффициент конверсии продажреклама на авто спб

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Capitalism is not a system to be promoted or evaded.  Capitalism is a fact.  Capitalism is the way it works.  Capitalism means: when the scale goes up on one side, it goes down on the other.  Our love of law making to fix economics is the obsession with the irrational idea that you can push down on both sides of the scale at once without breaking the scale.

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, the president said he wants us to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.

Hurray, we can buy more stuff!  Like… apples.

If I have an apple, and you want to buy it, will you be surprised if at the register I tell you, “They’ve raised the price to nine dollars.” You say, “Is that what you want to sell it for?”

No, I say. No one can afford to buy them now. So I am having to throw out all my apples as they go bad.

When two people are trading at a price they negotiate for themselves like grown ups, and the buyer is forced to buy at a higher price, it will hurt the seller. The seller cannot sell $9 apples. Since the buyer is forced to buy them at a high price, he won’t buy, so the seller is harmed. But don’t get confused about the analogy, listen carefully to who the buyer and seller are.

In work and wage – the business owner is the buyer. Stores are hoping to buy some hourly work from a worker.  The worker is the seller. Of course, we are used to thinking that workers are victims.  But they are only victims where they aren’t free.  Like slaves in Egypt. Rather, in a free society, workers are business people who sell labor to businesses that buy the product of work.  Sellers, though, are the ones hurt by the intrusion of a minimum hike. Stores can’t afford as much work so the seller (the worker) is the one who is hurt – and that means higher minimums would hurt workers.  As we said, in non-free societies, workers become victims.  Minimum wage is a mathematical Pharaonic brick policy

It is simple math – more money for the same work equals less work for the same money. They will cut your work.

Suddenly, the business doesn’t have a choice, they have to charge workers nine dollars an hour (if they were to get that hike through congress). But they would have to alter something to deal with the effects of such a change, because they would have to pay more without more income. This means less hours assigned to workers. More bricks… less straw. The extra money has to come from somewhere. It will come from the hours of workers. It will come from the quality of products they can afford to buy from vendors to sell to the public. The higher minimum will obstruct the people who have jobs to offer; it will starve the people who are hungry for jobs. Companies will offer less jobs. The higher minimum wage hurts the very workers it purports to protect.

When the scale goes up on one side, it goes down on the other.

By the way, we are promised you would have more cash in your pocket. But those dollars would be spent by you in some store that now would have to comply with a higher minimum.  Stores don’t just pass on these “savings” to their workers – they also pass them on to their customers.  The most logical place for the business to recoup the difference in P&L is from you.  The prices will go up.  The hours worked by workers will go down. (So customer service will incidentally hurt as well).

And this movement is understandable, because the market IS free in a way, even under duress of big government intrusion. Capitalism is a fact. The market may get told what to do, but it will retain a mathematical balance on its own.  Bernoulli tells us that if you squeeze the back end of the toothpaste tube, paste will come out the other. You may call that tightening up the system.  But you could just as well call it bleeding the system. When the scale goes up on one side, it goes down on the other.

Listen, friends. If you make hourly wages, and if you make minimum, then I hope you can do better and better for yourself. But know that pushing down on businesses is not going to hurt the businesses.  It will hurt you, the worker.  If you make minimum wage, you need to know that raising the minimum wage is one of the worst things that could happen to you.  You will get a bump, but then you will get laid off.  Or just cut back.  And then the prices will rise against your cut-hour paycheck.

We could stop voting for Pharaoh’s mathemagicians.  But that would mean finding the candidate who promised less stuff.  And since we don’t understand the scale, we think that promising less government enforced and funded stuff means we would get less stuff.  But less intrusion means more freedom.  Less intrusion means improvement of general welfare.  And we love to hear big promises.

Pharaoh makes big buildings. And he promises big promises. But whenever you hear Pharaoh promising you so many more bricks, remember that you’re the one making them.

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President Obama outlined plans Tuesday night at his State of the Union address. His speech was mostly the same old thing, continuing to play heavily on support for the middle class while proposing regressive taxes that directly attack middle class incomes. Unique to tonight’s speech was the presence of green ribbons worn on the lapels of guests and members of Congress. This green ribbon was meant to memorialize the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. NPR commentators noted that the green ribbons were particularly important because of the President’s push for gun control legislation.  It was also noted that while Vice President Joe Biden was wearing a ribbon, Speaker of the House John Boehner was not.

What happened at Sandy Hook was a tragedy, and nothing should take away from our sympathy for the families who lost their loved ones. But at the same time, this sort of political manipulation because of a real tragedy is simply disgraceful. The ribbons and children they represent are being used as tools to bolster the President’s anti-2nd Amendment agenda.

The State of the Union address is a particularly troubling event. Thomas Jefferson stopped the practice of giving presidential speeches to Congress because he felt that it made the president out to be an imperial figure. He instead would send a written note about the current affairs of the country to those who needed it. The presentation this year makes it clear that it is only about political posturing. Members seek out aisle seats hours before the event, hopeful that they may get a picture hugging the president or shaking his hand, hoping to pander to the constituents who might be watching.

Many came adorned with green ribbons to hear lofty promises about how our President is going to put our nation back on track. It was very appropriate that all this posturing was represented with green. You may remember L. Frank Baum’s famous Emerald City of Green deception: Oz. Obama’s America is a new Oz.

“Even with eyes protected by the green spectacles, Dorothy and her friends were at first dazzled by the brilliancy of the wonderful City … There were many people – men, women, and children – walking about, and these were all dressed in green clothes and had greenish skins. They looked at Dorothy and her strangely assorted company with wondering eyes, and the children all ran away and hid behind their mothers when they saw the Lion; but no one spoke to them. Many shops stood in the street, and Dorothy saw that everything in them was green. Green candy and green pop corn were offered for sale, as well as green shoes, green hats, and green clothes of all sorts. At one place a man was selling green lemonade, and when the children bought it Dorothy could see that they paid for it with green pennies.”

And the new Oz has a new wizard, President Obama. A fool’s magician, yet  just as all  the good citizens of the Emerald City were forbidden to remove their green-tinted glasses, each American watches the state of the union through the comfort of a pair of their own colored glasses.

When will America discover that her President is no better than the false Wizard of Oz? Baum’s imperial ventriloquist is too much like our own head of state. What we need now is not more speeches from this talking head, but we need the brainless, the cowardly, the heartless, and those who are lost to break down the wizard’s chambers to discover the man behind the curtain and demand that he stop misleading the citizens. Back in Oz it went like this:

“You must keep your promises to us!” exclaimed Dorothy.
The Lion thought it might be as well to frighten the Wizard, so he gave a large, loud roar, which was so fierce and dreadful that Toto jumped away from him in alarm and tipped over the screen that stood in a corner. As it fell with a crash they looked that way, and the next moment all of them were filled with wonder. For they saw, standing in just the spot the screen had hidden, a little old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face, who seemed to be as much surprised as they were. The Tin Woodman, raising his axe, rushed toward the little man and cried out, “Who are you?”
“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,” said the little man, in a trembling voice. “But don’t strike me – please don’t – and I’ll do anything you want me to.”
Our friends looked at him in surprise and dismay.
“I thought Oz was a great Head,” said Dorothy.
“And I thought Oz was a lovely Lady,” said the Scarecrow.
“And I thought Oz was a terrible Beast,” said the Tin Woodman.
“And I thought Oz was a Ball of Fire,” exclaimed the Lion.
“No, you are all wrong,” said the little man meekly. “I have been making believe.”
“Making believe!” cried Dorothy. “Are you not a Great Wizard?”
“Hush, my dear,” he said. “Don’t speak so loud, or you will be overheard – and I should be ruined. I’m supposed to be a Great Wizard.”
“And aren’t you?” she asked.
“Not a bit of it, my dear; I’m just a common man.”
“You’re more than that,” said the Scarecrow, in a grieved tone; “you’re a humbug.”
“Exactly so!” declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him. “I am a humbug.”

One day we will realize that Obama, our Wizard, and the Government, our Oz, offer no solution to our needs. The true solutions are but “make believe.” The government exists at the expense of the Munchkins. Our presidential Wizard squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples who are not doing us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and steals from our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. The president is not a powerful wizard, but a conniving liar who has tricked us into submission.

It is the obligation of every patriot to denounce the Obama humbug. The federal government has overstepped its boundaries, making promises it cannot keep. When will Americans awaken and realize that the president is not the magician he claims to be? He has no solutions for the economy, for crimes, for gun violence, for peace, for any of those things he campaigns for. The president, like the Wizard, is after one thing: expanding the power of his office and maintaining his great and powerful image. Once the wizard is exposed, the power is gone.

Let’s look behind the curtain, exposing the man behind the smoke and mirrors, sending him off in his own balloon full of the hot air he so much enjoys billowing.

Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a link is given.

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Shrove Tuesday is a day of feasting. It marks the conclusion of the Epiphany Season. On this day, the Church feasts before she enters into a more solemn and penitential season called Lent, which is referred to as a Season of Confession.

Shrove Tuesday is celebrated with a pancake dinner, which is accompanied by eggs and syrup (bacon can be added).

This day provides the Church an opportunity to celebrate once again the abundance of the Gospel in our lives and in the world. The glory of the Epiphany season is that Jesus has given us life and life more abundantly (Jn.10:10). Following the rich feasting tradition of our Hebrew forefathers, the English speaking Church has broadly practiced Shrove Tuesday for over 800 years.

What’s the Importance of this day?

As a tradition of the Church, and not an explicit teaching in the Bible, the individual or churches are not bound by such traditions. However, if churches do practice this, it is important for members to join in this festive occasion. It provides the Church another healthy excuse to fellowship and form greater bonds through a delightful and bountiful meal.

On the day before we enter into the Lenten Story where Jesus journeys to the cross, Christians everywhere in the English speaking world will prepare rightly by celebrating God’s gifts to us, so that we can rightly meditate, fast, pray, confess and repent by remembering the sufferings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2).

What if my Church does not do Shrove Tuesday?

Assuming the congregation is silent on the issue and has not taken any strong constitutional or theological position on the matter, then as a family you are also free to celebrate Shrove Tuesday. You may also want to invite friends over to enjoy a pancake dinner.

To Shrive

Traditionally, Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the 40 days of Lent (Sundays excluded from this number). Whether your Church has an Ash Wednesday service or not, Shrove Tuesday is still valid as a way of celebrating the Christ who has given us all things, including His own body for our sakes (I Pet. 2:24).

Shrove comes from the word shrive meaning to confess. As we celebrate this evening, let us not forget that the Christian life is, as Luther stated, a “life of daily repentance.” Confession is not just reserved for Lent, but it is for all seasons. But on this Lenten Season we receive a particular reminder in our lessons that a repentant heart is a clean heart before God.<>компания seo system отзывы

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