If all else fails, remember the Constitution
Preamble We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
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Though wrong, will not make news…
From
January 13, 2008
Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.
New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.
“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset.
His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across Iraq, asking people about births, deaths and migration in their households.
Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”
The Lancet did not break any rules by failing to disclose Soros’s sponsorship.
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In case you forgot (and were about to give up your liberty)
- The philosophy of liberty is based on the principle of self-ownership.
- You own your life.
- To deny this is to imply that someone else has a higher claim on your life than you do.
- No other person, or group of persons, owns your life.
- Nor do you own the lives of others.
- You exist in time: future, present and past.
- This is manifest in [respectively]: your life, your liberty and the product of your life and liberty.
- To lose your life is to lose your future.
- To lose your liberty is to lose your present.
- And to lose the product of your life and liberty is to lose the portion of your past that produced it.
- A product of your life and your liberty is your property.
- Property is the fruit of your labour: the product of your time, energy and talents.
- Property is that part of nature that you turn to valuable use.
- Property is the property of others that is given to you by voluntary exchange and mutual consent.
- Two people who exchange property voluntarily are both better off, or they wouldn’t do it.
- Only they may rightfully make that decision for themselves.
- At times, some people make use of force or fraud to take from others without voluntary consent.
- The initiation of force or fraud to take life is murder.
- The initiation of force or fraud to take liberty is slavery.
- The initiation of force or fraud to take property is theft.
- It is the same whether these things are done by one person acting alone, by the many acting against the few, or even by officials in fine hats.
- You have the right to protect your life, liberty and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others; and you may ask others to help defend you.
- But you do not have the right to initiate force against the life, liberty and property of others.
- Thus you have no right to designate some other person to initiate force against others on your behalf.
- You have the right to seek leaders for yourself, but you have no right to impose rulers onto others.
- No matter how officials are selected, they are only human beings and they have no rights or claims that are higher than other human beings.
- Regardless of the imaginative labels for their behaviour, or the number of people encouraging them, officials have no right to murder, to enslave or to steal.
- You cannot give them any rights that you do not have yourself.
- Since you own your life, you are responsible for your life.
- You do not rent your life from others who demand your obedience.
- Nor are you a slave to others who demand your sacrifice.
- You choose your own goals based on your own values.
- Success and failure are both the necessary incentives to learn and grow.
- Your action on behalf of others, or their action on behalf of you, is virtuous only when it is derived from voluntary mutual consent.
- For virtue can only exist where there is free choice.
- This is the basis of a truly free society.
- It is not only the most practical and humanitarian foundation for human action, it is the most ethical.
- Problems in the world that arise from the initiation of force by government have a solution.
- The solution is for the people of the earth to stop asking government official to initiate force on their behalf.
- Evil does not arise solely from evil people, but also from good people who tolerate the initiation of force as a means to their own ends.
- In this manner, good people have empowered evil people throughout history.
- Having confidence in a free society is to focus on the process of discovery in the marketplace of values, rather than to focus on some imposed vision or goal.
- Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth, and typically results in unintended, perverse consequences.
- Achieving a free society requires courage—to think, to talk and to act—especially when it is easier to do nothing.
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Great Article by Peggy Noonan
Things Are Tough All Over But Mrs. Clinton is no Iron Lady. The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they’d like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, “I will have beef.” Yes, said the waiter. “And the vegetables?” “They will have beef too.” Too good to check, as they say. It is certainly apocryphal, but I don’t want it to be. It captured her singular leadership style, which might be characterized as “unafraid.” She was a leader. Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender. She represented a movement. She was its head. She was great figure, a person in history, and she was a woman. She was in it for serious reasons, not to advance the claims of a gender but to reclaim for England its economic freedom, and return its political culture to common sense. Her rise wasn’t symbolic but actual. In fact, she wasn’t so much a woman as a lady. I remember a gentleman who worked with her speaking of her allure, how she’d relax after a late-night meeting and you’d walk by and catch just the faintest whiff of perfume, smoke and scotch. She worked hard and was tough. One always imagined her lightly smacking some incompetent on the head with her purse, for she carried a purse, as a lady would. She is still tough. A Reagan aide told me that after she was incapacitated by a stroke she flew to Reagan’s funeral in Washington, went through the ceremony, flew with Mrs. Reagan to California for the burial, and never once on the plane removed her heels. That is tough. The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don’t use what they are. They don’t hold up their sex as a feint: *Why, he’s not criticizing me, he’s criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.* When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. “When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the ‘boys club.’ ” But when “legitimate questions” are asked, “she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules.” Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: “Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops.” It was all so incongruous–can anyone imagine the 20th century New Class professional Hillary Clinton picking up a vacuum cleaner? Isn’t that what downtrodden pink collar workers abused by the patriarchy are for? But even better, and more startling, people began to giggle. At Mrs. Clinton, a woman who has never inspired much mirth. Suddenly they were remembering the different accents she has spoken with when in different parts of the country, and the weird laugh she has used on talk shows. A few days ago new poll numbers came out–neck and neck with Barack Obama in Iowa, her lead slipping in New Hampshire. There is a sense that Sen. Obama is rising, a sense for the first time in this election cycle that Mrs. Clinton just may be in a fight, a real one, one she could actually lose. It’s all kind of wonderful, isn’t it? Someone indulged in special pleading and America didn’t buy it. It’s as if the country this week made it official: We now formally declare that the woman who uses the fact of her sex to manipulate circumstances is a jerk. This is a victory for true feminism, in its old-fashioned sense of a simple assertion of the equality of men and women. We might not have so resoundingly reached this moment without Mrs. Clinton’s actions and statements. Thank you, Mrs. Clinton. A word on toughness. Mrs. Clinton is certainly tough, to the point of hard. But toughness should have a purpose. In Mrs. Thatcher’s case, its purpose was to push through a program she thought would make life better in her country. Mrs. Clinton’s toughness seems to have no purpose beyond the personal accrual of power. What will she do with the power? Still unclear. It happens to be unclear in the case of several candidates, but with Mrs. Clinton there is a unique chasm between the ferocity and the purpose of the ferocity. There is something deeply unattractive in this, and it would be equally so if she were a man. I wonder if Sen. Obama, as he makes his climb, understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans, and from those not affiliated with either party. They see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness. I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: “We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well.” But we won’t. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting. I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama’s new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton’s generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don’t think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both. Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week. *Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of “John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father” (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore<http://www.opinionjournalbookstore.com/Noonan.htm>. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.*
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