First there was the Death Star menacing humanity. Now, there is “the Death Panel.” Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called President Barack Obama’s health plan “downright evil” on her Facebook page and warned American of Obama’s “death panel” that will hold the power of life or death over average Americans. Indeed, the Obama Death Panel appears to have their sights on little Trig. Presumably, the chair will be Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious), the Dark Lord of the Sith.
Palin states in her first statement after quitting her job as governor that “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care . . .Such a system is downright evil.”
The following footage from one of the patient reviews of the Death Panel has been located:
The real news here is the disclosure that Palin’s page has 700,000 readers, making it the most popular comics page in the world.
For the full story, click here.
“… As for offering my services I’m through with that. My days are filled with writing here, doing my own writing, swimming, or just laying in the sun. There is much to be said for retirement
even though I loved my work.”
—
You’ll get no argument from me. Would you consider taking up water ballet, perhaps? JT could probably give some pointers! 😉
One of the disturbing things I’ve noticed about Landmark Education /The Forum, formerly known as ‘est, and ‘invented’ by Erhard aka John Paul (Jack ) Rosenberg aka Curt Wilhelm von Savage aka Jack Frost etc etc is that they and thier lawyers are expert in causing any other derogatory information about them, except for positive advertising and testimonials to all BUT ‘disappear.
I just spent quite a while using varieties of key word combinations to locate this story, involving a married ‘The Forum’ trainer/couple, at least one of whom was still actively involved internationally, as I recall, and was reported on the news and in papers- just three years ago…
And there are other tragic cases too, but you really have to already know what your are looking for, I guess! I thought I did ‘know’ or I was reasonably sure, and I still had a tough time!
http://www.cultnews.com/?p=2081
06.24.06
Former Landmark leader wanted for murder surrenders to FBI
Posted in Landmark Education at 1:43 pm by Rick Ross
“After an eleven day manhunt and with the authorities hot on his trail and closing in, fugitive and former Landmark Education leader Darren Mack surrendered at a hotel in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico reports The Reno Gazette.
Mack in custodyMack was wanted for the brutal murder of his wife Charla in Reno, Nevada.
Mrs. Mack, like her estranged husband, was very active and deeply involved in Landmark, a controversial self-improvement seminar-selling company headquartered in San Francisco…”
Darren Mack was a multi-millionaire from a rich family that made its money in the pawn broker business.
Mack is also wanted for the sniper shooting of the family court judge that awarded his wife substantial alimony payments and child support.
Friday the former fugitive was flown from Mexico to Dallas where he was booked. Later Mack was taken back to Nevada where he was met at the airport by an armored SWAT van carrying five officers armed with assault rifles.
Once a rich man worth more than $10 million dollars Mack seems marked for either a long stay in prison or perhaps a death sentence.
Cultnews previously reported that at least one of Mack’s Landmark cronies posted a message to him on the Internet at his Myspace site.
That message said, “Darren, I know you from Landmark Education…I just wanted to remind you about what you used to teach others – about integrity and completion of the past and affinity. Remember? You know you’re driving yourself crazy with all the things you’re telling yourself. You also know the only way through this is through it. I know you have the ability to get this complete…”
It seems the “only way through this” for Mack will be the courts and a prison term to “complete.”
Whatever “breakthroughs” he may have once sought through Landmark training to benefit his marriage, it ended in murder.
And despite his former stature and influence within Landmark, it appears doubtful that Darren Mack will ever be touted as one of the company’s “success stories” again.
Note: Later in August Art Schreiber, General Counsel for Landmark Education, contacted CultNews to make a distinction regarding the status of Darren Mack and his history with the company. Schreiber said, “Mr. Mack did lead one of our many programs for several years but ceased being a Landmark leader in November, 2002…”
bdaman writes: How is the government going to check up on us? How many government employees are going to be added to a new agency to audit 350 million Americans to see if we have adequate health insurance? How is the government going to verify that we have acceptable coverage? Are all health insurance companies going to be required to issue some form of notarized birth certificate type document, renewable annually, that we will have to present to a government agent twice a year? Are insurance companies going to be required to contact the government if we cancel our policies? When a person dies, will the government be informed in a timely manner so they don’t fine us for not complying after we have left this earth?
just because you are not an organizational specialist, have no imagination and even if you were and had are totally against this doesn’t mean it can’t work.
it does work already for vets and for folks on medicare and will reduce the need for massive management.
look, if you have so many questions why not research medicare? ask your parents or your grandparents what they pay, how it works?
as for death? when a person dies a death certificate is issued. often the surviving spouse or adult child gets several copies to be sent to various places like life insurance companies for instance.
are you really this stupid or do you just pretend?
Mike S:
That is an interesting thought, but I see nothing in her writings that leads me to that conclusion. William Buckley thought as you do, that her ideas would lead to a civilization like North Korea.
Is it her belief in freedom of speech?
Or is it her belief in abortion?
Maybe it’s her views on our constitution, a great document?
Her belief in limited government?
The sanctity of the individual?
Maybe you dont like reason and rationality?
The idea that you should be able to keep what you make?
How about the right to free association?
I know it must be because she is a believer in free markets and capitalism?
What about her views on race, namely that a persons skin color is immaterial?
Maybe it is her hatred of the Ku Klux Klan and all other such organizations?
Her belief that one man owes another nothing except his respect?
I guess I am just too stupid to understand your reasoning.
Mike S:
I believe bdaman is of African American decent. This is based on some of the things he said on the Global Warming thread prior to the Palin thread so he had no reason to be disingenuous.
Personally he seems like an OK guy to me (sorry for the support bdaman I am sure you dont want it for obvious reasons) and either was making a joke (not good) or really did not know the extent of his transgression. I honestly dont see him as someone that would set out to intentionaly hurt someone. People take labels far too seriously. And most people that are doing the labeling are typically ignorant of what they are doing and do not understand the impact of the label.
“But what you can blame is an idea that would lead to the creation of the Soviet Union under the principles of Marx’s philosophical works.”
IS,
What you never get and which I alluded to in a much previous post, is that ideas only really matter to people who make their living discussing them. Ideas when it comes to governance are only as viable as the people implementing them. Stalin was a stone psychotic, crazier perhaps than Hitler, which is going a piece. The Russian Revolution was quite justified being that the Tsarist system was an abomination. Led by a psychotic Marx’s ideas were turned on their sides, as I’ve said I don’t believe in Marx, in order to justify this psychotics paranoiod needs. Marx didn’t kill the people, he did.
Another more salient example. Jesus preached “The Golden Rule” and “Turning the Other Cheek” yet his preachings were morphed into supporting one of the most brutal empires of history the Roman’s whose greatest talents were the effcient killing of people and engineering. Most of their “philosophy” was cribbed from the Greeks, but it didn’t have a civilizing effect on them and neither did Christianity. The Church, founded on the Messiah, who believed in non-violence, the Golden Rule, silent prayer and helping the unfortunate, became a militaristic, greedy, entity that used ritual as a means of faith, while they hid their Savior’s true words.
It is never about the philosophy or economic system, those historically all can be perverted into unrecognizable forms, it is always about the sociopaths, psychotics and plain selfish bastards who use the philosophies as “come ons.” In the one you espouse it would take less than five years from its’ implementation anywhere, for it to morph into the most regressive of tyrranical oligarchies.
Gyges:
I have been thinking about how you and everyone else on this site like facts to back up an argument and was wondering why? And you and everyone else bash me when I argue from principles telling me to back it up with facts.
I started thinking about it and came to the conclusion that you to are advancing a principle, the principle that only particular facts are valid. Can you back that up with facts or is it your opinion?
MIKE S:
I know who Nat Hentoff is and have read some of his columns. And generally agree with his outlook on things as you would expect I would.
I threw that out there for Rafflaw as he was poking fun about Fox News not minding if I read one of his links. So I figured sauce for the goose…….
And you are right you cannot “blame” Marx for Stalin murdering and systematically destroying through famine 20 million(is that enough?) people.
But what you can blame is an idea that would lead to the creation of the Soviet Union under the principles of Marx’s philosophical works. In that way Marx is guilty of supporting Stalin. The idea that people belong to the state is what allowed Stalin to do what he did. And Marx’s ideas trace back to Plato.
You can make fun of me all you want but there is continuity in ideas and some ideas are good for men such as liberty and some ideas are bad for men such as the idea that humans are subserviant to the state through any number of mechanisms that limit or completely ignore our right to our own lives.
You can slice it anyway you want but government has been out of control for a good long time and it dosent look like we have the power to control further growth. You believe that national health care is moral and right. I believe it will lead to no good end for our country. Only time will tell which one of us is correct.
“I can’t help the timing of the Jewish thing, how ironic is that”
Bdaman,
It’s not ironic at all, just very stupid on your part and a blatant attempt to smear the President falsely.
“By the way, one only need to look at Obama’s stance on abortion to decide if he favors death panels.”
In the depths of your bigotry and in your ignorance of Judaism the fact that Jews primarily believe that life begins with the first (God’s) breath is lost on you. I would guess that almost all of the Rabbi’s on the phone believe in a women’s right to choose and those who don’t would base their opposition on not “giving unmarried women” the choice of having sex.
You are so lost in your fundamentalist beliefs that you have no time to understand other ways of belief. This really indicates someone who is not as strong a believer as they pretend to be. Because a true believer in a faith would be curious about other beliefs and not fear the diminishment of her/his own by investigating them. I know as much about Christianity as you do and I’m not a Christian. I would guess that I know more about all other religions than you, who believes you’ve found the revealed truth and is afraid to test your belief by understanding others. Here’s a tip for you that many great and pious Christian scholars have followed: If you really want to understand Jesus, understand Judaism, because he was a Jew to the day he died and by the evidence of your own Gospels never believed the Jews killed him.
One final point and that is your shadowy allusions to your being half black. Your method for relating this has always been that you are mixed race and your mother was white. Never that your father was black. I’m beginning to firmly beieve that that too is a deception on your part. For all we know your mother could be a Serb and your father Scandanavian and so you could broadly claim to be mixed race. I think the truth is you adopted this as a deception, the better to snipe at the President with and that completes the picture of your total trolldom. It is not a pretty picture, but then bigots seldom photograph well.
FFLEO,
I’m not quite sure why you think I’m calling on him to be censored. My advice simply deals with responses to his comments, not his ability to make those comments.
I hope by now you realize that all I ask when I give my opinion is that it be considered. I’m not insulted when people disagree. If Mike continued to engage BDAman, I probably would seldom bring my thoughts on the matter up again.
You obviously feel differently then I do on this matter. I’ve had my say and people will decide what they decide. I just wanted to clear up that I never called for him to be censored.
“Rafflaw:
here is an article to read and I wont tell Huffington Post or the Workers daily.”
IS,
Do you know anything about the Jewish World Review, or about the career and views of the aged Nat Hentoff? For the former I’ll give you a clue. 75% of Jews voted for President Obama, most of them didn’t subscribe to the Jewish World Review. The clue for Hentoff is to look at the publishers he’s worked for. Why not quote World Net Daily as an unfettered source?
Gyges,
While I understand your position, I strongly disagree with censoring bdaman, unless he spews vulgarisms and abject hatred. Censure him all you want, but I do not want to see him censored unless he breaches the rules of civility, of which some regulars have demonstrated that they are capable and more so than any troll is or has been capable.
I want to read the responses from our intelligent regulars to commenters such as bdaman; otherwise, others and I would never get that reading opportunity. Remember, bdaman is espousing the views of many Americans and we need to let him speak through his writings to serve as a metric for us to gauge the thinking of others in our society.
Mike Spindell, you are as sharp or sharper that any tack in the Turley Blawg box of brass tacks and tackiness.
Therefore, Mike Spindell et al. please carry on with your reasoned rebuttals/refutations of bdaman’s comments. I have a lot more to learn from what you posit.
“Maybe you should reconsider offering your services, on a smaller scale, to begin with and then you could just trains people to do what you do.”
Patty C,
In the early 80’s I had two separate patients who wanted my permission to do the EST weekend in NYC. I did not feel threatened by it and also did not feel that it could do them much harm. I was wrong. Both of them individually had traumatic experiences and were each moved out of view so as not to disturb anyone. Their description to me of what went on was a horror show in how not to help people change.
A close friend of mine, who was an artist with an Adonis body and a strong mind was talked into going to an introductory session and he disrupted the entire thing by ridicule, finding it to be in his words “A**H**L*S, sppouting gibberish and trying to make you feel bad.” At 6’4,” with muscles bulging, they didn’t
know how to cope with him. The people that invited him though, one a very soon to be ex-girlfriend, thought him boorish for not being nice. The willingness of the human mind to rationalize the notion of an easy road to awareness is unlimited.
As for offering my services I’m through with that. My days are filled with writing here, doing my own writing, swimming, or just laying in the sun. There is much to be said for retirement
even though I loved my work.
Believe as you wish, the liberal media is the one spinning all the race. MSNBC showed a man carrying an AR-15, A CLOSE UP of a gun around the waist. The pants, the shirt, the tie the man was wearing. What MSNBC didn’t show you was it was the same black man that I posted in this thread. Then while showing thier edited video the anchor says white people are carrying guns where the president is speaking, someone is going to harm him.
Like I said, how ironic that a black man is compared to Hitler and how ironic would it be that a black man who has favored Lincoln, placed his hand on Lincoln’s bible could face the same fate.
I can’t help the timing of the Jewish thing, how ironic is that. I would read Mike Appletons post again. Sorry I don’t have time to give you an in depth analysis of my thinking. I typically sit at the computer, post over a span of 10-20 minutes then I’m off and running. I will be real busy over the next three to four days so enjoy.
Mike,
You’ll notice I do think the occasional mocking of his claims is o.k. On a practical level I get annoyed with his machine gun style tactic of debating and noticed responding to him only encourages more completely unrelated posts.
On a philosophical level, I happen to feel that seriously engaging him somehow legitimizes his claims in the eyes of those that share some of the less radical elements of his political philosophy. It creates a feeling of “us vs. Them” when the same people are debating his crazy views as are debating the saner views of others, leading those others to view his claims as more reasonable then they are. Sort of an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” fallacy.
For what it’s worth, other than the fact that it encourages the rapid fire spam posting that he does, I really enjoyed your trouncing of him.
“Since Plato taught Aristotle everything he knew, you could consider him a ‘harmonizing sentiment’ of ‘the day’”
Bob,
And as you know Aristotle disagreed with much of his mentor Plato’s conceptions. The Declaration was a good example for you to use. It is not referenced much by some who would twist the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, but almost all of them considered themselves to be followers of Natural Philosophy and were men of the “Enlightenment.” While they were well read and well versed in the classics and in the leaders of Natural Philosophy, they considered themselves to be independent thinkers and acted as such.
What annoyed me so much in an argument like the one propounded by IS is its’ setting up a false dialectical chain, to discredit a policy that none of the chain’s links really expoused upon.
This allowed him to take Plato’s statements and conflate them with a Health Care Bill. To me this is the height of intellectual dishonesty and assumes a cause and effect that isn’t necessarily there. In reverse, while I’m not a fan of Karl Marx he certainly was not a monster, yet his avid follower Jospeh Stalin was. To attribute Stalin’s acts to Marx is as false as attributing the non-existent (except in the private health insurance industry)”death panels” to Plato’s philosophy.
We forget he came from a people where infanticide was considered a proper way of dealing with less than perfect babies. Oops, sorry for that, the anti-abortionists can now use Hellenic Norms to compare the pro-choice movement with practicers of infanticide.
“How many times does BDAman have to prove that he’s not worth talking to before you’ll stop engaging him?”
Gyges,
You’re right of course. He is representative of a new trolling type. There are those like BVM that just come on and continue to post links, make short inflamatory statements, but never ever engage in discussion. That is the old troll type we were getting.
The a new breed started, maybe the powers that be are sending in their “A” team. This type starts out slowly, takes part in discussion and professes centrist political leanings. When we’ve become a little used to them they begin to throw in more partisan material and less actual interaction. Only replying to parts of arguments and ignoring the other aspects they are unable to answer. Finally, after all their points have been refuted and they have been exposed they begin to respond more and more hysterically, because we stopped playing.
This was Bdaman’s MO as it was Jim Byrnes/Birthers. In both cases when it finally dawned on me, not being the sharpest tack in the box, I began to call them out using their own techniques against them. This brought out the lurking rage and the true nature of their games, as they gamely tried to deny the charges.
However, as you say after that what is the point in feeding them and I will try not to continue. With Bdaman, what finally did piss me off was his bigotry. Come to think of it though, his claim at having a black father is probably also crap also, thrown in to compare himself to Obama for rhetorical usage. I’ll
try to take your good advice re: this, but you must know by now even though I’m an old fart, I’m not always as wise as I should be.
Mike,
How many times does BDAman have to prove that he’s not worth talking to before you’ll stop engaging him? I understand that’s he says vile things.
Look at this thread. All your responses to him do is encourage him to post trolling non sequiturs in the hope that some of his personal vendetta will get taken seriously. He BRAGS that people are bringing guns to political events. That certainly proves that the health-care bills have “death Panels.” He brings up an error on Obama’s MYSPACE PAGE… you get the point.
You want to see how to deal with him, go look at the Global warming thread from a couple of weeks back. He was eventually ignored and that thread stopped at 200 instead of the 500+ length that this one has gotten to. I’d be willing to bet at least 1/5-1/4 the comments are his spam. He is the only person currently here I’ll say this about, but all that his views deserve is the occasional mocking, and being ignored. Intelligent conversation and debate is one thing, he is another.
Should read (Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825)
Mike Spindell: “I’m not against the classics per se, but if they wanted to go back a ways wouldn’t FDR have been good enough? Perhaps even Otto von Bismarck, no liberal he, creating German Social Security and Health Care in the 1880’s.”
Since Plato taught Aristotle everything he knew, you could consider him a ‘harmonizing sentiment’ of ‘the day’
“This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.” (letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825)
Bdaman,
Can’t stay away from the Jewish thing can you? Do you know that among Jews next month marks our New Year? Do you further know that this New Year on the Jewish calendar is extremely important to us and in tandem with Yom Kippur rates as our holiest time period? The President was reflecting on his understanding that during this period any Jew who takes his faith seriously reflects upon the errors he has made in the previous years, seeks to redress them and resolves to be better in the year to come. President Obama, speaking to a group of Rabbi’s, was using the High Holy Days as a metaphor to make his point. This has nothing to do with separation of church and state, which incidentally the overwhelming majority of Jews believe in, for obvious reasons. As for the “evil” of his closing with “L’shana Tovah,” if you had a friend or acquaintance that was a faithful Jew that you weren’t seeing between now and mid September, that would be a very thoughtful and considerate thing to say. It would be taken by a Jew as a sign of respect. However, since in your heart we are Christ Killers how dare that man show any Jew respect? Will you be up for three more days thinking about this faux pas?