Posts Tagged ‘Time’

My Person of the Year and Why

December 2, 2012
Ron Paul, member of the United States House of...

Ron Paul, member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(Read on to see why in my opinion Ron Paul is the person of most influence over events of the world in this year 2012, at least of most impact on world events beginning this year).

Time Magazine, apparently attempting to expand its readership, or maybe to try to slow down the attrition of its readership to places that are not so tilted toward the plutocratic directives of the big-government crowd, with the smarter-than-you attitude, has put its person-of-the-year selections in the wild with a poll for public input.

Democratic Whoopsy: Kim Jong-Un and Mohamed Morsey Lead Time’s ‘Person Of The Year’ Poll | TechCrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/27/democratic-whoopsy-kim-jong-un-and-mohamed-morsey-lead-times-person-of-the-year-poll/

Gregory Ferenstein, the author of the techcrunch.com article, summed up the theme of the article well in the opening paragraph:

The Internet has a hard time taking things seriously and will happily enact silly vengeance on websites daring enough to leave important tasks up to a vote. Time’s coveted “Person of the Year” poll has been hijacked by thousands of pranksters who have voted up the not-so democratic icons, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and Egypt’s Mohamed Morsey. The up votes could be legitimate exercise in satire, punishing Time for even floating the idea of those two in a poll next to Obama and brave political dissidents. But, if Morsey–or worse, Kim–actually wins the poll, Time will have egg on its face (both Kim and Morsey have nearly twice the number of votes as 3rd place).

Of course Mr. Ferenstein missed one important reason that Time exposed its yearly attention-grabbing exercise to a public poll, and that is the desertion of its readership for periodicals that do not regularly insult them and their “clinging to their religion and guns”, to use one refrain that sums up the arrogance.

I’d much rather trust my facts-based faith than in government edicts from Central Planning, and in my neighbors’ guns than in a government that is so arrogant as to tell us they are ordering us around for our own good.

I’d rather trust what I know and what my neighbor knows than what any political power tells me, especially when it’s for my own good.

But Time Magazine generally goes along with this theme of “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you”. Reach for your wallet when you hear that.

Zuckerburg as one who most influenced the events of the year more than Julian Assange apparently sparked a firestorm of comment in the Blogosphere over issues of privacy. I don’t follow Time’s person-of-the-year posturing very much, this time it just got my attention this year from other places. I believe both of those persons influenced events surrounding privacy issues, albeit in different ways. Zuckerburg’s influence was in helping expose your most private moments to the whole world, Assange’s was in exposing government secrets.

Julian Assange’s contribution was more important, and no doubt hit like a missive into thousands of secret conversations in the halls of power, and no doubt resulted in hundreds of plans on drawing boards over strategies to get more political control over the Internet.

MY PERSPECTIVE ON “PERSON OF THE YEAR

Next December I’ll call this something else, to distinguish it from the Time Magazine term, if free speech is still as open as it is today, and the dollar crash has not yet put the means for it out of reach. Of course the right to free speech is under attack around the edges in the US, as bloggers that blast the TSA get harassed at airports with extra attention, and even the most outspoken voice in the United States Senate against TSA gets detained for hours at one airport, with the TSA denying it.

When Bush said we need to do this and that “without violating” constitutional rights, he evoked bitter sarcastic laughter at this sick joke. He said it with a straight face. Now Obama doesn’t even bother giving lip service to the idea.

The idea of Obama as professor of constitutional law at Saul Alinsky Institute is what I call a “negative credential”. It’s like Stalin giving lectures on civil liberties, or Paul Krugman giving lectures on how to get a prosperous economy. For those who don’t know about Krugman, he’s a columnist at New York that gives out advice to the government on how to improve the economy, and when his ideas cause poverty and misery he just says they simply should have done more of what he said.

MY “PERSON OF THE YEAR”

I’ll tell you right now who influenced world events more than any other. It is the most under-reported story on the Internet, not counting the various conspiracies and intrigues that go on in high places that will not be reported at all, “or else”, until a generation later, like MK-Ultra and the syphilis tests and the Gulf of Tonkin and such things.

That person is Ron Paul, because he is personally responsible for forcing the most important political issues into the “national conversation”, and forcing the media to actually cover it. His bold and very public statements on the real causes of economic malaise and the loss of liberty and proposal of very real solutions gave hope to many more to enter into their own local conversations on these topics.

A decade ago, there was no other political figure talking about the Federal Reserve, for example, and no one else made a credible and honest case against political hubris, the arrogance of thinking that a political authority could solve a problem by issuing a decree.

Those issues and his denouncing of the erosion of liberties in general attracted a gathering of like-minded freedom-loving people.

His campaign for liberty resulted in tens of millions of people around the world becoming aware of each other. Some of them, like me, agreed with most of his ideas long before they knew of him. Others among these tens of millions were attracted for their own various reasons, and in the process discovered the underlying and wider implications of individual liberty in general.

A very big deal, this one: Ron Paul’s following forced the Republican Platform to include an audit of the Federal Reserve, and a nod to the gold standard. This is unprecedented in 100 years.

Of course Romney would have done his best to avoid doing anything about either of those two positions, but it showed the influence of the movement for freedom that congealed this year 2012 in the Republican Party.

Another result of the Ron Paul campaign to use the presidential horse race to educate the public on the issues of liberty, is that despite the best efforts of the plutocrat class, many that were attracted to some of the propaganda that publicized the plutocrat-financed “Occupy” movement, discovered a lot of things they had in common with the Tea Party movement.

Time Magazine named the Occupy movement as one of the reasons in 2011 they named the generic “the protestor” as their person of the year, but totally ignored the Tea Party demonstrations of 2010 which gathered much more massive numbers and represented the flip of parties in the House. The Occupy thing fizzled, and it now looks like the “Arab Spring” protestors have become mere dupes in the reach for power by power-hungry Islamic authoritarians, and those authoritarians dupes of the world-class plutocrats that financed the Islamists’ rise to power from the shadows.

In summary, Ron Paul has influenced world events by helping liberty-minded people find each other.

The media gave attention to the issues that were in the public mind during 2008 and 2012, plus the issues he forced into the conversation as related to current policy, but note that he also opposed membership in the United Nations and regarded the organization as an implicit vehicle for world dictatorship. He avoided using those terms that way outright, I believe, but it’s obvious.

For Christians the full impact of that will become more manifest during the years leading up to the Tribulation and thereafter. The world dictator predicted by the Bible is also known today as The Antichrist. But those who understand what’s happening will recognize other opponents of his dictatorship as being against the Antichrist, even though they are not “saved”, or not yet “saved”.

We can call these others “anti-anti-Christs”.

Liberty-minded people will have no choice but will have to become “anti-Antichrists”.

The convergence of political and economic tyranny will become evident with the top-down command to all the people to take a “mark” in the right hand or in the forehead.

In that mark of the Beast, the issues of so-called political “civil rights” such as free speech, free press, freedom of religion, and what most people think of when they think of “civil rights”, these things will meet with the issues of economic freedom. You cannot buy or sell without this mark, we will be told.

Some authors at Wired Magazine are already pushing for what they call a “cashless society”, by which they mean abandoning paper money in favor of electronic cash. Memo to Wired: Cash by any other name is still “cash”.

It’s hard to wrap my mind around the idea that the very smart folks at Wired Magazine don’t realize how much this idea of the government mandating electronic cash shows how flimsy the whole idea of fiat currency is. I’m sure some of their staff cheered the Ron Paul candidacy, lots of geeks liked his ideas. His primary campaign in 2007-2008 at first attracted by far the most donations from Silicon Valley, especially Google, where at least one of their technical staff quit so he could dedicate his time to the campaign.

For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.- Mark 4:22

Thou shalt not steal.- Exodus 20:15

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s. -Exodus 20:17

And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.-1 Samuel 8:5
And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. -1 Samuel 8:7

The Spirit of the Lord [is] upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,-Luke 4:18

And they that understand among the people shall instruct many: yet they shall fall by the sword, and by flame, by captivity, and by spoil, [many] days.–Daniel 11:33