Thom Hartman "Libertarian Paradise Complete w/mad cow disease"

I've been so completely offended by this blanket response draped over a narrow frame that I feel the need to rant.

First off, there's a much bigger issue which makes the entire point of this video completely moot. The thing of it is that JUST because a single cow was discovered with the disease does NOT by any means indicate there's "nothing to worry about". Cows don't just GET Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis("mad cow disease", which translates to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans) by any sort of random chance. The fact is that cows develop BSE when they're fed reconstituted animal by-product.

Cows are ruminant animals, which means they're meant to eat grass, which is considered too inefficient to supply the demands of American beef consumption... SO, rather than educating the public about the health benefits of limited meat consumption, we have government subsidized industrial meat processing plants which feed their cows government subsidized (genetically modified) corn and soy... which is pretty bad on its own, but because it's even MORE profitable to throw all the leftover bits from the slaughtering process into the GMO grains, that's what happens. This makes a feed that makes the cows get very fat, very quickly AND unfortunately causes them to develop BSE, which is the inevitable result of cannibalism.

BSE/CJD are caused by prions. Prions are nasty little bacteria that latch onto everything they touch and, as of yet have no easy way of being killed short of burning them at temperatures hot enough to MELT STEEL (this means anything cooked on a surface that once cooked tainted meat can potentially pass the disease right along... so going vegetarian doesn't help worth a damn unless every single knife/pan/dish used has never touched industrial meat). Because of this, whenever prions are discovered in a lab, all the equipment must be destroyed. Because of THAT, prions aren't typically tested for in labs. Because of THAT, many of the people who contract CJD are routinely diagnosed as having Alzheimer's Disease because the symptoms are a similar dementia.

...but wouldn't that be suspicious in young people? Well... the kicker about CJD is that it takes between 20-40 YEARS to show symptoms, so it's highly unlikely that a child will ever die from it. The disease takes a comparatively long time to display symptoms in cows as well, and by the time they show, it's well past too late to do anything. Every other member of the herd has derived its food from the same source, and will be sold as food long before they have the opportunity to display symptoms.

So that's just the BACKGROUND to why Thom's video here is an insult. If you want to know where I'm getting all this information, try reading "International Meat Crisis" by Harvestime Books.

Now... as for Thom's libertarian-bashing. It's EXACTLY as senseless and unproductive as the same old ad nauseum democrat/republican fuckery, without being so obviously under reign by the same hands... The thing that really sucks about libertarian/socialist nay-saying is that BOTH sides have viable solutions AND considerable blind spots.

Socialists have the principles of altruism, equality and justice which are undeniably essential to a thriving society. However, when combined with imperialist empires, these programs with noble visions invariably become corrupted by parasitical management. Regulations become too stringent, and bureaucracy thwarts all efforts toward progress while the leaders engage in cronyism and bribery.

Libertarians have the principles of individual sovereignty, personal responsibility and non-violation which are undeniably essential to a FREE society. However, when combined with privately regulated forms of currency, these ideals are utterly worthless. Materialism and greed have no bounds, and people are permitted to screw each other endlessly in pursuit of financial one-ups over the next person.

So... is the discovery of a single cow with BSE just-cause for hailing the importance of government monitoring? Absolutely not. The fact they release this information with the final note being "there's nothing to worry about" PROVES that they're continuing to keep people in the dark! Does this mean there should be NO regulation whatsoever? Of course not! ...but look at the regulations for certified Fair Trade or Cruelty-Free products, which are both voluntary market systems AND much more stringent than anything under the FDA or USDA.

The market IS capable of regulating itself to a large degree, but it requires information to be widely disseminated and readily available... As it stands, information IS still readily available(CISPA hasn't passed yet... and by the way, such efforts to regulate the internet ARE inherently socialist in nature), but information is NOT widely disseminated. This information is not reaching millions of people, 24/7 on every channel/billboard/radio transmission/print publication. Information like this has to be sought for. Oprah tried to disseminate SOME of this information during the Mad Cow scare in the 1990s, and the government-subsidized beef industry sued the pants off her! It's imperialist government regulation which has CAUSED mad cow disease to exist in the first place!

If information similar to what I'm presenting in this blog WERE permitted to reach millions of people, we wouldn't HAVE american tax dollars subsidizing GMO crops, or rBGH-laden milk, or CJD-causing beef... We might have products available which WOULD be able to advertize what they feed their cattle or what they don't include in their ingredients, which WOULD cause their sales to increase and put the poison stuff out of business... But this is not the case. We have (socialist)regulations in place which prevent free speech in the press and airwaves... and so we continue to have (socialist)subsidies going directly to Monsanto, and Big Oil, and Big Pharma...

I LOVE socialism when it means keeping everyone fed, sheltered, educated, cared for.... but it's absolutely the worst thing ever when people are FORCED to accept food they don't want, shelter they don't appreciate, education they don't need, health care that's not first rate... When taxes are collected at the barrel of a gun and dispersed at the will of private interests(who have effectively bought themselves a sort of libertarian paradise exclusive to them), then you have, well... the US as it stands while I type this.

What if we stopped going along with manifest destiny? What if each state operated as a sovereign nation? What if we all agreed to disagree, as it were, and just let there be a place for everything? What if states could choose to legalize or prohibit whatever they liked, and people who weren't content with it were free to move? What if taxes weren't inevitable, but voluntary and non-coercive? What if we allowed individuals to do what they like, so long as they aren't violating anyone else? What if we didn't automatically violate every person born by tagging them with a social security number and taxing them to live from the day they're born? What if we viewed violations of nature in the same light as violations of humans? Would we let corporations continue to rape the environment to protect their right to make a profit?(fuck no)

To Thom, I would like to say this: A "Libertarian Paradise" is a socialist paradise as well, because there isn't one or the other who isn't still a person. That which bends does not break, and if libertarians and socialists can just bend together, we might just be able to figure out what it means to be human.