Saturday, January 18, 2014
Speech: The Right Of Rebellion Against Tyranny; Castro 1953
Fidel Castro speaks at his own trial while charged with treason and this excerpt is from his defence speech of 'History Will Absolve Me.'
“Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the
most ancient times to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.
It was so in the theocratic monarchies of remote
antiquity. In China it was almost a constitutional principle that when a king
governed rudely and despotically he should be deposed and replaced by a
virtuous prince.
The philosophers of ancient India upheld the
principle of active resistance to arbitrary authority. They justified
revolution and very often put their theories into practice. One of their
spiritual leaders used to say that 'an opinion held by the majority is stronger
than the king himself. A rope woven of many strands is strong enough to hold a
lion.'
The city states of Greece and republican Rome not
only admitted, but defended the meting-out of violent death to tyrants.
In the Middle Ages, John Salisbury in his Book
of the Statesman says that when a prince does not govern according to law
and degenerates into a tyrant, violent overthrow is legitimate and justifiable.
He recommends for tyrants the dagger rather than poison.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica,
rejects the doctrine of tyrannicide, and yet upholds the thesis that tyrants
should be overthrown by the people.
Martin Luther proclaimed that when a government
degenerates into a tyranny that violates the laws, its subjects are released
from their obligations to obey. His disciple, Philippe Melanchton, upholds the
right of resistance when governments become despotic. Calvin, the outstanding
thinker of the Reformation with regard to political ideas, postulates that
people are entitled to take up arms to oppose any usurpation.
No less a man that Juan Mariana, a Spanish Jesuit
during the reign of Philip II, asserts in his book, De Rege et Regis
Institutione, that when a governor usurps power, or even if he were
elected, when he governs in a tyrannical manner it is licit for a private citizen
to exercise tyrannicide, either directly or through subterfuge with the least
possible disturbance.
The French writer, François Hotman,
maintained that between the government and its subjects there is a bond or
contract, and that the people may rise in rebellion against the tyranny of
government when the latter violates that pact.
About the same time, a booklet - which came to be
widely read - appeared under the title Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, and it
was signed with the pseudonym Stephanus Junius Brutus. It openly declared that
resistance to governments is legitimate when rulers oppress the people and that
it is the duty of Honorable Judges to lead the struggle.
The Scottish reformers John Knox and John Poynet
upheld the same points of view. And, in the most important book of that
movement, George Buchanan stated that if a government achieved power without
taking into account the consent of the people, or if a government rules their
destiny in an unjust or arbitrary fashion, then that government becomes a
tyranny and can be divested of power or, in a final recourse, its leaders can
be put to death.
John Althus, a German jurist of the early 17th
century, stated in his Treatise on Politics that sovereignty as the
supreme authority of the State is born from the voluntary concourse of all its
members; that governmental authority stems from the people and that its unjust,
illegal or tyrannical function exempts them from the duty of obedience and
justifies resistance or rebellion.
Thus far, Honorable Judges, I have mentioned
examples from antiquity, from the Middle Ages, and from the beginnings of our
times. I selected these examples from writers of all creeds. What is more, you
can see that the right to rebellion is at the very root of Cuba's existence as
a nation. By virtue of it you are today able to appear in the robes of Cuban
Judges. Would it be that those garments really served the cause of justice!
It is well known that in England during the 17th
century two kings, Charles I and James II, were dethroned for despotism. These
actions coincided with the birth of liberal political philosophy and provided
the ideological base for a new social class, which was then struggling to break
the bonds of feudalism. Against divine right autocracies, this new philosophy
upheld the principle of the social contract and of the consent of the governed,
and constituted the foundation of the English Revolution of 1688, the American
Revolution of 1775 and the French Revolution of 1789. These great revolutionary
events ushered in the liberation of the Spanish colonies in the New World - the
final link in that chain being broken by Cuba. The new philosophy nurtured our
own political ideas and helped us to evolve our Constitutions, from the
Constitution of Guáimaro up to the Constitution of 1940. The latter was
influenced by the socialist currents of our time; the principle of the social
function of property and of man's inalienable right to a decent living were
built into it, although large vested interests have prevented fully enforcing
those rights.
The right of insurrection against tyranny then
underwent its final consecration and became a fundamental tenet of political
liberty.
As far back as 1649, John Milton wrote that
political power lies with the people, who can enthrone and dethrone kings and
have the duty of overthrowing tyrants.
John Locke, in his essay on government, maintained
that when the natural rights of man are violated, the people have the right and
the duty to alter or abolish the government. 'The only remedy against
unauthorized force is opposition to it by force.'
Jean-Jaques Rousseau said with great eloquence in
his Social Contract: 'While a people sees itself forced to obey and
obeys, it does well; but as soon as it can shake off the yoke and shakes it
off, it does better, recovering its liberty through the use of the very right
that has been taken away from it.' 'The strongest man is never strong enough to
be master forever, unless he converts force into right and obedience into duty.
Force is a physical power; I do not see what morality one may derive from its
use. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at the very least,
it is an act of prudence. In what sense should this be called a duty?' 'To
renounce freedom is to renounce one's status as a man, to renounce one's human
rights, including one's duties. There is no possible compensation for
renouncing everything. Total renunciation is incompatible with the nature of
man and to take away all free will is to take away all morality of conduct. In
short, it is vain and contradictory to stipulate on the one hand an absolute
authority and on the other an unlimited obedience ...'
Thomas Paine said that 'one just man deserves more
respect than a rogue with a crown.'
The people's right to rebel has been opposed only
by reactionaries like that clergyman of Virginia, Jonathan Boucher, who said:
'The right to rebel is a censurable doctrine derived from Lucifer, the father
of rebellions.'
The Declaration of Independence of the Congress of
Philadelphia, on July 4th, 1776, consecrated this right in a beautiful
paragraph which reads: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Happiness; That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; That whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or abolish it and to institute a new Government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.'
The famous French Declaration of the Rights of Man
willed this principle to the coming generations: 'When the government violates
the rights of the people, insurrection is for them the most sacred of rights
and the most imperative of duties.' 'When a person seizes sovereignty, he
should be condemned to death by free men.’
Friday, January 17, 2014
Photos: A Mans Best Friend Aged 20 Years Finally Passes.
Fred Unger giving his 19 year old dog a swim in Lake Superior in Wisconsin for it soothed his ravaging and painful arthritis. His dog, and loyal companion since he was a pup, passed away peacefully in July of 2013 at the ripe old age of twenty or 140 in man years. Truly best friends to each other.....................
Speech: General George S Patton; D Day 1944
This summary is not available. Please
click here to view the post.
Oscar Wilde's last Paragraph of De Profundis ("From the depths") 1897
Oscar Wilde’s last paragraph of his long yet beautiful letter, De profundis (“from the depths”), was
written from Jail between January and March 1897, and moves today as strong as
it did then.
“All trials are trials
for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times
have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second
time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison
for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me,
has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike,
will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose
silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I
may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my
footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great
waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole again.”
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Cicero Quotes On Yesterday About Today
“The authority of those who teach
is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”
“What is morally wrong can never be
advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be
to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of
action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.”
“We must not say every mistake is a
foolish one.”
“The shifts of fortune test the
reliability of friends.”
“Times are bad. Children no longer
obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”
“If we are not ashamed to think it,
we should not be ashamed to say it.”
“Laws are silent in times of war.”
“To be ignorant of what occurred
before you were born is to remain always a child.”
“A nation can survive its fools,
and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at
the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers
rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his
victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the
baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation,
he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the
city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer
is less to fear.”
“Six mistakes mankind keeps making
century after century:
Believing that personal gain is
made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot
be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is
impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and
refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to
believe and live as we do.”
“The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret -- that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.”
“Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.”
“It is foolish to tear one’s hair
in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.”
“A mind without instruction can no
more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.”
Cicero was born 106 BC and died 43 BC
Barry Clifford: Some Thoughts For This Day
1) Don't question yourself anymore
2)
Do not contact negative people and avoid the others
3)
Smile at least once every 15 minutes
4)
Practice good thoughts while keeping out the bad ones
5)
Contact someone nice that you always meant to
6)
Liberate your thoughts with pleasure and without the
guilt
7) Speak your mind to others and to yourself
8) Accept that your birth was a great accident of chance
9)
Accept that your life can only be determined by you
10) Never say sorry unless you
mean it
11) Accept your mistakes were
because you at least tried
12) Accept your regrets as part of the
mistakes
13) Stop thinking about yesterday and the day before that
14) Believe yourself to be number '1' yet equal to
all
15) Accept the night as the end of the days great adventure
16) Tomorrow, start this exercise all over again
Photos: A Question Of Pride
Two female lions face off on a lone male to protect their pride.
These two male lions face off over ownership of a pride and the only thing hurt was pride itself.
By Sarah Skinner and Cater News agency (below)
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Article: The Most Gullible Man In Britain
The village ruined by the most gullible man in
Britain: Incredible story of the chartered surveyor, an email pledging a £3m
lotto win and the neighbours impoverished in a web of sheer greed
By Paul Bracchi
Arthur Stimpson, from Norfolk, was 'brainwashed' by an email scam into
believing he had won £2.7million on a Spanish lottery and handed over £50,000
of his own money to conmen who claimed it was needed to release the massive
windfall. When his own money ran out, Stimpson fooled those closest to him into
handing over more than £1.1million in his increasingly desperate bid to get his
hands on the jackpot.
Back
in the summer of 2007, an email from ‘Spain’ arrived in Arthur Stimpson’s
inbox. The words ‘ATTENTION: NOTIFICATION OF AWARD’ were written in capital
letters at the top and below was a letter informing him that he had won a major
prize in the Spanish national lottery.
His
name had apparently been selected at random and entered by computer into the
draw. All he had to do was ring the number given to claim his prize.
Now,
at this stage, most of us would probably have stopped reading and pressed the
‘delete’ button because, as the old adage goes, ‘if something appears too good
to be true, then it probably is’.
If
only Mr Stimpson had heeded that advice. Instead, curiosity got the better of
him and he found himself dialling the number in the email. The voice at the end
of the line was ‘delighted’ to tell him that he had scooped 3.3 million euros
(£2.7 million).
Of
course, there would be ‘administrative costs’ requiring the payment of certain
‘transfer fees’, for tax and insurance purposes and suchlike, but when these
had been cleared the ‘transfer process’ could begin and he would receive his
windfall.
Mr
Stimpson, it should be pointed out, attended both university and public school
and was a Member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (MRICS). In
other words, he was a man of considerable intelligence and accomplishment.
Remember that, when you read what follows.
His
decision to take what he had been told by the man with the thick Spanish accent
at face value was the start of an astonishing — and sometimes farcical — chain
of events that had cataclysmic consequences, not just for Mr Stimpson himself
but also for his wife, four children, aged 12 to 23, and the local community in
the village of Suffield in Norfolk (pop: 140), who were unwittingly entangled
in an ever-spreading nightmare.
For,
as any sensible person must have already guessed, behind that ‘too good to be
true’ email were ruthless conmen.
How
much do you think the normally levelled-headed, bespectacled Mr Stimpson paid
to the ‘representatives’ of the ‘state lottery board in Madrid’ — in so-called
‘transfer fees’? The figure is believed to have exceeded an almost unbelievable
£1 million.
The
first £50,000 came from Mr Stimpson’s own life savings. After he had ‘wired’
the money to Iberian bank accounts, though, he was he told that — surprise,
surprise — it was not enough to release the ‘jackpot’. More fees were needed.
So Mr Stimpson persuaded friends and neighbours into parting with their own
money with promises of up to 1,000 per cent returns. Most never saw their cash
again.
On at least one occasion, the
court heard, Mr Stimpson put £75,000 into a plastic bag and handed it over to
‘men from the lottery board’ who turned up at the end of his drive by prior
arrangement.
The
brothers who run a local butcher’s shop gave him £74,000; a farmer who had
known Mr Stimpson for many years contributed £110,000; the godfather to one of
Mr Stimpson’s children stumped up £90,000. Others ‘loaned’ him sums of
£150,000, £85,000, £30,000, or £10,000. In all, 13 victims were drawn into Mr
Stimpson’s desperate attempt to obtain the non-existent lottery millions.
Almost
every penny, police suspect, ended up the hands of the lottery conmen.
It
would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking example of gullibility,
fuelled by greed, than the story of Arthur Stimpson, which culminated this week
with his being jailed for four years at Norwich Crown Court on multiple fraud
and forgery charges.
By
then, Mr Stimpson, in his customary grey tweed jacket, was a broken man; he had
lost everything — his reputation, his friends, and his magnificent
eight-bedroom former Victorian rectory worth £1.25 million, which was sold to
help pay off creditors (including those he had duped himself).
But
the sale allowed him to repay them only £280,000 because the property had a
mortgage, leaving them £874,000 out of pocket. Has one email ever cost a man so
dear?
It
is the details of his story that are so astonishing. On at least one occasion,
the court heard, Mr Stimpson put £75,000 into a plastic bag and handed it over
to ‘men from the lottery board’ who turned up at the end of his drive by prior
arrangement. His wife Emma, needless to say, was unaware of the illicit
rendezvous or the increasingly dangerous world her husband was being sucked in
Sold: The Old rectory in Suffield, Norfolk, the
former home of chartered surveyor turned conman Arthur Stimpson
Mr
Stimpson is an extreme example; but he is certainly not alone. Every day,
otherwise sensible individuals, from all over the country, succumb to cyber
crime. The overseas lottery scam is among the most ubiquitous, the modern
version, if you like, of the notorious timeshare rackets of the Seventies and
Eighties.
The
conmen, some of them Nigerians based on the Spanish mainland, but with a
network of accomplices in Britain, pump out faxes, emails and letters in
English claiming to be the organisers of El Gordo, or The Fat One (a Christmas
lottery with billions in prize money on offer) or La Primitiva (a weekly
lottery) to name but two.
The
vast majority of those targeted are not taken in. But a very significant
minority are. How significant a minority? An estimated three million people
every year, according to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), although few end up
being fleeced so spectacularly as Arthur Stimpson.
Even
now, those who knew him as a conservatively dressed chartered surveyor still
find it hard to believe that this was the same Arthur Stimpson who was passing
carrier bags stuffed full of notes to shady ‘middlemen’.
It’s
not as if he needed the money. Stimpson, a school contemporary of Stephen Fry,
was wealthy in his own right, the scion of a well-known local farming and
land-owning family. He worked freelance for several firms of local estate
agents, specialising in country house and agricultural land sales, and had a
reputation for being ‘straightforward and honest’,.
So
what happened after he responded to that fateful email? Well, a crude but
well-rehearsed criminal operation swung in to action, one that would be
unleashed on anyone foolish enough to take the bait. It lasted more than three
unrelenting years.
Once
he had expressed an interest, Mr Stimpson began to be bombarded — via email —
with ‘official’ bank letters, documents and certificates.
Some
bore the name of a Luis Alberti from the ‘Casa Blanca’ bank in Madrid. A simple
Google search would have established that the Casa Blanca bank does not exist.
There
was also a ‘statement’ supposedly showing that the windfall had been deposited
in the Madrid branch of the Banca Unicaja. This bank is real enough. But,
again, had Mr Stimpson bothered to type ‘Banca Unicaja’ into an internet search
engine, he would have discovered that the ‘Banca Unicaja’ has been frequently
used in lottery scam correspondence.
Indeed,
a warning about such scams has been posted on the website of the British
Embassy in Madrid. ‘The Spanish Lottery has informed us that they are aware of
the major problem of the circulation of bogus letters announcing false lottery
wins,’ it says. ‘Many of these letters purport to be from the state lottery
organisation, but are not genuine.’
The
initial email was sent in July, 2007. He is understood to have wired the first
‘transfer fees’ instalment to Spain just a few days later. It is unclear for exactly
how much.
But
he continued transferring money at regular intervals and was repeatedly assured
on the phone, or by email, that he was about to receive his fortune ‘any day.’
Within a few months, all his savings had been squandered. By then, Mr Stimpson
had lost £50,000.
‘His story [about the lottery]
sounded feasible at the time,’ said one victim, who asked not to be named, but
who lost more than £50,000. ‘At first I gave him £10,000. Then we gave him more
money over the next few weeks. He gave us copies of all sorts of bank
statements and letters which apparently showed the money was waiting for him.'
Why
didn’t he just cut his losses and stop? It is a question, of course, that could
be put to anyone who has ever been conned; anyone who has ever gambled.
Presumably, Mr Stimpson thought he had passed the ‘point of no return,’ that he
had no option but to keep ‘gambling’ in the hope that he would eventually
recoup his ‘stake’.
In
fact, Mr Stimpson went for broke, so to speak, embroiling friends and business
acquaintances into the scam. Among the first to be approached, in April, 2008,
were father-and-son farmers Steven and Peter Howell, from nearby Bintree. They
gave him more than £100,000 (they took the precaution of taking out a legal
charge on Mr Stimpson’s home so they eventually got their money back).
Others
were not so lucky. ‘His story [about the lottery] sounded feasible at the
time,’ said one victim, who asked not to be named, but who lost more than
£50,000. ‘At first I gave him £10,000. Then we gave him more money over the
next few weeks. He gave us copies of all sorts of bank statements and letters
which apparently showed the money was waiting for him.
‘He
was promising £10,000 back for very £1,000 we spent. The money was always just
days away. I put him on the spot once and asked him to swear on the lives of
his wife and children that he was getting the money and he did swear. I think
he believed it.’
Police
believe all the money was either being wired abroad or personally handed over
to the fraudsters in envelopes by Mr Stimpson. All the details of these
handover meetings are supplied by Mr Stimpson, and it is possible that none
took place, and that he was pocketing some of the money himself in a desperate
bid to cover his losses. But on the balance of evidence, detectives believe his
story.
One
of the most colourful meetings — perhaps bizarre would be a more accurate
description — took place in London in the summer of 2009. Mr Stimpson was shown
a briefcase allegedly containing several million U.S. dollars by a man
purporting to be a Spanish ‘bank official.’ This was his lottery money, Mr
Stimpson was told.
It
had been stained with protective dye for ‘security reasons’ to prevent anyone
stealing it. Before it could be handed over to Mr Stimpson, it would have to
be sent to specialist company in Switzerland to be cleaned with
chemicals. As a ‘gesture of good faith,’ however, Mr Stimpson was given a small
amount of dollars that had already been ‘cleaned’.
Shortly
afterwards, yet another bogus statement was produced to show that the ‘cleaned’
lottery prize money was in an offshore account with HSBC and ready to be
‘transferred to him imminently’.
And so it went on.
Paul
and Karl Graves run a butcher’s shop in Briston. Arthur Stimpson was regular customer
for years. They agreed to lend him £74,000 after being shown family oil
paintings and heirlooms which Mr Stimpson said were worth tens of thousands of
pounds. He assured the brothers that he would sell these possessions to repay
them if the lottery millions didn’t materialise. In April last year Mr Stimpson
did ‘repay’ them — just £20,000.
The
list of victims goes on. Friend James Thompson, who chose Mr Stimpson as
godfather to one of his children, never received a penny of the £80,000 he
loaned him. Then there’s the Agnew brothers, James, 58, Stephen, 57, and St
John, 47, childhood friends of Mr Stimpson who regularly socialised with him.
Mr
Stimpson borrowed a total of more than £400,000 from them. They got £30,000
back. ‘We were all friends,’ said St John Agnew, a stockbroker. ‘My father was
a very close friend of his father. He has totally betrayed the trust we had in
him’.
Mr
Stimpson was declared bankrupt in August, 2010. The following month he was
forced to sell the family home — and move in with relatives. Mr Stimpson was
finally questioned by detectives last December when they began taking
statements from his victims.
What
did he have to lose, Mr Stimpson must have asked himself, when he called that
Spanish mobile phone number back in 2007. The answer, with hindsight, was
everything.
‘There
was a time once when Mr Stimpson was the well-thought of son of a well-thought
of man,’ his barrister told Norwich Crown Court. ‘He feels nothing but remorse.
He knows trust is at the core of every relationship. He bears responsibility
for tearing that fabric. He would do anything to restore the fortunes of those
he has affected for the worse.’
That
will never happen. The perpetrators of the scam have never been identified, and
since Stimpson pleaded guilty on all charges, the case is closed — the money is
gone for ever, vanished overseas into a network of untraceable accounts.
No
doubt, the lottery scammers can scarcely believe their luck, and are our there
right now, hunting for another victim like Arthur Stimpson. Someone whose
common sense can blinded by simple greed.
Photos: Flooding in Oughterard
Barry
Photos: Getting Dinner In Less Than 60 Seconds
These are the incredible photos taken by photographer, Amos Nachoum, in Botswana in Africa.
Getting into position
Tuning the angle
Under water and on target
Leaving with dinner
Going home
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