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LIBERTY:

Governments are standardizing their national ID cards so people can be monitored around the world.

"The smart ID cards being adopted by different nations worldwide are all on a common format: – ICAO 9303 part 3. (This document available can viewed online here)…Behind the ID project, the participating nations are also all adopting a common format for personal information on government databases. This is what ID cards are about – more than the physical cards themselves, they are an interface to access databases of personal information. Adopting a common format for cards implies adopting a common format for data systems and databases. Interoperability of systems and universal accessibility of data has been an explicit goal, not merely implicit. There is also a project to make your personal data available to all other governments, worldwide."

How scary is that? This is another reason to oppose national ID.

You know how the new passports are supposed to be ultra-secure? Remember how they couldn't be forged? Then how could Elvis Pressley get one and use it to board a plane? How did those (presumed) Israeli agents get fake passports from other countries to assassinate that Hamas guy in Dubai? Don't buy the hype about these ultra-secure new technologies. They aren't for security. They're for controlling citizens.

"Naturally, this wasn’t supposed to happen. When governments began issuing digitally encoded passports a few years ago, it was supposed to improve border security. For instance, Maura Harty, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, told a Congressional hearing in 2004:

“Embedding biometrics into U.S. passports to establish a clear link between the person issued the passport and the user is an important step forward in the international effort to strengthen border security.”

Only, the technology doesn’t work.

Indeed, the “ultra-secure” RFID chips digital passports contain can be cloned with about $100 worth of off-the-shelf electronic equipment. As a result, we have teams of assassins and who-knows-who-else roaming the world with digitally modified passports. Indeed, digital passports actually are far less secure than their predecessors.

The reason is that digital passports—and indeed digital data in general—suffers from an inherent security flaw…

If you take a non-digital passport and try to modify it physically, it’s very hard to do so without leaving some evidence of what you’ve done. There might be smudges, ink marks, or microscopic impressions of a razor blade used to cut out an old photo and insert a new one.

But with our new “ultra-secure” digital passports, if you figure out how to change the data on the RFID chip, the earlier data vanishes. There’s absolutely no trace of the tampering."

This was know before these passports were ever implemented, yet government implemented them anyway. The national ID cards use the same technology. Moreover, because they give us a false sense of security, getting us to rely on them instead of our brains, they make us even less secure. Like gun control laws, these aren't about stopping criminals. They're about controlling citizens.


ECONOMY:


No amount of printing money or government stimulus can make up for the dramatic loss in investment spending.

"While most Americans are familiar with the broad ups and downs of the economy and the job market — the stuff of daily headlines — the deeper story of the continuing recession can be found buried in the statistical appendix to the 2010 report of the president's Council of Economic Advisers.

That story: a devastating decline in investment spending.

The government's data reveal that, contrary to popular belief, consumer spending held up fairly well during the recession, falling less than 2% from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of '09.

Most of this decline was erased during the third and fourth quarters of 2009, so by the final quarter of last year real private consumption spending was less than 1% below its previous quarterly peak.

Although the drop in private consumption spending obviously contributed to the recession, the drop in private investment spending — primarily business purchases of structures, equipment, software and additions to inventories — was far more significant.

Gross private domestic investment peaked in 2006. Between the first quarter of that year and the second quarter of 2009, it fell precipitously, by nearly 34%.

During the second half of 2009, investment spending increased by only 10%, so that late last year it was still (when measured at an annual rate) running 29% below its early 2006 level.

This huge decline in investment spending portends an extended period of slow economic growth, lasting several years and perhaps longer. Worn-out equipment, obsolete software, ill-maintained structures and depleted inventories are not the stuff of which rapid, sustained economic growth is made."

IPhones purchased with funny money don't make a recovery.


FEDERAL RESERVE:


India and China's central bank both want to buy the same gold. Why is the IMF selling gold? Is it an attempt to keep the price down to mask worldwide economic problems?

"It’s pretty hard to make a case that IMF sales will hurt the gold price. As I said a few weeks ago in my dirty jokes column, IMF sales tend to mark bottoms in the price and not tops."

Sounds like that's its modus operandi.


The US isn't alone. The Canadian central bank has eroded away 94 percent of the Canadian dollar's value in 75 years. Central banks destroy currency everywhere.

"There are big stakes involved. Inflation is a way for governments to spend more without having to directly impose taxes. A central bank is an essential part of big government.

Central banking operations also serve as a permanent bailout for debtors. Interest rates are usually kept lower than they would be in a free financial market. And by reducing the value of the money being owed, they make life easier for debtors. So the modern era of central banking is one where debt, public and private, inexorably grows, to the point where the whole monetary edifice now threatens to collapse. 

Finally, central banks protect the reckless practices of financial institutions, who lend money that they don’t have under the fraudulent fractional reserve system. With government acting as a lender of last resort, financial institutions are prone to taking greater and greater risks. As we’ve seen recently, wads of cheap cash are always at their disposal to keep them solvent and profitable."

We're living the truth of that statement.

"All the gobbledegook that passes for monetary economics nowadays aims to obscure the basic economic fact that central banks make us poorer. The Bank of Canada’s archives contain endless studies about ways to calculate money supply, fancy rules on how to manipulate interest rates, etc. This scholarship is supposed to help central bank bureaucrats better “preserve the value of money” when, in fact, the very existence of the Bank is the reason why money gets devalued."

This is a great essay.


Peter Schiff predicts a dollar sell off in 2010, but it's hard to see how the euro will stabilize in time to make that happen. Schiff mentions that uncertainty, and while I understand the dollar will fall in the long run, I'm surprised he committed himself to 2010 in that prediction.


EDUCATION:


Evidence the public school movement was started by Protestants to stop Catholic schools. They've nearly wiped them out by now.

"Horace Mann, the founder of the public school movement in Massachusetts, believed that “the [public] schools are the means, instruments, vehicles, and true church by which salvation is given to society.” Given that goal, Mann “changed the function of education from ‘mere learning’ or religiously-oriented education to ‘social efficiency, civic virtue, and character” (by the twentieth century, character “ceased to be a concern” in the public schools, Rushdoony notes). Mann also demanded that control of community schools be transferred into state hands.

...

John Swett was responsible for “framing the basic legislation of the state system” as California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction during the 1860s. Swett made his goals perfectly clear: “Children arrived at the age of maturity belong not to the parents but to the State, to society, and to the country,” he insisted – so children should be educated not according to the beliefs of their parents, but those of the government. The “civil religion” taught in government schools was designed to neutralize the papist heresies taught in the parochial schools."

Look how successful they were and what it's cost us.


Obama wants to consolidate more power over schools in the Dept. of Education with "sweeping" changes to further harm our children. I have to go with stupid on this one. I bet Obama really thinks he's so gifted he can command the government monopoly on schools to do a good job. You have to figure the timing on this announcement is an attempt to distract the American people from stopping health care oppression.


HEALTH CARE:


Cato breaks down several reasons why Obamacare increases government spending on health care, not decreases it.


POLICE STATE:


Swat team arrests man for legally buying guns because they were concerned what he might do with them. Forget actually committing a crime or probably cause, now police need only be concerned to arrest somebody. Coming to your house soon.

How the government gets around due process by using regulatory courts and government experts. All these regulatory courts are unconstitutional. The Constitution created a justice system and provide no provision for another in the executive branch.

Here's how the national ID card will work:

"Once a card is instituted into the system, card creep will begin. It will begin to be used for other purposes. First, what they will do is mark the easy ones, sex offenders and those found guilty of domestic violence. Then they'll do those who have a DUI charge. Then they'll do those who are charged with hate speech.Then they'll mark the cards of those who have been arrested for protesting. Then it will be those who have managed their employees in an "abusive" manner.

Eventually, landlords will be required to have the card reader.If you are a sex offender (and in many states this is broadly defined to include hookers), you will not be able to live in a neighborhood where there is any type of activities for children, regardless of how small the group of children and how well chaperoned. Which means you will end up in the dead end part of town. Try to turn your life around after getting marked like this, forget about it. You will be on the street as a hooker, until you die.

If you were married to someone, or went out on a date with someone, who was legally savvy and charged you with "domestic violence". It will be on your card. Want to get married again? The card will be checked and at a minimum you will have to take "domestic abuse" classes. Way down the road, with this mark, you may be denied the right to re-marry. Did you have one too many drinks a year ago? It will be on your card. Go into a bar, (We will all have to show our cards there. Thye will have the readers.), and the bartender will give you two beers at most. You see if you are pulled over for a DUI after your card is marked, he's going to jail for 20 years. He's not going to take that chance. In other words, forget about worker Christmas parties for the rest of your life. Forget about unwinding with your co-workers at the end of the week. It will be to embarrassing, when you are cut off while you are still totally sober.

If there ever is a chance you ever get so mad that you protest something and are "detained" or arrested, it will go on your card, not as a protester, but as dangerous and anti-society. Try getting on a plane with that mark, or a passport to travel overseas.

Are you a manager who actually requires an honest days work from your employees? You know there are those that will use the system to get a mark on your card. It's a delicate thing to fire anyone these days. It will in the future be difficult to manage anyone, because once you get that mark on the card, you won't be managing anyone.

Do you like to speak out on topics, with no malice intended against any specific group? Forget about it. You will be branded a speaker of "hate," and it will go on your card."

What government program hasn't worked this way?

WAR:

Libertarians love to quote this 48 percent of the world's military spending is done by the US with no context as if it means we have as big a military as the rest of the world combined. That's baloney. What it means is we spend way too much for the weapons we buy compared to other nations. A US Navy ship costs way more than a comparable ship in the Russian Navy. A US fighter jet costs way more than a comparable Russian fighter jet. The maintenance on our weapons is outrageously higher. It's not that our military is so big compared to everybody else's (though it is bigger than we need for defense of the US). It's that we pay way too much for it. IP laws are a big part of it. Corruption is a big part of it. That we keep using our weapons on foreigners and have to replace them is a big part of it. Because we're fighting wars half way around the world, fuel is a big part of it. If we ended the wars, brought all troops stationed overseas homes, reduced the corruption, reformed IP laws, and brought competitive forces into weapons procurement, we could field a comparable military to what we have today and focus it on defending America instead destroying other countries for a fraction of the cost. But acting like that number implies some apples to apples comparison between the capability of the US military and foreign militaries, as is implied when they pull it out with no context, is intellectually dishonest.

We certainly don't need to spend 4 percent of GDP on the military. That's crazy. That was a huge amount when we faced the Soviet threat. Now the most significant threat we face is terrorism.

NATO admits to another massacre of civilians and cover-up in Afghanistan. Taliban suicide bombers kill 30 in Khandahar.

POLITICS:

Liberals start coffee parties in coffee houses to respond to tea parties. You can't make this stuff up.

MISC:

Where does the Constitution give government the power to make us change our clocks?

"Never think of yourself as rallying a tribe but rather think of recruiting others into the smart set." I may not do that well enough in my essays. I'm going to have to think about that.


Everybody complains we have too much or too little gridlock in Washington. Gridlock is a myth. This Congress has already passed 145 laws. That's 10 a month. Some gridlock. It's hard to find this page. I assume that's intentional.