China blasts the Nobel Peace Prize committee for giving the award to a Chinese political prisoner and censors communication relating to the award.
SOCIALISM:
Democrats considering vote on card check during the lame duck session. Republicans should be able to filibuster it.
FASCISM:
Gary North reports that leftist advocate of Nazi economic policy is "getting a hearing in Tea Party circles". Getting a hearing in tea party circles is pretty vague, and a hearing doesn't mean acceptance.
"The strategic problem is this: the Tea Party movement is filled with people who have no economic understanding. They cannot distinguish Ron Paul's opposition to the FED, based on the gold coin standard, from Ellen Brown's opposition, based on a fiat money standard. They are intellectually defenseless."I give the tea party people more credit. How hard is it to see that this movement wants to give government more power?
"In 2006, Brown's 500-page book appeared. By 2008, it was in its 4th printing. It is an attack on fractional reserve banking and the Federal Reserve System. It began getting a hearing on the World Wide Web.
The book does not initially appear what it really is: a call to set up a government-funded welfare state. But there are brief statements to this effect in the early pages. Only on page 234, halfway through the book, does she get to the point: the Nazi economy.
The German people were in such desperate straits that they relinquished control of the country to a dictator, and in this they obviously deviated from the "American system," which presupposed a democratically-governed Commonwealth. But autocratic authority did give Adolf Hitler something the American Greenbackers could only dream about – total control of the economy. He was able to test their theories, and he proved that they worked.
At this point, anyone with an IQ above 90 should begin to smell a rat."That's why I'm not worried about this. Happy to be informed so I can intelligently confront this idea if I run into it, but not worried.
ECONOMY:
Many job losses are from state and local governments cutting bureaucrats. That's a good thing. But many others are from the private sector. That's bad.
Housing prices in Britain drop £6,000 in a month.
As if all the government's interventions in the market haven't done enough damage, Obama considers using the government's gun to stop mortgage companies from foreclosing. Hey, why bother making a house payment? This will cause mortgage companies to dramatically reduce the number of loans they make and to increase the interest rates. This is an attempt to artificially inflate the price of houses and it will backfire since almost nobody will be able to buy one if this is implemented. How's that economic recovery working out for you?
Gary North translates Bernanke's grim speech about America's looming debt crisis, ignored by the media because:
"Ben Bernanke gave a grim speech on October 4. It did not get media attention. That was because it was so grim.
It was on the looming fiscal crisis of the Federal government. There will be no easy way to avoid it, he said. Congress has to decide what spending to cut. This means that Congress must decide which special-interest groups to alienate. Then it must decide which taxes to raise. Whose ox will get gored?"God forbid the propaganda arm of government, the accomplice of the left and the right, tell the people the hard truth they need to understand. If you thought the media was supposed to inform you and provide a check on government, you're sadly mistaken. In support of my claim that the first job requirement of every aristocrat is to lie without conscience:
"The essence of politics is buying votes with the taxpayers' money, but without losing more votes than you buy. That is to say, there must be deception. Each beneficiary must conclude: "I am going to get more out of this than I am likely to pay into the system." They all cannot be correct about this. So, the tax burden is concealed."Of course. The only way for an aristocrat to advance his or her career as a professional politicians is to buy more votes for a longer period of time than the other aristocrats in the system. No matter how pure the motives of the aristocrat going in, and none of them have pure motives as I've explained, this is still true.
"There are two other factors of concealment: increasing deficits and increasing monetary expansion.
Here is where Bernanke is firing a warning shot across Congress's bow. His speech is a warning to Congress that the Federal Reserve will not take the hit. It will not destroy the dollar in order for Congress to play its game of deception.
This was Bernanke's Declaration of independence. The media did not pick up on this. I don't think Congress did, either."This is an interesting conclusion, and I doubt it's accurate. In the end, Congress can always nationalize the Fed. If Congress wants the Fed to inflate, it will inflate, either as an ostensibly independent agency or as a nationalized central bank. Bernanke may want to say no (though we've seen no evidence in his years in government that he might). He may pressure Congress to balance the budget. But Congress has the ultimate power. I think this is a bluff. What he might be doing is telling Obama he's no longer going to be part of his plan to destroy America. Maybe Bernanke just figured out that was Obama's plan and Bernanke was part of the implementation. Any way you look at it - bluff, declaration of independence from Congress or distancing himself from Obama - it's likely to end his career. Of course he just got reappointed, so he doesn't have to worry about that in the short term.
Twelve ominous signs for the economy basically boil down to this: insiders are fleeing the stock and bond market into gold.
Contrary to what we've been taught, the reason the aggregate stock market goes up is the money supply goes up: inflation. Think about it. Money to buy stocks must come from somewhere, generally other stocks.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
The legalized fraud of our banking system begets mortgage fraud. Funny how that works.
This article claims Obama has on his desk a bill that would protect banks from prosecution and being sued for bank fraud.
HEALTH CARE:
Federal judge in Michigan upholds Obamacare's mandate to purchase health insurance as predicted. The government exists to grow and expand its power at our expense.. This ruling green lights any economic intervention by the government which is perfectly consistent with the nature of government.
WAR ON DRUGS:
Hamas is learning from the prohibitionists in the US, invading people's home, confiscating their drugs and burning them. It's worked so well here.
POLITICS:
As I've been saying all along:
"In spite of the pundits’ cry of political turmoil and changing political winds, less than 10% of the House and Senate seats will likely switch parties due to the upcoming election. Turmoil? Changing winds? Hardly.
The churn is exposing the immense amount of political rent to be had by those who hold power, no matter how tenuous the hold."We can expect Republicans to slow Obama down, but nothing will be rolled back.
Email lampoons the idea that the not-mosque at not-ground zero has anything to do with tolerance. Pretty funny.
LOCAL:
Local gas prices to flirt with $3 a gallon. How's that lack of inflation working out for you?
Bedbugs show up at the Courtyard Marriott on Edwin Moses. This is another example of the decivilizing effect of government.
"The current buzzword to show off this newfound love of lowering the standard of living and of forced poverty is sustainability.
If you want a definition of sustainability, it is this: rolling back the advances of civilization by force."How true is that?
"[B]edbugs were almost completely wiped out all over the planet by the 1950s, due to modern, life-saving chemicals like DDT, a chemical invented by scientist Paul Hermann Müller working for a private Swiss company (Novartis) that has been widely smeared but has saved hundreds of millions of lives. Its banning in the early 1970s, under the influence of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, has been blamed for a global calamity.
Thanks in part to this ban, malaria today kills between one and three million people per year. This is shocking but it is not entirely unusual in the sweep of history. It is easy to regard insects as the most dangerous evil on this earth, having killed far more people than gulags, gas chambers, and even nuclear weapons.
In fact, insects are the only things on this earth that have been more dangerous to human welfare than governments — and that's really saying something. In the 14th century, disease-carrying insects killed off as much as 60% of Europe's population. The United States has had its own serious issues with yellow fever. We don't think about this, but this is because we don't have the black death right now, due mainly to the achievements of capitalism.
Today we are living with a return of bedbugs on an epidemic level. The National Pest Management Association says that nearly all pest-management companies say that they have seen thousands of new bedbug reports from all over the country. There is even a website that tracks this:bedbugregistry.com. This epidemic, which is so bad that even the New York Times published an alarmed editorial, is directly related to the banning of chemicals that had had bedbugs under control.
There are other chemicals besides DDT that control bedbugs such as propoxur, but in 2007 the EPA banned it for indoor use. Now any pest-management company that uses it indoors is threatened with fines and, potentially, with jail. It's so bad that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has begged the EPA for a change in policy, but the EPA won't budge. Instead, it advises people to "reduce clutter in your home to reduce hiding places for bed bugs" and also suggests "eliminating bed bug habitats." Oh, and of course the EPA strongly suggests that you work on "raising awareness through education.""That's how our wonderful government "protects" us. It has our best interest at heart.
"Another suggestion we hear about bedbugs is that we should wash our sheets in hot water. Well, that would be fine except that most houses no longer have hot water from the tap. Because of government regulations, our hot water heaters are shipped with a default setting that makes our water lukewarm. The consequences of this are themselves devastating. Our clothes do not get clean. Our bodies do not get clean. Our dishes do not get clean. To change this requires that you open your hot water heater and turn it up to the hottest setting, but not many people know about this trick. If you suggest to a repairman that he do it for you, he will suspect that you are an agent provocateur and run away."
I never fell for this one.
MISC:
I think Menchen is wrong about this elitism. Or maybe not wrong in absolute terms, but in general terms. I think the vast majority of people are born with the capacity to be intelligent. It's the norm. That's what our genes offer, though obviously there are a few outliers who will be smarter and a few who will not be as smart. But the vast majority of people have that learning ability crushed in childhood and they never develop to their potential. Family problems or poor education - especially government education - crushes their natural ability to be very intelligent.
UK government tells citizens to dig themselves out of snow this winter. People are up in arms, but they shouldn't be. Their snow removal will be significantly improved. Of course, they won't get a refund on their taxes which used to cover snow removal. This is another example illustrating the real reason government exists. It's not to provide services. It's not for the good of the people. It's not to protect the people. It's to amass power and wealth to the ruling class at the expense of the people.
Google has been secretly testing cars that drive themselves in traffic. I'm tempted to say this is a hoax, but at the same time, it's perfectly believable. I don't see any reason why this isn't possible with today's technology. Google has done more to make our roads safer in a year than government has done since the invention of the car. Productizing this will be a big boon to the alcohol and bar industry. Prohibitionists will hate it because they use drunk driving laws as a proxy for prohibition.
Looks like the Bucs will be number 1 this week.
Indoor gardening in the winter.
Body-building protein powder could add 10 years to lifespan.
"Although it is not clear if the supplement, which is already used by body builders and sold under brand names including Aminotrofic, would extend human life [it's only been tested on animals], Professor Nisoli believes it could have clear health benefits."Sounds good to me.
I've often claimed that we're mostly creatures of instinct like any other animal, that almost every decision we make is made by our subconscious mind and that decision is subsequently rationalized so we think our conscious mind made the decision. Neuroscience seems to have proved me right.
"One significant finding of these studies is that a person's brain seems to commit to certain decisions before the person becomes aware of having made them. Early studies found delays of about half a second, but with contemporary brain scanning technology scientists in 2008 were able to predict whether subjects would press a button with their left or right hand up to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made the choice."That's not to say we don't make rational decisions. We can and do reason, and we make decisions based on the outcome of the reasoning, but those decisions are rare. And even when reasoning is involved, the final decision may well be made unconsciously.
I've known since childhood that stretching before exercise isn't useful. Every sports coach I ever had pointed that out. You should warm up before exercise, not stretch. Stretch afterwards. I don't understand why people don't know this, like it's just been discovered.
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