Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Union boss says tea partiers advocate returning to slavery. Who forces people to join unions against their will? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

ECONOMY:

Harry Reid says, "But for me, we'd be in a worldwide depression." You can't make this stuff up.

Here's some digestible info on foreclosuregate or fraudclosure, both terms being used.

"Foreclosure-gate is heating up and the mad scramble for what's left of $45 trillion in real estate is guaranteed to leave homeowners homeless, pension funds unable to pay their pensions and even some of the biggest banks insolvent.   A great housing goat rodeo was created when some of the 65 million mortgages on U.S. homes didn't follow proper legal procedures;  

• Fraud by homeowners who lied on their loan applications

• Fraud by banks who didn't follow proper legal procedures around the notarization and processing of mortgage documents

• Fraud by investment banks who packaged this junk and resold it to unsuspecting pension funds

• Pension funds promised returns to their pensioners they could never achieve

Lies, lies, lies and more lies.  In this jockeying for position, the only thing guaranteed is Leona Helmsley's Law i.e. "Laws and taxes are for the little people"."

This is what happens with inflationary monetary policy. It undermines the value of thrift and creates a culture of spending, borrowing and more spending. It pressures people to race to get theirs as fast as possible. Everybody wants in on the spoils. It brings out the worst in people. So it sounds like from a legal point of view, during the process of bundling, splitting and reselling these mortgages,

"So somewhere between the REMICs and MERS, the chain of title was broken."

And that means:

"That is, the person who took out the mortgage loan to pay for the house no longer owes the loan, because he no longer knows whom to pay."

And that means;

"BECAUSE IF THE CHAIN OF TITLE OF THE NOTE IS BROKEN, THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO FORECLOSE."

"The sheriff for Cook County, Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago, said on Tuesday he will not enforce foreclosure evictions for Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase and Co. and GMAC Mortgage/Ally Financial until they prove those foreclosures were handled "properly and legally.""

I find it hard to believe the rich, powerful and politically connected financial firms will be forced to eat these bad mortgages just because it's the law. The law doesn't apply to them because they're protected by the aristocrats.

""This is a major, major crisis. The Lehman bankruptcy could be a spring rain compared to this hurricane. And if this isn't handled right...and handled right quick, in the next couple of weeks at the outside...this crisis could also spell the end of the mortgage business altogether. Of banking altogether. Hell, of civil society. What do you think happens in a country when the citizens realize they don't need to pay their debts?""

This will never happen. Congress will fix it for their cronies.

Conservative and lazy investing.

TAX AND SPEND:

Because of big deficit spending, financiers have leverage over the aristocrats. I'm not so sure this isn't an improvement. It's unlikely the financiers are as evil as the aristocrats, though they'll use their leverage in their own self-interest like everybody else.

Britain's planned budget cuts by conservatives give hope that Republicans might do the same here. Unlikely, not impossible.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

How many things are wrong with this sentence?

"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he would use weekend meetings of G-20 finance ministers to advance efforts to "rebalance" the world economy so it is less reliant on U.S. consumers, to move toward establishing "norms" on exchange-rate policy, and to persuade others the U.S. doesn't aim to devalue its way to prosperity."

Everything except maybe the part about the G20 meeting. And it goes on:

"In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Geithner said the world sorely needs to agree on guidelines for exchange-rate policy. "Right now, there is no established sense of what's fair," he said."

I want tax cheats figuring out what's fair for all six billion people on the planet, don't you?

Ben Bernanke keeps talking about the threat of inflation, and he's promising to inflate to combat that threat, but Robert Murphy wants to know where the deflation is.

"There are several problems with the exclusive reliance on "core CPI" as a gauge of the tightness of monetary policy. First and most obvious, it is absurd to focus on the "core," which excludes food and energy prices. It is precisely these prices that are the most important for struggling households — and they are certainly not falling. According to the government's own figures, from September 2009 to September 2010, consumer food prices were up 1.4 percent, while consumer energy pricesrose 5.4 percent.

Given that many households are either in financial distress or are terrified that they soon will be, is it really so surprising that consumers aren't spending gobs of money on things besides food and energy?

Another problem is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics can't very well document changes in product quality, which tend to mute price increases. To take an example offered by Silas Barta, the next time you open a cereal box, check out how flimsy the cardboard is; it was sturdier several years ago. I doubt that the government CPI figures take this sort of thing into account when telling us how weakly prices have responded to Bernanke's incredible bouts of money creation."

All government statistic are lies to bolster the power and wealth of the aristocrats and their cronies.

"Besides nitpicking the construction of CPI data, there is the problem of focusing just on consumer prices in the first place. For example, according to the latest report of the Producer Price Index, in the last year prices for finished goods are up 4.0 percent, the prices for intermediate goods are up 5.6 percent, and prices for crude goods are up a whopping 20.3 percent."

Those prices are for products further down the production pipeline. They won't affect consumer prices until months or maybe years from now, but they will drive up consumer prices.

"According to economic theory, there's actually a very sensible reason toinclude asset prices when trying to determine the "cost of living." This is because most people don't want to live for a single day on milk and bread that they just bought at the grocery store. In principle an ideal price index would include prices for both present and future goods. As a convenient proxy, it makes sense to include asset prices when wondering whether monetary policy is causing the dollar to strengthen or weaken."

And Bernanke's inflation of the money supply has definitely driven up the stock market, commodities and other assets. And this chart of the dollar versus a basket of currencies shows how successful Greenspan and Bernanke have been at destroying the dollar.

"It was a futile attempt to evade a bad recession that led Alan Greenspan to blow up the housing bubble. Now Ben Bernanke is doing the same thing, only with far more intensity. If he really wanted to help the economy, Bernanke would stop debasing the dollar and would allow market prices to tell the truth."

Deception and manipulation are powerful tools of government, and the Fed exists solely to deceive us into allowing it to steal from us.

The Fed will print, print and print until the dollar is destroyed. That's why they put Helicopter Ben in charge. I like this idea:

"He suggested that, like the king in a fairytale, Mr. Obama should dress up at night like a pauper and go out and talk to business people. According to Marcus, King Obama would then realize how unpopular he is and how destructive his economic policies have been for small businesses. He also suggested that the academics at the Fed and in the administration should, for once in their lives, go out and work, instead of sitting in big glass office towers and having no clue about what is ailing the economy."

Nice summary of the process:

"Now, does anyone really think that, under the conditions Marcus has described, the Fed’s increase in the quantity of money will flow into US employment and real wage gains? As Marcus likes to say, “You must be kidding!”

The money flows will continue to boost employment in emerging economies, along with their wages and asset prices.

The best way to visualize this process is to think of a huge money-printing machine in the US that produces an unlimited quantity of dollars. Most of these dollars flow to the corporate sector, financial institutions, and wealthy individuals. A large proportion of these dollars is then transferred to emerging economies through the US trade deficit and investment flows, and boosts economic activity and increases wealth in emerging economies relative to the US."

Nice.

EDUCATION:

Government university sends email to students and faculty urging them to vote Democrat. Your tax dollars at work. Of course the mail is illegal. Of course the university apologized. Of course nobody will get in trouble. They're above the law. And you can't un-ring a bell.

I've long called the Ivy League the world leader at brainwashing smart people to be stupid. I've also claimed that children are their smartest before they enter kindergarten, when government begins the process of making them dumber. As John Taylor Gatto says, "Genius is as common as dirt." Until government gets its hooks in children. This author seems to have caught on as well, wondering if our education system makes students dumber.

HEALTH CARE:

Democrat governor of Tennessee explains how Obamacare is driving businesses to drop health coverage and force people onto the public option. He pretends this is an accident, but it's not. Obamacare was designed to destroy private insurance and usher in socialized medicine, and that's exactly what it's doing.

Author agrees with me: Republicans have no intention of repealing Obamacare. They're just going to modify so they can share in the looting. That's what they'll do even if the win the presidency, the House and a filibuster-proof Senate in 2012.

The political elite and their media propagandists are changing direction from climate change to biodiversity as the new crisis.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

USA Today is catching on: La nina to produce a cold winter.

I always get a kick out of it when people who think they know so much are surprised at what they learn. In this case:

"“Plants clean our air to a greater extent than we had realized,” says NCAR scientist Thomas Karl, the lead author."

That doesn't surprise me at all.

POLICE STATE:

Are the TSA's new porno-scanner rules hurting Disney? Let's hope so. The Mouse may get them changed. Here are the choices a parents has:

"1. a dose of ionizing radiation concentrated almost entirely on your skin to create a nude image on the government's computer screen. They call this Whole Body Imaging, or WBI. Please see attached sample image of a male subject, also here. Note that the detail of the image, even before zooming in, allows the viewer to see that the glans is uncircumcised.

2. a government agent using his gloved fingers to grope/frisk/probe the exterior of the child's entire clothed body (including inspection of private parts) in order to ascertain the same detail of information as the WBI would have done (see above). They call this Enhanced Pat-down.

3. police escort to interrogation by TSA security as to your reasons for refusing the above two choices...followed by confirmation that you did not verbally abuse any government agents...followed by being permitted to turn around and go home."

No thanks.

What's the real motive behind the rush to put these scanners not only into airports, but on the streets?

"Courtesy of the never-ending “War on Terror,” intrepid DHS bureaucrats have now deployed more than 500 mobile x-ray vans. The vans drive up to suspicious looking objects, vehicles, houses, or individuals, and zaps them with a focused stream of X-rays. Technicians then analyze the reflection of the x-rays (the “backscatter”) to determine if explosives, drugs, or other contraband substances are present."

Does that sound like an unreasonable search and seizure to you? I does to me. But as for the terrorist threat it's ostensibly meant to fight:

"Not so coincidentally, it turns out that full-body scanners are useless to protect against their purported target – terrorists carrying bombs into airplanes. “I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” the former chief security officer at the Israel Airport Authority recently testified. “That’s why we haven’t put them in our airport.”"

So the foremost experts in defending against terrorists in the world, the Israelis, think they're useless. Of course not all terrorists are smart enough to disguise the bomb that well, but it still makes you wonder if there isn't a different motive behind this:

"So, what’s the rush to employ full-body scanners – or backscatter x-ray mobile vans? Well, maybe it is to check out your teenage daughter…and not for drugs or bombs.

Maybe it’s time for a lead vest after all…if not for you, for her."

You can bet government will quickly ban any led clothing that can block the x-rays. The perverts are in charge.

WAR:

Clinton aid lost US nuclear codes for months.

Apparently WikiLeaks is planning an new Iraq war document dump. Naturally the Pentagon says it's a security threat. We've heard that before. They were lying then, and I bet they're lying now. Last time they were upset because the it provided insight into the war. But the American people largely ignored it. This time the Pentagon doesn't seem too worried. They probably realize it's better to not publicize it.

POLITICS:

Only 46 percent?

"Since 2006, the number of Americans who believe the federal government to be a threat has remained roughly the same. According to Gallup Polls, 46% of Americans believe the federal government "poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.""

Worse yet, these numbers are driven by partisanship, not an understanding that government by its very nature is the threat.

"Something else of interest to note ... throughout the Bush administration, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to perceive the government as a threat. Now that a Democrat (Marxist) president is in office, the reverse is true. In fact, the swing in those numbers is stunning. Back in September of 2006 when the Republicans had the presidency and both chambers in Congress, 57% of Democrats believed the federal government to be a threat. Now that number is down to just 21% with Democrats running the show in Washington. Meanwhile in 2006, just 21% of Republicans believed our imperial federal government to be a threat. Now with Obama, Reid and Pelosi running the show, that number has jumped to 66% who believe our federal government to be a threat."

It doesn't matter which party is in power. Once the aristocrats steal our money and our power, it's in the hands of the bureaucrats.

Thomas Sowell takes on Barney Frank. I want voters to take him down.

All this talk by Democrats about electing a new speaker if they keep the House is bull.

Another reminder that freeing the people from oppression is what makes a president beloved.

MEDIA:

Juan Williams win in the end.

"I guess it all turned out well for Juan Williams. Fox has now offered him a $2 million three-year contract to have an exclusive and expanded role on the network as well as a column on FoxNews.com."

Sweet. Maybe I should figure out a way to get fired from my jobs.

MISC:

Google busted for capturing emails and passwords. The reason these companies get so big and face no real competition is patents. The government granted IP monopoly is at the root of these issues.

I get what Hobbes is saying here:

"According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short""

If you look at the animal kingdom, this is certainly true. No doubt this perspective is deeply ingrained in men's instincts programmed by our genes. You can see it with crime and war. But that doesn't mean we have to voluntarily surrender our freedom to a sovereign to protect us. That's quite a leap most likely made because he was the product of his time. I still like the idea I came up with a while back: I think, therefore I am, therefore I own myself. Nobody has a right to do me harm. Self-ownership is the basis for libertarian philosophy, and I think this justifies that basis. I think Hobbes is way off base here:

"Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical and asocial."

As I've pointed out before, mammals are social, and in some sense political. Wolves form social groups with leaders. Apes form more complex social groups with leaders. Man in the natural state is indisputably social and political. The only reason we're social and political today is we're programmed that way by our genes.

"The social contract was an 'occurrence' during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs (e.g. person A gives up his/her right to kill person B if person B does the same)."

No social contract is necessary for this. All that's necessary is a recognition that every man owns himself and therefore none have a right to harm others. This is a bizarre rationalization to me, but mine is probably just as bizarre to others. Here's why it might seem to so bizarre to me:

"Modern Anglo-American law, like European civil law, is based on a will theory of contract, according to which all terms of a contract are binding on the parties because they chose those terms for themselves. This was less true when Hobbes wrote Leviathan; then, more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us."

But I think it seems bizarre because it fails Occam's Razor. None of the presuppositions require a contract with a sovereign to establish a society. This is more like it:

"What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No, that would mean but the continuation of [Rousseau’s] idea. The social contract is an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society. In this, the notion of commutative justice^[4], first brought forward by the primitive fact of exchange, …is substituted for that of distributive justice … Translating these words, contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of business, and you have commerce, that is to say, in its highest significance, the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially producers, and abdicate all pretension to govern each other."

But again, I don't see the need for a contract at all. Everybody owns themselves, so nobody has a right to harm anybody else. That seems to be the basis for the non-aggression principle, and I don't see why you need anything further to build a civil society.