Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Government threatens students that if they read the WikiLeaks report, they won't be eligible for government jobs in the future. You know this is going to backfire. Students probably didn't even know about the release until government threatened them. And it doesn't stop there.

"State Department spokeswomanNicole Thompson insisted the warning wasn’t an official Department directive but added that making public comments or posting links to WikiLeaks content wasn’t “a good move for any US citizen.”"

So they're threatening students, military personnel and every other American. Our government is both stupid and evil.

Possibly the most valuable service WikiLeaks has performed is to bring back distrust of government.

ECONOMY:

Greenland prospers because it seceded from the EU.

"If you think that leaving the EU would be catastrophic, take a look at Greenland. By rights its people ought to be poor. Their island is isolated, suffers from freezing weather, has a workforce of only 28,000 and relies on fish for 82 per cent of its exports. But it turns out that since leaving the EU, Greenland has been so freed of EU red tape and of the destruction of the Common Fisheries Policy, that the average income of the islanders today is higher than those living in Britain, Germany and France."

This isn't rocket science. Increasing economic freedom always leads to greater prosperity and reducing economic freedom always leads to less prosperity. There are no exceptions.

TAX AND SPEND:

The Council on Foreign Relations finally acknowledges that the US is is in serious decline because of out of control government spending.

"The November/December issue features an article that I think will become a turning point. A decade from now, or a quarter century from now, historians will return to it and summarize its contents. It will be regarded as the first official announcement in the highest of high places that the Federal deficit is out of control, and that this in turn threatens the survival of America's position as the world's most influential political-military participant.The article is titled, "American Profligacy and American Power: The Consequences of Fiscal Irresponsibility." I have been reading Foreign Affairs for about four decades, but I do not recall any article with a title this inflammatory."

Obama must be ecstatic.

A reminder that the federal government massively cut spending after WWII. It can be done.

The costs of the EU bailouts are threatening the financial system in Germany and angering the Germans.Duh.

"Credit default swaps (CDS) measuring risk on German, French and Dutch bonds have surged over recent days, rising significantly above the levels of non-EMU states in Scandinavia.

"Germany cannot keep paying for bail-outs without going bankrupt itself," said Professor Wilhelm Hankel, of Frankfurt University. "This is frightening people. You cannot find a bank safe deposit box in Germany because every single one has already been taken and stuffed with gold and silver. It is like an underground Switzerland within our borders. People have terrible memories of 1948 and 1923 when they lost their savings."

The refrain was picked up this week by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. "We're not swimming in money, we're drowning in debts," he told the Bundestag."

 The EU is going to break up. The sooner, the better.

"The great question is at what point Germany concludes that it cannot bear the mounting burden any longer. "I am worried that Germany's authorities are slowly losing sight of the European common good," said Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of Eurogroup finance ministers."

The common good. The universal excuse for theft.

REGULATION:

US government reaches trade deal with South Korean government. Why is this necessary? Why can't a company or individual in one country freely trade with another in the other without government permission or interference? This is just another example of how government makes us all poorer.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Praise for Money, Sound and Unsound.

EDUCATION:

Government domination of financial loans has turned college students into indentured servants of the government, which was always the plan.

HEALTH CARE:

People don't need lap bands to lose weight. They just need the FDA to get out of our lives and food supply so we can eat healthy.

Call the food safety boondoggle just passed by the Senate a Patriot Act for food. Lovely. I hadn't realized the House had already passed a version, so this will become law. Even worse.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The WikiLeaks dump also exposes how government corrupted the IPCC by intentionally placing frauds in high places. It's good to see this make it to the mainstream, at least in Britain:

"WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord

Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord"

Exactly what you would expect from government.

POLICE STATE:

With the chorus of people calling for the murder or trial for treason of Julian Assange, it's a good time to point out just how thoroughly our government has turned the world upside, when lies become sacrosanct and truth-telling becomes a treasonous, or capital, offense.

So first government pressured Amazon to shut down WikiLeaks servers, and it did. Now it's pressured Paypal to cut off a funding stream for it. This is a pointed example that government is the god of corporations. They bow to government's will and they pay tribute, or else government crushes them out of existence.

WikiLeaks data dump exposes that Israeli organized crime has deeply infiltrated the security industry and is spying on US police, secret service, etc.

"Given the additional information provided by this cable, it is reasonable to believe a corrupted segment of the Israeli military-law enforcement establishment has literally gone into business with Israeli organized crime."

This isn't surprising, government is always in cahoots with organized crime, but it is frightening.

Just the other day I posted that a market to disguise faces from surveillance cameras would some appear. This guy is on the leading edge. Years ago I predicted a market in clothes that would block RFID signals, but while some products have appeared, that has been slower to appear than I expected. Soon purses, coats, etc. will have that ability.

This is an easy question to answer about why the FBI set up the Oregon patsy and had him drive a not-bomb all the way to his target and try to set it off. Because they wanted to scare Americans and look important.

I wasn't aware the FBI had known about the original World Trade Center bomb plot in 1993, had informants inside, had a plan to produce a fake bomb, then called that plan off and allowed a real bomb to be used.

"Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said."

Those other ideas resulted in 6 dead and over 1,000 injured.

"The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.

"He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C.," Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him."

How did I never hear this?

WAR:

Dispute of common claims supporting the nuking of Hiroshima.

"Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the US Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized."

"Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the US Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city — and escaped serious damage."[4] The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn't like the idea of killing "all those kids."[5] Wiping out another one hundred thousand people … all those kids."

"Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command's list of the 33 primary targets."

"Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency — that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that had been needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.[7] The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll — nearly twice the total of US dead in all theaters in the Second World War — is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators."

"The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.[10] The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's own chief of staff, was typical:

the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.[11]

"

This article makes a powerful case that the targets of the atomic bombs were civilians, not military forces or industrial infrastructure.

Comparing how TSA works to how schools work. That's because the government only knows one way of doing things: by force.

POLITICS:

The class domination theory of power or who rules America.

MISC:

Capitalist take on the "no room at the inn" story.

The reality is nobody else will protect our rights. The only rights we have are the ones we protect.

What's so special about the relationship between the lengths of the index finger and ring finger?

Food storage program for paleo dieters.