Saturday, December 11, 2010

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

In a case of a government solution to a government created problem, it appears the FCC's threats to force privacy controls on internet businesses might be bearing fruit. Usually government's solutions are worse than the original problems, but if the FCC stops at threats, that might not be the case in this instance. Of course the original problem was created by IP laws that protect the companies in question from competition from innovators who would better protect their customers' privacy. But this might be a case of a blind dog treeing a raccoon. But don't think for second the FCC will stop at threats. They will act and create a bigger problem than the original. The real solution is to abolish IP laws so pressure from competition will lead to service providers protecting the privacy of users to the extent they wish.


ECONOMY:

An ancient, inexpensive system for transferring money without government observation still exists, but I think this is a system government is trying to shut down ostensibly because terrorists use it.

Swiss bank refuses to allow customer access to his own gold. Hello. So much for thinking Swiss banks are a safe place to store your gold. Alternatives for keeping your gold safe. Best advice?
"Get a shovel and start digging"
And don't forget about ground penetrating radar. They'll use it.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

This video shows how idiotic Bernanke comes across claiming he doesn't have any idea how the Fed spent the $3.3 trillion, the equivalent of the entire federal budget at the time, it created out of thin air in 2008.

Ben Bernanke is like a circus clown juggling way too many props, and when he drops them, not 'if' but 'when', we're all going to feel the pain. Gary North provides more insight into the fraud:
"The extent of his ability is indicated in the 21,000 documents released a week ago by the Federal Reserve System regarding who got how much money in the 2008 near meltdown.
At the time, he preferred that the public not discover just how good a juggler he is. About a third of the $3.3 trillion that the FED lent to the banking system got reported as additions to the monetary base: the FED's balance sheet.
How did the FED keep almost $2 trillion in loans (credit) off its books? How were the digits transferred? No one in the media is asking this. No one in Congress is asking it.
The entire theory of banking rests on a premise: for every bank credit, there must be a borrower's debt, and both must be on the bank's books. But there were about $2 trillion in loans made to banks by the FED in late 2008 for which there was no credit or debt statement. Anyway, that was what we were told in 2008.
These five words come to mind: "Bernie Madoff was a piker.""
Here's a nice little summary list:
"Here is what we know at this point.
  1. The Federal Reserve was able to conceal $2 trillion in loans to banks and companies around the world.
  2. No one in the media is pursuing this seemingly impossible accounting procedure.
  3. There is nothing to keep the FED from doing this again.
  4. The public will probably not be told when the FED is doing this.
  5. Congress prefers "Don't ask. Don't tell,"
  6. No one at the FED has been compelled to testify under oath regarding unprecedented accounting deception.
  7. Bernie Madoff was a piker.
"
That's a great job if you can get it. I'd like to be able to print up $2 trillion in money and keep it invisible and not have to answer to anybody about it. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. While the Fed is handing out trillion dollar bills to its friends, we're distracted with the meaningless Dream Act and the phony controversy surrounding the Bush tax cuts which is nothing more than a sissy fight between which ruling class faction gets to buy the most votes with our money.
"Bernanke and his team will at some point drop the digits. That is statistical reality. Like the California quake, the Big One is a sure thing. We just do not know when."
Dropping digits is a metaphor for stealing the last little bit of value in our dollars.
"The four largest banks now hold over half of the bank assets in the American banking system. The other 8,000 divvy up the rest. Of these, about 100 hold over 20%. Pareto's law tells us that the top 64 banks should hold 51% of the assets, yet only four hold 55%. The system is seriously skewed in favor of the Big Four: Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, and Wells Fargo. These are simply too big to be allowed to fail."
Once again, good work if you can get it. The collapse is coming. I should have paid more attention in econ 101. When they talked about macroeconomics, I realized they were full of crap, so I tuned them out. I actually asked the professor a question, got a completely bull**** answer, and it was probably the last time I asked a question in college because of it. I should have caught on and joined them instead of becoming an engineer.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Nations reach global warming agreement in Cancun. And you thought after climategate and Copenhagen, global warming was a dead issue. Hah. The one world government crowd will never give up their ambitions to rule us all.

47 percent of Americans blame natural cycles for global warming while only 41 percent blame man. Apparently none of the know that there's been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

POLICE STATE:

State governments are seizing safety deposit boxes and other property under the guise of seizing unclaimed property to obtain funds.

TSA's nude scanners fail.
"It is very likely that a large (15–20 cm in diameter), irregularly-shaped, cm-thick pancake [of PETN explosive] with beveled edges, taped to the abdomen, would be invisible to this technology. ... It is also easy to see that an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible."
Nobody should be surprised by that. These nude scanners were never about safety. They were about money and oppression. They were about covering up the ridiculous failures of TSA agents to identify terrorists or weapons. The emperor in the White House demands we stand naked before him so he doesn't feel embarrassed that he's naked before us.

MISC:

Praise for The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.
""Until shortly before the common era," Scott writes, which is to say the last 2000 years, "the very last 1 percent of human history, the social landscape consisted of elementary self-governing kinship units that might, occasionally, cooperate in hunting, feasting, skirmishing, trading, and peacemaking. It did not contain anything one could call a state. In other words, living in the absence of state structures has been the standard human condition.""
That's a great observation.
"In effect, ironically, the state is the price of civilization — not, as the statists believe, because the state is necessary to safeguard or protect civilization, but rather because it is civilization the state fastens upon like a leech or a tapeworm, because the most civilized societies are the wealthiest and thus the most profitable to loot."
This explains that observation, and I have no doubt that that's true. There's way more profit in looting large trading centers than in small, geographically disparate clans and villages, so the state didn't arise until the large trading centers appeared. But can't forget that government exists in both environments, and the state is a natural evolution of clan government applied to the much richer trading centers.
"Of course, as Scott notes, in the early state's propaganda counseling against any such walking away from civilization, "the linkage between being civilized and being a subject of the state is … taken for granted." And countless generations of historians have followed the lead of the early state's court intellectuals and cheerfully "confounded 'civilization' with what was, in fact, state-making.""
That's because they're inevitably parallel developments for the reason I just explained.
"Zomia is, Scott tells us, "one of the largest remaining nonstate spaces in the world, if not thelargest." In fact, Scott says, "the signal, distinguishing trait of Zomia … is that it is relatively stateless. Historically, of course, there have been states in the hills" but "while state-making projects have abounded [there], it is fair to say that few have come to fruition," and "those would-be kingdoms that did manage to defy the odds did so only for a relatively brief, crisis-strewn period."
The human settlements that make up Zomia, Scott maintains, are "best understood as runaway, fugitive … communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.""
Those sound like good reasons to escape. And you can see the parallel in the US today and more and more people develop plans for escaping the US.
"A simpler way of saying this would be to say, employing Albert Jay Nock's terminology, that the people of upland Southeast Asia have government, but not the state."
In other words, they are not anarchists as the title wants us to believe. They simply have a less predatory form of government. Apparently Nock disagrees with me:
"This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the one type as merely marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher; they are commonly so taken, but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus — to classify both under the generic name of "government," though this also, until very lately, has always been done, and has always led to confusion and misunderstanding."
Nock defines government:
"[Government] is in the common understanding and common agreement of society; … [G]overnment implements the common desire of society, first, for freedom, and second, for security. Beyond this it does not go; it contemplates no positive intervention upon the individual, but only a negative intervention."
But even clan leaders find ways to loot their clans. They just do it on a significantly smaller level and through means other than brute force. It seems Nock's fallen for the fallacy that there's such a thing as good government. But I agree with him on this next point:
"the code of government should be that of the legendary king Pausole, who prescribed but two laws for his subjects, the first being, Hurt no man, and the second, Then do as you please; and … the whole business of government should be the purely negative one of seeing that this code is carried out."
And this is why I advocate we take all power of aggression from government. We must take away the power to tax. We must take away all power to interfere with peaceful activity. In order to be free and as prosperous, healthy and happy as possible, we must abolish all laws except those that respond to aggression. And we can do that without having to escape to some backward, agrarian society hiding in the hills. When we do it, if we do it, the US will rocket to a state of greatness and prosperity that we can't even imagine. So while there is a fundamental difference between a government that by law cannot aggress against its citizens and one that can, there is no such thing as a government that does not aggress against its citizens. But once the law is right, preventing such aggression, citizens can oust the abusers of the law, and that's the best any society can achieve. No civilization has ever achieved that, but it's not impossible, and it should be our goal. But we're rapidly accelerating the wrong way.


If we define the state as a government that legalizes predation of its citizens, I can buy that. All governments prey on their citizens, but at least in the case of a non-state government, citizens have a recourse to deal with the predators in their government. But there's no such thing as good government. Think about it. Even many moms and dads hide money from each other. A clan leader is several generations removed from most of clan. Of course he finds ways to loot them. But if he's caught, he suffers the consequences.


The problems of representative government compared to monarchy:
"The king demanded a tribute, but not much of one. During the monarchical age, the share of government revenue remained remarkably stable and low. Economic historian Carlo Cipolla notes,
All in all, one must admit that the portion of income drawn by the public sector most certainly increased from the eleventh century onward all over Europe, but it is difficult to imagine that, apart from particular times and places, the public power ever managed to draw more than 5 to 8 percent of national income.
As for the level of tyranny, it could ebb and flow with the king's whim but it mostly ebbed. Tocqueville observed,
There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.
Sure, the king could have decreed that you not smoke, not ingest too much salt, not cut hair without a license, or not use more than 1.6 gallons of water to dispose of human waste, but he simply did not give a damn, unlike today's elected representative, who is more Gladys Kravitz than statesman.
The king was a capital owner in his domain, and he acted like one. Only an idiot would risk lowering the value of his property while raising the possibility of regicide over mindless minutia. And if the king was an idiot, plenty of courtiers and sundry relatives were in waiting to set him straight."
If only we were anywhere near that free. Everything we enjoy today we enjoy because of the economic freedom of our ancestors and the capital formation that came from it. But because we've lost so much economic freedom, we're cannibalizing our capital and our society is in decline because of it. It seems a paradox that people care so much about having one decision, the decision between which party stomps on our necks, every two years, but they don't care about freedom to make dozens or hundreds of decisions every day.


The art of manliness book.

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