Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

US government accused of treating the Army private who leaked documents to WikiLeaks inhumanely.

"From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement.  For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell.  Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.  For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch).  For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs.  Lt. Villiard [a Quantico brig official] protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out."

If that's true, it sounds illegal to me. That might be OK for a enemy combatant who failed to meet the standards of the Geneva Convention during a war, but not for a US citizen in the US.

"And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation."

That sounds morally equivalent to administering truth serums.

ECONOMY:

Prediction that silver will hit $50. Note to self: buy more silver. Now. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow.

Prediction guru Gerald Celente predicts 2011 will be the beginning of a world-wide revolution:

"Wake-Up Call In 2011, the people of all nations will fully recognize how grave economic conditions have become, how ineffectual and self-serving the so-called solutions have been, and how dire the consequences will be. Having become convinced of the inability of leaders and know-it-all "arbiters of everything" to fulfill their promises, the people will do more than just question authority, they will defy authority. The seeds of revolution will be sown…."

"Crack-Up 2011 Among our Top Trends for last year was the "Crash of 2010." What happened? The stock market didn’t crash. We know. We made it clear in our Autumn Trends Journalthat we were not forecasting a stock market crash – the equity markets were no longer a legitimate indicator of recovery or the real state of the economy. Yet the reliable indicators (employment numbers, the real estate market, currency pressures, sovereign debt problems) all bordered between crisis and disaster. In 2011, with the arsenal of schemes to prop them up depleted, we predict "Crack-Up 2011": teetering economies will collapse, currency wars will ensue, trade barriers will be erected, economic unions will splinter, and the onset of the "Greatest Depression" will be recognized by everyone…."

"Screw the People As times get even tougher and people get even poorer, the "authorities" will intensify their efforts to extract the funds needed to meet fiscal obligations. While there will be variations on the theme, the governments’ song will be the same: cut what you give, raise what you take."

"Crime Waves No job + no money + compounding debt = high stress, strained relations, short fuses. In 2011, with the fuse lit, it will be prime time for Crime Time. When people lose everything and they have nothing left to lose, they lose it. Hardship-driven crimes will be committed across the socioeconomic spectrum by legions of the on-the-edge desperate who will do whatever they must to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table…."

"Crackdown on Liberty As crime rates rise, so will the voices demanding a crackdown. A national crusade to "Get Tough on Crime" will be waged against the citizenry. And just as in the "War on Terror," where "suspected terrorists" are killed before proven guilty or jailed without trial, in the "War on Crime" everyone is a suspect until proven innocent…."

I've been predicting this was coming for decades, and when it hits, there will be an upside and a downside. The upside is people will try to throw off the yoke of government, and there's a possibility they will succeed, but it's unlikely at this point. The downside is government will kill many people, and many who were dependent of government will die. I've been laying out plans to improve the upside and limit the downside for as long as I can remember, to no avail. We continue to accelerate down the road to serfdom. I just hope these revolutions aren't as violent and deadly as I fear they will be. I hope people will cast away government more easily than I foresee. I fear all those people who talk about optimism for the future are fools who fail to see the horrific consequences of the intermediate destruction, and after that there's no certainty of a freer society to follow. We are not experiencing a Nazi-style collapse. What we're experiencing is closer to the Weimar collapse that produced the Nazis. On a global scale. I can't see a silver lining before the devastation. I can't see the American people freeing themselves in time. It breaks my heart.

Ten giant corporations in danger of bankruptcy.

TAX AND SPEND:

Lucky sperm club. Really. Summary: Dead people can't care if government steals their money. They're dead. This striking quote provides wonderful insight into the mind of a leftist. Family doesn't matter. Nature doesn't matter. The ability a person is born with doesn't matter. Hard work doesn't matter. That's why property doesn't matter. We're all pawns for leftists to engineer to their liking.


Whistle-blower on tax evasion scam ends up in prison while all the tax evaders and the management who enabled it go free. It's like Will Grigg always says, never, ever, ever call the police.


HEALTH CARE:

Salt theory reminds us that we need more healthy salt.

POLICE STATE:

Compilation video of TSA abuses.

This is one of the reasons government can never provide quality services:

"One of the most infuriating ironies of the TSA — among a host of them — is ChertNap’s Law: each time screeners fail, the TSA punishes passengers. Here’s the latest application of said law, courtesy of John “Pervert” Pistole:

“’We’ve had a series of reports actually going back several years from the inspector general, from the General Accounting Office, and our own TSA Office of Inspection, where they do … covert testing,’ Pistole acknowledged  … last month during an interview on Good Morning America. ‘And unfortunately, [undercover testers] have been very successful over the years…’”

This “helped convince him that airport screening needed to get that much tougher — and a desire to do better [sic] helped give rise to the controversial new regimen that includes enhanced pat-downs and back-scatter machines that can see beneath a traveler’s clothing.”"

Government agents are unaccountable. They never get fired. Government agencies are unaccountable. They never get abolished. The more bureaucracies and bureaucrats fail, the more money and power the government steals from us and gives them. Because government is funded by theft and because government exists solely to increase the power of the aristocrats and their cronies at our expense, government rewards failure and uses failure as an excuse to steal more money and power from us.

Here's a public service announcement from the TSA:

"TSA agents routinely fail to detect pistols, knives, and other weapons of mass destruction at airports nationwide. The failure rate — on TSA’s own tests!—is often 100%."

But their failure rate on feeling up your daughter's genitals and breasts is 0 percent. Who said the TSA was incompetent?

TSA agents serenading travelers at LAX with Christmas carols. This must be a PR stunt that we're paying for with out tax dollars.

It's beginning to look a lot like Russia.

MEDIA:

The New York Times says WikiLeaks is becoming more journalistic. That's like Satan saying somebody is becoming more like him. It's not a good thing. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate that WikiLeaks does a thorough job of redacting names of people who might otherwise be targeted for murder from the documents it releases, but in no other way should WikiLeaks become like American journalists.

MISC:

Lew Rockwell criticizes American exceptionalism, but his criticism is as wrong as the conservative interpretation of it. Nationalism is not a disease any more than recognizing that one's inherent abilities are greater than another is a disease. Recognizing our country is better than another doesn't necessarily mean believing our government is better than another, though most  make that mistake. The US is an exceptional country because so many US citizens are children of a subset of populations of other countries who chose to endure hardship to succeed without grants from the ruling class of their original counties. In other words, more US citizens are progeny from libertarians than in any other country on earth. More than the citizens of any other country, libertarianism is our birthright. That love of freedom, that great libertarian streak that runs through the vast majority of us, makes us and our country great. Our government does not make us great. It diminishes our greatness. Fighting wars overseas does not make us great. They diminish our greatness. Aggressive foreign policy also diminishes our greatness. It is our love of freedom, so much of which we have given away, but which has not quite been crushed from us yet by our government, that makes us great. But the burden of government has overwhelmed our ability to produce, and therefore our government is dragging us into rapid decline. But we can reverse this by tapping into the streak of libertarianism that runs through mainstream Americans and we can return to a trajectory of greatness by re-embracing freedom.