Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Mainstream economists don't get it.

TAX AND SPEND:

100 US cities could default in 2011.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bernanke's world:

"Bernanke and the current monetary regime, though, are taking things further. They are determined to keep rates lower than any time in history, indefinitely. This will lead to pervasive malinvestment, bank bonuses, and price inflation. Meanwhile, retirees will continue to collect pitifully low income on their CDs.

But don't worry; Wall Street bonuses are safe. Any bank that can't make money in this environment should have their damn head examined. Borrow money at 0%, buy higher-yielding assets. Dip into various gov't giveaways, let the bonuses flow, change accounting rules to conceal losses. Rinse, repeat.

Financial sector profits are back up to 42% of all corporate profits in the United States – an absurdly high level. None of this should come as a surprise I guess, with Bernanke, William Dudley, and a few others at the helm of the Fed."

...

"Robbing the middle class and savers blind and enriching the banks are just unfortunate consequences of what's good for the economy – or so they'd have us believe. I see it more as a direct transfer of wealth."

It's good for the personal economies of the bankers and other plutocrats. Bernanke is the biggest looter in the history of the world.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

T. Boone Pickens abandons his plan to have the government steal money from people to build wind farms. Instead he's going to try and sell his windmills to Canada since the Canadian government already passed a law stealing people's money to build wind farms.

POLICE STATE:

How government overly classifies documents to thwart legitimate leakers and criminal investigations into its actions.

"Insofar as the document classification system in the U.S. has been absurdly extended and abused, this has created a serious moral problem for conscientious soldiers in the armed forces. For, by over-classifying documents, political and military elites are able to hamstring their subordinates and make the exposure of what they are doing virtually impossible, unless it is leaked. Any unsavory, illegal, untruthful or even just plain embarrassing information can be hidden from public view simply by stamping the offensive document "secret." It is also a way for political and military elites to avoid prosecution for crimes in the United States by claiming that their defense involves "sensitive" or "secret" documents that cannot be revealed in open court. This strategy is so common in our corrupted day and age that it even has a name: "greymail.""

Government can't be anything but corrupt.

"Bearing these observations in mind, it ought to be obvious that average soldiers should celebrate Bradley Manning as a hero who stood up to this unconscionable intimidation from above. He didn’t just reveal to the world that the upper echelons of the political and military establishment are engaged in outright crimes and deception; he revealed and took a stand against conscientious soldiers being silenced by asinine document over-classification. He is, in other words, a defender of the honor and integrity of the average soldier and the Army’s own core values, which stands in stark contrast to the depravity of the political and military elites that we meet in the Wikileaks documents, and who are now trampling on the constitution even in their detention of Mr. Manning."

I still think officers, especially West Point, Naval Academy and Air Force Academy officers, should lead the way in refusing to serve in our illegal wars. They take an oath to defend the Constitution, not blindly follow orders that violate the Constitution.

WAR:

General Petraeus calls the war in Afghanistan unwinnable.

"President Obama promised to persist until the United States achieved victory, but as Daniel Ellsberg, a veteran and former military analyst for the Pentagon pointed out, Gen. Petraeus has told the president there will be no victory. Ellsberg quotes Petraeus from Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars: “You have to recognize also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. … You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives.” Again, the quote from behind the closed doors of the Oval Office came from the traditional leaking in the capital, not from WikiLeaks."

I would like to see Petraeus be that honest in a public statement to the American people. The war would end quickly if he was.

"If Obama's inaccurate statements to the American people about a war costing $5.7 billion per month are not enough, you can look to the documentation of failure and potential war crimes in the WikiLeaks reports, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, and the diplomatic cables. They show, among other things, that U.S. troops kill civilians without cause or concern and then cover it up(more examples of hiding civilian killings here, here, and here), including killing reporters; the CIA is fighting an undeclared and unauthorized war in Pakistan with Blackwater mercenaries; thepresident of Afghanistan is not trustworthy; Afghanistan is rife with corruption and drug dealing; the Pakistan military and intelligence agencies aid al-Qaeda and the Taliban; and the U.S. looks the other way when governments it controls torture. The cables also show that beyond the war fronts that Hillary Clinton has turned State Department Foreign Service officers into a nest of spies who violate laws to spy on diplomats, all with marching orders drawn up by the CIA. All of this has the world looking at the United States with new eyes."

It's about time people saw our government for what it is.

POLITICS:

Remember when Republicans were in power, and they wanted to reform the filibuster so Democrats couldn't thwart their agenda so easily? Now that Republicans have taken the House but Democrats still control the presidency and the Senate by a slight majority, Democrats want filibuster reform. Funny how that works.

MISC:

How not only to protect but increase your privacy.

Some bureaucrat literally passes himself or herself off as God. This child will be warped for life.