Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

US government orders Twitter via subpoena to hand over messages from Icelandic MP involved in WikiLeaks. How does this happen without a court case?

Bill to criminalize threatening language toward aristocrats.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Obama's ATF to force gun dealers in border states to report certain transactions.

"The measure would require around 8,500 gun dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to report sales of two or more high-powered semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines to the same person within a five-day period."

This is doubly unconstitutional. First, the Constitution grants no power to the president to do this. Second, what part of "shall not be infringed" don't they understand? If they try this, there will be tremendous push-back.

TAX AND SPEND:

Greece and Ireland have fallen. It looks like Portugal will be the next domino to fall in the collapse of the euro. The very premise of a bailout is bogus. It doesn't resolve anything. It just transfers debt from one place to another. The Germans are tired of countries transferring debt to them. It can't last. Portugal managed to borrow at just under its 7 percent limit, so the bailout may be postponed until the next rollover, for all the good that will do. Why did the Chinese and Japanese come to the aid of the euro Portugal by buying its government's debt?

"What are these strange benefactors up to? Why would Japan – with the highest debt load in the world…and barely able to finance its own deficits – lend to Europeans? But the Asian rescuers are just exchanging bad US-dollar debt for bad European debt. They must figure that they are up to their eyeballs in American paper…might as well diversify into some Euro trash as well.

The other thing it signals is more shift of wealth, from the West to the East. Asians are now creditors to Europeans and Americas. That’s just the way it works. The old world goes into debt to the new world. America is part of the Old World now. The Asians will now be calling the shots."

Power?

I didn't realize Hungary also received a bailout last year.

Illinois aristocrats "temporarily" raise income tax rates supposedly to raise more revenue. It won't work. More people will flee Illinois to avoid having their incomes confiscated. It's sad that Ohio has higher rates than these new ones in Illinois.

Real US debt problem:

"A few months back, Laurence Kotlikoff wrote that "The U.S. is bankrupt." Using the government’s numbers properly labeled, he found that the U.S. fiscal gap, which is the difference between the present value of projected spending and revenues, is $202 trillion. An IMF study of the U.S. finances found that it would have to double taxes to close its fiscal gap. This is an impossibility. It would destroy the struggling economy."

The question isn't if we dramatically reduce government spending. The questions are when and how. We can do it intelligently by choice, the sooner the less painful it will be, or we can wait until it it forced on us by creditors, maximizing the pain. But one way or another, it will happen.

"As the Federal Reserve keeps buying more and more government debt, with no prospect of reducing its holdings unless and until the government gets its house in order, bond yields are likely torise, despite Fed buying, because yields also reflect inflation premiums. The prospect of inflation will rise as the Fed monetizes the debt. We would then see yields rising accompanied by firm prices of commodities and metals."

According to shadowstats.com, inflation is already over four percent, but it's going to get worse. According to money.cnn.com, commodity prices are up 20 percent since September. These prices are leaking into consumer goods. We've already experienced some of the pain with rising gas prices which are up 14 percent since September. I wish these Austrians would stop conceding the inflation argument. Inflation is happening, and it's going to get worse.

"Outright default on U.S. bonds is not in the cards because that immobilizes the entire U.S. government. The government won’t do that. It will look after itself and its own survival first. The American public comes last. Default upon promises made to Americans is the more likely course of action."

This is why Republicans will vote to raise the debt ceiling despite the demands of the people.

Mainstream news organization recognizes inflation is happening now.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Thinking about these questions will make it clear just how big a scam the Fed is.

"Every single year, hundreds of billions of dollars in profits are made lending money to the U.S. government.

But why in the world should the U.S. government be going into debt to anyone?

Why can't the U.S. government just print more money whenever it wants?

Well, that is not the way our system works. The U.S. government has given the power of money creation over to a consortium of international private bankers.

Not only is this unconstitutional, but it is also one of the greatest ripoffs in human history."

Get it?

"If the U.S. government had been issuing debt-free money all this time, the U.S. government would likely not be spending one penny on interest payments. Instead, the U.S. government spentover 413 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2010. This is money that belonged to U.S. taxpayers that was transferred to the U.S. government which in turn was transferred to wealthy international bankers and other foreign governments. It is being projected that the U.S. government will be paying 900 billion dollars just in interest on the national debt by the year 2019."

Now that's a successful scam. Check out this graph of inflation so you can get a good laugh whenever somebody tells you the Fed's job is to fight inflation. Look at that line when the Fed was freed from the gold standard.


HEALTH CARE:

Obesity, most of which is caused by the FDA's food pyramid, subsidies and regulations, costs Americans and Canadians $300 billion per year.

Contrary view on the doctor whose research linked vaccines and autism:

"The legal evidence seems increasingly to contradict the stances of Big Pharma and its medical and governmental enablers. This is not going to help Dr. Wakefield though, who looks increasingly like the Galileo of his day, pressured on all fronts to deny something that he and many others know is most likely true."

Sounds like this story isn't dead yet.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Another temperature fraud: NOAA says 2010 is tied with 2005 as the hottest years on record. The problem is that 1998 and 1934 are actually the two hottest years on record, with 2005 third.

A couple of guys working individual, each with a laptop and working only with publicly accessible data, both produce better forcasts than Britain's Met Office bureaucracy and supercomputers.

"Piers Corbyn, while seemingly a bit eccentric, has the distinction of being the only man to have this headline:

The man who repeatedly beats the Met Office at its own game

Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again."

"Back on August 6, 2010, when the UK BOM was predicting a warm winter, and every Met Agency in the West was already declaring that 2010 would be the hottest year ever, Bryan Leyland predicted (on a global scale) that before the end of the year, there would be significant cooling. As you can see from the chart, this is exactly what happened.The UK Met Office has a gigantic supercomputer, 1,500 staff and a £170m-a-year budget, but a retired engineer in New Zealand armed only with Excel and access to the internet and with the McLean is et al 2009 paper, was able to get it right."

I like that the first guy is an astrophysicist and the second an engineer. Neither is a meteorologist.

30 Australians die in flooding after environmentalist blocks flood-control dam. Once again, government kills. And the government culpability continues with the revelation that report has been presented to the the government detailing the risks and proposing a plan to implement them, but government buried and covered up the report.

WAR:

Eisenhower is accurately credited with warning Americans against the military-industrial complex, but few realize how much he expanded it.

I don't know if I've ever said this before, but I agree with Michael Moore on this:

"Terrorists aren’t trying to kill us because they hate our freedom. They’re killing us because we’re in their countries killing them."

Maybe he's coming around to the evils of government.... Nah.

"What Moore is saying is not new. The CIA calls it blowback. The Bible calls it reaping what you sow. The terrible truth is that the war on terror creates terrorists."

That's why we need to convince the American people that our government is the aggressor and has been for 60+ years. The American people won't tolerate our government being the aggressor, but right now they don't realize it because they're not aggressors, and they identify with their representatives and therefore the government. Even a government report recognizes this:

"The information campaign – or as some still would have it, "the war of ideas," or the struggle for "hearts and minds" – is important to every war effort. In this war it is an essential objective, because the larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended."

It took me a while to figure this out, but once you figure it out, it's a "duh" moment. It's obvious. Invading and dropping bombs on Muslim countries turns the US into the enemy of mainstream Muslims which is the opposite of what we want. The report goes on:

"American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.

Muslims do not "hate our freedom," but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.

Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim selfdetermination.

Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack – to broad public support."

The government can no longer claim it doesn't understand this, yet the wars continue. This tells us that the wars are not about US security. They never have been. Like everything government does, they're about looting the American people and the people in the target countries.

How Lockheed Martin is profiting from war. The subtitle should prompt interest:

"How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother"

"Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well.  After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history.  It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.  It's involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.

Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes the F-35 Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) – and when it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution."

Yikes. Haliburton is way old news. A big percentage of this tax money flows back into the pockets of the aristocrats via campaign contributions. All that money in politics was originally tax dollars stolen from us by the government. I wrote that before I read this next paragraph:

"If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin's sheer size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf. It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone.  Not surprisingly, it's the top contributor to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described "#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress.""

Every day I realize more how depraved our government is.

"While the bulk of its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has quite a track record when it comes to law-breaking: it ranks number one on the "contractor misconduct" database maintained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-DC-based watchdog group."

That's because power corrupts, and all government money, because it is stolen at the point of a gun, is poisoned by corruption. Corruption is proportional to the government money involved.

FOREIGN POLICY:

How many foreign military bases does the US have?

"There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it’s 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure."

This is nuts. Nobody can fathom how much anger and vitriol against us this creates.

POLITICS:

Congressmen is one of the safest jobs in the country. But it may not remain that way.

While the aristocrats and media focus on an incident of private violence, it's important to recognize the bigger evil of systematic, pervasive government violence.

Apparently Confucius also recognized the importance of taking back the meaning of words.

LOCAL:

The wussification of America accelerates as government issues a weather advisory for blowing and drifting snow. We have three to four inches on the ground. Don't be fooled by the wrecks. By tearing up all the roads around Dayton and never finishing repairing them, government has turned our roads into carnage factories on a daily basis regardless of weather. The road construction baloney around here is the modern equivalent of digging ditches then filling them back in, but these projects kill a lot more people.

MISC:

Scientists discover they can disrupt people's moral compass with magnets over certain parts of the brain. You know this will be used for evil.