Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Nice summary of the US government's sham attack on Megaupload.com.

"As Megaupload's Kim Dotcom's megafarce trial continues, the New Zealand Herald reports that his alleged offense not only falls below the threshold for extradition, but also that the warrant may not be properly served. 'My understanding as to why they haven't done that is because they can't. We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States,' says Megaupload's lawyer Ira Rothken. Not surprisingly, Kim Dotcom has a few choice words to say about having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost, and millions left without access to their legitimate data."

I'll bet the sadists in the US government are already implementing a plan to punish New Zealand for its insolence in not extraditing Kim Dotcom.

TAX AND SPEND:

The reality of government debt.

"Today, governments issue bonds. They have been doing this in the West for three centuries. They have been defaulting on these bonds ever since, just as they have been doing on all other forms of debt since at least the fourth century B.C. The rate of defaults has escalated over the last two centuries.

In an academic paper on these defaults, we learn this. "Most fiscal crises of European antiquity, however, seem to have been resolved through currency debasement' – namely, inflations or devaluations – rather than debt restructurings."

This is a tip-off. The politicians have sought to preserve the illusion of trust – "their word is their bond" – only to cheat the debtors by inflating the currencies. They repay the debts with money of reduced value. They pay the amount of money they owe, but the money will not buy as much. As the prophet Isaiah told Judah in the mid-eighth century B.C., "Thy silver has become dross" (Isa. 1:22a). This deception has been going on for a long time."

But government bonds tie the bond-holder to the government, which is exactly what the government wants.

"This leads me to a consideration of the economics of government bonds. It can be summarized in one sentence: "Politicians' words are their bond, and they are liars.""

Well said. The essay includes an interesting explanation of how government are able to fleece the rich through bonds more than they can through taxes.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

More evidence the sun may be repeating a cycle like the one that produced the very could Maunder Minimum.

POLICE STATE:

NSA whistleblower claims NSA is already illegally capturing all email from all Americans. Laws are for us serfs, not our rulers.

WAR:

Our murderous rulers continue to march toward outright murder of Syrians as they did Libyans. Syrian is no threat to the US. Libya was no threat to the US. Iraq was no threat to the US. The same for Somalia, Yemen and god knows how many other countries where our rulers are murdering people.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The election in France is harbinger of turmoil in the EU.

POLITICS:

All those votes Obama purchased with our tax dollars pays off with big campaign cash advantage over Romney.

Ron Paul has enough money to carry on.

On the bacchanalian orgy that is the US government.

"I am certain no one has undertaken an objective study, but I would venture to say U.S. government employees have for decades been the single largest and most identifiable group using foreign born prostitutes. No other nation has as big a military presence around the globe as the United States and the military is certainly the largest user of these services. Ask any veteran who has served abroad."

No kidding.

"Many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea (the Pacific Ocean, that is), I served at a top secret military installation with about 1,000 other Army and Air Force personnel. Aside from providing maintenance to the station, the biggest income center for the locals had to be the prostitution and black market industries. This is true of nearly every military installation around the globe, whether it is for intelligence gathering, placating or killing the natives or simply providing a landing strip for aircraft.

The term "Ugly American" was created by Americans, mostly in the 18- to 25-year-old demographic, stationed overseas drinking themselves into stupors, degrading the natives and having paid sexual relations with the local girls. The natives frowned on these activities, of course, but the money was too good to pass up.

The maltreatment of conquered or co-opted nations is as old as the history of wars and empires. The occupying forces have forever taken advantage of the natives and prostitution is as much a part of empire building as creating supply lines."

It's no different at home. At least in the kinder, gentler US empire, soldiers pay for sex with natives instead of the raping and pillaging done by past empires.

"If you take hundreds of young men and make them part of an occupying force thousands of miles from home, whether in a combat zone or not, the inevitable happens.

It is not an aberration as the current news from government officials suggests any more than finding a deer in the woods is an oddity.

Ask the call girls in D.C."

I bet there are more prostitutes in D.C. than any city on earth and they're better paid.

MEDIA:

Here's another example of that media meme I predicted we would see all election cycle.

"Primary stumbles warnings for Romney versus Obama"

Yep. Romney's clumsy and a stumbler in contrast to the perfectly oiled machine of the Obama campaign. It's not like Obama ever claimed there were 57 states or anything. All Obama's flubs will be covered up, and the press will manufacture flubs for Romney even when he doesn't make any.

One of the most significant but rarely mentioned ways the media lies to us is by intentionally using outdated, flattering or unflattering, or outright photo-shopped pictures.

Here's one of the grotesque realities that smart people realized decades ago but stupid people might recognize today.

"GOP elite holds off the tea partiers"

Well, duh. that's like saying the king has killes many serfs. Maybe they'll write about dog bites man next.

MISC:

Magnitude 6.6 quake off Indonesia. Indonesia is really getting rocked.

I'm disgusted by both Hitler and Mao themed restaurants.

The NBA players hired a former US Attorney to head their union, so they should expect dirty, dishonest tricks from him. US Attorneys break the law with impunity. That attracts corrupt people and further corrupts them.

A conservative writing in the American Conservative compares the US to China and finds that China is more free and more supportive of human rights. It's nice to see conservatives beginning to figure out what libertarians have long understood. This comparison of how the Chinese government handled the melamine scandal and how the US government handled the Vioxx scandal shows that because the Chinese government isn't democratic, it fears its people and therefore responds to them unlike our government which has bamboozled the people into thinking they control it so doesn't fear us.

"China’s leaders may not be democratically elected, but they pay close attention to strong popular sentiment."

The reason they pay so much attention is they are not democratically elected. The Chinese people have no illusions about it. They realize that conquerors rule them, and those rulers realize that the people can overthrow them at any time if they rise up en mass.

"Long prison sentences were freely handed out and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were eventually tried and executed for their role, measures that gradually assuaged popular anger. Indeed, the former head of the Chinese FDA had been executed for corruption in late 2007 under similar circumstances."

Oh my goodness. Could you imagine if top government officials in the US were executed for corruption? Our government would be wiped out.

"Although the Vioxx scandal certainly did generate several days of newspaper headlines and intermittently returned to the front pages as the resulting lawsuits gradually moved through our judicial system, the coverage still seemed scanty relative to the number of estimated fatalities, which matched America’s total losses in the Vietnam War. In fact, the media coverage often seemed considerably less than that later accorded to the Chinese infant food scandal, which had caused just a handful of deaths on the other side of the world."

But Merck is effectively a government bureaucracy as are the media companies that do these stories. Government agents are never held accountable for their crimes. Even if you think about war coverage, the news never informs us who profits from war, with the lone exception of Halliburton during the Iraq war, and that was only because Dick Cheney had worked there.

"This story of serious corporate malfeasance largely forgiven and forgotten by government and media is depressing enough, but it leaves out a crucial factual detail that seems to have almost totally escaped public notice. The year after Vioxx had been pulled from the market, the New York Times and other major media outlets published a minor news item, generally buried near the bottom of their back pages, which noted that American death rates had suddenly undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline.

The headline of the short article that ran in the April 19, 2005 edition of USA Today was typical: “USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.” During that one year, American deaths had fallen by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation’s population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly “surprised” and “scratching [their] heads” over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.

On April 24, 2005, the New York Times ran another of its long stories about the continuing Vioxx controversy, disclosing that Merck officials had knowingly concealed evidence that their drug greatly increased the risk of heart-related fatalities. But the Times journalist made no mention of the seemingly inexplicable drop in national mortality rates that had occurred once the drug was taken off the market, although the news had been reported in his own paper just a few days earlier.

A cursory examination of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offers some intriguing clues to this mystery. We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn. Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population. The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates."

That is amazing. That means Vioxx was potentially killing 50,000 people a year.