Sunday, June 30, 2013

War

The war on drugs not only funds crime, murder and civil war in Mexico, it funds terrorists.
"Over the next six years, the ISI set up hundreds of small opium-processing plants across Afghanistan. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border had become the world's biggest producer of heroin, and is now the single biggest source of the heroin on North American and European streets. The annual profits, estimated to be about $150 billion yearly, were invested in the continued training and arming of Islamic militants who eventually graduated into staffing radical Moslem insurgencies from the Middle East to the Balkans."
We're so stupid.
"The Clinton Administration's sudden goodwill towards Pakistan at the time was evidence that all interested parties didn't want the issue of the February 1993 New York Trade Center bombing to ever resurface — in particular, the CIA's connection to the accused Egyptian and Pakistani bombers. Years before, in October 1981, following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the US and Egyptian governments had chosen to step up their infiltration of the Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist groups — a move that occurred partly in response to the CIA's desire to avoid another Sadat assassination, and partly to use it as a propaganda weapon against Libya and Iran (and now Iraq). Thus, by 1990, the situation in Egypt was such that no Islamic militant could take a bath without the Egyptian or US intelligence services knowing about it.

The actual degree of this infiltration's success is best demonstrated by the 1995 trial of the accused New York World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution evidence included videotape recorded by an FBI informant, a former Egyptian army officer who offered to defuse the planted truck bomb but was refused by the FBI. The witness denied that he was an Egyptian intelligence agent; however, US officials admitted at the time, "He's no choirboy." The informer received over $2 million for his "assistance." This is an interesting contradiction of a US law that states that it is illegal to use American taxpayers' money to pay a bribe to a convicted murderer.
"
So the informant came from Egypt.
"These deadly attacks included the Mafia's orchestration of the Red Brigade's notorious 1978 kidnap and murder of staunchly anti-Mafia Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The strategy in these high-profile crimes was to manipulate citizens' fear of "terrorism" to push for more government police power. Gladio employed many former Axis intelligence officers who, under former General Reinhard Gehlen and Eisenhower's CIA director, Allen Dulles, had been recruited immediately after W.W.II to help create the CIA. One of these officers was the infamous Licio "The Puppetmaster" Gelli, a former high-ranking Italian Fascist "Blackshirt" and longtime head of the powerful Vatican-Mafia Masonic Lodge founded in 1895, called "Propaganda Due" or P2."
This is amazing.

Foreign Policy

I have no confidence in this analysis of Isreali politics and the supposed peace process, but I am confident that whatever the situation really is, John Kerry will make it worse.

More evil foreign policy.
"The Obama administration sent a thinly veiled economic threat to this South American country on Thursday when it indefinitely delayed a decision to eliminate tariffs on imports of roses worth about $250 million a year. The move created leverage over the leftist government seen as likeliest to grant National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden political asylum that would protect him from U.S. criminal charges."
Obama is punishing poor flower growers.

NSA has ticked off the world. As if the world needs any more reason to hate the US. I don't believe these revelations are really a surprise.

Global Warming and Energy

In a good reminder that Obama is narcissistic, he's stupid, he tilts at windmills.
"President Barack Obama is urging Americans to make climate change a political litmus test, asking them to declare they won't vote for any politicians who don't protect future generations from environmental devastation."
Obama knows that Americans have seen through the global warming fraud. They consistently name global warming their lowest priority issue. Yet Obama thinks he's so powerful, he can change that. The man's a narcissistic fool.

NBC makes up a record high temperature in Las Vegas. Apparently that record was actually tied today.

After being exposed my McIntyre, climate frauds at CRU forced to abandon the one tree Yamal super-stick.

Aging weather stations bias temperatures higher.
"A paper published  in the International Journal of Climatology finds that aging of the solar radiation screens on weather stations is causing a large positive bias in measured temperatures of 1.63°C, which by way of comparison is more than twice the global warming of 0.7°C recorded since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850."
No matter how many nails get nailed in global warming's coffin, it never dies.

Police State

More details about PRISM released.
"These slides provide some additional detail about PRSIM and outline how the NSA gets information from those nine well known internet companies. Apparently, the collection is done by the FBI using its own equipment on the various companies' premises and then passed to the NSA where it is filtered and sorted."
The NSA can't do it on its own?

US European allies won't be happy about this.
"According to a report dated 2010 recently provided by [former NSA contractor Edward] Snowden to the German news magazine 'Der Spiegel', the NSA has systematically been spying on institutions of the EU in Washington DC, New York, and Brussels. Methods of spying include bugging, phone taps, and network intrusions and surveillance according to the documents."
I'm sure they do the same.

Why would this spying threaten a trade deal? This is childish. Naturally, the people get screwed again.

As I predicted years ago, stealth clothing has hit the market.

Cleveland police using fake drug checkpoints to intimidate drivers.
"Police in the Cleveland suburb of Mayfield Heights know they're not allowed to use checkpoints to search drivers and their cars for drugs.
So they're trying the next best thing: fake drug checkpoints.
Police in the city of 19,000 recently posted large yellow signs along Interstate 271 that warned drivers that there was a drug checkpoint ahead, to be prepared to stop and that there was a drug-sniffing police dog in use.
There was no such checkpoint, just police officers waiting to see if any drivers would react suspiciously after seeing the signs.
Authorities say that four people were stopped, with some arrests and drugs seized. They declined to be more specific."
So they're saying that avoiding a fake drug checkpoint is grounds for a search. These predators know no limits.
""I don't think it accomplishes any public safety goals," said Terry Gilbert, a prominent Cleveland civil rights attorney. "I don't think it's good to mislead the population for any reason if you're a government agency.""
In what universe has this guy been living?

Local

Learn to earn Dayton plans to separate children from parents immediately after birth and indoctrinate them as tools of the state.

Health Care

Ketogenic diet prevents and fights cancer.

Because government has controlled funding and research for HIV for decades, AIDS has not been cured. Just like cancer. Continuing to do the same thing will produce the same failure. If we really want to cure AIDS and cancer, we need stop government corruption of the research.

Minimal shoes are spreading to more sports.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Foreign Policy

Iranians elected a moderate, angering US warmongers looking for a reason to attack and who said the Iranians would never elect a moderate.

Misc

Microsoft denies customers without Window 8.1 access to latest DirectX, making DirectX more irrelevant. OpenGL is already faster than DirectX, even on Windows. Microsoft doesn't know how to not be a bully, and it keeps costing them.

Police State

Ohio investigators going through old, unsolved rape kits to test DNA evidence, but they're not trying to overturn false convictions like they should.

Local

Judge grants Dayton temporary restraining order against the Vault, temporarily shutting it down until they can permanently shut it down.
"Complaints filed with the court detail various incidents including murder, shootings and large fights, as well as repeat violations of the 299-patron capacity limit."
Bar owners don't want violence in their bars. Instead of being helpful, the government is preying on the bar owner. The bar has been victimized by small-time crooks, and now it's being victimized by the far more destructive institutionalized crooks. Even setting a 299 person limit is an act of aggression against the property owner
"Dayton police have responded to the location 118 times since January 2012, according to complaints filed with the court.
Specific incidents listed for 2012 are June 23, when more than 100 people were involved in a fight; Aug. 19, when a fight inside the club spilled out onto the street and resulted in a shooting; and Nov. 23, when a male was shot and killed, according to court records."
I bet you anything they didn't arrest the 100+ people. Local governments keep attacking businesses instead of the trouble-makers, so the trouble-makers just move from bar to bar until the city closes them all down. This sounds like the goal is shutting down all nightclubs in the area, not stopping the violence.
"“… serious personal injury or death to citizens of the city of Dayton will likely result before a preliminary hearing is conducted,” the judge’s ruling states. “The public interest in avoiding such physical injury or death will be served by the issuance of this injunction. The aforesaid public interest substantially outweighs any potential economic harm that the respondants(sic) will experience …”"
This is baloney. This is an admission the city is not stopping the trouble-makers. It's blaming the victim. They will just go elsewhere and do the same thing. Local governments have shut down A-List, 88 Club, Hammerjax, Heat and now the Vault, they never stop the violence.

DP&L lays off workers in reorganization.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Economy

The Chinese have already eclipsed Americans as travelers.
"Spookily enough, two months after my trip to Australia, my vague insight was confirmed by a survey, which shows that the Chinese are now the world’s most important tourists, overtaking the Germans and Americans in spending power."
This is another sign of our decline.
"Consider the stats. China (population 1.35 billion) overtook America (population 320 million) as the biggest consumer of steel in 1999. That was the beginning. China overtook America as the world’s main exporter in 2007, as the biggest user of the internet in 2008, and as the world’s greatest manufacturer in 2010 (the first time America has been supplanted in this role since the 1880s, when the USA overtook the UK).
2010 was also the year China overtook America as the world’s largest car market, as the world’s largest retail market, and as the world’s greatest producer of patents. A year later China became the globe’s greatest user of energy. In 2012 China became the world’s biggest market for PCs, and the primary source of global trade. Just three days ago China unveiled the world’s most powerful computer. As for Chinese forex reserves, they total $3.4 trillion. That is to say, the loose change in China’s pockets, from all those foreign hols, is equivalent to the entire economy of Germany.
China is therefore, in many ways, already the most important country in the world – by a distance. It will also, on present trends, finally surpass the USA in overall GDP sometime between 2015 and 2025.
Of course, China has serious problems. It will surely crash, even as it ascends – just as America crashed in 1929. But in the end demography is destiny. China is simply too big to fail. To believe that China won’t surpass America in total economic size and hegemonic power you have to believe the Chinese are so stupid they are incapable of giving themselves a per capita income equivalent to that of Trinidad and Tobago. Such stupidity seems unlikely, not least because the global education survey, PISA, now believes Chinese kids are the smartest on the planet."
While some of this was inevitable - surely not the smartest kids part - it didn't have to happen anytime soon. That's it's happening so rapidly is a function of our government's greatly accelerated looting and oppression. And it doesn't have to continue this way. If Ron Paul had been elected, we would have quickly turned things around an got back on the path of powerful economic growth. If we cut $1 trillion of government spending at the fed level, dramatically cut spending at the state and local level, do the same to regulations at all levels, and end the wars and shut down our foreign bases, we can make this another American century.

Tax and Spend

The US charges a large gas-guzzler tax.
It even calls itself a gas guzzler tax.


Politics

Hooray for Thomas Sowell succinctly expressing this obvious observation:
"Although many people have been surprised and disappointed by Barack Obama, it is hard to think of a president whose policies were more predictable from his history, however radically different those policies are from his rhetoric."
No kidding. And another:
"I may be among the few people who want Attorney General Eric Holder to keep his job – at least until the 2014 elections. Holder epitomizes what is wrong with the Obama administration. He is essentially Barack Obama without the charm, so it should be easier for the voters to see through his lies and corruption."
Great thoughts.

Tyrants use a Fabian strategy - incremental - to obtain their tyrannical goals.

Health Care

Obama conscripts local libraries to drag people onto Obamacare.

Religious groups still unhappy about providing birth control in violation of their religious beliefs. I don't think this article explains it very well, otherwise, religious groups would have no complaint. According to this article, insurers for religious groups will still provide birth control, but it will be charged back to the government.
"The lawsuits are split almost evenly between nonprofit plaintiffs — including several Roman Catholic dioceses — and for-profit businesses who say the rules go against their religious beliefs. For-profit businesses are not included in the accommodation released Friday and were not eligible for the time extension."
Maybe only for-profit businesses are unhappy, and of course Obama hates profit.

Global Warming and Energy

Monckton again brings up the possibility of prosecuting the IPCC for fraud.

Author considers Obama's new, dictatorial green regulation push to be the low point of his presidency.
"The economy, after all, is everything. Without an economy you can't afford a domestic policy, let alone a foreign policy. So you'd think the very last thing any president would do as his country began to show the first vague signs of slow – and quite possibly illusory – recovery after a long recession would be to jeopardise it with a whole new raft of utterly pointless regulation and wasteful government expenditure. Why it would be like seeing a man drowning and, instead of throwing him a life line tossing him a lead weight."
That's exactly what he's doing, and he's doing it on purpose. Remember, Obama is Cloward and Piven's president. He's ACORN's president. He's Saul Alinski's president. He's Bill Ayers's president. He wants to collapse the US economy so he can become America's Vladimir Lenin. He's unhappy the economy appears to be growing, though it's not true. He ran as president to crush our economy so he could implement radical socialism, and he's intentionally stabbing our economy with a green dagger to further that goal. Obama knows the rest of of the world is abandoning this green energy fraud because they're sane, if self-serving. He's doing it to us on purpose.

Freedom of Speech

Government has made it illegal to speak a terrorist threat. Eighteen year old imprisoned on terrorism charges for joking reference to killing kids in a Facebook post. Man convicted for threat.

War

The ultimate source of terrorism.
"However, while the mainstream media has been willing to exaggerate and even fabricate the truth of these claims, they have remained silent in regard to the US government's deep involvement in the active promotion of that very terrorism they claim to bemoan. A deeper look into the issue clearly shows the key players in this terrorism originate from regions that are firmly in the Western sphere of influence. Although the Islamic Jihad has numerous Iranian and Iraqi members (and has used Iran, Iraq Syria and Libya as safe havens), its major influences (and leaders) come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria — nations where Western political and cultural influence is extensive. Moreover, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islamic fundamentalism could not have bloomed without the CIA's deliberate covert assistance — a fact that is apparent when one examines the recent history of the region."
Just like in Libya and Syria.
"Thus, despite Congress's arms embargo, the CIA and Pakistan's secret service, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in CIA history, two years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Radical Islamic fundamentalism was to be deliberately promoted to attain specific Cold War political objectives. In return, General Zia, banking on his image as the great Islamic crusader, built up a loyal following amongst the Pushwar people who inhabited the Pakistani-Afghani border and was quick to staff his military and security forces with numerous Pushwars.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner, via Pakistan's ISI, included Afghans fighting the Soviets in their pro-Islamic/anti-Soviet policy as part of trying to transform the conflict into a large-scale holy war, an Islamic jihad. This action, it was believed would make this war the USSR's Vietnam. In a way, it did, but Afghan conflict soon turned out to be much more than that. For the next decade, the CIA and the ISI recruited, armed, trained and funded almost 100,000 hardcore muhajedin from 40 different Islamic countries, commanded by a then-obscure Harvard educated civil engineer and Arab construction tycoon named Osama bin Laden, as crusaders for the USA's proxy war. This Islamic Foreign Legion's rank and file was largely unaware its jihad was actually being fought on behalf of and paid for by Uncle Sam. (The irony is that the Uncle Sam was equally unaware that it was foolishly financing a future jihad against itself.)
"
This is amazing info.

Regulation

When government regulations like patents restrict a market to a couple of giant corporations, they spend resources on stupid stuff like writing software for smart-phones to guess our moods.

Police State

US Army blocks access to the Guardian's reporting on the NSA.
NSA leaks boost support for open source software and resistance to the cloud.

Attacking Snowden has been ineffective, so now our rulers are attacking Greenwald. This revelation has the potential to spark real change, and our rulers are terrified of that. Smear-monger tied to Obama and Bill Ayers through Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Anything to take the focus off the NSA surveillance itself.

Colorado state lab caught manipulating blood alcohol results to favor the prosecutor. I'm sure they all do it, and that's not all they do to favor the prosecutor.

While we worry about the high-tech spying, we shouldn't forget the widespread, low-tech spying.

Status on the trashing of the Bill of Rights.

I doubt an acquittal of George Zimmerman will prompt the worse race riots in US history.

Misc

Insight into monopoly.

47 years after Star Trek debuted, NASA is just now getting around to investigating using a magnetic shield to protect spacecraft from plasma.

Google developing an android game console believing Apple is developing a game console to go with Apple TV. This is great news for gamers, but not Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.

Apparently it's debatable whether a quantum processor uses quantum effects. That doesn't sound promising.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Politics

The history and racist roots of the progressive movement and all the carnage it caused in quest of empire.
"Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: "Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things." "
Man, that's creepy. You can see so much of still today. I think the common denominator of progressives, who control both major parties in the US, is not only the willingness but the zeal to use aggression, coercion and violence to force their views on everybody else. They don't care as much about the ends as they do using violence as the means.
"Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck's welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality. "
That kind of explains it.

Same with socialism, which makes sense because of its close relationship with progressivism.
"In this brilliant work examining the foundation texts of socialism, Watson provides a powerful indictment of their reactionary, racist and genocidal ideas. There is a direct line from Marx and Engels to Hitler and the Holocaust; to Lenin and Stalin and the liquidation of the Kulaks and the extermination of the Ukrainians; to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and to Kolima, Vorkuta and Karaganda."
That doesn't surprise me at all.

When the president dies, suspect the vice-president first.

Regulation

More resistance to the Tesla direct sales model from state regulators.

Tax and Spend

In order to bury the controversy about the IRS targeting tea party and patriot groups, leftists created a story that the IRS also targeted progressive groups so everything was even. That was a lie.

Ohio Senate passes a budget.
"Republican Senate President Keith Faber, R-Celina, was among those who praised the bill during floor debate, highlighting added spending on public schools and government health care programs."
Republicans love to increase spending. It also cuts income tax rates, which would be a wonderful thing, but I bet it increases sales taxes, meaning there's no real cut. Here's some details on the tax changes.
"The plan will provide income tax breaks to nearly all Ohioans but will raise some taxes and shift some tax burdens."
"We’re also including a tax plan that includes a 50% tax cut on Ohio’s small business owners who create most of the jobs in this state,” says Faber.
Faber says the 50% tax cut would be applied to the first $250,000 of income generated by small businesses. And he says that would cover 98 percent of Ohio’s small businesses.
To give these income tax breaks, the state would raise sales taxes across the board from 5.5 to 5.75 percent. And the state would tax things like electronic books that are not currently taxed and raise taxes on tobacco products that are not taxed at the level of cigarettes. The state would also eliminate an income tax break for gambling losses."
While I would have preferred all cuts and no hikes, it sounds like these changes will benefit Ohio's economy.
"“The key to this proposal is to make Ohio the most attractive place in the nation for job growth and job creation for middle class Ohioans,” says Oelslager."
If that was the goal, it failed miserably. You'd have to abolish the income tax, cut spending and pass right-to-work to do that. I want to see the actual income tax cut info. That seems like important news to report to me. They tell the sales tax rates, but not the income tax rates. Here's more relative tax info, but no actual rates.
"Under the latest proposal, Ohioans would receive a phased-in 10 percent personal income tax cut. An 8.5 percent cut from current rates would take effect in fiscal 2014, 9 percent the following year and 10 percent the next -- although this budget applies only to the first two years. "
So what are the rates?
"The Plain Dealer analyzed the combined impact of the proposed new sales and income tax rates and found that the higher the income, the larger the savings, both in terms of real dollars and the percent savings.
For example, a single person making $25,000 a year would save an estimated $26 in taxes, a 3.1 percent dip. A single person making $110,000 would save about $360, a reduction of more than 7 percent. The same trend held true for families."
That makes perfect sense. High earners produce more, so they should get more of a cut. They also buy more, so that reduces the difference.
""Once again, the GOP has sacrificed the well-being of Ohio's 11 million citizens to pursue a misguided and unfounded tax policy," said Turner, of Cleveland. "Their tax scheme will still disproportionately help the most affluent Ohioans at the expense of good schools and safe streets for the rest of us. The nominal gains Ohioans will see in their paychecks will not offset the inevitable increase in local taxes." "
She's probably right about local taxes. Local parasites are greedy and power hungry the same as state and national parasites.

Federal Reserve

Housing bubble rapidly inflates.
"Home prices climbed more than forecast in the 12 months through April, rising by the most in more than seven years and showing further strength in the U.S. housing market. "
Seven years ago was 2006. Right after that the housing bubble burst and dragged our entire economy in the gutter. Get ready for the replay, but worse. Thanks, Fed.

The illusion of economic growth created by Japanese money printing has rapidly disappeared.
"The latest data confirms that while the yen value of exports has increased, actual trade volume has fallen. "
That's a perfect description of the illusion.

Health Care

After a decade of research, dad finds genetic cause for his daughter's disease.

Police State

While we focus on the NSA, local police are compiling huge databases on drivers with license plates readers.
"In San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since 2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego Association of Governments maintains the database. Unlike the Northern California database, which retains the data for between one and two years, the San Diego system retains license-plate information indefinitely."
It just keeps getting worse.

The British government is collecting social media data.

The NSA holds the largest blackmail archive ever imagined.
"These abusers -  who are building the largest blackmail archive in all of human history – keep coming back with the same old hateful slogan:
Understand this clearly: these are the words of a predator speaking to his hostages."
Exactly.

I challenge anybody to reconcile the NSA's gathering, or is it collecting, of all electronic communication with the Fourth Amendment.

Here's the question we need to ask about NSA whistleblower Snowden and the NSA.
"Which is more dangerous to personal liberty in a free society: a renegade who tells an inconvenient truth about government law-breaking, or government officials who lie about what the renegade revealed?"
That's a pretty easy question.

How Catherine the Great of Russia aided the American revolutionaries and why it's appropriate for Russia to aid Snowden now.
"In his book The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788-1800, historian Jay Winik describes Empress Catherine – the authoritarian ruler of a Russian police state – as the "midwife" of American independence. The American revolt quite likely would not have succeeded if Britain hadn’t been "neutralized and isolated by Catherine’s Armed League"; by denying King George’s request for military aid, and using her influence to curtail Britain’s naval advantage, the Russian tyrant "helped bolster the hopes of beleaguered American rebels fighting for their lives…."
The Russian government of Vladimir Putin has rendered similar aid to an American whistle-blower who is fighting for his life – much to the dismay and outrage of people who are Americans by birth, rather than conviction, and who mistakenly believe that patriotism is measured by one’s willingness to abide the institutional criminality of the government that insolently presumes to rule us."
And Putin is loving every minute of it. The longer he protects Snowden, the more this NSA story dominates the news.
"In any case, if Putin consciously aided Snowden, that choice – like those made by the Empress Catherine – was based on calculations of political advantage, rather than a principled devotion to individual liberty. And Edward Snowden’s willingness to accept help from Russia is akin to the entreaties made on behalf of the American rebels by Francis Dana."
Exactly.
"Mishin observes that under the administration of former President Medvedev (a prot̩g̩ of Putin), Russia had a flat income tax Р"and not the 30% or so suggested by those American conservatives but at 13" Рand a top corporate tax rate of 24% "compared to the American Federal rate of 36% and additional state rates." There is also a far greater diversity of opinion in the Russian media than one finds in the American "free" press Рa fact underscored quite memorably by the way the American media eagerly joined in the Orwellian Two-Minutes Hate of Edward Snowden."
I doubt most Americans realize our government is more oppressive than Russia's.

Obama says he won't scramble jets to shoot down an airliner carrying Snowden. This means the White House is entertaining ideas about how to assassinate him, and I bet a plan is already in place just waiting for an opportunity.

The government is presenting its case against Boston Marathon suspect 2 to the public in order to bias all prospective jurors to insure a conviction.

The red light camera saga in Elmwood Place continues as judge orders the cameras seized because and holds the village government in contempt of court.
"The village had tried unsuccessfully to have Ruehlman removed from the case. The Ohio Supreme Court rejected arguments that the judge showed he was biased with his sharp wording, such as calling the camera use a “scam” and “sham” and comparing it to a con artist’s card game."
It's always fun to watch government agents fight each other, especially when the result benefits government's victims.

ATF entrapment scheme on video. Why is ATF setting up robbers for stealing drugs. What does any of that have to do with alcohol, tobacco or firearms? This is a generic, corrupt, police action. Similar entrapment scheme in Chicago. This doesn't protect us. It steals our money and enriches government predators. Entrapment used to be illegal. Courts would throw out cases of entrapment. Since the police state explosion after 9/11, entrapment is now business as usual.

Ways to identify a dictatorship.
"Note that there is no practical distinction between a decision by the Supreme Court, a regulation made by an executive bureaucracy, and a practice quietly adopted by the intelligence agencies and federal police. None of these requires public approval.
For that matter, consider the militarization of the police, the creation of Homeland Security’s Viper teams that randomly search cars, the vast and growing spying on Americans by government, and the genital gropings by TSA. Consider the endless undeclared wars that one finds out often only after the troops have been sent. All simply imposed from above.
In principle, elected officials represent the desires of their electorates. In practice Congress barely touches on most issues of concern to the public. Overturning any of the aforementioned types of laws is virtually impossible."
"Another measure of dictatorship is the extent to which the people fear the government. A time was when governmental official in general, and the police in particular, had to be cautious in pushing the citizenry around. A justified complaint to the chief of police brought consequences. Today the police can do as they please, and you have no recourse. The new aggressiveness applies especially to federal police. If you object to excessive intrusion by agents of TSA, they will make sure you miss your flight. In principle you can complain, but in practice the effect is zero."
"Dictatorships characteristically watch the citizenry very carefully, using the secret police and encouraging people to inform on each other. Both are now routine. Did you vote to have your email read, your telephone calls recorded, your browsing habits on the web turned over to the NSA or the FBI? No. And you have no recourse."
"The IRS gains its punitive leverage from the fact that it is impossible to know what taxes you owe and simply pay them. Years back, Money magazine sent a “moderately complex” tax return to fifty tax preparers, from big-league to small potatoes. They produced widely varying results, with only two in Money’s opinion getting the right answer. If tax specialists can’t tell how much you owe, neither can you. This means that in practice you are always vulnerable."
"Lack of constitutional government. This is not the same as lack of a constitution. The Soviet Union had an admirable constitution. It just paid no attention to it."
All commonplace. No recourse.

Local

Clark County judge attempts to manipulate a domestic violence case in favor of the Springfield police lieutenant defendant by refusing a continuance for the special prosecutor. The prosecutor was forced to dismiss the case so he can reinstate it later.

More whooping cough in Dayton.

Feds rule in favor of RTA against Beavercreek's refusal to add bus stops near Fairfield Mall. Apparently RTA isn't buses for everybody. It's just buses for minorities. The feds should get out of our business.

Misc

Not too long ago I asked Wal Thornhill why he didn't take issue with NASA's theory of rebounding supernova because it makes no sense. It seems NASA and the Thunderbolts Project are finally acknowledging that.
"According to a recent press release, “Many of the best computer models of supernovas fail to produce an explosion.” Instead of the stellar simulation collapsing and rebounding like a supernova ought to do, gravitational forces are so great that a rebound does not occur after collapse."
Of course. How gravity generate more energy than itself? Rebounding supernova defy the principle of conservation of energy.

More on the FBI-CIA cover-up regarding the crash of TWA-800.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

War

Questioning conventional wisdom about WWII. Regarding the claim that had we not entered the war, we'd all speak German now:
"The German General Staff, which had codenamed contingency invasion/occupation plans for dozens of nations (even one for the never-tried conquest of Switzerland called "Operation Christmas") had none for the USA. Neither did the Japanese High Command. Neither nation's economy was ever fully mobilized for total war to the extent the USA's and Great Britain's had been."
Dictators don't fight all-out wars because they're too destructive. They fight wars for personal gain. Japan's rulers hoped to make quick gains against the US and reach a quick settlement. They knew they couldn't defeat the US. No doubt Germany's rulers knew the same. Neither military bothered to develop the capability to invade the US.
"Even Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the chief planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) spoke warningly of "a rifle behind every blade of grass" when discussions of invading the USA came up."
Another great reason for private firearm ownership.
"Authors Meirion and Sue Harries disclosed in their 1992 book "Soldiers of The Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army" that for each US GI there was an average of four tons of material produced, for the Japanese counterpart, an average of two pounds."
Wow.
"Worst of all, much of the above was already well known by the Roosevelt administration before Pearl Harbor."
Some tend to forget WWII had been going on for several years before Pearl Harbor.
"The winner of W.W. II, tragically, was in reality not the Allies but instead the theory and practice of the large-scale coercive collectivist state, be it in the form of Communism or the large-scale welfare/warfare states of various types and the consequent rise of a violent, unstable, impoverished Third World addicted to the benefits of the same as cavalierly dispensed by the meddlesome mandarins of the First World. True, since 1945 we've been speaking a different language, and it's not German, Japanese, or even Russian or Chinese. Rather, it's the language of socialism couched in perpetual, petulant demands for ever-more forced, taxpayer-supported "fairness and social justice" on a global scale (commonly called "humanitarian intervention") at the heavy expense of true peace, prosperity, and individual liberty. And the price, as usual in the imposition and maintenance of socialism, was and still is the untold millions of dead, impoverished, miserable, and imprisoned."
This is another great essay.

War is the health of the state.

Claim that assassination of McKinley launched a century of war. Here are the real motives for war.
"The London Saturday Review, an upper class journal, writes on 24 August 1895:
"We English have always waged war against our competitors in trade and transport. Our main competitor today is no longer France, but Germany…. In a war against Germany we would be in a position to win a lot and to lose nothing." (Page 34)
On 1 February 1896 the same journal writes:
"If tomorrow every German were eliminated, there would be no British business nor any English enterprise which would not profit (lit "grow"). If every Englishman were to vanish tomorrow, the Germans would reap gains…. One of the two must quit the field. Get ready for the fight with Germany, for Germaniam esse delendam." (Page 34)
Germany must be destroyed….
Here is the pretense.
"As early as about 1870, in the immediate context of German unification, Stead advocated union between the British empire and the United States and came to defend what he called a "true Imperialism" aimed at the peace, security, unity, and humanitarian uplift of the world."
Progressives have been using the humanitarian message to hide their economic aspirations for empire forever.
"The assassination of McKinley – a Rockefeller man favorable toward Germany – ensured the replacement by Teddy Roosevelt, a Morgan man. Morgan, favorably disposed toward Britain, had his man in place – a move that would ensure the US moves closer to Britain."
It makes sense.

War on Drugs

With gene splicing creating Frankenstein creatures everywhere, write wonders how long before somebody gene splices marijuana's THC genes into common plants. This highlights the ultimate futility of government aggression, but the aggressors don't care. They're getting rich of government aggression today.

How the US government created the so-called illegal drug problem and profited from it.
"Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis"), devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis"), with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis"). It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini's terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same. "
It worked.
""It would become supreme irony that the CIA's enormous search for weapons among drugs — fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and machines — would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."
Admiral's son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother's Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.
The public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially high potency of LSD.
Leary (and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing American Veterans' Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer's professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer's influence, crediting him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly.""
"It was also well within CIA policy to randomly distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of LSD."
That's similar to the way they poisoned alcohol during prohibition. This is an amazing essay.

Global Warming and Energy

Wealth saves the environment. Poverty destroys it. Environmentalists harm the environment by preventing wealth creation, trapping people in poverty.

NOAA busted for using false data in a paper.

Obama's laughable state-by-state global warming report has incorrect count of counties in his home state of Hawaii.

Regulation

Supreme Court legalizes benefits for gays.

Ohio House passes bill to ban red light and speeding cameras.

Politics

In internal Labor party politics, former Australian Prime Minister Rudd handily ousts sitting Prime Minister Gillard. Gillard is best known for campaigning on a platform against a carbon tax then immediately implementing a carbon tax as soon as she took office. She advanced highly unpopular gun bans and attempted to seize control of the internet. She also wanted to ban betting of sports events. Talk about a tyrant in a democrat's clothes. Apparently before this vote, both candidates agreed to quit politics if they lost. Let's see if the infamously lying Gillard keeps her word. Rudd explains why this contest occurred:
"Rudd said he was standing in the ballot – contrary to his previous assurances – because Labor was “on course for a catastrophic defeat unless there is change” and Australians “want a real choice”."
Gillard's lying and tyrannical policies had guaranteed a historic loss for her party. Gillard quits, for now.

Fifty-seven percent of Ohioans disapprove of Obama. That's all? What took so long?

Police State

US publicly backs off demands Russia extradite NSA leaker Snowden. Realizing they look like hysterical fools, they're finally going to be a little intelligent about this. Snowden should be more worried now.
"The outright refusals by Russia and China to cooperate on Snowden served as a fresh wake-up call to the U.S. that it cannot expect burgeoning superpowers to comply with its requests despite recent attempts to overcome longtime suspicions, and improve global partnerships."
The US has tried to rule the world through bribery, coercion, treachery and war for two decades, and the result has been chaos. We should end our government's foreign policy of aggression and lead the world by example by embracing the principle of non-aggression at home and overseas.
""We would hope that Russia would not side with someone who is a fugitive from justice," Kerry said. "We're not looking for a confrontation. We are not ordering anybody.""
Apparently Obama slapped Kerry down pretty good.

Who's the hero and who's the villain? Snowden informs Americans our government is spying on us all but is supposedly a bad guy for fleeing to China then Russia. Where else was he supposed to go? If he went anywhere else, they'd send him back for prosecution.

"It is time to stop letting U.S. foreign policy undermine the republic, such as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appears to have done in lying to Congress about these massive programs to spy on Americans."
On the other hand James Clapper spies on Americans and lies about it.

Some countries refuse to be bullied by the US over Snowden.
"Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino responded to Washington’s threats with a statement that the Ecuadorian government puts human rights above Washington’s interests. Foreign Minister Patino said that Snowden served humanity by revealing that the Washington Stasi was violating the rights of “every citizen in the world.” Snowden merely betrayed “some elites that are in power in a certain country,” whereas Washington betrayed the entire world."
The truth hurts. Describes how Kerry like a fool.
"Here we have a US Secretary of State lost in delusion along with the rest of Washington. A country that is bankrupt, a country that has allowed its corporations to destroy its economy by moving the best jobs offshore, a country whose future is in the hands of the printing press, a country that after eleven years of combat has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban is now threatening Russia and China. God save us from the utter fools who comprise our government."
It's too late.
"The world is enjoying Washington’s humiliation at the hands of Hong Kong. A mere city state gave Washington the bird. In its official statement, Hong Kong shifted the focus from Snowden to his message and asked the US government to explain its illegal hacking of Hong Kong’s information systems.
China’s state newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote: “The United States has gone from a model of human rights to an eavesdropper on personal privacy, the manipulator of the centralized power over the international internet, and the mad invader of other countries’ networks. . . The world will remember Edward Snowden. It was his fearlessness that tore off Washington’s sanctimonious mask.”
China’s Global Times, a subsidiary of The People’s Daily, accused Washington of attacking “a young idealist who has exposed the sinister scandals of the US government.” Instead of apologizing “Washington is showing off its muscle by attempting to control the whole situation.”
China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that Snowden’s revelations had placed “Washington in a really awkward situation. They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”"
No wonder US rulers are angry. The truth really hurts.
"The stuck pig squeals from the NSA director – ”Edward Snowden has caused irreversible damage to US” – are matched by the obliging squeals from members of the House and Senate, themselves victims of the NSA spying, as was the Director of the CIA who was forced to resign because of a love affair. The NSA is in position to blackmail everyone in the House and Senate, in the White House itself, in all the corporations, the universities, the media, every organization at home and abroad, who has anything to hide. You can tell who is being blackmailed by the intensity of the squeals, such as those of Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Mike Rogers (R, MI). With any luck, a patriot will leak what the NSA has on Feinstein and Rogers, neither of whom could possibly scrape any lower before the NSA.
The gangster government in Washington that has everything to hide is now in NSA’s hands and will follow orders. The pretense that amerika is a democracy responsible to the people has been exposed. The US is run by and for the NSA. Congress and the White House are NSA puppets."
Don't forget Boehner.
"Let’s quit calling the NSA the National Security Agency. Clearly, NSA is a threat to the security of every person in the entire world. Let’s call the NSA what it really is – the National Stasi Agency, the largest collection of Gestapo in human history. You can take for granted that every media whore, every government prostitute, every ignorant flag-waver who declares Snowden to be a traitor is either brainwashed or blackmailed. They are the protectors of NSA tyranny. They are our enemies."
They are most likely victims of the NSA too.
"Following Snowden’s revelations, Germany’s most important magazine, Der Spiegel, had the headline: “Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself From America.” The first sentence of the article asks: “Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.”"
Wow. The blowback from Snowden's revelations might make him the revered figure in the US since the Founding Fathers because it might precipitate real change.

Criticism of the Guardian's chosen method of revealing Snowden's leaked info including evidence it's all about the money. It always is.
"The pattern is the same in every industry, from farming, to manufacturing, to every aspect of transportation, to the health insurance scam, to anything else you can name. In one common version, already vested interests go to the State demanding regulation and protection from “destabilizing” forces which, they claim, threaten the nation’s well-being (by which, they mean competitors who threaten their profits). The State enthusiastically complies, the cooperative lawmakers enjoying rewards of many kinds and varieties. Then they’ll have to enforce all those nifty regulations and controls. The State will do some of it but, heck, it’s complicated and time-consuming, ya know? Besides, some of the State’s good friends in “private” business can make a killing doing some of the enforcing. Give it to them! Etc. and so on."
That's why the state exists.
"Silber then goes on:
… But that’s chump change. The real money is elsewhere — in, for instance, foreign policy itself. You probably thought foreign policy was about dealing with threats to “national security,” spreading democracy, ensuring peace, and whatever other lying slogans they throw around like a moldy, decaying, putrid corpse. The State’s foreign policy efforts are unquestionably devoted to maintaining the U.S.’s advantages — but the advantages they are most concerned about are access to markets and, that’s right, making huge amounts of money. Despite the unending propaganda to the contrary, they aren’t terribly concerned with dire threats to our national well-being, for the simple reason that there aren’t any: “No nation would dare mount a serious attack on the U.S. precisely because they know how powerful the U.S. is — because it is not secret.”
How does the public-”private” intelligence industry make foreign policy? The NYT story offers an instructive example in its opening paragraphs:
When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.
It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.
“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”"
Wonderful.
"Silber then underscores once more the highly instructive principle laid out by Robert Higgs:
I remind you once again of what I call The Higgs Principle. As I have emphasized, you can apply this principle to every significant policy in every area, including every aspect of foreign policy. Here is Robert Higgs explaining it:
As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent “failed” policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money.
When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars."
Higgs is exactly right. The government is not stupid, slow and inefficient. It's ruthlessly effective at stealing our money.

Der Spiegel's article on NSA spying has a great picture of Obama as Big Brother.
That's perfect.

Local

Police arrest man for driving in a car made to look like a police car.

Cops endanger people in four counties with high speed chase over domestic dispute.

A semi jack-knifed at the edge of I-75 construction.

Local gas prices down 60 cents.
"DeHaan attributed the drop to maintenance work being completed at a major ExxonMobil refinery in Joliet, Ill. Consumers also cut their gas consumption when prices were higher, and oil prices have fallen a bit since early June, he said."
One refinery causes this?

Federal Reserve

The irrational fear of deflation.
"The person who epitomizes this fear of deflation best is Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. His interpretation of the Great Depression has greatly biased his view against deflation. It is true that the Great Depression and deflation went hand in hand in some countries; but, we must be careful to distinguish between association and causation, and to correctly assess the direction of causation. A recent study by Atkeson and Kehoe spanning a period of 180 years for 17 countres found no relationship between deflation and depressions. The study actually found a greater number of episodes of depression with inflation than with deflation. Over this period, 65 out of 73 deflation episodes had no depression, and 21 out of 29 depressions had no deflation. "
But we did see deflation in 2008 and a lot of jobs disappeared at the same time, and that makes it easy to stoke deflation fears.
"I am sure that the economists at the Fed are surprised that we did not react to lower interest rates as we did after the dot com bubble of 2001. Human actions simply cannot be modeled as you would the reactions of lab rats in a biology experiment. "
This is a funny point. The Fed lowers interest rates to combat deflation. According to Fed logic, nobody will buy a loan while interest rates are falling, so their actions contradict their claims.
"Central bank power depends on the ability to generate inflation.
This is why central banks have been so generous supporting economic research in so many academic institutions that serve to theoretically justify the central bank’s current inflationary policies. The common fallacy of “a little inflation being good” has been expounded by the media and economists for a reason. Inflation is theft as you sleep, since it robs the value of the dollars in your wallet. Two-percent inflation over 35 years reduces the value of money in your pocket by 50 percent. If anything, evil has a new face; it is called a central bank."
When you print money, you can buy off academics to say that your printing of money, but not mine, is a good thing. Another term for deflation is improved standard of living.

Health Care

Why obesity is not a disease regardless of the worthlessly broad definition of disease.

Misc

Evidence that human ancestors colonized the Americas up to 300,000 years ago and modern humans may have evolved there as well.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Economy

Claim that Barnes and Noble's pursuit of nook is putting it out of business by cannibalizing its brick and mortar business. The nook division may be floundering, but B&N's brick and mortar business was going to die anyway. Best to salvage something.

Foreign Policy

Kerry is a bombastic fool. I bet Obama already regrets appointing him.

War

Gulf War veterans accuse the government for retaliating against them for telling the truth about Gulf War syndrome.

Evidence Petraeus's affair began earlier than claimed.

Tax and Spend

Blaming peer review for the stagnation of science. This misses the point. Government monopolization of funding is the what gives peer review this power.

IRS credit cards used to buy alcohol and porn.

Global Warming and Energy

Analysis of Obama's global warming plan.

Government decivilizes us more.
"A gentleman from New Mexico sent me his lengthy comments on an even more lengthy 475-page document issued by the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM is busy closing lands off to mining and closing public roads that have long been in use, as part of the environmental madness enforced by true believers who are in government bureaus. "
We're the stupidest people who ever lived. No people were ever born to such plenty and such opportunity bequeathed by our ancestors and squandered it to such an extent.

Federal Reserve

Innovative ways to package gold and silver as money.

Regulation

Some guy arbitrary decides that some patent enforcement is good, but the US is doing too much.
"But it is necessary that we have some system to deal with the basic economic problem of the public goods nature of knowledge."
That's not a problem.

Politcs

Ohio Governor Kasich's approval rating reaches all-time high of 54 percent.

Police State

NSA word game regarding terms 'gather' and 'collect'. It's kind of like a peeping Tom taking pictures of you through your window, then claiming he only looks at them after he obtains a warrant.

NSA keeps encrypted data for as long as it takes to crack it.

NSA leaker Snowden admits he took Booz Allen job to collect info on NSA spying. And he did.

Anger over Snowden continues.
"The state of surveillance and perpetual war are one and the same. The U.S. government’s rationale for pervasive snooping is the "war on terror," the warfare state under whatever name."
Exactly.

Snowden surfaces in Moscow airport.

Some conservative wants to bring back slavery, calling it national service. I don't want a dialog on slavery, but those who want to enslave others never go away.

Ron Paul cuts to the heart of the motivation behind ubiquitous surveillance.
"My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that the US Government views you and me as the enemy."
They absolutely consider the American people the enemy.

The spying apparatus is creating another two-tiered system: the watchers and the watched. But it's always been that way. And even the watchers are watched.

Speculation that Boston Marathon bombing suspect 1 was an FBI double agent.

Health Care

Active chemical in Monsanto's Roundup linked to breast cancer and found in ground water.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Foreign Policy

Obama tries to rein in Secretary of State Kerry as he makes promises Obama can't deliver on. This is a political maneuver on Kerry's part to set himself up for the 2016 presidential election against Clinton.

Immigration

Fifteen Republicans join Senate Democrats passing an immigration amendment that includes a National ID requirement. The amendment passed today includes another stimulus boondoggle.
"The measure would provide $1.5 billion in the next two years to provide jobs for Americans between the ages of 16 and 24."
It just keeps getting worse.

Illegal immigrants get lesser punishment for crimes.

Economy

Mises scholar analyzes the Bush-Obama Great Stagnation from 2000-2012. Maybe it should be called the Clinton-Bush-Obama Great Stagnation.
"If the government and the Fed persist in the kind of destructive policies they have undertaken since 2007, the potential for another great depression will remain. Even without such a catastrophe, the U.S. economy presents at best the prospect of weak performance for many years to come."
It's going to get much worse before it gets better.

Tax and Spend

Government bureaucrats are often sick.
"According to this report http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/06/12/good-news-30/ (see The Ferris Bueller Act - the first paragraph): "the average federal public servant calls in sick 18.2 days per year—nearly three times the absenteeism rate in the private sector.""
Must be nice.

Regulation

How LBJ made a fortune off his influence over the FCC.

Education

Schools allow students to use the wrong bathroom if they claim they are trapped in the body of the wrong sex.

Diversity does not improve education.

War

47 killed, 81 wounded in Iraq. Saddam's executioner was one of those killed.

Veteran commits suicide rather than live with the war crimes and cover-up he was forced to commit. He'll probably be scapegoated now.

Nazis used similar arguments of preemptive self-defense that we hear today in the US to justify their crimes.

Emails from British contractor show that the White House approved the Syrian rebels to commit a false flag chemical weapons attack that would be blamed on Assad's forces.

Global Warming and Energy

Instead of trying to jump all the way to fuel-scale production, alternative, renewable oil creation company first targets women's make-up because the quantities are so much smaller.

EPA prevents economical Ford vehicle from being sold in the US.

Federal Reserve

California orders the Bitcoin Foundation to cease and desist. How dare it offer a supposed alternative money to Federal Reserve notes?

The era of world-wide fiat currency is coming to and end, and all the bad things that would have happened over the last 40 years but didn't because fiat currency papered over them are going to happen worse and all at once not least of which is the brainwashing of minds.

Japan officially adopts bail-in policy of stealing depositor's money recently implemented in Cyprus. Coming soon to the US. Cyprus banks were paying an outrageous amount on interest to depositors, so depositors were benefiting from the scam. So it makes sense to me that those depositors had to pay some. But that's why Cyprus was the test run. US banks are paying no interest, but the government will still steal depositor's money for a bail-in.

Misc

HTML5 creates all kinds of security risks by enabling significant local data storage.

Health Care

Link between bacteria, gun inflammation and cancer.

70 percent of Americans hooked on government's prescription drugs.

It's scandalous that doctors prescribe speed for children with ADHD.

Is the NFL really stupid enough to promote Obamacare?

Government's pediatricians are now supposed to treat "heterosexism" and "homophobia". This is what happens when government controls our health care system. I bet they use this excuse to hook more children on government drugs.

Police State

NSA whistleblower Snowden to seek asylum in Ecuador.
""He goes to the very countries that have, at best, very tense relationships with the United States," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., adding that she feared Snowden would trade more U.S. secrets for asylum. "This is not going to play out well for the national security interests of the United States.""
Because everybody else has extradition treaties. He's trying to escape oppression, so he has to go to countries that resist the US. And I doubt these countries will demand any more info. I'm sure they're happy to protect this guy from the US given what he's already released.

Snowden seems to be missing, and the US is angry.
"In the name of “democracy promotion” efforts in places like China, Iran, Belarus, and elsewhere, the US government has spent millions of dollars providing tools and training to “dissidents” so that they could burrow into their governments and expose abuses and human rights violations. When these governments crack down on the activists acting on US instructions, the US issues another State Department Human Rights report detailing the troubling decline in democracy in said country.

When Snowden reports on his government’s abuses, however, he is charged with espionage – of aiding the enemy. But who is the enemy?"
What hypocritical scams.

The prosecution of Snowden has nothing to do with preventing espionage or keeping us safe.
"What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. It's a completely one-sided and manipulative abuse of secrecy laws. It's all designed to ensure that the only information we as citizens can learn is what they want us to learn because it makes them look good. The only leaks they're interested in severely punishing are those that undermine them politically. The "enemy" they're seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It's the American people.
The Terrorists already knew, and have long known, that the US government is doing everything possible to surveil their telephonic and internet communications. The Chinese have long known, and have repeatedly said, that the US is hacking into both their governmental and civilian systems (just as the Chinese are doing to the US). The Russians have long known that the US and UK try to intercept the conversations of their leaders just as the Russians do to the US and the UK.
They haven't learned anything from these disclosures that they didn't already well know. The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been "harmed" is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability. If anything is a crime, it's that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it."
Exactly.

I like this comparison of Snowden to Paul Revere. The NSA is trying to prevent people like Sam Adams and Paul Revere from threatening their modern tyranny.
"As McClatchy News reports, the Obama administration – already surpassing all previous administrations combined in their relentless prosecution of whistle-blowers – is cracking down hard within the government to make information of all kinds unavailable to the public, including the press. Tyranny percolates best in the dark, especially when the transition from a constitutional republic to democratic despotism is still in process. And we are right at that conjuncture when it’s still possible to stop it – which is why we’re getting a virtually united bipartisan Establishment pushing back hard against Snowden, Greenwald, and those who support them. "
I don't think there's time to stop it.

More on the TWA Flight 800 cover-up. More.

Obama orders federal employees to spy on each other to stop whistleblowers.

Australian ruling coalition rejects NSA-style ubiquitous surveillance right before an election it seems likely to lose.

Privacy and security services to protect your communication from PRISM.