Monday, June 30, 2014

Health Care

In a rare victory for property rights, the Supreme Court ruled Hobby Lobby, because it is privately held, didn't have to meet Obamacare's contraception mandate for religious reasons.

The contraception mandate was really access to morning-after, i.e. abortion,  drugs.

Police State

I love this blimp protest of NSA.

Federal Reserve

Central bankers warn of asset bubbles, blame investors not themselves for printing so much money.

Foreign Policy

Maybe Google can open trade with Cuba.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

War

It looks like a see-saw battle for Tikrit.

Netanyahu supports Kurdish independence, proving the establishment intended to break up Iraq.

ISIS declares its holdings a new country.

US military bans bibles because of separation of church and state, but forces troops to adhere to Ramadan standards.

Immigration

Obama wants $2 billion more for border security that he'll waste. The problem isn't money or manpower. It's socialist management.
"One example of the staffing mismatch: the roughly 2,500 agents in the San Diego sector arrested 97 immigrants illegally crossing the border on June 14, according to an internal document reviewed by The Associated Press. On the same day, the roughly 3,200 agents in the Rio Grande Valley made 1,422 arrests."
Ridiculous.

Politics

Even though Americans claim to disapprove of Congress, and two-thirds say they want to oust their own representative, voters keep sending incumbents back.
"More than halfway through the party primaries, 293 House and Senate members have completed their quests for renomination during the primary season. The score: incumbents 291, challengers 2."
That's so depressing.
"More incumbents will be vulnerable in the general election than the primaries. Still, the vast majority of sitting lawmakers are snug in their seats.
Over the past five decades, voters have routinely returned 9 of 10 incumbent candidates to the House. Senate races are a bit less predictable, but usually more than 80 percent of incumbents win."
So is that.

Global Warming and Energy

Swedish farmers doubt climate change and climatologists.

Antarctic sea ice area sets new record.

Immigration

Study concludes all economic growth since 2000 has gone to immigrants.

Socialism

Socialist water management threatens to leave Las Vegas without water.

Detroit cuts off water to thousands for non-payment.

Police State

Militarized police make no sense since crime is falling.
"Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway."
They know the unrest is coming.

Oregon cops drawing blood at DUI checkpoints. This is nuts.

Health Care

Ebola outbreak in Africa deadliest ever.

Facebook conducts psychological experiment on 600,000 users without their knowledge or consent.

Economy

Civil unrest on the rise.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

War on Drugs

Praise for the bootlegger.
"The prohibitionist is an instinctive authoritarian and self-enraptured bully determined to cleanse the world of conduct he considers offensive, no matter the cost. At antipodes is the bootlegger, an entrepreneur in the original sense of the word — someone who takes risks in order to provide goods to willing customers in mutually beneficial transactions. "
Nice contrast.

War

Iraqi army retakes Tikrit.

Russia delivers fighter jets to Iraqis.
"Earlier this week, Prime Minister Maliki revealed that Iraq purchased jets from Russia and Belarus in order to help its fight against Sunni militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL).
At the same time, Maliki criticized the US for taking too long to deliver on its own contract after Iraq purchased F-16 jets from America."
That's because the US supports ISIS.

Local

Warren County rulers steal land and money from developers.
"Warren County wants the developers of a proposed 1,430-acre development to provide land for a public school and commercial sports complex, and allow collection of as much as $4 million for the local school district."
This is Orwellian:
"Then, county commissioners laid out conditions they wanted Otterbein to agree to in exchange for permission to build homes at a residential density rarely approved in Warren County.
“I like to play ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’ ” Commissioner Dave Young said. “This is 9,000 new residents with a couple thousand new kids.”"
A deal they can't refuse.

Carjacking near where Wagoner claimed he was attacked.

I wonder if this report of over 1,000 people at Hillary's book signing is exaggerated.

If the economy is so good, why can't this mall pay off its loans?

Global Warming and Energy

Increased supply lowers price of electricity in Germany. Must be nice.

Canada cancels Keystone Pipeline and will send oil to Asia instead because Obama refused to OK the pipeline.

Regulation

FAA redefines drones, outlawing children's toys.

Friday, June 27, 2014

War

Mexican helicopter shoots up American side of border, but it's OK. They're the good guys, even if they killed you or a family member.

In another step into re-war in Iraq, US flying armed aircraft over Iraq. Maybe they'll kill people on both sides just like US policy. Supposedly it's only drones. Supposedly.

Immigration

The reason tech plutocrats supports amnesty is, if immigration reform is dead, so is raising the H1B cap.

To confuse Americans, government propagandists blame drug cartels for illegal immigrant children flood. As if they suddenly thought of this. The good news is, finally the people in general will start tying these things together.

Health Care

The Onion nails our health care system in one sentence:
"Hailing it as a groundbreaking discovery with far-ranging benefits, pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced a new breakthrough Friday that vastly extends the lifespan of near-death patents."
Perfect.

Media

Good for Levar Burton, who raised $4 million so far for "Reading Rainbow" and for Seth McFarlane who pledged to match any new donations up to $1 million.

Science-fiction is just fiction with science involved. Says Devin. By science she means technology.

Remember Kate Bush.

Foreign Policy

As the west planned all along, Ukraine stiffs Russia and signs trade pact with EU. I think Ukrainians should trade with whichever individuals give them the best deal regardless of country. Russia threatens trade penalties as a result. That doesn't make any sense. Russia will lose too.

In a great example showing foreign policy is always an extension of domestic policy, Obama and Biden are using political correctness and homosexual rights as a new excuse to bully countries. Rulers find anything they can exploit to foment conflict.

Politics

How Bill Clinton cashed in on the presidency by making $104.9 million for speeches.
"Bill Clinton has been paid $104.9 million for 542 speeches around the world between January 2001, when he left the White House, and January 2013, when Hillary stepped down as secretary of state, according to a Washington Post review of the family’s federal financial disclosures.
Although slightly more than half of his appearances were in the United States, the majority of his speaking income, $56.3 million, came from foreign speeches, many of them in China, Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom, the Post review found."
So much for hard work.

Local

Wagoner fired.
"Wagoner repeatedly has declined comment. The attorney who represented him in the criminal investigation, Jeremiah Denslow said Tuesday, "From my understanding not only the Dayton police but the FBI has done a thorough investigation and a lengthy one. While they believe Mr. Wagoner was not truthful with them, I suspect the authorities didn't feel they could prove it in a court of law."
The investigation also has been reviewed by the Montgomery County Prosecutor's Office. Office spokesman Greg Flannagan said Tuesday that the police investigation had the potential for misdemeanor charges, which would not be handled by the county prosecutor. "Our office did have some discussions with the Dayton Police Department concerning this matter and we were assured any possible alleged charges would be misdemeanors. There would not be any felonies they could pursue.""
The articles never mention Wagoner is following the advice of his attorney.

This story tells you about the economy. Apparently the car market needs a boost, and the gun market is the place to get it.

Lying and making false reports are SOP for cops, so I wonder what this cop really did to get prosecuted for it.
"Cash is accused of making false statements during official proceedings on Oct. 19 and Dec. 29 of last year, as well as impeding or hampering a public official during the performance of their duties, according to complaint documents filed in the Montgomery County Western Division municipal court."
There it is. Cops are allowed to lie to benefit the government, but never to benefit the people.

Only fifteen people died in alcohol-related crashes in all of Montgomery County last year, but that doesn't stop the tax-feeders from using that as a pretense to set up two DUI checkpoints targeting the Oregon District.

Police State

Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they're private corporations and therefore immune to open records laws.

Here's a guide about what to do if a police officer tries to search your phone without a warrant.
"Despite the strong privacy protections established in the court's Riley decision, police still have the right to search your phone without a warrant in a few certain scenarios known as “exigent circumstances.” This includes, for example, the abduction of a child, when police suspect a person is in imminent harm, or “some imminent threat of evidence destruction,” says Fakhoury. “So its not like a carte blanche rule.” In those instances, there's simply not much you can do.
Fortunately for us all, says Stanley, “those kinds of circumstances should be very rare.”"
They won't be rare, and warrants will be quick and easy for them to obtain.

You cell phone is still not safe from police.
"But the high court’s decision doesn’t prohibit warrantless cellphone tracking by police. The ACLU conducted a study in 2012 in which it filed more than 380 public record requests to local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Of the roughly 250 agencies that responded, 92 reported engaging in cellphone tracking, and only 10 reported that they did not track cellphones. (The remainder provided a vague statement or no statement at all about phone tracking.) Only six of the agencies that tracked cellphones said warrants were required by local or state law."
They'll get your data without touching your phone, and in upside-down world, that's considered legal.

Somebody is copying my line:
"When it comes to spying, surveillance, and privacy, a simple rule applies to our world: however bad you think it is, it’s worse. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’ve learned an enormous amount about the global surveillance regime that one of America’s 17 intelligence outfits has created to suck into its maw (and its storage facilities) all communications on the planet, no matter their form. We certainly know a lot more than we did a year ago about what the government is capable of knowing about us. We’ve also recently learned a good deal about “big data” and what corporations can now know about us, as well as how much more they may know once your house is filled with “smart” technology."
OK, it's not an exact copy, but it's close. There's nothing smart about smart technology.

Think you're protected from the government dragnet?
"The United States federal government issued more than 19,000 National Security Letters – perhaps its most powerful tool for domestic intelligence collection – in 2013, and those NSLs contained more than 38,000 individual requests for information. The new data was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday as part of its effort to comply with a directive from President Obama to declassify and release as much information as possible about a variety of tools that the government uses to collect intelligence."
While Obama ordered the release, he only did so because of Snowden.

Why hasn't the NSA shot down this blimp and bombed the EFF into submission? This must violate tyrannical airspace restrictions.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Immigration

It's nice to see Ilana Mercer take a sane position regarding the flooding of illegal immigrant children into the US. I've noticed the open border libertarians have remained silent. Plutocrats, even Rupert Murdoch and Fox News and Zuckerberg, advocate amnesty to push down the wages of workers so they can get even richer.

Cheat sheet that instructs illegal immigrant children what to say and do in order to stay in the US found at border.

Pelosi to meet and greet new illegal immigrants.

Socialism

GM scapegoating a low-level engineer for the ignition switch problems is not credible.
"I speak from the experience of owning a supplier company that was smashed to smithereens primarily by the GM engineering and purchasing bureaucracy during the last decade of its mayhem. If there is one thing that could be said about GMs modus operandi during the era of the safety switch fiasco, therefore, it is never did any engineer walk alone anywhere within a country mile of GM operations."
That was even before the government takeover, and it could only have gotten worse after.
"Business meetings at GM were held in small auditoriums. Even mid-ranking executives were accompanied by a posse of aides every step of the day. And the layers of bureaucratic approval were so dense and deep that it is amazing that the GM monster actually functioned—so sclerotic had its bureaucratic arteries become after the temporary boom of the 1990s."
If you call that functioning.
"But nowhere in the vast expanse of GM did bureaucratic layering and encrustation reach a more absurd level than in its so-called PPAP (“production parts approval process”) procedures—– a regime that governed every waking move of the tens of thousands of executives and functionaries that compromised its purchasing and engineering departments. The inherently true fact is this: the alleged villain—Mr. Raymond DeGiorgio—was a prisoner of the PPAP bureaucracy, not a lone wolf that fooled the thousands of managers, checkers and overseers above him."
Even in nimble, large companies, production changes are thoroughly documented and reviewed.
"But this episode is not about culpability for one failed part—especially since it now appears that GM is close to achieving the recall of every single car it has ever made in the last several decades. The real issue is the corruption of crony capitalism."
It does seem they will have to recall them all.
"An out-of-control, dysfunctional, dangerous, red-ink bleeding industrial dinosaur like GM should have been put out of its misery in Chapter 11 in 2008. After all, folks, GM did manage to loose the stunning sum of $85 billion during the five years leading up to 2008, and it did so after selling 35 million vehicles at total revenues of nearly $1 trillion. No industrial managers have ever—before or since—managed to accomplish such an economic fiasco."
Thanks, Bush.
"The GM recovery was no miracle of statist intervention. It was a travesty on capitalism and the taxpayers of America. And the unraveling is just getting underway. Just wait until its junk-bond financed sales to sub-prime borrowers collapse and it uses up the tens of billion of phony “fresh start” cookies jar reserves provided by its quick rinse bankruptcy."
Liquidate.

Police State

Government's biometric database searches will produce large numbers of false positives, many of them on purpose.

Low crime country purchases military armored vehicle.

I wonder if the government is trying to overwhelm us with information of its criminal activities.

Freedom of Speech

Supreme Court creates problems by ruling on copyright grounds against Aereo's right to re-broadcast live TV on the internet.

War on Drugs

All twenty Colorado marijuana stores tested in sting failed to sell drugs to minors. This is what legalization advocates expected.

Libertarians are right about the war on drugs.

Foreign Policy

Germany kicks out Verizon over NSA revelations.

Global Warming and Energy

Neutral Austria signs new pipeline deal with Russia.
"South Stream, which will cost an estimated $40 billion, is designed to carry Russian gas to the centre of Europe, a continent already dependent on Russia for a third of its gas needs, on a route that bypasses current transit country Ukraine."
Obama doesn't understand the limits of US threats. Since Austria doesn't border Ukraine, some other countries will have to be involved.

Feds instruction EPA employees to stop defecating in hallways. These are the people threating us with energy policy.

Regulation

Federal law explicitly admits minimum wage requirements cause unemployment, so it allows waivers.

Economy

Ohio racinos on pace to surpass casino revenue.

With another housing bust on the way, I wonder if the goal isn't to give the plutocrats ownership of most US homes in modern feudalism style. I bet the death tax eventually prevents people from inheriting homes so plutocrats can get ownership of currently individually owned homes too.

Local

Power out again. What a farce.

War

Obama in quandary of his own making as enemies Syrian and Iran enter Iraq war on the side of ally the Iraqi government. This would be funny if people weren't being killed.

If the airforce base is threatened, why doesn't Iraq's military remove the vehicles at risk.

260 killed, 63 wounded in Iraq.

While Syrian rebels threaten Bahgdad, Obama promises more aid to their allies.

While US rulers claim Putin is fomenting war, his actions make it appear he's trying to save the world from more war.

Using pseudonym, Pentagon official calls drone assassination program murder.
"It is worth noting that the Obama administration had already added al-Awkaki to target lists before the Justice Department delivered its response to the administration’s question about the legality of such operations — and despite federal statues banning the killing of Americans abroad."
Sounds like a high crime to me.

Politics

Supreme Court unanimously strikes down Obama's phony recess appointments.

Why limited government is a vain hope.
"The notion of limited government is incapable of being realized in practice. If there is a monopoly government, any limitations on the government must be ones the government has imposed on itself. To expect this sort of limitation to be effective is futile."
Vain over the long run at least.

Changing the crooks in Congress, like ousting Eric Cantor, changes nothing.

Health Care

Neanderthals ate their veggies. They still went extinct.

The CDC wants us to believe that 1 in 10 deaths are caused by alcohol. I'm skeptical.
"The study was conducted using the CDC's Alcohol-Related Disease Impact tool, which estimates total alcohol-attributable deaths across the United States and in individual states. This study marks the first release of a nationwide report on the number of alcohol-related deaths, but Stahre said they had been collecting information since 2001. The tool gathers mortality statistics from local and state governments and used scientific methods developed by a group of experts on alcohol and public health to determine the number of deaths linked to alcohol use."
Estimates. Are those the same experts that infected their colleagues with anthrax? This is more government propaganda.

Hospitals data mine patients.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Immigration

Immigration court backlogged 360,000 cases.

War

The US can't lose in Iraq since its on both sides.
"One would think the neoconservatives who engineered the Iraq War – the worst disaster for the United States since Vietnam – would never emerge from hiding.
Not so. With dazzling chutzpah, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the real power in the Bush administration, just claimed President Barack Obama was responsible for the growing mess in Iraq."
As if Iraq was lovely while Bush was in office.

Syrian warplanes attack ISIS in Iraq in support of Iraqi troops.

The US is at war with itself in Iraq.
"Advisor Susan Rice, using the same phrase, explains that "the United States has ramped up its support . . . providing lethal and non-lethal support where we can to support both the civilian opposition and the military opposition" in one policy discussion, and then the President announces that he is sending nearly 300 marines and 300 special forces to Iraq as advisors in another policy discussion, the translation is that America is arming and advising both sides of the same war: that America is providing lethal support against its own marines and special forces."
That sounds like treason to me.
"But it’s not an inconsistency. It is only an inconsistency if your premise about American foreign policy is that it has anything to do with aiding the foreign country for which the policy is designed. If that premise were true, then ISIS couldn’t be a terrorist organization and a liberation army simultaneously. But if you change the premise and accept the unalterable facts on the ground, that American foreign policy is really an instrument of domestic policy, that it is designed to benefit American, and not foreign, interests, then the inconsistency disappears. It is not inconsistent to fight with ISIS on one front and against ISIS on the other if fighting with ISIS brings about a favorable American outcome on one front and fighting against ISIS brings about a favorable American outcome on the other. The consistency is the favorable American outcome on both fronts. The ironic choice of partners is merely the means to those consistent ends. "
True, but it still sounds like treason.
"The third apparent inconsistency follows from the second: the removal of the American installed Nouri al-Maliki. Someone needs to replace him. And, according to the New York Times, one of the chief names being "floated so far" is Ahmed Chalabi.
The irony here is that al-Maliki was the man America wanted while Chalabi is the man America realized was its enemy. So America is "floating" the replacement of its friend by its enemy. Chalabi was the source of much of the information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that led America to war in Iraq in the first place. The problem was, according to UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, that "the ‘sensitive information’ Ahmed Chalabi had been selling America (and the U.N.) was nothing less than snake poison." The information turned out to be "lies and distortions. . . . fabrications and misrepresentations of fact." What’s worse, now that Iran and not Iraq is our enemy, is that, according to Andrew Cockburn, "Chalabi’s connection to the most hardline elements in Iran, particularly the intelligence officers of the Revolutionary Guards, are longstanding." Chalabi told Ritter that "he had tremendous connections with Iranian intelligence. He said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians. . . ." Chalabi, it seems, was helping Iran manipulate America into doing its work in Iraq. Chalabi would later be accused by the CIA of passing information on to Iran about US intelligence sources and methods.
So the irony and inconsistency here is layered. America is considering replacing al-Maliki with a man who is not only a betrayer of America, but an ally of Iran, who is now America’s primary enemy."
Still sounds like treason.

Education

From our rulers' perspective, government schools are a great success.
"a success in dumbing down the nation so that we fall easy prey to charlatans, hustlers and quacks."
And an even bigger success at stealing our money.

Tax and Spend

The bond market is in such an unstable bubble, a Fed governor recommends owners of bond funds be forced to pay an exit fee to sell.

Media

A couple weeks after giving Hillary an adversarial interview, Diane Sawyer loses her job.

Hillary's publisher won't recoup book advance because of poor sales.

Federal Reserve

Germany gives up trying to get its gold back from the Fed. That's telling.

The reason so many economists back the Fed is the Fed buys them.

Politics

Boehner is such a wuss, he won't have Congress hold Obama accountable to his lawlessness. He's going to mommy courts instead. What a weenie.

Tens of thousands of Democrats give win to Republican establishment incumbent in Mississippi over tea party contender.
"Surprisingly, more votes were cast in the runoff than in the June 3 primary. McDaniel increased his vote from 155,000 on June 3 to 184,600 last night. But the 25-35,000 Dems who crossed over to vote for Cochran gave him the extra margin to surpass his opponent."
Obama must have put out the word.

Local

Unemployment rises slightly, locally, in May.

More on Wagoner.

Storms knock out power again. And again. And again.

Bizarre story about police chasing canoers.
"The officer, Sgt. Mark White, reports he removed his gear and shoes, jumped in the water and swam after the canoe with the woman, her children and the shirtless man.
"I swam towards the fleeing canoe constantly advising him that I was the police and that he is being ordered to stop the canoe and the operator (Joe Drazek) began to laugh and tell me that I was not a police officer," Officer White wrote in his report.
About a quarter of a mile down the river, White reports he caught up to the canoe and Drazek tried to hold on to a tree branch to prevent the officer from pushing the canoe to the shore. While trying to climb into the canoe, White indicates that Drazek used the oar to push him back into the river.
White says he was able to get the canoe to the bank and instructed the children and Dehart to exit the canoe while struggling with Drazek. During the altercation, the officer noticed a strong odor of alcohol on the man's breath and several empty beer cans in the canoe."
I'd never believe this cop if I was on the jury. Was he wearing a cape too?
"After the arrest, Autumn DeHart reportedly told the officer that the family had stopped canoeing for a cookout, grilled food and drank alcohol. Back on the river, her husband of eight years began to tip the canoe over with the intent to spill everyone out of the canoe. Mrs. DeHart said she was worried about her children and told him repeatedly she didn't want him to tip the canoe.
DeHart explained to Officer White that her husband began to get increasingly upset and verbally abusive, then tipped over the canoe. One child was ejected with her mother.
Mrs. DeHart said her husband wouldn't allow her back into his canoe, so the family then got into Drazdek's canoe to complete the trip. She said that her husband was "very verbally abusive towards her" along the rest of the trip."
These guys should sue for false arrest and assault. Being a jerk is not a crime.

Global Warming and Energy

Gore buried in freak snow down under.

The EPA is also missing emails.

Economy

Revised estimates for Q1 show it was worse than reported, which is typical, but it was also the worst quarter since the recession officially ended.
"The Commerce Department revised its estimates of first-quarter gross domestic product Wednesday to show that the economy contracted at a 2.9 percent annual rate. A combination of shrinking business inventories, terrible winter weather and a surprise contraction in health care spending drove the first-quarter decline, which is the worst since the first quarter of 2009, when the economy shrank at a 5.4 percent rate."
And that's even with the Fed printing $65 or $75 billion a quarter. But don't worry. It's no big deal.
"Still, the report is no harbinger of economic doom. Analysts view the contraction as more of a hiccup borne out of temporary factors, and all signs point to a robust rebound for the rest of the year. "
Those same signs pointed to a good first quarter too, as experts told us over and over, but they were wrong. More.

I've argued for decades that making it easy for anybody to code just created a ton of crappy code. Now all that crappy code is full of security problems that never get fixed. We were far better off when programming languages were harsh on bad programmers.

Gross Domestic Expenditure (GDE) and Gross Output (GO) are more accurate metrics than GDP for measuring the economy.

Police State

Supreme Court rules 9-0 police usually need a warrant to extract cell phone data. Usually. This is no big deal, and the pretense it is is just to fool us into thinking government cares about our privacy. They already have the person and phone in custody. A search warrant is a rubber stamp.

Man uses drones to video police. Turnabout is fair play.

DHS agents, claiming to be police, break into couples house, one of whom previously worked for DHS, handcuff both naked for two hours, and demolish their belongings including their surveillance system.

Hyundai warns drivers of speed cameras so they can slow down. Even though this is the purported purpose of speed cameras, cops won't like it - they'll target Hyundais - and government will ban this.

ACLU publishes report on over-use of SWAT raids.

Misc

Big bang and quantum theories collide, showing Higgs boson should have crushed the universe during inflation.

X-ray observation highlights the silliness of modern cosmology.
"“We know that the dark matter explanation is a long shot, but the pay-off would be huge if we're right,” said Esra Bulbul of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass. who led the study. “So we're going to keep testing this interpretation and see where it takes us.”"
They're trying to prove a theory instead of following the scientific method, and they get to do that because they have virtually unlimited funding from money stolen from taxpayers.

Immigration

Border agents urgently need tens of thousands of pairs of underwear for illegal immigrant children.

Obama blames Republicans for crisis.

Texas agents caught a murder suspect, sex offender and MS-13 gang member already in US.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Misc

The just and moral actions of entrepreneurs.
"What can be unambiguously stated about a capitalist’s profit or loss is this: His profit or loss are the quantitative expression of the size of his contribution to the well-being of his fellow men, i.e., the buyers and consumers of his product, who have surrendered their money in exchange for his (by the buyers) more highly valued product. The capitalist’s profit indicates that he has successfully transformed socially less highly valued and appraised means of action into socially more highly valued and appraised ones and thus increased and enhanced social welfare. Mutatis mutandis, the capitalist’s loss indicates that he has used some more valuable inputs for the production of a less valuable output and so wasted scarce physical means and impoverished society.
Money profits are not just good for the capitalist, then, they are also good for his fellow men. The higher a capitalist’s profit, the greater has been his contribution to social welfare. Likewise, money losses are bad not only for the capitalist, but they are bad also for his fellow men, whose welfare has been impaired by his error."
Exactly.
"Logically, the institution of a state has a twofold implication. First, with a state in existence all private property becomes essentially fiat property, i.e., property granted by the state and, by the same token, also property to be taken away by it via legislation or taxation. Ultimately, all private property becomes state property. Second, none of the state’s “own” land and property – misleadingly called public property – and none of its money income is derived from original appropriation, production, or voluntary exchange. Rather, all of the state’s property and income is the result of prior expropriations of owners of private property.
The state, then, contrary to its own self-serving pronouncements, is not the originator or guarantor of private property. Rather, it is the conqueror of private property. Nor is the state the originator or guarantor of justice. To the contrary, it is the destroyer of justice and the embodiment of in-justice."
The institutionalization of injustice.

Hopefully this "correction" to the speed of light will open eyes to new theories.

Economy

Because Google is acquiring companies like crazy, prediction of a major setback. Google's reputation has already suffered because of the NSA scandal.

China outsourcing jobs to the US. We know about that in Moraine.
"Chinese companies invested a record $14 billion in the United States last year, according to the Rhodium Group research firm. Collectively, they employ more than 70,000 Americans, up from virtually none a decade ago. Powerful forces — narrowing wage gaps (Chinese wages have been doubling every few years), tumbling U.S. energy prices, the rising Yuan — up 30% over the decade — are pulling Chinese companies across the Pacific. Perhaps very soon, Chinese workers will start protesting their jobs being outsourced to the cheap labor in the U.S."
No kidding.

Credit Suisse fear barometer hits all-time high.

Regulation

One example of how voluntary market actors regulate others in a free market.

FAA bans delivery of packages by drones.

Politics

The guy who beat Cantor fires his libertarian campaign manager and hires a form Cantor aide. The establishment wins again.

Rich liberals refuse to admit they're rich.

Global Warming and Energy

The alarmism of global warming frauds is turning people off. Hoisted on their own petard.

Cold season temperature variability has reduced recently.

Oil companies taking on massive debt at low rates to expand fracking operations.

Federal Reserve

Fed money-printing isn't just inflating a stock market bubble, but its erased normal volatility.

Foreign Policy

I wasn't aware that Israelis stole hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium from the US in the 1960s.
"After investigations by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, other government agencies, and inquiring reporters, no charges were ever filed. A General Accounting Office study of the investigations declassified in May 2010 stated "We believe a timely, concerted effort on the part of these three agencies would have greatly aided and possibly solved the NUMEC diversion questions, if they desired to do so."[1]"
Probably so.

War

The Constitution requires Obama to get a declaration of war from Congress before starting a new war in Iraq, but he says he doesn't need one.
"Who wants U.S. troops back in Iraq? The American people do not. Congress does not. Tehran does not. The Shia extremists do not. The Sunnis do not. And ISIS does not."
Obama and the warmongers do.

305 killed, 55 wounded in Iraq.

Obama considers bombing Syria as well as Iraq, but who will he bomb since he funds, equips and arms ISIS as well as the Iraqi government?

Map purports to show a strategic plan redrawing of borders in the Middle East much like we're seeing occur today.

Astounding number about military veteran suicides.
"You might kill yourself after you get out. In March of this year, no U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, but almost 700 veterans committed suicide. According to Jack Hammond, the retired Army brigadier general who runs Home Base, a Massachusetts program that treats vets and their families, “veterans between the ages of 18 and 24 are four times more likely to kill themselves than their civilian counterparts.”"
Wow.

Putin renounces his power to invade Ukraine as Ukraine's coupmeisters negotiate with separatists.

Separatists reportedly shoot down Ukrainian helicopter.

Local

It's awfully coincidental that two traffic stops in Lebanon, both of Michigan men, turned up butter laced with marijuana. This stinks of NSA and DEA using secret evidence and informing cops who used pretextual stops to hide the real source of information.

Storms knock out power to thousands.
"The severity of the storms has forced Dayton Power & Light to ask for mutual aid from Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky, Rob Beeler, customer business manager at DP&L, said Monday night."
Since this happens all the time, maybe DP&L should do something to make their system resistant to storms like burying power lines.

Police State

Researchers uncover complex hacking infrastructure government use to hack mobile device.

In a rare case of obeying the Constitution, Appeals court overturns conviction because prosecutors used information that wasn't described on the warrant.

After 13 years or so, a judge noticed the no-fly list violates the Constitution.

FBI facial recognition software to become operational this year.

War on Drugs

Nine Ohio bills to exacerbate the heroin problem.

More on the drug trade.

Taliban had virtually eradicated opium production in Afghanistan by 2001, then the US brought it back.

Afghanistan reports record opium production while banks launder billions in drug profits.

Global drug trade ranks with arms and oil as the biggest businesses in the world.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Tax and Spend

While real disasters are going on everywhere, Congress and the media distract Americans with the meaningless IRS scandal.

Single mother welfare to buy votes.
"In fact, when all of the various federal and state programs are considered, a single mother with one child receives the equivalent of a $60,000 income – and pays virtually no income taxes."
That's a pretty good incentive.

Immigration

Tech leaders push for amnesty.
"Is it because they will be able to get more visas for high-tech workers, which when combined with the outsourcing of American jobs will ensure that they don't have to hire higher-cost and more demanding American workers?
Or is it because the Obama administration is bribing them to support amnesty for 11 million people by promising them more visas for high-tech workers while at the same time threatening them with more regulations, more investigations, and more IRS scrutiny unless they get behind amnesty?"
That's possibly why.

Link between immigration reform and lies about about STEM worker shortage. This article says illegal immigrants can code.

Feds order border patrol to stand down during flood of illegal immigrants and the media is banned from covering the story.
"And while Americans are routinely violated – and abused – at TSA checkpoints in the name of “safety,” illegal immigrants on the other hand are roaming past America’s border with complete impunity and are given better treatment by the government."
No kidding.

Of course illegal immigrants won't show up for their hearings.
"after you travel thousands of miles, you pay of dollars, went through a very difficult situation, you get over here and they tell you to appear in 90 days, I would say the vast majority are not going to show up."
Duh.

Police State

When government stops you on the highway to rob you, the proper term is "brigandage".

Former NSA chief now makes $1 million a month in plutocrat sector.

That "military" hand-held X-ray scanner is already heading to the police, if they don't have it already.

Economy

Sales of existing homes up 4.9 percent in May as the housing bubble grows.

Social media advertising bubble crashes.

War

Cease fire and peace talks in Ukraine.

Obama's legal justification for assassinating Americans.
"The Obama administration justified using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas by citing the war against al-Qaida and by saying a surprise attack against an American in a foreign land would not violate the laws of war, according to a previously secret government memorandum released Monday.
The memo provided legal justification for the September 2011 killing in Yemen of Anwar Al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader who had been born in the United States, and another U.S. citizen, Samir Khan. An October 2011 strike also killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, al-Awlaki's teenage son and also a U.S. citizen.
The memo, written by a Justice Department official, said the killing of al-Awlaki was justified under a law passed by Congress soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The law empowered the president to use force against organizations that planned, authorized and committed the attacks."
The Constitution is never mentioned in this article. Nor this one.
"The Justice Department memo "confirms that the government’s drone killing program is built on gross distortions of law", said Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who challenged the Awlaki killing, who added that the "forced transparency comes years late"."
The highest law of the land doesn't matter to these guys.

2005 article called Iraq War Bush's folly.

Articles refute neocon's blame of Obama for losing Iraq. One thing missing in all this blame of Obama is Obama negotiated hard to keep US troops in Iraq past 2011, but the Iraqis rejected that plan.
"Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed hope Monday that the United States and Iraq can soon reach agreement on a possible U.S. military training role in Iraq beyond Dec. 31, when all American troops are scheduled to depart.
Panetta's remarks contrasted with indications from a senior Obama administration official and a senior U.S. military official on Saturday that the U.S. is abandoning plans to keep any troops in Iraq past the year-end withdrawal deadline — other than about 160 troops who would be attached to the U.S. Embassy.
Panetta and other top U.S. officials have pressed the Iraqis for months to decide whether they want a substantial U.S. military training mission in 2012. During his first visit to Baghdad as Pentagon chief in July, Panetta appeared exasperated by the Iraqis, at one point saying, "Damn it, make a decision.""
So much for his baloney that Obama abandoned Iraq. He didn't want the war to end. He tried to extend the war the same as he extended the war in Afghanistan two years from 2014 to 2016.

Claim that sectarian rifts in Iraq were almost nonexistent until Saddam, then the US stoked them.
"The most serious sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq’s modern history followed the 2003 US-led occupation, which faced massive popular opposition and resistance. The US had its own divide-and-rule policy, promoting Iraqi organisations founded on religion, ethnicity, nationality or sect rather than politics."
Another failure of central planning. Criticism of the US dividing Iraq along sectarian lines, first by firing all the Sunnis, is legion.

Another idea why government fails so spectacularly.
"In a recent discussion I had with Scott Horton on his radio show, we speculated as to why the White House, which surely includes very many smart, hard-working, and responsible people, just cannot seem to recognize the cognitive dissonance inherent in supporting contradictory policies in places like Syria. Supporting the “rebels” in an effort that will likely fail to bring down the government in Damascus only prolongs the suffering of the Syrian people, while, if by some chance the insurgents actually did win, it would mean the death of the once-vibrant Syrian Christian community and the likely installation of a fundamentalist terrorism-supporting regime in the heart of the Arab world that would make its counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Iran look positively libertarian. And that support comes at the immediate price of the bloody disintegration of neighboring Iraq.
We eventually came to the conclusion that the staffs in large bureaucracies are not necessarily selected for their independence of mind. Quite the contrary, they rise to the top because they learned in grade school to get along well with others, which in practice means that groupthink will always prevail even if it is highly illogical and in the long run damaging to genuine interests. Combine that with an essentially reactive foreign policy, and you have a formula for coming to the wrong conclusion nearly every time."
That's being generous. It fails to mention competing self-serving interest.
"I can assert without any fear of contradiction that clandestine source reporting can be as bad as what one reads on just about any site on the Internet, and is often considerably worse than what appears in the newspapers. This bias in favor of reporting produced by the “community” induces a tunnel vision on the part of intelligence analysts that has belatedly led to a debate about the value of open sources versus the tightly controlled version of reality that prevails in security clearance land."
I like open source intelligence.
"Unfortunately, government bureaucrats don’t really see the quality of finished intelligence as an information issue. They tend to take steps to shut out unwelcome reports rather than including them and weighing their validity. This is because their prime objective is to control the story being fed to the public and the media."
Now he's getting into competing self-interest.

US sponsors terrorism in Middle East by supplying and arming ISIS.
"What is unfolding is a process of “constructive chaos”, engineered by the West.  The destabilization of Iraq and its fragmentation has been planned long ago and is part of the ”Anglo-American-Israeli ‘military road map’ in the Middle East”, as explained in 2006 in the following article"
Just like I wrote.
"Attempts at intentionally creating animosity between the different ethno-cultural and religious groups of the Middle East have been systematic. In fact, they are part of a carefully designed covert intelligence agenda.
Even more ominous, many Middle Eastern governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, are assisting Washington in fomenting divisions between Middle Eastern populations. The ultimate objective is to weaken the resistance movement against foreign occupation through a “divide and conquer strategy” which serves Anglo-American and Israeli interests in the broader region.”"
Israel wants to reduce the Middle East to stone age factions fighting among themselves, and the US is helping because it also protects the petro-dollar.

ISIS funding shows a state being born.
"“The view of Charles Lister at the Brookings Doha Center is that ISIS is largely able to fund itself. ‘ISIS has made an effort to establish networks in society that generate a continuing flow of money.’ As an example, Lister points to the systematic extortion conducted by ISIS in the recently conquered city of Mosul.
“‘The exortion affects small businesses and big companies, construction firms, and if the rumors are true, even local government representatives,’ Lister told DW. ‘In addition, it’s suspected that the organization levies taxes in the areas that it completely controls – for example Raqqa in northeastern Syria.’”
Is there really any difference between taxes and extortion? The case of ISIS suggests that there isn’t. A proto-state behaves like a state by extracting revenues from those in its territory of control. ISIS also behaves like a state in grabbing resources, such as the oil in northern Syria, and in looting. The methods being used are age-old."
Give me your money, or else.
"“‘It’s assumed that ISIS pays the foreign fighters in its ranks, but perhaps it pays all its troops,’ according to Charles Lister. ‘In the areas under ISIS control, the organization subsidizes bread, water, and fuel, and also finances the maintenance and operation of basic public services. All that costs money.’”"
A nice socialist-fascist proto-state.

ISIS threatens to nuke Israel.

Global Warming and Energy

Supreme Court upholds EPA tyranny, just as one would expect.

NOAA, which corrupts the temperature record to make it seem hotter now, claims May set a high temperature record.

Education

In direct repudiation of government schools, study finds kids with less structured schedules are more successful.

Regulation

Every now and then a little bit of sanity leaks into the media about net neutrality.

Health Care

Eating more saturated fat reduces risk of heart disease, the opposite of what government has been forcing on us for 60 years.
"Most people actually need upwards of 50-85 percent fats in their diet for optimal health—a far cry from the 10 percent currently recommended."
Yummy.

Some researchers realized that bacteria are important to our food. At this rate, a couple of centuries from now, the establishment will catch on. 

Regulation

Regulations contributed to Gulf oil spill.

Columbus orders cab drivers to install state of the art credit card readers, or else... 

War on Drugs

Pope criticizes legalization of drugs. I liked his common man approach when he was raised, but his economics and support for violence has to be resisted.

Misc

The Big Bang cultists who claimed they proved the Big Bang and cosmic inflation suddenly discovered there's dust in the galaxy. Apparently they didn't know that before, but now that somebody told them, they're not sure they proved anything. They didn't prove what they thought.

Immigration

Obama shuts off the media from investigating illegal immigration at the border to hide his lawlessness. Can't have the truth leaking to the American people.

War

Judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death captured and executed by ISIS.

Tony Blair promotes fantasy land, claiming removing Saddam didn't precipitate this. Of course it did.

Rand Paul blames Bush, Cheney and Blair for invading. Cheney criticizes Paul, giving him a boost.

Israel attacks nine military targets in Syria, using death of teenager - most likely a false flag carried out by rebels - as pretense. Like Syria has something to gain by killing an Israeli teenager.
"It was not immediately clear whether Syrian troops or one of the many rebel groups battling the government carried out Sunday's deadly attack in the Golan. But Lerner said it was clear that the attack was intentional. Israel has repeatedly said it holds the Syrian government responsible for any attacks emanating from its territory, regardless of who actually carries them out."
That works out really well for the rebels.

Foreign Policy

More on German spy agency's collusion with NSA.

Police State

Workplace surveillance.

Military, and therefore the police, have hand-held X-ray guns to look into your cars and airplane wings.

Politics

Book claims, in detail, Hillary has serious health problems. Quoted in full since Drudge doesn't keep this stuff around:
"BOOK: HILLARY HAS BAD HEART
Sun Jun 22 2014 18:01:30 ET

*Exclusive**

A new provocative work by bestselling author Ed Klein claims Hillary Clinton's health problems are much more severe than she has publicly revealed!

"She had managed to keep her medical history secret out of fear that, should it become public, it would disqualify her from becoming president," writes Klein in BLOOD FEUD.

BLOOD FEUD hits the street this week [it ranked #89 on AMAZON Sunday afternoon.]

Page 193

The true story of what happened to Hillary, which is being recounted in these pages for the first time, was radically different from Reines’s version.

To begin with, Hillary fainted while she was working in her seventh-floor office at the State Department, not at home, as Reines told the media. She was treated at the State Department’s infirmary and then, at her own insistence, taken to Whitehaven to recover. However, as soon as Bill appeared on the scene and was able to assess Hillary’s condition for himself, he ordered that she be immediately flown to New York–Presbyterian Hospital in the Fort Washington section of Manhattan. When Reines subsequently released a statement confirming that Hillary was being treated at the hospital over the New Year’s holiday, it naturally intensified speculation about the seriousness of her medical condition.

While she was at the hospital, doctors diagnosed Hillary with several problems.

She had a right transverse venous thrombosis, or a blood clot between her brain and skull. She had developed the clot in one of the veins that drains blood from the brain to the heart. The doctors explained that blood stagnates when you spend a lot of time on airplanes, and Hillary had clocked countless hours flying around the world.

To make matters worse, it turned out that Hillary had an intrinsic tendency to form clots and faint. In addition to the fainting spell she suffered in Buffalo a few years before, she had fainted boarding her plane in Yemen, fallen and fractured her elbow in 2009, and suffered other unspecified fainting episodes. Several years earlier, she had developed a clot in her leg and was put on anticoagulant therapy by her doctor. However, she had foolishly stopped taking her anticoagulant medicine, which might have explained the most recent thrombotic event.

“The unique thing about clotting in the brain is that it could have transformed into a stroke,” said a cardiac specialist with knowledge of Hillary’s condition.

Page 195

According to a source close to Hillary, a thorough medical examination revealed that Hillary’s tendency to form clots was the least of her problems. She also suffered from a thyroid condition, which was common among women of her age, and her fainting spells indicated there was an underlying heart problem as well. A cardiac stress test indicated that her heart rhythm and heart valves were not normal. Put into layman’s language, her heart valves were not pumping in a steady way.

When the author attempted to contact the Clintons’ cardiologist, Dr. Allan Schwartz, he refused to comment, which made it impossible to determine the exact nature of Hillary’s medical status or its long-term significance. However, sources who dis- cussed Hillary’s medical condition with her were told that Hillary’s doctors considered performing valve-replacement surgery. They ultimately decided against it. Still, before they released Hillary from the hospital, they warned Bill Clinton: “She has to be carefully monitored for the rest of her life.”

Developing...
"
I've known for decades she had a bad heart, but I didn't know it affected her health. It'll be fun to watch Hillary try to dodge this.

Sports

Ghana, which the US surprisingly beat in its first game, accused of match-fixing.

Global Warming and Energy

The mainstream media noticed that NOAA/NASA frauds are manipulating the temperature record to make it seem hotter today than it was in the past. The 1930s is the hottest decade on record. I've been pointing this out for years. The manipulation is global.

Obama wants to use the EPA to save the bees. You know this will make things worse.

24 things the media claim are caused by global warming.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Politics

Researcher talks about the "deep state" and the parallels between 9/11 and JFK's assassination.

Federal Reserve

Growing income inequality started around 1970 when the US went of the Bretton Woods agreement.

We're supposed to be happy about rising prices.
"The recent pick-up in consumer prices is generally considered good news for the economy because annual inflation was well below the Federal Reserve’s 2% target last year. Low inflation reflects a weak economy and can lead to deflation, or falling wages and prices, which often foreshadows recession."
Hooray, I'm poorer.

Police State

Google subsidiary buys home surveillance company. You know NSA is monitoring those cameras.

Feds tell cops to deceive judges about stingray surveillance.

Immigration

Obama makes meaningless moves to create the illusion he's responding to the illegal immigrant surge he incited.

Central American media outlets switch gears from encouraging children to go to the US to discouraging it. This is just the propaganda, what's seen. What's not seen is the encouragement that goes on behind the scenes.

Health Care

CDC personnel, who supposedly protects us from disease, infect themselves with anthrax. 75 treated. 84 treated. The CDC is like the Three Stooges with spacesuits and guns.

CDC described as a bio-weapons facility. Why does the CDC keep quantities of anthrax around?

ADHD anecdotally linked to processed foods

War

More Iraq analysis.

251 killed, 39 wounded in Iraq.

Iraqi Shiite cleric threatens US forces. Nobody but the warmongers want the US back in Iraq.

US-trained Iraqi soldiers haven't offered much resisted to ISIS and its Sunni militia allies, but Shiite militias vow to defend Baghdad.

US rulers call Iraq's civil war a political crisis.

Supreme Iraqi cleric calls for PM Maliki to resign and make way for more inclusive government.

74 percent of Americans against another war in Iraq.

Report exposes lie about US being surprised.
"A secret plan to aid the Iraqi army in its fight against Al Qaeda-aligned Sunni Muslim militants was authorized by President Barack Obama late last year, but was handicapped by a lack of resources and mistrust over Iran's influence on the government of Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a published report.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the White House initially devoted only a small group of specialists to the task of gathering intelligence on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). A senior U.S. official told the paper that the plan ""wasn't a priority and nobody thought it was a serious effort.""
They had a plan.

Even the Washington Post is forced to admit the Iraq civil war and the Syrian civil war are the same war.

The consequences of the war in Iraq and the war on terror.
"More than a decade after its invasion and occupation, after Cheney made those fervent claims, no administration would have the slightest problem linking al-Qaeda to Iraq (or Syria, Yemen, or a number of other countries). A decade later, the evidence is in. Sunni Iraq, along with areas of neighboring Syria, one of the countries that was supposed to bow down before American might, now houses a rudimentary jihadist state, a creature birthed into the world in significant part thanks to the dreams and fantasies of the visionaries of the Bush administration. Across the Greater Middle East, jihadism and al-Qaeda wannabes of every sort are on the rise, while terror groups are destabilizing regions from Pakistan to northern Africa."
Al Qaeda is everywhere. This is a great article.

Tax and Spend

Disability recipients top 11 million for first time.

Media

New York Times refuses to list Dinesh D'Souza's book on its best sellers list.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Foreign Policy

While the German government feigns outrage over NSA spying, the reality is Germany's spy agency helped NSA tap German fiber-optic networks.

Besides UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, 33 countries help NSA tap fiber cables.

Socialism

I like the idea of capturing an asteroid, but it should be funded voluntarily, not by NASA with stolen money.

War

Pat Buchanan on schizophrenic US policy in the Middle East.

Great article on Iraq.
"What’s unfolding in Iraq, with ISIS, is no more than a progression along a predictable continuum, the starting point of which was an American occupation that unseated an extremely effective law-and-order leader: Saddam Hussein. Consequently, where there was once oppression and order, there is now only chaos and carnage. The lawlessness we brought to Iraq with our messianic, faith-based initiative has allowed the manifestation of divisions that have riven the region for four millennia.
As this column predicted in 2007, “Once we decamp, some Saddam-like strongman will fill the power vacuum left. The dictator to emerge from the ruins of Iraq will impose Sharia, pray to the hidden Imam, and compel women to walk about in black nose bags. We had it good with Saddam because he was secular, an enemy of fundamentalist Islam. Can we have back what, in our folly, we fouled up? No.”"
Great quotes from previous articles.

151 killed in Iraq.

Obama taking US back into Iraq.
"President Obama’s announcement that the US is sending 300 "advisors" back to Iraq to stave off the rising Sunni insurgency was couched in assurances that "American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq" – but who really believes that? A proven liar – "If you like your health insurance you can keep it" – this President has absolutely no qualms about engaging in systematic deception if it serves his purposes. Indeed, his version of the numbers is in itself a blatant lie: in reality, we are sending 575 military personnel into Iraq, including the 275 marines and troops sent to guard the now-imperiled US Embassy – and that’s just what they’re announcing publicly. God knows what the real numbers are."
Obama lies without conscience.
"This has been the one point of unity on both the Obamaite left and the neoconservative right in assigning blame for the crisis: it’s all Maliki’s fault. He is charged with pursuing "sectarian" policies that somehow drove the Sunnis into the camp of ISIS – a group so brutal and sectarian that it was expelled from Al Qaeda. Maliki, says the President, must "reach out" to the rebellious Sunnis – who are even now joining ISIS in droves – and form a coalition "government of national unity." This, we are told, will somehow defuse the well-armed ISIS cadre, who number some 15,000, and prevent Iraq from falling into their hands. "
It seems a little late for that.
"In tandem with Qatar, Kuwait, and the Saudis, Washington poured aid – and arms – into the rebel camp. Amid the kaleidoscopic ideological landscape of the Syrian battlefield, it was and is impossible to tell who is getting arms from where – and if you’re wondering how and where ISIS got the heavy weaponry it is now deploying in Iraq you need look no farther than arms depots in Jordan (and Libya) intended for our Syrian jihadist friends. Indeed, ISIS is proudly displaying its American-made arsenal all over social media, and the claim that all of it was captured from Iraqi forces just doesn’t pass muster.
Yes, we helped arm ISIS, along with our backstabbing Gulf allies – and now we’re sending troops into Iraq who will come under fire from weaponry paid for by American taxpayers. If ever there was a crisis entirely created in Washington, what is happening in Iraq today is a textbook case."
Exactly.

VA transfered resources from treating patients to adopting green energy.

Over 400 military drones have crashed since 2001.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Police State

Local and state police using dragnet surveillance.

Foreign Policy

Analysis of evidence of Iran's nuclear program.

Politics

What kind of baloney is this accusation that Scott Walker coordinated raising funding? What do you think Democrats and labor unions do all the time? How can this be illegal?
"The political fallout for the likely 2016 presidential candidate is unclear. Walker has denied wrongdoing, and no charges have been filed. But Thursday’s development thrusts an investigation into his political activities that had gone dormant back into the news — as the governor is locked in a neck-and-neck race for a second full term. Democrats were quick to pounce on the documents."
So a bunch of left-wing political hack prosecutors made the accusations but didn't file charges, and they're using it to slime him.

Faith in Congress reaches all-time low of 7 percent. Those 7 percent must all work for the government.