Foreign Policy

Wikileaks published CIA code showing how CIA disguised its hacking as if done by foreign governments. More.

Politics

We should never create an environment when a person castrates themselves multiple times.

Economy

GE CEO says robots won't steal jobs. What's missing from this discussion is the creation of wealth. More.

Tech giants claim they won't sell your browsing history in the same way they said you could have unlimited data. The government has it all.

Media

Of course parents should be responsible for which videos children watch online, but since government is destroying the family by destroying the economy and trapping children in government prison-schools, it's not possible.

Local

WSU accounting reports proven fraudulent.

Police State

Outrageous charges against reporters who ran sting operation against Planned Parenthood to silence people from doing the same.

Economy

Amazon-Walmart price war is squeezing grocery suppliers.

Foreign Policy

EU president says he'll break up US, getting Texas and Ohio to secede, because Trump supported Brexit.

Protests in Russia are undoubtedly funded by US rulers.

You know the US is manipulating the Ecuadorian election to get at Assange.

War on Drugs

Admitted drug lab corruption could overturn 23,000 convictions. I'm more concerned about the much greater unadmitted corruption.

Tax and Spend

Less than 1 percent of scientific papers follow scientific method.

Media

Judge Napolitano returns after being suspended for explaining how politicians use allied intelligence agencies to spy on their opposition.

Media

Netflix is eating Hollywood.

Economy

Elon Musk warns there could be no stopping AI. Musk announces product to link people with AI. More.

Regulation

Patents prevent us from owning nice things.

Environment

Record low for Arctic sea ice in winter.

1.2 billion barrels of oil discovered in Alaska.

Local

Sauerkraut festival considers moving because of new regulations.

Dayton skyscraper for sale. It won't sell for much despite the bubble.

Sinclair college to increase fees.

War

Ten changes to stop terrorism.

"Top security experts agree that mass surveillance makes us MORE vulnerable to terrorists.
Indeed, even the NSA admits that it’s collecting too MUCH information to stop terror attacks.
In virtually every recent terror attack – in Boston, Paris, San Bernadino, Orlando, etc. – the suspect was already on a terror watch list, known to authorities, previously interviewed by the FBI, or the like. They were already known to authorities.
Mass surveillance simply doesn’t keep us safer.  Indeed, instead of focusing on known bad guys and their associates, the government is flooded with surveillance data from spying on everybody. So they can’t do their job to stop terrorists."

Like I keep saying.

Health Care

Why our health care stinks.

"As regulators allowed special interests to help design policy, everything from medical education to drugs became dominated by virtual monopolies that wouldn’t have otherwise existed if not for government’s notion that intervening in people’s lives is part of their job."

That's it.

Politics

Evidence shows Trump was right about being surveilled and those who said otherwise are liars.

"Two days after FBI Director James Comey assured us there was no truth to President Trump’s tweet about being wiretapped by Barack Obama, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump may have had more than just a small point.
The U.S. intelligence community, says Nunes, during surveillance of legitimate targets, picked up the names of Trump transition officials during surveillance of targets, “unmasked” their identity, and spread their names around, virtually assuring they would be leaked."

I wonder if the majority of people will find this out.

"The real scandal, which the media regard as a diversion from the primary target, Trump, is that a Deep State conspiracy to bring down his presidency seems to have been put in place by Obamaites, and perhaps approved by Obama himself."

The press will never report that.

"On Jan. 12, writes Henninger, the Times “reported that Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed rules that let the National Security Agency disseminate ‘raw signals intelligence information’ to 16 other intelligence agencies.”
Astounding. The Obamaites seeded the U.S. and allied intel communities with IEDs to be detonated on Trump’s arrival. This is the scandal, not Trump telling Vlad to go find Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails.
We need to know who colluded with the Russians, if anyone did. But more critically, we need to unearth the deep state conspiracy to sabotage a presidency."

Good luck with that. It'll take a whistleblower.

"As for the reports of Lynch-White House involvement in this unfolding plot to damage and destroy Trump the real question is: What did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it?" 

You won't see any congressional hearings about that.

The New York Times reported Obama wiretapped Trump bank in January.

Even Teddy Roosevelt warned the US was ruled by a secret, deep state.

Anti-Trump protestors start fights at Trump rally.

I've long advocated splitting California in two.  New Yorkers outside New York City should do the same.

Economy

More American jobs likely to be taken over by robots than in other countries.

Robots to take 10 million British jobs.

American farmers forced to hack their tractors with Ukrainian code.

Bill Gates is still the world's richest man.

Police State

New bulldozer-like riot control vehicle.

NSA programs.

Legalized robbery.

"In modern-day America, greedy government goons steal from the innocent to give to the corrupt under court- and legislature-sanctioned schemes called civil asset forfeiture. In fact, according to The Washington Post, “law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did.”"

Lovely.

UK again demands backdoors into encryption proving encryption works and having a backdoor wouldn't have stopped the latest terrorist attack.

The National Geospacial Intelligence Agency is a multi-billion dollar spy agency nobody has heard off.

Cyberwarriors can stop cars, open jail cells and shut off water.

War

Trump's military budget increase proposal - just the increase - is larger than all but two countries spend on military.

Police State

Comcast offers pervasive, 24/7 surveillance system to companies. NSA, CIA and FBI approve.

Regulation

How come China gets a secure version of Windows 10 but not Americans. F*** Microsoft.

Environment

Harvard and UN team up to test geoengineering. What could go wrong?

Record precipitation and snowpack in California. So much for the eternal drought.

Media

Facebook allows post about hunting and killing white women while censoring others for hate.

Politics

Republican Obamacare copy fails.

Health Care

Colon cancer screen in unhealthy.

Economy

Bankers, through their government allies, have rigged the economy in their favor.

"As further proof, let’s look at this data recently obtained by Zero Hedge. In the past 4 years, JP Morgan’s in-house trading group has had exactly 2 days of losses:

That’s not trading. Trading involves uncertainty and risk. This situation has none. It’s an extraction process — siphoning value from the market day after day with ironclad dependability."

That's impressive rigging.

War

US and Russian troops are operating in the same Syrian city.

Foreign Policy

After the Cold War, mini-nukes, robots, and nanobots are being used to scare us. Don't forget global warming and a pandemic.

Police State

Who's liable for decisions made by AI and robots.

Politics

A timely reminder that China helped get Bill Clinton elected in return for missile technology, people were arrested, but there was no investigation of Clinton.

Bogus request by leftist billionaires for New York to raise taxes on them.

Contrary to claims, nationalists win more seats in Netherlands.

"The Dutch elections on Wednesday have provided a whole bunch of Orwellian narratives. PM Mark Rutte’s right wing VVD party, actually the ‘business’ -or should we say ‘rent-seekers’ in 2017- party, who lost some 20% of the seats they had obtained in the previous parliamentary election in November 2012, down from 41 to 33 seats, is declared the big winner. While Geert Wilders’ very right wing party, PVV, won 25% more seats -it went from 16 to 20- and is the big loser." 

"What Rutte’s going to do next is form a new coalition, this time not with the left but with the center-right, and no-one will be able to tell the difference. If Dutch, and European, and global, politics have one main problem, it’s that. Left is right and right is left and winners are losers. If a guy like Dijsselbloem can squeeze Greek society dry in his capacity as Eurogroup head, while he runs as a leftist candidate in his own country, and loses hugely, anything goes."

Upside-down world.

Circumstances make it appear Obama did spy on Trump regardless of what rulers claim.

"How could DNI Director Clapper and CIA Director Morell say that no connection had been established between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, without there having been an investigation? And how could such an investigation be conclusive in exonerating Trump’s associates — without some use of electronic surveillance?
Did the FBI fly to Moscow and question Putin’s cyber warfare team?
More questions arise. If, in its investigation of the Russian hacking and a Trump connection, the FBI did receive the fruits of some electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign, were Attorney General Loretta Lynch, White House aides or President Obama made aware of any such surveillance? Did any give the go-ahead to surveil the Trump associates? Comey would neither confirm nor deny that they did.
So, if Obama were aware of an investigation into the Trump campaign, using intel sources and methods, Trump would not be entirely wrong in his claims, and Obama would have some ‘splainin’ to do."

We'll see.

David Rockefeller, possible the world's most powerful rulers, died at age 101.

Environment

A medium dog has the same carbon footprint as an SUV.

Education

First the government shuts down ITT Tech then it sends back $141 million in loan relief.

Tax and Spend

After Trump proposes cuts to Meals on Wheels, donations surge.

Cost overruns like those for this Butler County monument are business as usual for local governments too.

Scientists acknowledge what NASA swore was water on Mars could be sand. No kidding. They don't understand Martian sandstorms either.

NASA gets more money for manned mission to Mars.

War

It's largely gone unreported that Israel is waging war on Syria.

Tax and Spend

You can't credit Trump with this debt reduction. This is a result of high tax revenue because of the bubble. Obama had low tax revenue when he took office.

Trump says he'll have a big tax cut. I hope so. I hope he cuts spending more.

Police State

Nobody wants an Internet of Things. It's a dumb idea pushed by government for the sole purpose of spying on people.

Politics

Negative Trump policies.

Trump undermines free trade.

Praise for Trump's radical budget.

Another comparison of Trump to Jackson.

Leftist Silicon Valley psychopath CEOs.

Trump's plan to cut pseudo-science funding is a big step toward depoliticizing science.

Democrats are warning supporters there will be no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russians.

After Trump proposes cuts to Meals on Wheels, donations surge.

Federal Reserve

While most Americans, at least older ones, are against wage and price controls, we allow the Fed to set the price of lending money.

Environment

Solar cycle 24 continues to be weak.

Unsealed documents prove RoundUp isn't as safe as claimed.

Pesticides aren't necessary to grow natural crops, but modern crops may need them.

Tax and Spend

The government wants to take over your brain.

Politics

Leftists call for murder.

Police State

Judge grants search warrant for everybody who searched a crime victim's name on Google.

Judge Napolitano explains how Obama could have secretly spied on Trump through Britain's GCHQ.

"We face the gravest threat to personal liberty since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 proscribed criticism of the government.
We have an unelected, unnamed, unaccountable elite group in the intelligence community manipulating the president at will and possessing intimate, detailed knowledge about all of us that it can reveal.
We have statutes that have given the president unconstitutional powers that have apparently been used. And we have judges on secret courts facilitating all this as if the Constitution didn’t exist."

Right.

Police State

Nobody cares about the CIA revelations.

War

The next phase of war in Iraq and Syria.

"Five thousand US troops are back in Iraq to bolster the shattered nation’s puppet regime that is propped up by American bayonets.  New Iraqi military formations have been formed, totally equipped with modern US M1 Abrams tanks, Humvees, and fleets of trucks.  More US forces are on the way.
These US-financed Iraqi units are euphemistically called ‘anti-terrorism forces’ and are supervised by US officers.  In fact, what we see is the old British Imperial Raj formula of white officers commanding native mercenary troops."
"Most of America’s Iraqi ‘sepoys’ (as native troops in the British Indian Raj were known) are Shia bitterly opposed to the nation’s minority Sunnis.  After its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US encouraged animosity between Shia and Sunni as a way of breaking resistance to foreign occupation – ‘divide et impera’ as the Romans used to say."

But the Shiites are aligned with Iran and Sunni with Saudi Arabia.

A real Pentagon plan to win a nuclear war with Russia.

Regulation

Government claims its regulations make cars safer, but highway fatalities spiked in 2015 and are rising in 2016.

"Could it possibly be that government-mandated “safe” cars have become very distracting to drive? That we have passed a kind of idiot-proofing Event Horizon?
Might it be that the spike in motor vehicle fatalities is an unintended consequence of serial efforts to absolve – via technology – the driver of responsibility for paying attention to his driving?
Is it possible that encumbering cars with so much technology meant, ostensibly, to prevent accidents from happening has instead made accidents more rather than less likely – as a result of warning buzzer/light/vibrating steering wheel overload?
That makes sense.
And, it correlates." 

It also correlates with the bubble finally reaching flyover country.

"It’s typical of the disjointed logic of government that, on the one hand, “distracted driving” is a very bad thing (and it is) while on the other hand, the government encourages just that via technologies which are specifically set up to relieve the driver of the chore of paying attention."

I agree with this too.

Foreign Policy

Rand Paul blocks NATO's inclusion of Montenegro. Insane McCain claims he works for Putin.

Environment

Tesla needs to raise cash, to Musk is buying a stock offering.

Tax and Spend

Feds hit debt limit again.

Politics

Hawaii judge blocks Trump's second travel delay.

Federal Reserve

The Fed may speed up rate hikes.

"And with inflation showing signs of perking up, Fed policymakers may signal there could be more than the three rate rises they have forecast for this year."

Inflation is obviously much higher than they pretend, but it also will cause a crash that Trump could be blamed for.

Politics

How Obama spied on Trump without leaving a trail.

"The reason is that British intelligence had access to NSA surveillance data – which captures every phone call in the United States – and were able to provide such intelligence to President Obama without a FISA court warrant or any other paper trail that would expose an American intelligence agency that used the same NSA data."

Beautiful corruption.

"It is widely rumored that such arrangements are common among intelligence services to work around limitations their own governments impose on them." 

So all incumbents are spying on their political opposition through foreign intelligence.

Republicans don't want to expose widespread voter fraud by Democrats.

Police State

Smart vibrator maker caught spying on users, and you know the NSA intercepted that data.

Police State

Accusation Furgeson police created a fake story of Michael Brown robbing the convenience store before a cop killed him.

"Filmmaker Jason Pollock says he uncovered explosive video footage that proves Missouri police suppressed evidence in order to create the impression that Michael Brown, the teenager shot by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, robbed a convenience store shortly before the encounter."

I don't know if it's true or not, but it's plausible. We do know the police failed to follow procedures during the investigation; for example they allowed the cop to keep his gun. The state is too corrupt to trust.

Foreign Policy

China concerned over CIA hacking. No kidding.

Federal Reserve

Fractional reserve gold. Like bank notes, banks don't hold the gold they owe to people, so when you come to collect, it may not be there.

Politics

60 percent of posts supporting Obamacare come from a handful of paid activists.

Paid activists dominate social media.

Social media sites purging non-leftists.

Soros, globalists, and leftists preparing and funding massive protests (riots).

Bill Clinton recognizes the artificial left-right division rulers have agitated threaten their power.

The attacks on Trump might be effective, but they hurt Democrats and all rulers too. That's what Bill Clinton is warning about.

Politics around Trump is fun to watch.

"That was the thing about Clouseau; unlike Sherlock Holmes, who would prevail through intelligence and skill, Clouseau could always be counted on to stumble out of danger and pratfall his way to victory. And the bad guys, no matter how smart they were, no matter how skilled, couldn’t beat him.
I’ll be frank; I still can’t decide whether Trump is Holmes or Clouseau. But the sonofabitch always wins, and his enemies always lose in spectacular fashion, and it’s making for the presidency that’s far more enjoyable to watch than any Hollywood movie."

He's neither. He has the instincts to fight back, and the people like that.

The first of two FISA warrants to wiretap Trump was submitted right after Bill Clinton met AG Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix.

Trump will change little of note in Washington.

"Trump’s Russophobic appointments, such as McMaster, Mattis, and Fiona Hill are actually worst than Obama’s Victoria Nuland, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice. Just as Hillary and Nuland brought regime change to Ukraine, Tillerson at the State Department has signaled regime change of the democratically elected government in Venezuela. Ecuador and Bolivia won’t be far behind."

Ecuador houses Julian Assange.

Blaming Obama for replacing the last Pope.

Education

This is what government schools produce.

"According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov). For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace. Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading."

Socialist education.

Environment

Australian farmers switch to diesel power because of renewable energy shortage.

Elon Musk promises to fix Australia's energy shortage problem in 100 days with batteries or it's free.

New EPA chief says CO2 isn't the cause of global warming.

Freakishly hot February.

Top global warming propaganda organization to close because of lack of funding.

Police State

How the FBI corrupted Geek Squad to spy on people.

How wiretaps theoretically work. In reality the NSA collects everything.

Bin Laden has won.

Wikileaks's Vault 7 press release. More.

17 instances of criminality documented in the CIA Vault 7 leak.

The CIA is not targeting terrorists.

"Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals."

Not surprising. Terrorists promote government power.

"As Wikileaks noted, the CIA did not seem especially interested in ISIS, or drug cartels.
But the French Election did interest the CIA. We know they monitored the candidates to intercept communications. The CIA was especially interested in the prospects of French economic growth, specifically which candidates would follow “the German model of export-led growth.”"

Again, not surprising.

"The CIA mission seems to be controlling the world economy and choosing who will win elections of foreign governments. Where is the focus on Isis, China, and Iran coming from? The leaked documents specifically mention 10,000 targets from North America, Europe, and South America."

Not surprising.

"In reality, it is the CIA creating and disseminating these weapons in a disorganized insecure way that makes us all more vulnerable to whoever’s hands the cyber weapons have fallen into. We have been less safe since the CIA built the hacking arsenal."

Exactly.

"Which also brings up more questions about sketchy incidents like the death of investigative reporter Michael Hastings.
Vault 7 confirmed the CIA’s interest in taking over and controlling vehicles. Michael Hastings died in a strange and mysterious car accident.
He was preparing a report on then-CIA Director Brennan’s involvement in sanitizing Obama’s passport records. Hastings died when his car hit a tree and exploded, just three months after Brennan became head of the CIA."

Which is why suddenly everybody is developing a self-driving car.

Self-driving cars should be called hacker-available cars.

The CIA hacks make it easier for Russian, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and terrorists to hack us. That sounds like aiding and abetting the enemy to me.

"When do the unlimited powers of the Intelligence/Security agencies threaten America’s domestic and global national interests? The CIA and its political enablers claim the agency’s essentially unlimited powers, partially revealed by Wikileak’s Vault 7, pose no threat to America’s interests, since they are intended to “defend” American interests.
This is the rationale presented by neocon CIA allies in both political parties: the CIA can’t possibly threaten America’s interests because the CIA defines America’s interests."

That reminds me of Nixon claiming anything done by the president is, but definition, not criminal. It also contradicts what we learned above.

Ransomware didn't lock people out of their hotel rooms, but it can lock people with smart locks out of their houses.

Tech companies in bed with CIA against Wikileaks.

CIA funded Google and Facebook.

The DoD's venture capital network.

"Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns."

"In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.

But that’s just one side of the story.

Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining.

Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.

“We funded Stanford University through the computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students working on many exciting areas,” Prof. Thuraisingham told me. “One of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. The intelligence community’s MDDS program essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources, including the private sector.”

This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate student at Stanford appears to have been incidental. The Pentagon was all over computer science research at this time. But it illustrates how deeply entrenched the culture of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence community."

Government rules tech.

Great quote:

"“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin" 

Carlin got it.

Blaming FISA for out of control spying.

"The president can order the National Security Agency to spy on anyone at any time for any reason, without a warrant. This is profoundly unconstitutional but absolutely lawful because it is expressly authorized by the FISA statute."

This critique is misguided. Spies are never limited by law, only technology. New laws merely legalize what's already being done.

Yes, the Wikileaks CIA Vault 7 leak proves we live in a police state.

"The massive infection of commonly used software and electronic devices leads to a major problem: proliferation. As these viruses and other invasive programs are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, they fall into the hands of a variety of bad actors: foreign governments, criminals, and teenagers on a lark (not necessarily in descending order of malevolence). This plague is being spread over the Internet by a veritable army of CIA hackers: “By the end of 2016,” WikiLeaks tells us, “the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ‘weaponized’ malware.” The inevitable end result: a world infected with so much malware that computers become almost useless – and this parlous condition is paid for by you, the American taxpayer."

Like I said, aiding and abetting the enemy.

"And one more thing: I found it extremely odd that, when the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email was discovered, party officials refused to let the FBI and other law enforcement agencies examine either their server or Podesta’s devices. Instead, they gave it over to CrowdStrike, a private firm that regularly does business with the DNC. CrowdStrike then came out with the now-accepted analysis that it was a Russian job. "

That information is new to me.

Woman asks Amazon's Alexa if it is connected to the CIA. It is.

I'm sure Apple and others have fixed many of the Vault 7 vulnerabilities, but there's always new ones to exploit.

Criminal probe of Wikileaks's leak, not CIA hacking.

Regulations

Today's safer cars make for less safe drivers.

VW admits guilt for defrauding US emissions tests.

VW executive faces 169 years in prison.

Regulations force car companies to build compliance cars which they know will lose money.

Trade deals are fascist.

Economy

Americans are far less prepared for a depression than they were in the 1930s.

US jobs showed better than Obama gains in Trump's first month. We can't have that. The Fed must end the boom by raising rates.

War on Drugs

Alcohol, then coffee, created civilization.

Tax and Spend

Gill Gates fortune is threatened by robots, so he wants a robot tax.

Economy

A local teamsters pension fund went broke. Many, probably most, will follow.

Education

Millennials don't know the communist butchers or view them favorably.

Media

CNN insider leaks 218 hours of inside recordings showing CNN's bias.

Tax and Spend

Trump proposes big EPA budget cuts.

2016 was a record tax haul for the feds.

Federal Reserve

The Fed has cartelized central banks around the world.

The Fed is forced to acknowledge increasing price inflation.

Central banks including the Fed do not possess the gold they claim they do.

A gold-backed currency can't be the world's reserve currency.

"This is the paradox: to maintain the “exorbitant privilege” of a reserve currency, a nation must “export” its currency in size; a nation that runs trade surpluses cannot supply the world with enough of its currency to act as a reserve currency.
And any nation running large trade deficits will soon empty its gold reserves as international holders of the currency choose to convert their currency into gold, which is exactly what happened in the late 1960s in the U.S."

But gold should be the world's reserve currency.

Socialism

GM forced to rent its electric cars because it can't sell them.

Politics

Three Pakistani Muslim brothers, Democrat staffers all, suspended from accessing congressional computers after security breach.

Andrew Jackson may be a good comparison to Trump. Part 2.

"Both Trump and Jackson did not receive that courtesy. Jackson was confronted by a hostile Congress during his entire eight year presidency. His agenda of fighting against the powerful entrenched interests in Washington DC, while expanding presidential powers and the radical agenda of giving more power to the people, immediately provoked a hostile response from the vested interests."

Expanding presidential power is not good.

"Trump’s divisive illegal immigration stance and rhetoric to send them back to Mexico echoes the most controversial issue of Jackson’s presidency – the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Indian “issue” had plagued the country even before sovereignty from Britain. Previous administrations had tried to ignore the issue as settlers moved westward and clashed with Indian tribes in the South and North. Jackson was not one to ignore problems. The Act authorized the President to negotiate treaties to buy tribal lands in the east in exchange for lands farther west, outside of existing U.S. state borders. Jackson did not have a high opinion of the Indian tribes he relocated."

It is a good parallel except Trump's issue isn't racial. He employees legal immigrants.

Suggested reading on Rome.

Two establishments factions are fighting for control.

Backing and siding with violent protestors is a losing proposition for Democrats.

The CIA routinely rigs foreign elections, so why not domestic elections too?

The CIA is at odds with all presidents because it doesn't want to be controlled.

US spy threatens intelligence community will go nuclear on Trump.

Pat Buchanan uses term "deep state" discussing its attacks on Trump to keep a new Cold War alive.

There is a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Foreign Policy

One of the reasons Russia is buying gold is oil is beginning to be traded in gold to get around US sanctions.

Six Russian diplomats have died in the last 60 days. That's crazy. Maybe it's the CIA. Maybe it's Putin.

The bogus intelligence leaks about Trump's ties to Russia are designed to prevent Trump from de-escalating tensions with Russia.

War on Drugs

Throwing addicts in jail can't cure the opioid epidemic.

War

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected peace plan offered by Jordan and Egypt. Of course he did. He gets money and power from war.

The US military is planning to take over US cities.

"According to “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. military plans to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.
What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.
The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.
And then comes the kicker.
Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”" 

2030 seems late.

US sends conventional troops into Syria.

Police State

Prosecutor threatens to seize a man's livelihood if he doesn't turn over pictures.

We live in a police state, not a free and open society.

The Founding Fathers specifically denied general warrants to the federal government.

Health Care

Bill proposes allowing companies to demand genetic information from employees or charge them extra for health insurance. This is what happens when third parties pay insurance and the economy favors employers like in our government-planned system.

Of course the Feds are spying on your prescription drugs.

Kennedy and De Niro expose vaccines.

"Recently Robert Kennedy Jr. and Robert De Niro headed a news conference at the National Press Club to announce a $100,000 cash reward for anyone able to present a peer-reviewed scientific study revealing that mercury in vaccines is safe."

Nice.

Environment

Learning from the plethora of past failures, UCLA puts new end of snow prediction at end of century.

Health Care

Life expectancy expected to rise except in US.

Police State

Wikileaks claims 99 percent of CIA leak documents are still to come. The Ecuadorian embassy won't be able to protect Assange.

Economy

Trump's election sparks employment boom. It's unfortunate it won't last.

Immigration

Border crossings plummet as I always said they would.

Socialism

Poachers kill rhino in zoo and take its horn.

Politics

Hopefully Rand Paul gets it right this time.

NSA whistleblower supports Trump's claim Obama wiretapped him.

I have no doubt Paul Ryan sabotaged Obamacare replacement. Republicans love Obamacare.

Economy

Another dot.com bubble seems to be deflating.

"The owner of messaging app Snapchat is not profitable and has warned it may never be."

But the company is worth $3.4 billion. Sounds familiar.

Police State

Wikileaks dumps CIA hacking tool docs in release called more important that Snowden.

"As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding, "CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE""

I've long warned of this. The CIA will kill Assange, or at least get him extradited, but I doubt that will stop Wikileaks.

Spies surprised by leak.

"If you're writing about the CIA/@Wikileaks story, here's the big deal: first public evidence USG secretly paying to keep US software unsafe. pic.twitter.com/kYi0NC2mOp— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 7, 2017

The CIA reports show the USG developing vulnerabilities in US products, then intentionally keeping the holes open. Reckless beyond words.— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 7, 2017"

Exactly.

Tax and Spend

Establishment scientists mystified by supernova rings that perfectly fit predictions made by Electric Universe theory.

Politics

Top ten reasons one woman stopped being a leftist.

"1) Hate.
If hate were the only reason, I’d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.
Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.
Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.
In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.
If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.
One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014."

Good for her.

Regulation

Fast food restaurants automating because of minimum wage hikes.

Police State

Trump supports renewal of invasive spy law without modification.

We can only hope for an exodus of talent from the NSA. I'm skeptical.

NSA and GCHQ have intercepted in-flight mobile communications for years.

History of CIA incompetence.

Street lamps to be wired with cameras and microphones in San Diego. I won't visit there.

Spies have so much data on everybody they can selectively reveal whatever they want to benefit or destroy whomever they want. That's why I say NSA is the ultimate power in the country.

UK passes most invasive spy law in western world.

Hacked NSA tools for sale on market.

Prosecutors subpoena Alexa records in criminal case. Amazon claims Alexa is protected by the first amendment. That's a crazy argument. Regardless, Alexa and all other voice command assistants are spying all the time. The government gets that info whether it has a warrant or subpoena or not.

Amazon refuses to turn over Echo recording to Arkansas police.

Microsoft can call for a digital Geneva Convention, but all governments will break it. They always spy to the limits of technology. They limit themselves to legal spying.

Government allows Microsoft to sue it over email surveillance.

Twitter blocks government from accessing user data.

US-born NASA scientist detained at border and coerced into unlocking his phone.

State-sponsored hackers hack journalists.

DHS considers forcing US visitors to surrender social media passwords.

Man arrested for arson based on pacemaker data. Even medical devices are spying on you.

FBI reverts to using fax machines and snail mail to slow down responding to FOIA requests.

Secret rules make it easy for FBI to spy on journalists.

FBI hacked 8,000 computers in 120 countries based on one warrant. FBI uses malware like a grenade.

Fusion centers are a billion dollar boondoggle to promote paranoia.

Groupthink in the 17 member intelligence community which is focused on only expansion.

Obama signed new law against whistleblowers in December.

Why we need whistleblowers.

DHS and FEMA expose 10,000 trainees to ricin.

Anti-surveillance clothing hides people from surveillance cameras.

Local police building their own DNA databases.

Foreign Policy

Trump to propose dramatic cuts to foreign aid.

Politics

Trump discovers Obama wiretapped him at Trump Tower. This is an electronic Watergate.

Economy

Microsoft nearing $1 trillion valuation, mostly thanks to android patents.

"Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company.
He estimates that the Android revenue has a 95% margin, so it's pretty much all profit. 
This money, says Sherlund, helps Microsoft hide the fact that its mobile and Xbox groups are burning serious cash. "

Thank the government.

Apple hits record high.

Alan Greenspan suddenly remembers gold is money.

Economic globalization versus political globalization.

Testosterone blamed for bubbles.

Another woman's retailers goes bankrupt.

"BCBG is just one of many retailers to announce store closures in 2017. The Limited shut down all brick-and-mortar locations, including local stores, and also filed for bankruptcy. Macy’s, Sears, Kmart and Ann Taylor will also cut select locations."

Nine retailers closing stores nationwide, but the economy is fine.

The bubble will soon pop despite Trump's reforms.

Big data will not enable a centrally planned economy.

GDP and ZIRP prove the economy is still bad contrary to the hype.


Skepticism of AI concerns voiced by plutocrats.
We need robots to take jobs.

Home ownership rate in 2016 lowest since 1965.

Technology can't prevent recessions because they are caused by misallocation of resources due to low interest rates and artificial credit.

Fractional reserve banking would be limited in a free market.

Bonds containing risky mortgages receive AAA rating as they did in 2007-2008.

There are no Christmas presents in broken Venezuela.

Ten fundamental laws of economics.

Inflation is about the money supply, not prices. Price inflation is a product of monetary inflation.

The correct definition of money is important.

Socialism

Elon Musk plans to build a tunnel to fix traffic problems answering the silly question who will build the roads. The people who need them will build them.

Over half the world's primate species may go extinct.

Bumblebee on endangered species list.

Cheetah population crashes as cats head towards extinction.

War on Drugs

US overdose death rate doubled since 1999.

War

US rulers used to want to defeat enemies, but the Obama doctrine is to exterminate them. It's backfiring, but Trump has followed suit.

Trump increases drone strikes.

"In Syria: “A drone attack in northern Syria, part of a series of recent strikes by the United States in and around the province of Idlib, killed a top al-Qaida leader who had participated in the planning for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.”"

They still hadn't gotten all those guys?

Trump to expand war on terror which has backfired spectacularly. This doesn't bode well for the peace plan brokered by Russia and Turkey.

Pentagon plans escalation in Syria.

Report exposes US attack on Syrian troops was intentional.

Suspected chemical attack in Mosul.

Copying the US, ISIS drops bombs with drones in Iraq.

Ukraine's rulers violate peace agreement and attack separatists, hoping to draw Russia into war to force Trump's hand.

A reminder that Chelsea Manning is a hero.

SEAL team 6 is not above committing war crimes.

For training rounds, US seeks biodegradable bullets that sprout plants.

Chinese troops killed in battle upset Chinese people.

US called greatest threat to world peace.

"
The U.S. military. The author’s sobering conclusion:

• Since WW2, Earth has had 248 armed conflicts. The US started 201 of them.
• These US-started armed attacks have killed ~30 million and counting; 90% of these deaths are innocent children, the elderly and ordinary working civilian women and men.
• The US has war-murdered more than Hitler’s Nazis.

"

Ouch.

The latest undeclared US war is in Yemen.

Local

Dayton uses lead water pipes.

Immigration

Proving as I've always said, the government knows exactly where illegal immigrants are, ICE arrests one after picking up his child from taxpayer-funded school. Finding them is easy.

Police State

Another in a long line of studies shows TSA is worthless, so molestations will become more invasive. More.

Regulation

Hooray for Uber for using a tool to avoid regulators. I love this. Boo for media thinking this is a bad thing.

Politics

Russian ties to Democrats exposes them as self-serving hypocrites.

Republicans push Obamacare-lite.

Some leftist set a fire in Trump's Hotel.

Health Care

Vitamin D ten times more effective than flu vaccine.