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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Attacks on freedom of speech on the internet based on the theory that linking is publishing.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The national average of gas prices hits $3.01 as money leaks from Bernanke's radically expanded monetary base into the economy, but he think inflation is a good thing. Don't worry about being forced to spend more of your money on gas, which makes you poorer. There's nothing to see here. Move along.

HEALTH CARE:

WikiLeaks blows whistle on US government pushing GMO foods and other food abuses.

"If you go to the website of the FDA, you will note its newly-created “Office of Foods.” This, along with the food “safety” bill, will give the Feds unprecedented power over the food and agricultural industry. The Food Czar is none other than Michael R. Taylor, Obama’s point man for securing profits for the Big Agra-Manufactured Food Complex. Taylor, in case you don’t know, is a former Vice President and Chief Lobbyist for Monsanto. Taylor began his career as a lawyer with the FDA, and from there he went to King & Spalding, a law firm that represented Monsanto. He then went back to the FDA as a deputy commissioner for policy so that he could oversee the FDA’s approval of Monsanto’s BGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone). Taylor then moved to the USDA. Then he was off to Monsanto.

Note that Monsanto’s top rBGH scientist, Margaret Miller, also moved on to the FDA where she, along with Taylor, moved the FDA forward to approve Posilac, Monsanto Corporation’s formulation of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbST or rBGH). Miller, while working for Monsanto, had submitted the Monsanto scientific report to the FDA for approval, and she went to the FDA prior to the approval. Her first task at the FDA was to approve her own scientific report she had prepared for Monsanto. Both her and Taylor were subjects of a GAO (General Accounting Office) investigation for their role in the approval, yet the GAO Report ended up dismissing any financial impropriety."

You can't make this stuff up.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Senior Republican Congressman in committee makes the case that man-made CO2 will not destroy the earth because God said so in the bible. This guys gives skeptics a bad name.

POLICE STATE:

Does this sound familiar?

"One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does.  Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless."

It's also why the aristocrats are frantically trying to seize control of the internet. They keep floating proposal after proposal, and the public rejects them all. But after years being unable to gin up support for their schemes, they decided to go ahead with net neutrality anyway.

"At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor."

This is scary.

"To understand the breadth of the Surveillance State, recall this sentence from the original Priest/Arkin article:  "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  As Arkin and Priest document today, there are few safeguards on how all this data is used and abused."

Government safeguards are meaningless anyway. The government does not acknowledge any limits on its power, and it does not bother to obey the law. Any purported safeguards are tools to fool the people into believing otherwise. Here's how the US government views WikiLeaks:

"In the WikiLeaks case, a fringe group led primarily by foreign nationals operating abroad is illegally obtaining, reviewing and disseminating American intelligence information with the stated intent of hurting the United States (WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange himself made this declaration). That not only meets the definition of aggressive, hostile and war-like activity, but squarely targets America's diplomatic positions and intelligence interests while inflicting collateral damage against our financial institutions and service providers who cut-off their relationship with WikiLeaks. This, folks, is war."

Don't let that foreign part fool you. Obama has already claimed the power to assassinate Americans as a war power. Any American doing something similar as WikiLeaks will be treated as an enemy combatant too.

"That's the mindset of the U.S. Government:  everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes.  And what's most remarkable about this -- though, given the full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising -- is how eagerly submissive much of the citizenry is to this imbalance.  Many Americans plead with their Government in unison:  we demand that you know everything about us but that you keep us ignorant about what you do and punish those who reveal it to us."

True and depressingly sad.

"But the imbalance has become so extreme -- the Government now watches much of the citizenry behind a fully opaque one-way mirror -- that the dangers should be obvious.  And this is all supposed to be the other way around:  it's government officials who are supposed to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy.  Yet we've reversed that dynamic almost completely."

Great observation.

Here's a story to remind everybody that TSA nor government in general give a damn about the safety of the people. It's all a scam. It's a protection racket that dwarfs in size, scope and the money it steals anything the mafia could put together.

"Many experts are skeptical that the TSA's new backscatter pornoscanner machines are safe, but even the experts who endorse them are careful to bracket their reassurances with certain caveats: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated. Whether or not you're comfortable with the intended radiation emissions from the scanners, no one in their right mind would argue that a broken machine that lovingly lingers over your reproductive organs and infuses them with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is desirable.

But when Andrew Schneider, AOL's public health correspondent, contacted the TSA to find out what maintenance and testing is in place to ensure the safe operation of the scanners, he discovered that the TSA appears to have no regime at all to ensure that they are functioning within normal parameters. While the TSA claims that entities like the FDA, the US Army and Johns Hopkins all regularly inspect their machines, none of these groups agrees, and they all disavow any role in regularly maintaining and testing the TSA's equipment (the Army has tested machines in three airports, but has not conducted any further testing). And Johns Hopkins denies that it has certified the machines as safe for operation in the first place -- let alone taking on any ongoing testing and certification program."

They only care about us as money-providers, the way ranchers care about cattle. Have you noticed that our government controlled health care industry treats us that way? A person looks sick, they shove a bunch of drugs up our behinds, just like they do cows. They don't care about healing us, they just treat the symptoms

WAR:

Anybody who thought repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell would lead to more tolerance in the military was sadly mistaken as now personnel can be kicked out of the military for disagreeing with the policy. This is an important example that no matter what, government is always divisive.

LOCAL:

Everyday somebody is dying on I-75 around Dayton. Today a wreck knocked a barrier into southbound I-75. I-75 between Cincinnati and Dayton has been under construction for over 10 years straight, and there's no sign that it will ever end. The plans are for more construction for the better part of this decade, and you know there will be delays and overruns and at some point they'll have to start tearing up what they've already put down. Government has turned this stretch of highway into a death trap.

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ECONOMY:

The Economic Freedom of the World 2010 Annual Report from the Frazier Institute ranks the US as sixth behind Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Chile. I'm surprised we're not lower, but it's an abomination we're not number one.

REGULATION:

The US government has leveled trade sanctions on several foreign governments, but then it turns around and grants waivers for politically connected corporations to do business with those countries. Government is a scam.

"At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has made nearly 10,000 exceptions to American sanctions rules, approving deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.

Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law exempting agricultural and medical humanitarian aid from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes."

It's good to be a crony of the king.

Any bets on how long before government regulates, bans or seizes these gold vending machines?

EDUCATION:

Government school bans candy canes because they might be sharpened and used as weapons.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Government admits polar bears are not endangered. Environmentalists have a melt-down.

Obama reminds he doesn't need Congress to damage our country, he has his EPA limit greenhouse gas emissions at power plants and refineries in order to make our energy more expensive, harming the poor most of all.

POLICE STATE:

Federal marshals and sheriff's deputies seize a pilot's firearm and CCW permit because he posted videos showing how ineffective TSA security is. It's all for show. Another illusion created by government to lure people into a false sense of security and to oppress them in the process.

I've often pointed out that when Americans mistakenly think they're free and they act on that mistaken perception, groups of armed thugs attack them, wrestle them to the ground, slap them in irons and drag them off to tiny cages. Here's an example of a woman who thought she was free to refuse molestation at the ands of TSA agents.

"Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.

"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" said Hirschkind.

When Hirschkind refused, she says that "the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me.  I was crying by then.  They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security.""

I'm sick of hearing people talk about how much they love freedom while they empower criminals like these TSA agents and their police accomplices.

"The TSA says less than three percent of travelers get a pat-down."

As if that makes it OK. And it's not a pat-down. It's an invasive search.

Potential jurors revolt and refuse to convict defendant for marijuana possession. This would have been awesome to see. Notice how the judge instinctively and blatantly sided with the prosecution and tried to find enough jurors who would convict, guaranteeing a conviction.

Economic freedom leads to lower murder rates. This should surprise no one.

Another viewpoint on the charges against Assange his actions sound more serious.

"In these documents, one of the women alleges that Assange behaved threateningly with her and held her down to prevent her from reaching for a condom. He did end up wearing one, but she thinks he ripped it and deliberately ejaculated inside her. He also later rubbed up against her with his pants off, she says, against her will. The other alleged victim claims that she struggled with Assange over the condom all night, had consensual sex with him when he finally put it on, and then woke up later in the night to find Assange having sex with her, without her consent and without a condom."

Yet the fact remains both women parted with him amicably according to witnesses, and the original prosecutor dropped the charges before an activist lawyer with political connections got them reinstated.

"In my personal and professional experience with rape, these kinds of allegations are both credible and common."

In my experience women frequently exaggerate and lie in rape allegations. Half of all rape allegations are fake. And the first woman Assange was with had written a post on her blog on how women can use the justice system to get revenge on men who scorn them.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

The excuse and the real reason the government is regulating the internet:

"The Federal Trade Commission’s campaign to abolish the internet in its present form and replace it with a Depression-era model of government cartels protecting politically connected incumbent firms is predicated on a single word — privacy. Internet privacy is a “mess,” according to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, and it’s his job to clean it up."

When's the last time the government ever cared about our privacy? The goal is control, not privacy. Privacy is just a convenient excuse.

"Privacy is just another word for “piracy” in this context. The FTC’s crusade is joined at the hip to intellectual property firms that desire greater internet cartelization so they can strip the web of “proprietary ideas” that, in their minds, should only be distributed through more traditional, top-down channels. Decentralization is the enemy of both government regulators and companies that depend on a lack of innovation to maintain the status quo."

IP laws, monopolies granted by government and enforced at the point of the government's gun against the best interests of the people, provide another convenient excuse.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Now the goofy aristocrats have set up a toy gun destruction program. You can't make this stuff up.

ECONOMY:

There's no mystery why African countries are poor. It's lack of economic freedom.

MSNBC notices what Jeffrey Tucker predicted two years ago: a return to fashion in the workplace. Tucker is very reluctant to toot his own horn, but he deserves it because he nailed this one. There's a difference between phony self-promotion and pointing out facts.

Showing once again that we have the stupidest government in the world, the Cuban government is freeing some of its economy because it recognizes socialism doesn't work.

REGULATION:

This Supreme Court ruling regarding minimum prices is causing confusion and problems. This wouldn't be a problem in a free society. In the free society, it would be managed by contracts. If selling at a minimum price was part of the contract when the retailer purchased the merchandise, then retailers would have to honor it. If it wasn't part of the contract, then they could sell at any price they chose. This is an example of how legislation and courts create chaos and undermine the rule of law.

EDUCATION:

Sad, scary insight into the consequences of the government monopoly on education for blacks.

HEALTH CARE:

US Today gets it right again, suggesting people forgo the sweets and eat nuts instead.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Remember when the frauds used to claim that warmer winters were the result of global warming? They said that snow would be a thing of the past? At least that was internally consistent. But now that we're having such cold, snowy winters, the frauds are claiming that cold, snowy winters are the result of global warming. Heads they win. Tails reason, science and all of us lose. Maybe they don't know the definition of warming. Note to global warming frauds: warm is the opposite of cold. Nice refutation.

POLICE STATE:

How come al Qaeda hasn't attacked us in nine years? Do you remember the Washington D.C. sniper? Al Qaeda could do that all over the country. They could blow up a mall or elementary school any time they wanted. Why don't they? Maybe they don't want Americans to realize our government cannot protect us. Maybe they're using our government as a lever against us. They know that just the threat of terrorism after 9/11, without any additional attacks, led to government stealing trillions from us and massively oppressing us all in the name of preventing terrorism. No terrorist attack could possibly have been nearly as destructive to our society as government's response has been. They're using our government as a tool to destroy our country because they have no power to do it, and we're helping them.


The CIA launches an anti-WikiLeaks task force.


WAR:


How the US war machine keeps us locked in perpetual war. This quote shows how seemingly rational people can completely lose their minds too.

"When voters elected Barack Obama in 2008, his supporters acclaimed him higher than a prophet; he was messianic. As one fine and intelligent person—an expert in high tech as well as a farmer—wrote to me in immediate post-election euphoria, “Brad, why are you so upset, don’t you realize that we finally have a chance to end war and poverty, permanently?”"

How in the world do people become like that? That's literally insane. Here's the sad truth not understood by most.

"“Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere (usually, in fact, many places) at any moment.”"

I had this knowledge previously, but it's only recently that I came to understand why it is. It's not to make us safer. It's just another mechanism for aristocrats to loot and control others. That's the goal of all government policy: domestic, foreign or war.

"As further evidence of our degeneration into a martial empire, the U.S. sells 70 percent of the weapons in the international arms trade. In almost every way, Engelhardt contends, the United States precipitates the militarization of the globe."

Meanwhile the aristocrats condemn others for selling weapons.

I'm all for the US government using railguns to protect Americans, and apparently the USS Gerald R. Ford will use railguns to launch jets.


FOREIGN POLICY:

South Korea hasn't managed to provoke North Korea into a military response it can use as an excuse to attack the North so far, so they're staging yet another massive live-fire military exercise on the North Korean border. This is nuts, and American troops are in the line of fire. Get our troops out of there.

It looks like things are heating up in and around Israel too. Palestinians increase rocket attacks on Israel. Israeli government strikes back. Palestinians have an anti-tank weapon. Settlement building booming despite the supposed freeze. The US government has no business dragging the US people into the middle of this mess.

Senate approves nuclear reduction treaty with Russia. Good deal.

POLITICS:

Republicans keep laying the groundwork to discredit Ron Paul in 2012. This time Jonah Goldberg claims he's too old. That's the mildest attack he's likely to suffer.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Hypocrisy on WikiLeaks.

"In a recent press briefing, State Department spokesman Phillip Crowley made the Obama administration’s case. In answer to a question, Crowley said: 

"Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist. 

"QUESTION: What is his political objective? 

MR. CROWLEY: Well, his – I mean he could be considered a political actor. I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist. 

QUESTION: So his objective is to sow chaos, you mean? 

MR. CROWLEY: Well, I mean, you all come here prepared to objectively report the activities of the United States Government. I think that Mr. Assange doesn’t meet that particular standard. 

QUESTION: But just so I understand, P.J., what – I mean you just said the – that you thought he was – 

MR. CROWLEY: Well, but I mean – let me – he’s not a journalist. He’s not a whistleblower. And there – he is a political actor. He has a political agenda. He is trying to undermine the international system of — that enables us to cooperate and collaborate with other governments and to work in multilateral settings and on a bilateral basis to help solve regional and international issues." "

I love how this guy is playing to the reporters, pretending they have no political bias. Freedom of speech for those who support the government but not for those who don't.

The FCC's new net neutrality regulations is an example of price fixing which always leads to shortages, i.e. a slower internet. It's also a reminder that government actually owns all property in the US since it exercises final control over all property.

ECONOMY:

US birthrates decline following the world-wide pattern of government-dominated countries wiping out their populations.

Riding a motorcycle is good economics.

Movie to convince skeptics that western civilization is collapsing.

TAX AND SPEND:

Remember last summer when Congress passed a law that said all future spending must be paid for? Funny how the compromise on the Bush tax cuts happened to cut the payroll tax while increasing spending. And you fell for the claim that one party or the other actually cares about the deficit. Both parties are laughing all the way to the bank with our money.

REGULATION:

Government wants to regulate women sharing breast milk.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Article describes the costs of the CFC ban which was the environmental bogeyman before CO2. Banning CFCs had no noticeable effect on the ozone hole which appears to be a natural phenomena, but cost people many inexpensive, high-quality products, as always especially harming the poor.

POLICE STATE:

TSA begins abusing Washington D.C. train passengers.

Police murder an Iraqi war veteran. And as usual...

"Through the miracle of socialized municipal risk management, nobody will face accountability for the extra-judicial killing of a 25-year-old husband and father of two stepchildren who had celebrated his first wedding anniversary just days before he was murdered." 

 "No charges were filed against the individual who murdered Derek Hale. Shortly after Biden issued his report, Browne was promoted. This infuriating detail was merely filigree on the tapestry of mendacity woven by Delaware's "law enforcement community" to cover up the murder of Derek Hale."

No prosecution of the murderers. A promotion instead.

Red light cameras as tools of the surveillance state.

WAR:

Government tells so many lies, they often contradict. For example we're fighting in Afghanistan to defeat al Qaeda but Yemen is the operational host of al Qaeda.

"And now we are being told by senior administration officials that al-Qaida’s new base and center of activity is…wait for it…in Yemen!

If that’s the case, why are 150,000 US and dragooned NATO troops still in Afghanistan? CIA chief Leon Panetta recently admitted there were no more than 50 al-Qaida personnel in Afghanistan.

What, then, are American and NATO troops doing there? The oil and gas of the nearby Caspian Basin and a desire to exclude China from the resource-rich region seems a likely answer."

Oops. Contrast these three reports:

"First, a political whitewash issued by the Obama White House claiming the war was going well and some US troops might be withdrawn next year. This ‘don’t worry be happy’ summary was trumpeted by the pro-war New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other members of the government-friendly US media.

US generals spoke of "progress" in Afghanistan, whatever that means, as US forces were conducted a brutal campaign around Kandahar to crush resistance to the occupation and punish communities that supported Taliban.

Second, the Red Cross issued a grim report showing that Afghans were suffering widespread malnutrition and serious health problems after nearly a decade of Western occupation. So much for US-led nation-building.

Third, there were leaks about a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the combined findings of all 16 US intelligence agencies. This key intelligence report is explosive and may not be fully revealed.

The NIE reportedly asserts that the Afghan War, now costing over $13 billion monthly, is at best stalemated; at worse, Western occupation forces are on the defensive and their vulnerable supply lines increasingly threatened. Taliban is expanding its sphere of control, particularly in northern Afghanistan.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who was installed into power by CIA, put it bluntly last year, saying the US-led war was "ineffective apart from causing civilian casualties.""

Central planning is always doomed to fail.

"It’s amusing watching Washington blast poor old Hamid Karzai in Kabul for corruption while the US is furiously bribing many top officials and generals in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not to mention US collaboration with Afghanistan’s top heroin kingpins and communist war criminals. Pretty sordid stuff that will one day come out and cause a furor, just as CIA’s involvement in the Laotian and Central American drug trade did."

Government by definition is violence and the threat of violence, and it's funded by armed robbery. War is violence. It's impossible for it to be anything but fraught with corruption.

"President Obama declared last week that the US would continue fighting al-Qaida in Afghanistan. He is clearly not telling Americans the truth."

Knock me over with a feather.

FOREIGN POLICY:

South Korea continues to try and provoke North Korea into war.

"A South Korean destroyer prowled the sea and fighter jets screamed across the skies Tuesday in preparation for possible North Korean attacks a day after staging provocative artillery drills on an island the North shelled last month."

At least our mainstream media recognizes the provocation.

Washington's foreign policy rules:

"The credo is global leadership."

"America chooses the means, not just the ends, of global leadership. There are three fundamental assumptions about the means:

• global military presence

• global power projection

• global interventionism

While much has changed in the US military in the last 60 years, this trinity apparently remains too holy to be questioned (p. 14)."

Anybody who fails to adhere to these rules is washed out of Washington. I prefer leadership by example.

"Note the emphasis on "global." The United States must have a forward presence everywhere. It must be set up to project its power globally, whether that means boots on the ground, bombs from the sky, or knives in the dark. Able to intervene anywhere on the globe, the United States must have a policy of doing so."

I don't think being able to do this is a bad thing. The US must wield a powerful deterrent to every nation on earth. It's best if we have many prongs on that deterrent: economic, diplomatic and military. The problem isn't having those deterrents. The problem is aristocrats use them for advancing their personal and political agendas, not deterring an attack on the US. The other problem is what the author calls the forward presence. That's the trappings of empire. In other words over 700 military bases in 130 countries. Those bases are counterproductive. Aristocrats use them to intimidate and attack others, making us less safe. The US missile, navy and air force deterrent can reach any country on earth without foreign bases. The US marines can reach any country on earth without a foreign military base. Those bases aren't about deterrent. They're about giving the federal government control over foreign countries and a convenience for fighting perpetual wars.

"The corollary of this is that the United States exempts itself from norms that it expects others to comply with. Bacevich gives the example of how outraged Americans and the world would be if China had a defense budget that matched all the great powers' except the United States', created garrisons around the world including in Latin America, appointed People's Liberation Army generals responsible for different parts of the globe (including one for North America and one for Europe), conducted war games globally, and created a global strike force (pp. 23–24). In reality, American policy is far more expansive than the hypothetical Chinese example. Because Americans are the good guys, they are surprised when others are outraged."

Very true. The American people rightly think of themselves as the good guys, but our aristocrats are not. Just as they use government for their own ends in domestic policy, they do the same with foreign policy. Americans need to figure that out.

"The implications of this are fascinating. America has the ability, right, and duty to change the world however it wants and by whatever means."

The sociopaths don't suddenly become noble on foreign policy issues. Just as the ruling class uses the government's gun to loot us and socially engineer the US to their advantage in domestic policy, they do the same thing in foreign policy. We don't like it when they do it to us, and foreigners like it even less. This makes us less safe.

""What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" [Madeline Albright] Said to Colin Powell, this question summed up the foreign-policy elite's problem with how the army was rebuilt."

Which goes back to my statement of the problem: the aristocrats use our deterrents for their own petty power plays, not to deter attack on America. Interesting viewpoint that Petraeus created his new counter-insurgency
strategy, the key to which was controlling public perception, to enable government to perpetually fight wars.

"Bacevich suggests that we tend our garden before it is too late. His vision is an America that leads by example."

That's funny.

"Bacevich says that unfortunately it is easy to simply blame our leaders, but it is also the American people who let them get away with it, because too many Americans believe in the credo and trinity of Washington rules."

We have nobody blame for our government but ourselves.

MEDIA:

Julian Assange takes credit for breaking the climategate emails though WikiLeaks was only a secondary site.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

The FCC is ready to pass net neutrality regulations. This is a good reminder that the political circus in Washington is meaningless in day to day affairs. The bureaucrats do what they're supposed to, and what they're supposed to do is loot the people on behalf of the aristocrats regardless of which party is in power.

ECONOMY:

How Japan's economic problems are different than ours.

"The Federal Reserve System is playing the role of the official counterfeiter. It is passing the fiat money to the Treasury, or says it will. This is not Japan's scenario. The Bank of Japan did not inflate the yen sharply. This is why price inflation did not take place. Neither did price deflation. For 16 years, Japan's price level has remained close to flat.

Japan's problem has been the commercial banks' unwillingness to admit that they made bad loans in the second half of the 1980s. They refuse to write down those loans. But they also refuse to lend to small businesses. So, there has been little economic growth. This is the infamous Japan syndrome or Japan malaise. There is not enough capital to fund new, innovative businesses. Government bonds are absorbing people's savings.

The stagnation of the Japanese economy has been the result of the 1980s bubble, followed by large, paralyzed banks using any profits to pay down old loans. This has stifled innovation in Japan. It has protected the banks."

It still looks like inflation for us. That's a certainty since Bernanke won't stop until he gets inflation.

"I think we are in a Japan-like scenario. The Federal Reserve's promise to inflate does point to more price inflation, but our banks are like Japan's: not lending. This keeps price inflation at bay.

At some point, we will move out of Japan's model and into price inflation. But this will not happen until bankers lose their fear. There is no sign of this yet."

But commodities are already rising. Price inflation that the Fed won't be able to ignore is in the pipeline. Shadowstats.com shows inflation above four percent already. It's going higher.

TAX AND SPEND:

The parallels between taxation and slavery.

"The choice today is quite clear.  It is between peace, freedom and prosperity on the one hand, taxation, tyranny and impoverishment on the other.  Faced with this fundamental choice, we should see clearly that what we desperately need to do is not limit or reform the tax system, but to abolish it – and breathe the fresh, clean air of freedom."

Yes! More.

It looks like municipal bonds may be crashing.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Solar cycle 24 continues to be unusually weak, and no spots were seen on the sun yesterday. This further we advance into solar cycle 24, the more it looks like we're in for repeat of the nasty Dalton Minimum.

Homeland Security to fight climate change in the interest of environmental justice. Right.

Remember when Obama forced BP to set up a $20 billion slush fund for his administration to use to buy votes ostensibly to insure efficient compensation for people's losses due to the oil spill? That worked about as well as everything else government does.

"Feinberg urged people who are upset with their emergency payments to apply again for a final payment as an alternative to filing a lawsuit that could drag on for years."

Absolutely. If the government didn't give you enough of other's people's money to buy your vote for Obama the first time, just refile, and the government will give you more of other people's money to insure they buy your vote. If you have to file a lawsuit, that means you probably won't vote for Obama in 2012, and his administration doesn't want that.

It snowed in Australia yesterday. That would be like it snowing here on June 19. That's global warming for you.

POLICE STATE:

TSA shuts down airport over a computer monitor.

The inhumane manor in which whistle-blower Bradley Manning is being imprisoned shows how our government and the people have changed for the worse since 9/11.

Because the function of government is control others, to force them to do things against their will or to force them to not do things they want to do, politicians can't have integrity, and integrity is stripped from bureaucrats and agents as well.

"As F.A. Hayek noted accurately in his book, The Road to Serfdom, "the worst get on top." What attracts the worst to the State apparatus are the power of compulsion that agents of the State have over others, the power of monopoly that restricts the rights of others, and the adulation (and in some cases idolatry) toward agents of the State from the masses."

The ones who are most successful at looting the people and forcing them to act against their own will rise to the top because that's the only thing a system based on violence and lies can reward. Here's why democracies become so bad:

"Free entry is not always good. Free entry and competition in the production of goods is good, but free competition in the production of bads is not. Free entry into the business of torturing and killing innocents, or free competition in counterfeiting or swindling, for instance, is not good; it is worse than bad. So what sort of "business" is government? Answer: it is not a customary producer of goods sold to voluntary consumers. Rather, it is a "business" engaged in theft and expropriation – by means of taxes and counterfeiting – and the fencing of stolen goods. Hence, free entry into government does not improve something good. Indeed, it makes matters worse than bad, i.e., it improves evil."

They're not worse than communism, but the US rapidly approaching the oppression level of a communist country.

"In his discussion of the WikiLeaks story and the cooperation with the government of the whistleblower website’s business associates Amazon.com, Mastercard and Paypal, Hornberger brings up the Bush Administration’s 2001 request of telecommunications companies to provide confidential information about their customers to help the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic spying program. The only one who didn’t cooperate with the request was Joseph Nacchio of Qwest Communcations. Shortly thereafter, the government indicted and then convicted Nacchio of "insider trading" laws."

Government payback. Insider trading laws are unconstitutional anyway.

"It is of great irony – well, hypocrisy is a better word – that such a counter-productive "insider trading" persecution of private, innocent individuals who are not committing any acts of theft or fraud, comes from the same federal government many of whose participants embrace the revolving door between government monopolies and privileged corporate interests. Former Federal Reserve employees’ informing their post-Fed private sector clients of the inside details of Fed meetings and decisions, long before such information becomes public knowledge, is but one example."

...

"So how can those who are driven toward State power possibly have integrity when the very apparatus over which they want control is inherently corrupting? Obviously, there have been plenty of those in the business sector who have shown a lack of integrity and have been corrupt, but the genuine business sector does not have the power of compulsion over others, the power to be above the law as does the compulsory government sector. And by genuine business sector, I mean that which is not tied to the State apparatus through "crony capitalism," or corporatism.

It is thus nearly impossible to expect even the most honest individual to grab hold of monopolistic governmental powers, legislatively, militarily or otherwise, and expect one’s integrity to remain intact. There are some exceptions, of course."

Thank goodness for Ron Paul as an example. He continues to win office in landslides despite (or because of) his principled stand for freedom. The lesson to be learned is that others could do the same in other districts, but they choose not to.

WAR:

As if waging hot wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan plus lower level wars elsewhere wasn't enough, the military wants to escalate the war in Pakistan. I guess they won't be happy until we've turned the Pakistani government into an enemy that wants to kill Americans too.

POLITICS:

Because Ron Paul suddenly has a position of power as chairman of the committee overseeing the Fed, the left will slander him aggressively. This is probably a great tactic on their part because it will split Republicans with some defending him and some wanting to replace him with an establishment Republican. Krugman is leading the attacks.

LOCAL:

Kettering Health Network insures it will get favorable treatment from the government by hiring Rep. Turner's wife.

Free kibbles

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Because of mandated renewable energy sources coming online in Oregon, customers will suffer significant price increases.

While Europe and much of North America freezes, Greenland and northeastern Canada are unseasonably warm.

POLICE STATE:

A government-loving New York Times reporter (redundant, I know) proposes that the government outfit USPS trucks with all kinds of sensors so they can better monitor the American people and make the USPS relevant again. That's enough suggestions from the peanut gallery, thank you. This is a fresh idea in the same way government's victims are fresh meat.

Security expert calls the TSA a waste of time and money.

"There are two basic kinds of terrorists. The[re] are the sloppy planners, like the guy who crashed his plane into the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin. He’s going to be sloppy and stupid, and even pre-9/11 airplane security is going to catch him. The second is the well-planned, well-financed, and much rarer sort of plot. Do you really expect the T.S.A. screeners, who are busy confiscating water bottles and making people take off their belts — and now doing uncomfortable pat-downs — to stop them?"

That's pretty easy to understand.

MISC:

I never had any problems with my Christmas tree stand.

I hope the cyber cat they put this brain in is about the size of a house cat, not a tiger.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Here's something every young person needs to know:

"If you’re reading this and under 30, let me be absolutely clear about one indubitable point: your government is going to sacrifice your future in order to pay for its own mistakes from the past."

Advice follows.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Fed forces price controls on debit card issuers. We know what this means: shortages.

Here's a fantastic story of the corruption between the Treasury, Fed and giant corporations like Goldman-Sachs.

"Recent disclosures from the Federal Reserve reveal that honesty was one of the earliest casualties of the 2008 financial crisis. These disclosures contain a number of juicy tidbits, like the fact that Goldman Sachs received tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect succor from the Fed.

Thanks to these spectacularly large taxpayer-funded bailouts, Goldman was able to continue “doing God’s Work” – as CEO Lloyd Blankfein infamously remarked – like the work of producing billion-dollar trading profits without ever suffering a single day of losses.

Thanks to the Fed’s massive, undisclosed assistance, Goldman Sachs managed to project an image of financial well-being, even while accessing tens of billions of dollars of direct assistance from the Federal Reserve.

By repaying its TARP loan, for example, Goldman wriggled out from under the nettlesome compensation limits imposed by TARP, while also conveying an image of financial strength. But this “strength” was illusory. Goldman repaid the TARP loans with funds it procured days earlier from the Federal Reserve. Then, over the ensuing months, Goldman recapitalized its balance sheet by selling tens of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities to the Fed.

And the public never knew anything about these activities until two weeks ago, when the Fed was forced to reveal them...."

The aristocrats wanted to say that TARP was a good move by the government. It saved our "financial system" which is a euphemism for giant Wall Street corporations like Goldman-Sachs and taxpayers even earned interest. In order to make this fiction appear real, the Fed stole billions from the American people through the inflation tax and gave it to these giant corporations like Goldman-Sachs. The aristocrats claim we're all better off and most people buy it because the inflation tax is invisible. This is pure evil. The article explains how specific investors get screwed even more:

"Secret bailouts do not merely benefit recipients; they also deceive investors into mistaking fantasy for fact. Such deceptions often punish honest investors, like the honest investors who sold short the shares of insolvent financial institutions early in 2009.

Some of these investors had done enough homework to understand that no private-market remedy could ride to the rescue of certain financial firms. Therefore, these investors sold short the shares of certain ailing institutions and waited for nature to take its course. But the course that nature would take would be shockingly unnatural. We now know why. The Federal Reserve altered the course of nature, and did so without telling anyone."

I can't say this often enough: this is pure evil. The criminality of government aristocrats makes the mafia look like bratty children by comparison. It's good to be the king or one of his cronies. This is one aspect of the illusion of wealth that must inevitably collapse.

Because of public outcry, Fed allows small bank its Christmas display.

EDUCATION:

I'm not surprised that top-notch people excel in the marketplace regardless of what university they attended.

HEALTH CARE:

British government has already released genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild ostensibly to fight disease.

"It is important to note that these GM mosquitoes, known as OX513A, necessarily have to be of the Aedis aegypti type in order to achieve the goals publicly stated by the developers. Therefore, the millions of male mosquitoes that were released into the open-air environment in 2009, and again in2010, were all of the dengue fever carrying type.

The OX513A mosquitoes were developed by a British biotechnology company named Oxitec and their subsequent release was overseen by the Mosquito Research and Control Unit (MRCU) in the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory.

Although Oxitec Limited was the developer who engaged in most of the groundwork for the GM insects, the project was not theirs alone. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, The PEW Charitable Trusts, and government agencies in the United States, England, Malaysia, and others were all involved in the development and promotion of the GM mosquitoes.

What has been quite suspicious, however, is the fact that Dengue fever, which has been nonexistent in North America for decades, has recently surfaced in Florida. Initially, the fever was found in 2009, but by 2010 the cases had vastly increased. In July 2010, a CDC study was released to very little media attention indicating that about 10 percent of the population of Key West had been infected with Dengue fever. This had doubled from 2009 where 5 percent had been infected. One might wonder what caused a virus that had been almost entirely eradicated to suddenly reappear with such vigor. That is, one might wonder if the answer weren’t so blatantly obvious. Of course, official reports do not address whether or not the Dengue fever is connected to the millions of mosquitoes capable of carrying the fever which were released just miles away in the Cayman Islands."

Too bad this article is so poorly sourced. It tells a captivating story, but it's all assertions.

Some voices in the mainstream medical establishment are pointing out how damaging government's program of pushing sugars and grains into our food supply and our psyches has been.

"“The country’s big low-fat message backfired,” says Dr. Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The overemphasis on reducing fat caused the consumption of carbohydrates and sugar in our diets to soar. That shift may be linked to the biggest health problems in America today.”

…Americans, on average, eat 250 to 300 grams of carbs a day, accounting for about 55% of their caloric intake. The most conservative recommendations say they should eat half that amount. Consumption of carbohydrates has increased over the years with the help of a 30-year-old, government-mandated message to cut fat."

No matter how hard it tries, government can't completely quash the truth.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Britain experiencing coldest December on record.

POLICE STATE:

The way the government has forced corporations like Bank of America to cut off and isolate WikiLeaks illustrates how corporations are agents of the government and so tightly coupled to the government that it's impossible to differentiate them. This is fascism.

The way they are treating this whistle-blower is horrible. They're using the prevention of injury watch to punish and break him down.

The truth about terrorism:

"The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one.

It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade — after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI "captures" the unfortunate victims of the government's entrapment.)"

"Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can't be done won't be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime."

Fortunately for us, few of the people who want to kill us have the means. But the longer we wage war against middle eastern Muslims, the more of them will develop the both the desire and the means to kill Americans.

"The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale — youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and who know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places — indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside.

That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part's "findings" to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers' money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it — and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it."

It's all about looting the people to enrich and empower the ruling class.

Ex-cop explains how police departments manipulate crime reporting to their benefit.

Homeland security recruiting neighborhood busybodies as informants. Great.

The TSA is a perfect example of supporting Franklin's observation that people who surrender freedom for security deserve neither safety nor security, and they get neither safety nor security.

WAR:

Don't ask, don't tell repealed.

General Petraeus understands the need for propaganda from the media when fighting wars, and the government's propaganda arm complies.

"In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a "war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences"."

The Taliban understand this too.

MEDIA:

Troll releases data showing a link between births and cell phone towers to see if the media will present this correlation as causation.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

US government accused of treating the Army private who leaked documents to WikiLeaks inhumanely.

"From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement.  For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell.  Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.  For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch).  For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs.  Lt. Villiard [a Quantico brig official] protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out."

If that's true, it sounds illegal to me. That might be OK for a enemy combatant who failed to meet the standards of the Geneva Convention during a war, but not for a US citizen in the US.

"And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation."

That sounds morally equivalent to administering truth serums.

ECONOMY:

Prediction that silver will hit $50. Note to self: buy more silver. Now. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow.

Prediction guru Gerald Celente predicts 2011 will be the beginning of a world-wide revolution:

"Wake-Up Call In 2011, the people of all nations will fully recognize how grave economic conditions have become, how ineffectual and self-serving the so-called solutions have been, and how dire the consequences will be. Having become convinced of the inability of leaders and know-it-all "arbiters of everything" to fulfill their promises, the people will do more than just question authority, they will defy authority. The seeds of revolution will be sown…."

"Crack-Up 2011 Among our Top Trends for last year was the "Crash of 2010." What happened? The stock market didn’t crash. We know. We made it clear in our Autumn Trends Journalthat we were not forecasting a stock market crash – the equity markets were no longer a legitimate indicator of recovery or the real state of the economy. Yet the reliable indicators (employment numbers, the real estate market, currency pressures, sovereign debt problems) all bordered between crisis and disaster. In 2011, with the arsenal of schemes to prop them up depleted, we predict "Crack-Up 2011": teetering economies will collapse, currency wars will ensue, trade barriers will be erected, economic unions will splinter, and the onset of the "Greatest Depression" will be recognized by everyone…."

"Screw the People As times get even tougher and people get even poorer, the "authorities" will intensify their efforts to extract the funds needed to meet fiscal obligations. While there will be variations on the theme, the governments’ song will be the same: cut what you give, raise what you take."

"Crime Waves No job + no money + compounding debt = high stress, strained relations, short fuses. In 2011, with the fuse lit, it will be prime time for Crime Time. When people lose everything and they have nothing left to lose, they lose it. Hardship-driven crimes will be committed across the socioeconomic spectrum by legions of the on-the-edge desperate who will do whatever they must to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table…."

"Crackdown on Liberty As crime rates rise, so will the voices demanding a crackdown. A national crusade to "Get Tough on Crime" will be waged against the citizenry. And just as in the "War on Terror," where "suspected terrorists" are killed before proven guilty or jailed without trial, in the "War on Crime" everyone is a suspect until proven innocent…."

I've been predicting this was coming for decades, and when it hits, there will be an upside and a downside. The upside is people will try to throw off the yoke of government, and there's a possibility they will succeed, but it's unlikely at this point. The downside is government will kill many people, and many who were dependent of government will die. I've been laying out plans to improve the upside and limit the downside for as long as I can remember, to no avail. We continue to accelerate down the road to serfdom. I just hope these revolutions aren't as violent and deadly as I fear they will be. I hope people will cast away government more easily than I foresee. I fear all those people who talk about optimism for the future are fools who fail to see the horrific consequences of the intermediate destruction, and after that there's no certainty of a freer society to follow. We are not experiencing a Nazi-style collapse. What we're experiencing is closer to the Weimar collapse that produced the Nazis. On a global scale. I can't see a silver lining before the devastation. I can't see the American people freeing themselves in time. It breaks my heart.

Ten giant corporations in danger of bankruptcy.

TAX AND SPEND:

Lucky sperm club. Really. Summary: Dead people can't care if government steals their money. They're dead. This striking quote provides wonderful insight into the mind of a leftist. Family doesn't matter. Nature doesn't matter. The ability a person is born with doesn't matter. Hard work doesn't matter. That's why property doesn't matter. We're all pawns for leftists to engineer to their liking.


Whistle-blower on tax evasion scam ends up in prison while all the tax evaders and the management who enabled it go free. It's like Will Grigg always says, never, ever, ever call the police.


HEALTH CARE:

Salt theory reminds us that we need more healthy salt.

POLICE STATE:

Compilation video of TSA abuses.

This is one of the reasons government can never provide quality services:

"One of the most infuriating ironies of the TSA — among a host of them — is ChertNap’s Law: each time screeners fail, the TSA punishes passengers. Here’s the latest application of said law, courtesy of John “Pervert” Pistole:

“’We’ve had a series of reports actually going back several years from the inspector general, from the General Accounting Office, and our own TSA Office of Inspection, where they do … covert testing,’ Pistole acknowledged  … last month during an interview on Good Morning America. ‘And unfortunately, [undercover testers] have been very successful over the years…’”

This “helped convince him that airport screening needed to get that much tougher — and a desire to do better [sic] helped give rise to the controversial new regimen that includes enhanced pat-downs and back-scatter machines that can see beneath a traveler’s clothing.”"

Government agents are unaccountable. They never get fired. Government agencies are unaccountable. They never get abolished. The more bureaucracies and bureaucrats fail, the more money and power the government steals from us and gives them. Because government is funded by theft and because government exists solely to increase the power of the aristocrats and their cronies at our expense, government rewards failure and uses failure as an excuse to steal more money and power from us.

Here's a public service announcement from the TSA:

"TSA agents routinely fail to detect pistols, knives, and other weapons of mass destruction at airports nationwide. The failure rate — on TSA’s own tests!—is often 100%."

But their failure rate on feeling up your daughter's genitals and breasts is 0 percent. Who said the TSA was incompetent?

TSA agents serenading travelers at LAX with Christmas carols. This must be a PR stunt that we're paying for with out tax dollars.

It's beginning to look a lot like Russia.

MEDIA:

The New York Times says WikiLeaks is becoming more journalistic. That's like Satan saying somebody is becoming more like him. It's not a good thing. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate that WikiLeaks does a thorough job of redacting names of people who might otherwise be targeted for murder from the documents it releases, but in no other way should WikiLeaks become like American journalists.

MISC:

Lew Rockwell criticizes American exceptionalism, but his criticism is as wrong as the conservative interpretation of it. Nationalism is not a disease any more than recognizing that one's inherent abilities are greater than another is a disease. Recognizing our country is better than another doesn't necessarily mean believing our government is better than another, though most  make that mistake. The US is an exceptional country because so many US citizens are children of a subset of populations of other countries who chose to endure hardship to succeed without grants from the ruling class of their original counties. In other words, more US citizens are progeny from libertarians than in any other country on earth. More than the citizens of any other country, libertarianism is our birthright. That love of freedom, that great libertarian streak that runs through the vast majority of us, makes us and our country great. Our government does not make us great. It diminishes our greatness. Fighting wars overseas does not make us great. They diminish our greatness. Aggressive foreign policy also diminishes our greatness. It is our love of freedom, so much of which we have given away, but which has not quite been crushed from us yet by our government, that makes us great. But the burden of government has overwhelmed our ability to produce, and therefore our government is dragging us into rapid decline. But we can reverse this by tapping into the streak of libertarianism that runs through mainstream Americans and we can return to a trajectory of greatness by re-embracing freedom.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Government marches ahead with its plans to control the internet.

SOCIALISM:

Hugo Chavez isn't satisfied with the dictatorial powers he already has. He wants the Venezuelan Congress to empower him to make laws by decree.

ECONOMY:

Real numbers show just how bad the economy is.

Potential pitfalls to avoid if you chose to switch your gold from unallocated to allocated storage.

TAX AND SPEND:

The US has the highest corporate tax rate of any industrialized nation. And they wonder why jobs are going overseas.

Great description of the scam the Treasury, Fed and big banks are running on us.

"Quickly loan money to desperate investment banks via TARP. Get the Federal Reserve to create money and use the money to buy junk assets from investment banks, so that they can pay back TARP. Declare yourself a financial genius."

Lord Geithner and other aristocrats keep telling us we're making money on TARP. It's all funny money created by the Fed.

Republicans and Democrats even got the Social Security tax cut wrong.

Thomas Sowell simply says what nobody else is saying about the Bush tax cut deal going on in Washington:

"Nobody's taxes are being cut, but spending is going up."

What else would you expect in Washington?

Democrats cave on their plans to push through a 2,000 page omnibus budget with their wishlist of spending increases, agreeing to a short continuing resolution until next year. That's a big improvement. I give Republicans credit for this. Earmarks aren't necessarily any more wasteful than any other government spending. The problem with earmarks is they're the primary tool that aristocrats use to buy votes, so their corrupting influence is significantly higher per dollar than other government spending. That's why aristocrats fight so hard for them.

"The two leaders have not worked out how long to extend current funding. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has introduced a measure that would last until February 18.

Until then, the government would continue to operate on the framework of an outdated budget that likely would make it difficult for federal agencies to cancel outdated programs and move ahead with new ones."

What a joke. Bureaucracies never cancel outdated programs.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The Fed orders Oklahoma bank to remove Christian references:

"Federal Reserve examiners come every four years to make sure banks are complying with a long list of regulations. The examiners came to Perkins last week. And the team from Kansas City deemed a Bible verse of the day, crosses on the teller’s counter and buttons that say "Merry Christmas, God With Us." were inappropriate. The Bible verse of the day on the bank's Internet site also had to be taken down."

In Bernanke we trust.

EDUCATION:

Atlanta teachers busted for cheating by correcting answers on students' standardized tests to make it look like the students, and therefore the teachers, performed better than they actually did. I'm happy to know the teachers knew the answers.

HEALTH CARE:

Kids with ADHD more at risk for obesity. This doesn't seem hard to understand. It's the sugar-carb highs and the insulin response. ADHD always sounded like sugar highs and lows to me, and now we know that grains and other carbs cause the same highs and lows as sugar.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Despite the collapse of the Chicago carbon exchange, California opens a carbon exchange. This is a good reminder that bad ideas never go away. Think Marxism.

POLICE STATE:

As is the nature of government, TSA continues to reach new heights of oppression.

"Adrienne Durso, “a breast-cancer survivor … said she went through a metal detector at the Albuquerque airport on Aug. 25 but was then subjected to a patdown. In a telephone interview with a San Diego TV station, she said the agent ‘heavily concentrated on my breast area where I told her I’d had a mastectomy the year previous and it just seemed to go on and on.’

She was travelling with “her teenage son[, who] was told he was not subjected to a patdown because he does not have ‘boobs.’”

This is, of course, precisely the sort of crime that would not only shutter a private company but catapult those responsible to prison while bankrupting them with fines – all to the strains of NOW’s hysteria and whining."

It's pathetic to see Americans bow down to these thugs just because they put on a government uniform. It's important to realize what Becky calls patdowns are not patdowns. They are invasive searches. I hate to see those terms intermingled.

Options for using the legal system to punish TSA agents for sexual assault.

Julian Assange released on bail, but apparently he's under house arrest at some mansion. Some bail. At least he has computer access. This is probably a ploy by police to monitor everything he does online and to get full access to WikiLeaks.

This is a bizarre story. Apparently Los Angeles police have captured a serial killer who took pictures and videos of women, some of whom he may have killed. After investigating missing persons and open cases, police are left with pictures of 160 still unidentified women who may or may not be dead. Assuming most of these women are alive, I find it hard to believe he killed a hundred women and got away with it until now, they chose not to say anything about this guy. Maybe there was no coercion or violence with them. But now they're faces are pasted all over the internet associated with this monster, and their lives will never be the same. And the reason for this release seems to be nothing but a power trip:

"Police said they were sensitive to the harm and embarrassment the release of the photographs could cause women who never told their family or friends about the encounters. In the end, however, they decided that the need to identify the women outweighed the potential harm. For similar reasons, the Times has decided to publish the photographs on its website."

Who's need to identify the women? How did they weigh that need versus the harm? How is it possible to do so? It sounds to me the police didn't like not knowing, so they decided their need to be powerful was more important than the privacy of the women in the pictures. They're playing god with the lives of these women just to satisfy themselves.

""As a police department, we have an obligation to account for the welfare of these women," said veteran homicide Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who headed the task force that hunted Franklin. "We're trying to fill in the life and times of Lonnie Franklin over the past 30 years, and talking to people is a big part of that. These are obviously women who had a conversation or two with this guy.... I won't be surprised if we find some of them were his victims.""

This has nothing to do with the welfare of these women. If any were his victims, they already know it. If any were his victims, they chose to keep the information private. For the police to make their experience public is unconscionable. It's an attack on their welfare. There is the possibility some of these women are dead and their family members don't know what happened to them. There's a service to be done for these families. But that service could be rendered in some fashion that doesn't publicize the others. For example, the police department can announce it has pictures, and families looking for missing relatives could examine them privately. This seems like a power trip with grotesque ramifications for many women to me.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Victor Davis Hanson describes the third world shanty towns in central California. He should have taken pictures.

MEDIA:

Survey claims that Foxnews viewers are more misinformed, but the example used in the survey shows the survey is biased. Duh.

Concern than the mainstream media is co-opting WikiLeaks to promote its pro-government agenda.

"

Wikileaks has the essential features of a process of "manufactured dissent". It seeks to expose government lies. It has released important information on US war crimes. But once the project becomes embedded in the mould of mainstream journalism, it is used as an instrument of media disinformation: 

"It is in the interest of the corporate elites to accept dissent and protest as a feature of the system inasmuch as they do not threaten the established social order. The purpose is not to repress dissent, but, on the contrary, to shape and mould the protest movement, to set the outer limits of dissent. To maintain their legitimacy, the economic elites favor limited and controlled forms of opposition...  To be effective, however, the process of "manufacturing dissent" must be carefully regulated and monitored by those who are the object of the protest movement " (See Michel Chossudovsky,  "Manufacturing Dissent": the Anti-globalization Movement is Funded by the Corporate Elites, September 2010)

What this examination of the Wikileaks project also suggests is that the mechanics of New World Order propaganda, particularly with regard to its military agenda, has become increasingly sophisticated.

It no longer relies on the outright suppression of the facts regarding US-NATO war crimes. Nor does it require that the reputation of government officials at the highest levels, including the Secretary of State, be protected. New World Order politicians are in a sense "disposable". They can be replaced. What must be protected and sustained are the interests of the economic elites, which control the political apparatus from behind the scenes. 

In the case of Wikileaks, the facts are contained in a data bank; many of those facts, particularly those pertaining to foreign governments serve US foreign policy interests. Other facts tend, on the other hand to discredit the US administration. With regard to financial information, the release of data pertaining to a particular bank instigated via Wikileaks by a rival financial institution, could potentially be used to trigger the collapse or bankrutpcy of the targeted financial institution.     

All the Wiki-facts are selectively redacted, they are then "analyzed" and interpreted by a media which serves the economic elites. 

While the numerous pieces of information contained in the Wikileaks data bank are accessible, the broader public will not normally take the trouble to consult and scan through the Wikileaks data bank. The public will read the redacted selections and interpretations presented in major news outlets.

A partial and biased picture is presented. The redacted version is accepted by public opinion because it is based on what is heralded as a "reliable source", when in fact what is presented in the pages of major newspapers and on network TV is a carefully crafted and convoluted distortion of the truth.

"

In other words, don't take the mainstream media's word for what WikiLeaks has made public.

MISC:

Copyright a tool for censorship.

The Humane Society claims animal abuse at Smithfield farms, with video. This kind of thing would almost never happen in a free market. In a free market, private regulating agencies would inspect all food production plants and refuse to certify any like this. The American people wouldn't purchase food from uncertified producers because they wouldn't stand for this kind of abuse. But because government controls our food production, this kind of abusive, unsafe treatment of animals is the norm, making our food supply unhealthy.

CERN experiment failed to produce microscopic black holes as predicted by string theory. This doesn't disprove string theory in general, but at the very least they have some details wrong.

What's the big deal about not putting ads in Wikipedia? As long as they don't pop up and obscure the information I'm looking for, ads are fine.

Gluten-free beers.

The impact on society of having so many men having been raised by women.

"There are three primary social institutions that have historically served to mold young boys into men:  family, religion, and education."

And the destructive effects of government on all those institutions is obvious to anybody willing to see. We have to be careful not to blame the marketplace or society for what is really caused by government. For example, zoning laws, laws against child labor and laws forcing children into government schools keep children from sharing their father's work, not modern business or society. I'm sure plenty of fathers could use their child's help on the job for several hours a day as a gofer or apprentice, but since the child is forced into the government's military-style schools, prohibited from the father's workplace and the father is forced to drive many miles to that workplace, working parents and children can't get together during the day.