Eduction

Millions fail to take advantage of ways the federal government allows people to reduce student loan payments and even erase the principle after 25 years.

Politics

While Americans were distracted with the Boston bombing, Congress did damage of its own.

Freedom of Speech

Japanese police pressure ISPs to shut down Tor. They won't ask for long. Soon they will coerce, and so will every other government. This is a powerful recommendation for Tor.

War

US using double-tap drone strikes to kill first responders. As a result, only one in fifty victims of drone strikes is actually a terrorist.

Syrian troops storm a rebel stronghold. Somewhere between 80 and 476 are dead. However,

"Three of those killed were children and six others were women, the Observatory said, adding that the rest were men, among them many rebel fighters."

I don't support the killing of any innocents including men, but this sounds like an amazingly accurate, and effective strike at rebels. I bet this moves Obama one step closer to direct intervention, not because of the casualty count but because of the success against the rebels.

Right to Keep and Bear Arms

King George tried to disarm Americans 238 years, sparking the American Revolution. Today Americans meekly submit to forcible disarmament by a tyrannical government.

Socialism

An interesting observation about the adulation awarded to first responders.

"Why you hear nothing about the fire fighters killed in the Texas fertilizer plant explosion? Because they were volunteers. You can't be a hero unless you're living off taxes. You can't be a hero if you die serving your neighbors while doing work that is supposed to be a government monopoly. To government, these men were "scabs.""

I noted something similar regarding the heroic runners at the Boston Marathon who were overlooked by the media.

Foreign Policy

Pakistani government upholds the rule of law by arresting Musharraf. Too bad the US is not that civilized.

Police State

A Watertown resident saw liberty die. Video shows cops going door to door raiding houses and terrorizing residents. Picture of US forces requiring Americans to submit papers for travel. Picture of SWAT force carrying two gallons of milk. You can't make this stuff up. More on the lockdown including lots of pictures.

Evidence of more lies by the police.

Boston proves the terrorists won a while back.

Another interesting observation.

"You were considered a nut if... ...you thought that martial law was coming to the US?
...if you were prepared for being cut off from food, water, and other essentials?
...if you thought that the US had totalitarian ambitions?
---if you opposed the empire, its wars and blowback?
...if you thought terrorist incidents would be used to repeal the Bill of Rights?
...if you thought of expatriating?
"

All the things they said could never happen here are happening here.

While the tyrants forced a million people into house arrest, they allowed Dunkin Donuts to operate even in Watertown. Insert cop stereotype joke here.

Police claim the surviving suspect shot himself in the throat in an attempt at suicide. Police also claim the suspects were planning another attack. Both those reports make the police seem more heroic. I'm skeptical. More unbelievable claims by the police.

"Eli also wants to know whether Our Rulers will "dump the ['suspects''] bodies at sea in keeping with Muslim (and CIA) tradition.""

Zing.

Author calls the police state David Koresh's revenge.

"Attorney General Janet Reno, who took office in the middle of the standoff, finally decided to put an end to it. At about 6AM on April 19, the FBI began pumping flammable and poisonous CS gas, banned in international warfare, into the Davidian home. Officials knew that women and children were holed up in the section of the home exposed to this gas. The government continued to deploy gas for almost six hours.
Chemistry professor George F. Uhlig testified in congressional hearings that he estimated there was a sixty percent chance that the gassing alone killed some children. "Turning loose excessive quantities of CS definitely was not in the best interests of the children," Uhlig said. "Gas masks do not fit children very well, if at all." He said that the gassing could have transformed their surroundings "into an area similar to one of the gas chambers used by the Nazis at Auschwitz."
The FBI brought out an Abrams tank, the Army’s heaviest armored vehicle, to replace its Bradley fighting vehicles. Agents drove the tank, which Attorney General Janet Reno later obscenely compared to "a good rent-a-car," into the building. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who had shot and killed Vicki Weaver in August 1992 at Ruby Ridge as she held her infant in her arms, was at the scene. FBI agents launched incendiary tear gas canisters. Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin later declared, "We know of no evidence to support that any incendiary device was fired into the compound on April 19, 1993." The FBI finally admitted six years later it had indeed used such projectiles at Waco.
The Davidian home went up in flames in the early afternoon. More than seventy people died, all of them civilian targets, many of them Americans, others hailing from other countries, more than twenty of them children and close to half of them people of color, although somehow the Davidians are often smeared, along with the so-called militia movement, as white supremacists. As the fire raged, the FBI turned back the local fire department. Special agent Jeffrey Jamar claimed that he feared for firefighters’ safety—presumably, the Davidians might shoot at the very people trying to stop the fire that was burning them to death. When it was all over, the ATF hoisted its flag atop the conquered ruins."

Revenge on us for allowing the police state to kill him and his followers. I remember driving by the smoking ruins that day. It still makes me retch thinking about it.

Long haul truckers use cameras to defend themselves from cops. After the meteor flew over Russia, we learned that Russians routinely drive with dash mounted cameras to defend themselves. Apparently Americans need to do something similar.

TSA will soon be on every corner.

Ohio's high security prisons becoming more dangerous.

Economy

The gourmet cupcake bubble is collapsing. I've never purchased a gourmet cupcake.

Health Care

Not satisfied with getting people sick by feeding them non-food in the form of grains, scientists now want to feed people non-food in the form of wood.

Misc

Scientists once again discover the obvious: grandmothers - post menopausal - were important to the development of humans. This also undermines the claim that humans tended to die after 30 years.

"In the hypothesis—and in the computer simulation—the few ancestral females who were initially able to live to postmenopausal ages increased the odds of their grandchildren surviving."

This shows again the confirmation bias of mathematical models, showing again they aren't science, but since this theory is the same I proposed before, it makes sense to me.

The top 50 things to disappear from store shelves in an emergency. This list is not accurate because it doesn't include ammo.

Global Warming and Energy

I've often written that being a climate fraud means never having to admit you're wrong. This guy has noticed the same thing.

"He showed me tables and graphs that clearly depicted it was getting warmer. He believed that I was just a victim of my own subjective imagination. Memory can fool you. One thinks that during childhood it was warm from May to September, but in reality its was warm only 3 days, and it is those 3 days that one remembers intensively. The tables from climate scientists, on the other hand, do not lie.”"

Then...

"But suddenly I read in the paper that a number of climate scientists had changed their minds. Now they were saying it is not going to get warmer, but colder, at least in Europe. Whatever happened to the tables I now ask myself.”"

That's how it goes. As soon as they change their predictions, they act like those were always the predictions they made.

Tax and Spend

Japan has the highest government debt to GDP ration of any country, and the administration promises to make it worse.

Ohio Republicans want to tax internet and catalog purchases. The supposed justification for sales tax used to be that local brick and mortar businesses benefited from government service. Taxing internet sales exposes the lie of that claim. Sales taxes are just an excuse to steal more money.

Police State

Apparently social media created two incorrect suspects of the Boston bombing last night. They're blaming social media, but CBS originally reported it got those names from Boston police.

Now we find out that the owner of the boat found the suspect, not the police, and he was outside their perimeter. All the crucial evidence in this case came from the private sector and private individuals.

Pictures show that other people besides the named suspects, including undercover agents, were carrying black backpacks exactly like the ones that reportedly housed the bombs. Video extrapolates that info into claim of a false flag attack.

FBI covers up that it had contacted suspect number one, the one cops killed, two years ago.

"RT would report that the mother of the suspect claimed the FBI had been monitoring her sons ever since, and led them along “every step of the way.” In an article titled, “‘They were set up, FBI followed them for years’- Tsarnaevs’ mother to RT,” it stated of the suspects’ mother:

But her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years. She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a terrorist act.

Interestingly enough, the WSJ also stated that:

The profile of the Boston bombing in many ways resembles a number of the recent foiled plots, a federal law-enforcement official said. They have been small with little or no intelligence chatter, and have involved suspects who have been in the U.S. for several years and appeared to have assimilated.

What the WSJ categorically fails to mention is that these “foiled plots” were from start to finish engineered by the FBI itself, with suspects, just as Tsarnaevs’ mother had claimed of her sons, under “constant FBI surveillance,” and in fact led along every step of the way in the lead up to high-profile arrests. What is also subsequently left out by the WSJ is that during these undercover operations, real vehicles, weapons, and explosives are involved, and usually switched out for inert items right before the final attack and arrests are made."

This suggests this was another FBI plot to entrap patsies, but this time the patsies succeeded. That might explain why the FBI took over the investigation right away. It also might explain why they were performing a supposed bomb threat drill at the race. Story includes other examples where the FBI handed the patsies explosives, guns and grenades.

"According to the affidavit, on November 4, 2010, Mohamud and the undercover FBI operatives traveled to a remote location in Lincoln County, Ore., where they detonated a bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the upcoming attack."

Suspiciously similar. The mother of the two suspects says the FBI was controller her oldest son.

"They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me…they were telling me that he [the older, 26-y/o Tamerlan] was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites… they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step…and now they say that this is a terrorist act!"

This looks worse and worse.

Terrifying pictures and indictment of martial law in Boston.

"Look at these chilling photos of a major American city under total martial law. The local police force and investigative units have switched over to military assault vehicles on the streets, robo-cop science-fiction soldiers plugged in to all manner of spooky devices looking like the Borg and screaming orders like "if you want to live, turn off your cell phones.""

The Nazis were never this oppressive. It's obvious these suspects know something terribly damaging to the government. And yet they failed to find the suspect. A boat owner found him because he violated the shelter in place order.

"In other words, the police state achieved nothing but the psychological conditioning of the population: when we, the state, decide any particular event is important enough, you will lose every single right including possibly the right to life if you resist."

Yep.

"Writing in the Washington Times Communities section, Thomas Mullen sums it up nicely:

19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev is in custody. Assuming that Tsarnaev is indeed guilty of these crimes, a very real threat to public safety has been taken off the streets. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the Tsarnaev brothers have taken the last vestiges of a free society in America down with them.
The Bill of Rights was already on life support before this tragedy. Before the dust settled after 9/11, the 4th Amendment had been nullified by the Patriot Act. The 5th and 6th Amendments were similarly abolished with the Military Commission Act of 2006 and the 2012 NDAA resolution, which contained a clause allowing the president to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil without due process of law.

This legacy is the real Boston tragedy. The Rubicon has been crossed."

Good for the Washington Times. It's nice to see a mainstream media outlet publish this.

Neither 9/11 nor the attack in Boston were random acts of violence. This is government propaganda.

Economy

Stockman praises Mises and Hazlitt and trashes Bernanke.

"“[T]he stated purpose of the Wall Street bailouts — to avoid a replay of the 1930s — was drastically misguided.  It was based on a phantom threat which arose overwhelmingly from the faulty scholarship of a single official . . . who had come to head the nation’s central bank. The analysis was actually not even his own, but was the borrowed theory of Professor Milton Friedman.”
“Forty years earlier, Friedman had famously claimed that the Fed’s failure to run its printing presses full tilt during certain periods of 1930-1932 had caused the Great Depression.  Bernanke’s sole contribution to this truly wrong-headed proposition was a few essays consisting mainly of dense math equations.  They showed the undeniable correlation between the collapse of GDP and the money supply, but proved no causation whatsoever.”
“In fact . . . the great contraction of 1929-1933 was rooted in the bubble of debt and financial speculation that built up in the years before October 1929 . . . . the . . . central bank [is] now led by an academic zealot who had gotten cause and effect upside down.”"

I'm so looking forward to reading this book.

Police State

After looking worse than the Keystone Kops and oppressing an entire city for nearly 24 hours, the cops stumbled upon the 19 year old suspect who exposed them as incompetent for a week. Maybe the blood trail gave him away although the cops reportedly missed it earlier. The most sickening part of the finale is the parasitic brass patting each other on the back, nearly breaking their arms in the process. It's like a Miss America pageant except all the contestants are claiming credit for solving a crime they failed to prevent and failed to solve for a week. They all keep saying the police worked together. They hit that point over and over. What that means is they didn't work together at all. They're overcompensating to cover up the internal rivalries and conflicts that made them so inept all week.

People on the left rooted for these terrorists to be white, anti-government people. People on the right rooted for them to be brown Muslims. Some rooted for them to be foreigners. Others rooted for them to be home-grown. Everybody won. The two terrorists are Caucasian, Muslim, foreign, and homegrown all. It's like the politicians and the media got together and designed by committee the two guys who would satisfy the predetermined viewpoint of every American faction. Now every American faction can be more scared about terrorism than ever. The Onion sums it up nicely, "Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens." I wish that would be the end of it, but it won't.

As always, the most important question to ask about the Boston Marathon terrorist attack is who benefited. Obviously the Russians benefited because they gained tremendous international support in their millennia long conflict against Chechens. The US government is another big winner. Despite two young men making the trillion dollar police state look fools for a week in one of the most spectacularly publicized failures of government since 9/11, America's tyrants shut down a city of a million people for a day for no good reason while thousands of troops - I mean cops - marched through the streets in search of one man. And most Americans think this was a good thing. One tyrant lamented he couldn't lock down an entire city or state. That'll be the goal the police state champions try to make possible. The big losers are Chechens and Muslims. Maybe we should look a little deeper than the story government and its propagandists push on us.

Economy

The US economy has been declining for a long time.

"When I was a kid of 16 years of age, my father brought home all the money we needed to live a good life in Manhattan. My mom stayed home with the kids. We had a maid and a cook, and we went out to a restaurant every Sunday. In contrast, today it takes a man and his mate both working full time to live the same way. A typical family can't send their younger child to a private school, and they can't afford to send their older child to a private university. A family can't afford to have a maid to do the housework, and a cook certainly isn't in the budget. Believe me, the American standard of living has declined since I was 16. Furthermore, in "the old days," families usually were able to save. Today, few families have much in the way of savings, if, indeed, they have any savings at all. Finally, when I was 16 our family didn't have any debt. Everything we possessed was paid for in cash. We had a small summer vacation home in Connecticut paid for in cash -- no mortgage. Today everybody with a home has a mortgage. In the old days, when somebody paid off his mortgage, they would have mortgage parties to celebrate that rare event. During the 1930s and 40s, debt was a dirty word. "

But it's declining much faster now.

Media

I've heard Jonah Goldberg claim he tended toward libertarianism, but apparently he hates libertarians.

War

Spying to benefit the Russians gets man 16 years in prison. Whistleblowing to benefit the American people could cost Bradley Manning a life sentence. Clearly the government considers the Russians much less of a threat than the American people.

Western countries are cutting military spending while others, because they have better economies, are increasing it. I'm telling you, the US wars are going to end one way or the other, so we should end them as soon as possible on our terms.

Tax and Spend

According to the tax foundation, tax freedom day is today, five days later than last year.

Here's the so-called Social Security benefit.

"Today, the best one can hope to receive from Social Security is dollars with the buying power of 75 cents for every dollar contributed. That makes Social Security worse than a Ponzi scheme. You can get out of a Ponzi investment. You can’t get out of Social Security. Who would stay with a bank that returned only 75 percent of one’s savings?
The Constitution doesn’t permit the feds to steal your money. But steal, the feds do."

Getting some of your stolen money back is no benefit.