Monday, October 31, 2005

CIA + Mossad + MI5 = Al Qaeda?

There's plenty of evidence here.
'Who benefits' is the question.

The answer is 'whoever benefits from massive
increased public approval and further funding,
arming and continued warfare against
Group/Ideology/Belief System X'.
That's who benefits - and that's who did
it.

Read.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

A little anti-smoking story

German anti-tobacco policies accelerated towards
the end of the 1930s, and by the early war years
tobacco use had begun to decline. The Luftwaffe
banned smoking in 1938 and the post office did
likewise. Smoking was barred in many workplaces,
government offices, hospitals, and rest homes.
The NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei) announced a ban on smoking in its
offices in 1939, at which time SS chief Heinrich
Himmler announced a smoking ban for all uniformed
police and SS officers while on duty.15 The
Journal of the American Medical Association that
year reported Hermann Goering's decree barring
soldiers from smoking on the streets, on marches,
and on brief off duty periods.16

Read.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

Just a small part of the iceberg

Whatever the risk, some good will come out of
this public alarm if we use it as an opportunity
to understand why the U.S. is now so poorly armed
to cope with a deadly flu outbreak. The reason is
that our political class has spent the past 30
years driving the vaccine industry out of
business with its own virus of over-regulation,
price controls, litigation and intellectual-
property abuse.
...
When one pharmaceutical company offered to sell
a new pneumococcal vaccine to the government for
$58 a dose, the Centers for Disease Control
demanded a $10-a-dose discount. Politicians want
companies to take all the risk of developing new
vaccines, but they don't want the companies to
make any money from taking those risks. Then the
politicians profess surprise and dismay that
there's a vaccine shortage.

Soon to come for the same reasons:

Rising prices due to less oil, food, and an unknown
host of other things.

Your politicians and bureaucrats pay no cost for
being wrong.

You'll be picking up the tab.

Full article.

Friday, October 28, 2005

Irwin Schiff and Amurikun "justice"

After 3 full days of deliberation the jury sent
a note to the judge asking him to see the beat
up, dog-eared, well read copy of co-defendant
Cindy Neun's IRS code book which had been shown
to them during the trial. They wanted to see
Cindy's IRS code book and also a "clean" copy of
an IRS code book.

The judge absolutely denied their request
saying that allowing the jury to see the law
would be "problematic".

Shiff was convicted and given a life sentence
but will appeal.

How is this not like Napoleonic law?

This is what your "rule of law" turned into.

How do you like it?

The Amurikun Banana Republic is alive and well.

But why would anyone want to play with their ball,
in their game, in their court [pun intended]? The
game is rigged.

Better to move your ass and your assets from the
playing field and out of their reach as you would
from any other thief.

See the whole story.

Via whatreallyhappened.com

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Donald Rumsfeld says...

I know Dr. Zakheim's been trying to hire CPAs
because the financial systems of the department
are so snarled up that we can't account for some
$2.6 trillion in transactions that exist, if
that's believable. And yet we're told that we
can't hire CPAs to help untangle it in many
respects.

...and you thought Enron was fucked up.

This is also old news: 2001.

Do you suppose they ever got it straightened out?

Bwaaahahahaha.

Read.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

On economics

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics,
which is, after all, a specialized discipline and
one that most people consider to be a 'dismal
science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have
a loud and vociferous opinion on economic
subjects while remaining in this state of
ignorance." -- Murray Rothbard

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Study Shows Silver Nanoparticles Attach to HIV-1 virus

In the first-ever study of metal nanoparticles'
interaction with HIV-1, silver nanoparticles of
sizes 1-10nm attached to HIV-1 and prevented the
virus from bonding to host cells. The study,
published in the Journal of Nanotechnology, was a
joint project between the University of Texas,
Austin and Mexico Univeristy, Nuevo Leon.
....
Scientists are also studying other uses for
silver nanoparticles. "We're testing against
other viruses and the 'super bug (Methicillin
resistant staphylococcus aureus).' Our
preliminary results indicate that silver
nanoparticles can effectively attack other micro-
organisms," Yacaman said.

Check the links on the right panel under
ionic/colloidal silver. There have already been
many in vitro kill studies on other microbes.

See the article here.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Read the fine print


A sign for thinning the zombie population or a
sign made by a zombie?

You decide.

--This has been another ZombieAlert brought to you by jomama.

Via thog

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Even a "conservative" gets it...somewhat

Perhaps the most perceptive writer about the
state is the Israeli historian Martin van
Creveld. In his book The Rise and Decline of the
State, he argues that the state has gone through
three historical stages. It arose to bring order,
which it did. But beginning with the French
Revolution and the development of abstract
nationalism, the state tried to become a god, to
which citizens owed and should sacrifice
everything. That false god died in World War I,
in the mud of Flanders. Then, the state became
the alma mater, the welfare state that would take
good care of all its citizens’ needs. That also
failed, in the failure of socialism and of social
welfare programs in non-socialist states
including the United States. The state found that
it could redistribute wealth but it could not
create wealth.

The author needs to do some homework.

If redistributing wealth is not socialist, I'm
Ghengis Khan.
Just as the next conservatism must address the
danger of the state, it must also offer some
answers to the danger to the state. Let me
quickly add that the answer is not to give the
state more power, to create the national security
state all conservatives should fear. On the
contrary, that will only make the state weaker in
the long run. The crisis is not one of state
power, but of the legitimacy of the state.

Why is that a "crisis"?

As I've said elsewhere, attempting to make the
state in one's own image is akin to attempting to
polish a turd.

Read.

Via John Lopez

Saturday, October 22, 2005

When it all started...and more

"Everything that should be against the law, was
against the law by 1912. Virtually every
enactment since then has been part of the
scaffolding of the welfare-police state."
--Vin Suprynowicz

...and a rotting scaffolding it is.

Also see his advice on jury nullification here.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Someone else who "gets it"

There will be no federal help this time. There
is no money for it and, thanks to examples all
around us, we now believe that a society that
props up bankrupt, money-losing companies will
soon be bankrupt itself. Keeping foreign
competition out makes no sense, either, since the
foreign competition is making its cars here in
the United States.

When smokestack America first crumpled with the
collapse of the steel industry a generation ago,
the industry survived, redesigned itself and grew
profitable again. Most of the workers and their
communities did not recover.

Nor will they this time. Nor will we, for Delphi
is a marker of a new America in which there is no
collective security, in which the union will not
make you strong, in which there is no government
to give you shelter and in which you know you are
alone.

No mangled, mushy ideas or words here, just straight
talk.

Read.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Netsukuku the Anarchical Parallel Internet

AlpT writes "Developed by the Freaknet,
Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will
be utilised to build a worldwide distributed,
anonymous and anarchical network, separated from
the Internet, without the support of any servers,
ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network
every node acts as a router, therefore in order
to solve the problem of computing and storing the
routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a
new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to
avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the
map of the whole net constantly under the size of
2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal
Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical
and decentralised system of hostnames management
which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux."

link.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Some dreams examined

Chumpfish quotes from a CFR report:

The report, entitled "Getting Serious About the
Twin Deficits" calls for urgent measures to
tackle serious challenges faced by the US
economy, including reducing the government
deficit by, among other steps, increasing taxes;
reducing oil imports through the imposition of
energy taxes or strict fuel efficiency standards;
and managing a coordinated depreciation of the
dollar vis-a-vis East Asian currencies.

Chumpfish is right in his comment. It's fatally
flawed for a number of reasons, mostly because of
the endless number of new and old ideas alternately
putting tourniquets on the appendages of the real
economy and removing blood (taxes...thereby
feeding the political economy) until the body
gets gangrene and/or anemia and the patient dies.
Only one of these economies is alive....somewhat.
Guess which one?

Hint: Government produces nothing.

And its debt is unpayable and uncollectable.

As for private debt...

The effect of many going bankrupt at some point
just means fewer taxes for the political economy.
Besides, private debt means it's in the real
economy where individuals are producing. Why
should anyone get excited if a number of their
fellows want to spend themselves into homelessness
or bankruptcy? It's their life.

Higher taxes for anyone will just feed the failing
state and kill the body with the hemorraging,
resulting in more private debt.

If that sounds like collective analysis, it is.

Best you not get caught near the bloodsuckers.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Detroit and others...

The financial crisis did not occur solely on
Kilpatrick's watch, Harris has said, but grew
slowly over time as residents and businesses left
the city. The looming deficit crisis has been
apparent for six years or longer, stretching into
the Archer administration, when Detroit enjoyed
surpluses mirroring national prosperity and saw
its work force bulge by 2,000 employees, while
continuing to lose its tax base.

Louis Schimmel, the municipal bond expert hired
by former Gov. John Engler to take over financial
management in Ecorse and Hamtramck, says
Detroit's financial situation mirrors that of
General Motors Corp. and Delphi Corp.

"In Detroit, the problem is that it's been so
horribly mismanaged," Schimmel said. "They always
think the answer is money. The answer is not
money. It's changing the structure. You can liken
it to what's happening in the corporate world. In
the '60s and '70s, companies were giving away
health care benefits they couldn't afford to pay
and all kinds of other things. The cost was made
up by the cost of the car. The employer said, 'We
are in our heyday; we can afford this stuff.' And
then China showed up, and India and everywhere
else. And Delphi said, 'The cost of labor is so
expensive we can't compete.' The same thing is
going to happen to cities.
[My emphasis]

"I predict in the coming years there will be a
lot of Detroits. In Detroit, all the spending
caught up with them."

"Mismanaged", the man says.

The controlling concept here is that when they saw
a fine, easy ride, they jumped on. The results are
inevitable when there's a blank check at every
turn. Management is irrelevant as long as the money
holds out.

It never does in a blank check environment. In such
a situation demand eventually exceeds supply, no
matter the mewlings of all the titled folks, like
mayor, senator, Dr. This or Dr. That.

The article.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Back to the carnival

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A panel appointed by
U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday backed
limiting tax breaks for housing and health care,
in hopes of making the tax system simpler,
fairer, and more friendly to economic growth.

The panel also agreed to give further thought to
adding a partial value-added tax -- a sales tax
collected at every stage of production -- to the
existing tax system.[My emphasis]

The shell game continues...

Full report.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Must be something in the Canadian water

Imagine my surprise as I randomly whipped thru
numerous, vapid blogger.com entries this morning
- some even agonizing about what color panties
they were going to wear today - when I happened
on a gathering of zombies, rather than individual
bloggers.

I hang around a number of Canadians, so this
doesn't surprise me much, particularly coming
from Vancouver. I've always had the feeling that
the zombie population in Canada was unusually
high.

This be almost proof for me.

You Other Canadians have my sympathy, a few of
whom are on my "Ornery Blog" roll. To them I say,
keep your powder dry or look for better climes.

My zombie alert meter pegged on this one.

They're coming outta the closet.

--This has been another Zombie Alert brought to you by jomama.

Via a participant.

Duty, schmuty

"In a free country it is the duty of writers to
pay no attention to duty." -- E.B. White

...and the duty of everyone else.

Isn't taking care of you and others you choose to
take care of "duty" enough?

It's plenty for me to do but, hell, do whatever
it is that raises your night gown.

Just don't come knockin' at my door to tell me what
you think my duty is. I'll tell you to come back
tomorrow and go to the end of the line, like I've
said elsewhere on this blog.

Fair enough?

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Effective protection

I had a friend who went to USC many years ago.
Since student housing cost an arm and a leg, he
decided to rent a house in Watts (yes, THAT
Watts), because it was cheap -- even though there
were drug dealers openly selling drugs on the
corners half a block away.

Before moving in, he went to the range, and
poked holes in paper targets with his shotgun.
When he moved in, he used these paper targets to
cover the windows of his house.

I recommend a 12ga. Remington pump, sawed off to
legal length barrel (last I heard, a little more
than 18 inches) with a pistol grip. I would use
"00" buckshot. It fires like a dream. Find an old
junked car to test it on to see what I mean.

As far as I'm concerned, it's the finest personal
protection available and the conversion is easy to
do.

The entire story is well worth a read.

Friday, October 14, 2005

A new kind of anarchy

In Time Magazine this past weekend, Joe Klein
asks “Turf wars, temper tantrums, mysterious
leaks—has Bush lost control of his own
government?”

“The President's rut reflects a gathering
dysfunction in his Administration,” Klein
continues. “The White House seems paralyzed.”

The ol' "deer in the headlights" routine again.

It was just time.

A new administration/leader is superfluous now and
almost no one wants to admit it.

Full article.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

The Tee Vee

"You watch television to turn your brain off and
you work on your computer when you want to turn
your brain on." -- Steve Jobs, co-founder of
Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine,
February 2004

Self-serving but true.

While I never watch TV anymore except for a very
few good movies and a few documentaries, this
"Turn-off-your-TV" propaganda is becoming
politically correct talk.

Why am I turned off of this PC talk?

Because I see it turning into a "mass" movement?

Probably.

I estimate there's one born every minute, mass
movement that is.

Now my crystal ball shows me some silly sombitch
in the back of the room standing up again and
howling at some future date, "Yea, there orta be
a law."

Nah. Leave the zombies happily porking out on
Fritos and diet Coke in front of their teles.

Do you honestly think it's a good idea to bother
a feeding zombie?

Read all about it.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Delphi filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy

For those that don't know it, Delphi is a huge
company and the bankruptcy just affects its uS
divisions.

And this move was probably arranged by accounting
slight of hand to show so much red ink in one
year. (See graph in the article.)

But could these accounts have been fraudulently
reporting income in previous years...like Worldcom
did?
"Who is to say this is the end of the line?" he
said. "If you're competing with Chinese labor,
then who is to say that $10 an hour is too much?"

Let's not forget the Malaysians, Indonesians, Thais,
Indians, Somalians, etc. The list is long.
Delphi's UAW workers said a sense of betrayal
has overwhelmed union members who have dedicated
years to their jobs.

"They just snatched the American dream from
thousands of people," said Don Thomas, a veteran
of 29 years at a Delphi plant in Rochester, N.Y.
"Nobody wanted to believe it until it happened."

The Zombie Syndrome, practiced so well by Amurikans
(sic) and Europeens.(sic)

The whining about world-wide job competition is
deafening. You hear almost nothing about tax
competition. This latter also drives jobs offshore.

Get over it.

Shit happens. Move on.

Large swaths of Europe, uS and Canada soon to look
like downtown Detroit.

Can old zombies teach themselves new tricks?

Full article.

--This has been another Zombie Alert brought to you by jomama.

Monday, October 10, 2005

The vanity of the selfless

"The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice
utmost humility, is boundless." -- Eric Hoffer

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Human Action

1. Phenomena that are the result both of human
action and of human design: Suppose that in a fit
of anger I punch you in the face; you lose teeth
and bleed. You’re angry at me. Your suffering is
the result both of human action (my punch) and of
human design (my intention was to harm you by
punching you in the face). You’d act perfectly
sensibly if you get angry with me and retaliate
by punching me back.
2. Phenomena that are the result neither of
human action nor of human design: Suppose that
you’ve planned a picnic with your new girlfriend
on Saturday; when you awaken you find that rain
is pouring from the sky, which is dark in all
directions. You’re angry; that’s quite
understandable. But you don’t shake your fist at
the heavens and blame someone; you don’t demand
that the rain stop; you understand that things,
such as rain storms, happen that are the result
neither of human action nor of human design.
3. Phenomena that are the result of human action
but not of human design: Suppose today you ask a
college student to look up a term – say,
"Hayekian." He or she will likely do so by
"googling it." "Google" has become a verb. You
might like this fact; you might despise this
fact; but a fact it is. It is obviously the
result of human action, but it is not the result
of human design. No one decided, or planned, that
"google" would be a verb.

Few people have difficulty identifying phenomena
that are properly classified in either of the
first two categories. But the third category is
different. People don’t get it easily. Too bad,
for it’s a vitally important category.
[My
emphasis.]

See some of the economic consequences of these
bits of human action.

See the post.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

More fine brain surgery from Fred

America is hollowing out, I tell you. Fast. It’s
societal apoptosis, cultural gangrene by national
choice. It hasn’t quite gotten bad enough for
people in Texas to notice it, as they drive their
Subarus to Wal-Mart to buy Chinese merchandise,
but give it five years. Maybe ten. The Soviet
Union collapsed from sheer bumbling foolishness.
We’re working on it.

Give it less than 5 years.

The uS will succeed in this just as the Soviets
did with their collapse. The difference between
these two states was one of degree, not substance,
and I doubt one could find any more than 50 people
in high places worldwide who think this substance
is important enough to consider. In other words,
most are just working on a kindler, gentler rip-
off.

Russia still hasn't got it.

Doesn't look like they will.

Full article.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Harriet Miers' Supreme Court nomination

[This page intentionally left blank]

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Institutionalizing poverty

14,000 arrested in new purge on street vending

Zimbabwean police have arrested more than 14,000
people in Harare in the past two weeks and
charged them with illegal street vending and
foreign currency dealings, according to the state
newspaper the Herald. They were fined and their
goods seized.

Police are enforcing an urban clearance campaign
in which 46,000 street traders have been detained
and the homes of an estimated 700,000 people
destroyed.

With unemployment at more than 70% and aid
workers reporting a rise in malnutrition in
cities, many people have resorted to street
vending to feed their families.

Rampaging zombies.

link.

--This has been another Zombie Alert brought to you by jomama.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Over at Harry's place

Take a look at the earthly Borg.

Chavez takes the money and runs

Venezuela has moved its central bank foreign
reserves out of U.S. banks, liquidated its
investments in U.S. Treasury securities and
placed the funds in Europe, Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez said Friday.

"We've had to move the international reserves
from U.S. banks because of the threats," from the
U.S., Chavez said during televised remarks from a
South American summit in Brazil.

This is what happens when you make new enemies
and muck around in their business. Kinda like two
sharks fighting in this case.

Read.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Instant homelessness - just a movie for now

Those glancing from their office windows may
have figured that Los Angeles' homelessness
problem was growing faster than anyone thought.

Overnight, a vast homeless encampment popped up
at one of downtown's busiest intersections.

There were tents, plastic tarps and old shopping
carts stuffed with clothing, bottles and cans.
They lined all four sides of the intersection of
Hill and 4th streets, next to the city's high-
rise district.

But this was one encampment where no homeless
people were allowed.

The street scene was fake. A film crew built it
as a backdrop for "Southland Tales," an
independent feature-length thriller that depicts
Los Angeles on the brink of social, environmental
and economic disaster in 2008.

In my talks with friends and acquaintances, I note
that most folks have that deer in the headlights
look when the topic of The System comes up.

Others like the producer of "Southland Tales"
probably have a pretty good idea of what will
eventually happen. Dunno. I'll have to see the
film.

Even others are busy as one-armed paper hangers in
a Texas windstorm offering up new rules to fix the
rules that didn't work since the first rule was put
on paper, making new enemies/rule breakers every
day. (See the next post I'll be making for an
example of the results.)

Doesn't it look to you like this last group and
their enforcers are made up of psycopaths and
zombies? Have we been invaded by aliens?

Very few will know why it turned to shit when it's
all over.

Think about it.

Full report.
(Registration required) See Bugmenot to get around it.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Emotional Rather blather

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday
that there is a climate of fear running through
newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his
more than four-decade career.

Reading this first line of the article, I thought
here was a report that was pregnant with promise.

But the baby was still-born.

If you're interested in seeing what I mean, here's
the article but I think you're just wasting your
time with this whiner.

Full article.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Word from The Inside

“It’s like working in an insane asylum,” says
one White House aide. “People walk around like
they’re in a trance. We’re the dance band on the
Titanic, playing out our last songs to people who
know the ship is sinking and none of us are going
to make it.”

They are in a trance.

Read.

--This has been another Zombie Alert brought to you by jomama.