Gold up almost $18 today

"Next month," the article reveals, "the Bank of
China plans to launch its newest product, dollar-
denominated certificates linked to the price of
gold."

You won't hear this in the MSM.

Read.

Future bumper sticker

"Had enough yet?"

Thanks to simmeringfrogs.

The rational Mexican surrender

The practical response of the pols turns out to
also be the ethical one....

But everyone here knows there's nothing ethical
about politics, right?

At least these boys are more rational than their
northern counterparts.

The War on Drugs?

It was over long ago.

Drugs won.

Psssst. Don't tell anyone.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Possessing marijuana,
cocaine and even heroin will no longer be a crime
in Mexico if they are in small amounts for
personal use under new reforms passed by Congress
that quickly drew U.S. criticism.

The measure given final passage 53-26 by
senators in a late night session on Thursday is
aimed at letting police focus on their battle
against major drug dealers, and President Vicente
Fox is expected to sign it into law.

Whole story.

Update

I've just slapped my already well-sloped forehead
for returning to my old belief system that pols
might have had something to offer civilization
(so-called). Damn, that's a hard habit to break.

Now Vicente Fox has reneged on his promise to sign.

Heat from the Colossus of the North?

Bank on it.

Digital cash

16. Conclusions

Untraceable digital cash is here. It will become
easier to use and more established in the next
several years. It is indistinguishable from
speech, so any laws intended to control it will
almost certainly impinge on speech in general.
While scare tactics may work to drive average
users away from using digital cash, those
operating on the margins have the most to gain
and lose and will likely not be dissuaded by such
laws. Not only have criminals rarely been
dissuaded by tax and banking laws, but here the
chances of getting caught are nearly zero. Boom
markets in information of all kinds can be
expected. Crypto anarchy has its benefits as well
as its problems.

It's going to be an exciting world.

No doubt. Are you ready?

We're all criminals now. Haven't you noticed?

Read.

The center cannot hold

Iran oil bourse next week
Apr 26, 2006

Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said on
Wednesday that the establishment of Oil Stock
Exchange is in its final stage and the bourse
will be launched in Iran in the next week.

In case you haven't seen this, you probably don't know the significance
of that.

Read.

Pub brawls

Social cohesion, the argument goes, is what
allowed our ancestors/parents/grandparents(the
apes?) to 'get along', in contrast with today's
world of chaos and conflict.

They don't say that without social cohesion
World Wars are now pub brawls, but never
mind.

Bet you never thought of that.

Read.

Viagra

Beating Bush's NSA e-mail surveillance simple.
According to NSA sources, there is a simple
method to avoid having one's e-mail captured by
NSA Internet filters that have been installed
within major Internet exchanges, such as the AT&T
facility in San Francisco, which is the subject
of a class action suit against AT&T. By typing
"Viagra" or "Cialis" in the message text, the
filters will automatically identify the e-mail as
spam and ignore it. The e-mail could contain the
words "Al Qaeda" or "Bin Laden," but as long as
Viagra or Cialis are in the text, the e-mail will
pass through the filters without being intercepted.

Well, maybe.

What can it hurt?

Read.

Are you a mark?

Take a look at Dr. Lenny's rendition of Gambling.

Immigrants to America

I don't know whether this is true or not.

"Fact is, no other country on Earth treats
'immigrants' and 'foreigners' as good as America
does (individually and governmentally), and
that's America's fault - or credit, depending on
your viewpoint. America is the $1000 a night
whore on the last night of Consumer Electronics
Show who has cut her price to $20 and is highly
available - but then bitches when she is gang-
banged." --unknown

Gulag USSA

Ordinarily, the fact that some CIA agent has
broken his or her oath of secrecy would not cause
much disturbance outside the unhinged James
Angleton types who make up some portion of any
intelligence community. Surely, out of tens of
thousands of employees, this is something that
happens with regularity.

But Ms. McCarthy's case is different, and it is
of interest to the world. She is responsible,
reportedly by her own admission during a furious
round of polygraph tests, for information
supplied to The Washington Post concerning the
CIA's vast secret prison system.

Have you had any friends or relatives missing
lately?

Read it all.

The Cheerful Mosquito

"I remain, like a cheerful mosquito, feeding on
the innocence and unexamined lives of others."
--JQP

Corruption

"Why does corruption in government always
surprise us? Why do we expect anything else from
it? Government is organized force. It takes our
wealth and makes war. And we think honest men
would do that work?" --Joseph Sobran

Queen Elizabeth Celebrates 80th Birthday

[This page intentionally left blank.]

Meadow muffins uncovered

This is a fine discussion for the currency
challenged (most Amerikuns). It's also a good
short history of the taxes of Empires past and how
expansion is crucial to their survival as they
attempt to satisfy the ever-increasing desires of
their subjects as larger numbers of former
supporters vote with their feet.

All the yapping about nuking Iran for their nukes
that will never be found is just throwing around
a bunch of meadow muffins. Follow the money.
The current Empire will protect its currency at
all costs to keep the world buying it.

Will the Iranian Oil Bourse open?

If it does the Empire will go down fast.

If it doesn't the Empire will go down fast.

Put the nukes away, boys. Save us all a lotta
grief.

Abstract: the proposed Iranian Oil Bourse will
accelerate the fall of the American Empire.
...
Whatever the strategic choice, from a purely
economic point of view, should the Iranian Oil
Bourse gain momentum, it will be eagerly embraced
by major economic powers and will precipitate the
demise of the dollar. The collapsing dollar will
dramatically accelerate U.S. inflation and will
pressure upward U.S. long-term interest rates. At
this point, the Fed will find itself between
Scylla and Charybdis-between deflation and
hyperinflation-it will be forced fast either to
take its "classical medicine" by deflating,
whereby it raises interest rates, thus inducing a
major economic depression, a collapse in real
estate, and an implosion in bond, stock, and
derivative markets, with a total financial
collapse, or alternatively, to take the Weimar
way out by inflating, whereby it pegs the long-
bond yield, raises the Helicopters and drowns the
financial system in liquidity, bailing out
numerous LTCMs and hyperinflating the economy.

The Austrian theory of money, credit, and
business cycles teaches us that there is no in-
between Scylla and Charybdis. Sooner or later,
the monetary system must swing one way or the
other, forcing the Fed to make its choice. No
doubt, Commander-in-Chief Ben Bernanke, a
renowned scholar of the Great Depression and an
adept Black Hawk pilot, will choose inflation.
Helicopter Ben, oblivious to Rothbard's America's
Great Depression, has nonetheless mastered the
lessons of the Great Depression and the
annihilating power of deflations. The Maestro has
taught him the panacea of every single financial
problem-to inflate, come hell or high water. He
has even taught the Japanese his own ingenious
unconventional ways to battle the deflationary
liquidity trap. Like his mentor, he has dreamed
of battling a Kondratieff Winter. To avoid
deflation, he will resort to the printing
presses; he will recall all helicopters from the
800 overseas U.S. military bases; and, if
necessary, he will monetize everything in sight.
His ultimate accomplishment will be the
hyperinflationary destruction of the American
currency and from its ashes will rise the next
reserve currency of the world-that barbarous
relic called gold.

Helicopter Ben has more at his finger tips than
buttons on printing presses. He can now inject
zeros electronically into the banking system.

Now we're going to find out what the true value
of zero is.

Here's what happens to political/funny money
issued and managed by USA, Inc...

...and here's is the resultant price history-in
political money-for real money...

Will it really matter what Helicopter Ben does?

Read.

The People's Republic of Virginia

Private property is also grounded in the premise
that each of us is existentially worthy as
individuals. Your existence, interests, and
purposes are no less valid than those of the
elitists who presume the power to reduce you to
being a means to their ends. The property
principle begins with self-ownership, a condition
incompatible with the status of being fungible
resources for collective authority.

Full essay.

The Big Granfalloon, society

"There is no existing entity called 'society';
there are only interacting individuals. To say
that 'society' should own land or any other
property in common, then, must mean that a group
of oligarchs -- in practice, government
bureaucrats -- should own the property, and at
the expense of expropriating the creator or the
homesteader who had originally brought this
product into existence."

--Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto

Global warming? Think again.

Below is a huge site with plenty of hard evidence
to support a mini-ice age coming soon.

Instead of taking clothes off, you might want to
consider bundling up. Depends where you live.

Next week, next month, next year, it's not a
question of if, only when. One day you'll wake up
-- or you won't wake up, rather -- buried beneath
nine stories of snow. It's all part of a
dependable, predictable cycle, a natural cycle
that returns like clockwork every 11,500 years.

. . . And since the last ice age ended almost
exactly 11,500 years ago . .

See why.

The site.

A start

Nearly half of Americans believe their
government should mind its own business
internationally and only one third approves of
how US President George W. Bush is handling
Iraq.

Now that's a novel idea. Les' do it. Also among
individuals. Particularly among individuals.

Read.

Fumbling around in the dark

"The evolution of the brain not only overshot the
needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example
of evolution providing a species with an organ
which it does not know how to use."
--Arthur Koestler

He just proved his point when he forgot the
appendix. None of us is immune.

Maybe someday someone will figure out how to use
the brain...or not.

Fumbling on...

What many really think of the IRS

Take a look.

Confused current leader

Do you really wonder why the Mayans walked off?

Will you walk off?

"History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes."
--Mark Twain

Update:

Now somebody says Will Rogers said that.

Who ya gonna believe?

NSA concerned over computer phone service

Ever noticed how much "concern" is in the air
nowadays? Why, it's an epidemic.

"Concern" and a cupla bucks'll get you a beer in
many places around the planet.

EBay, the online auction house, last year
purchased Skype, an online service that lets
people converse through their computers. Its 75
million users place voice calls over the
Internet. The calls sound clear. They are free,
because phone carriers aren't used. And because
of the Internet's diffused architecture and its
facility for privacy, Skypesters' identities,
their locations, and the substance of their
conversations can be undetectable.

Not "can be", "are" undetectable.

Skype and other widely used Internet
communications devices, including e-mail,
threaten the NSA's ability to gather intelligence
and to do so legally, National Journal
reported.

Get Skype today. It's free and easy to use.

Full article.

Screeching in the veldt

The late philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out
that when people compare themselves to one
another, they are disposed to feel one of two
emotions -- guilt or envy. Guilt when someone has
a lower station than you; envy when someone has a
higher station than you. I would add a third to
this mix: indignation. That's when you compare
someone of a higher station to someone of a lower
station, and feel that something is wrong. I
refer to this complex of emotional responses to
unequal life-stations as the "Stone Age Trinity."
...
Given the tremendous good that is brought about
by self-interested market exchange, it seems
we'll have to teach ourselves time-and-again the
intellectual lessons of prosperity in a complex
economic order. We will also have to fight turf
wars with those who think the sentiments of Stone
Age Trinity can be wrapped up in intellectual
claptrap (like Marxism), force fed to our
students in the ivory towers, sold to us on the
evening news, or foisted upon us inside marble
domes.

Listen closely.

Do you hear that screeching in the veldt?

Those are our ancestors longing for our return.

Highly recommended.

Via nusapiens

Avuncular Sam...

...or the Decline of the Prime Element of the
State: Pure force. Ain't very popular no mo'.

blah, blah....another method to hasten the state
spending more money in studies on studies etc and
its eventual auction for a dime on the dollar.

Full article.

Customs

". . Forgive him, for he believes that the
customs of his tribe are the laws of nature."
--George Bernard Shaw

The Nitty-Gritty

Isn't picking on the Bum of the Moment
just a distraction from The Big Picture?

*****

Albert Jay Nock calls this the "first and
greatest lesson in the study of politics" :

You get the same order of criminality from
any State to which you give power to exercise it:
and whatever power [you] give the State to do
things for you carries with it the equivalent
power to do things to you.

...No "democratic" State practice is nothing
more or less than State practice. It does not
differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State
practice, or any other.

From Nock's "The State of the Union" column in
the March 1939 issue of American Mercury.

Yet so many are living in denial of that,
endlessly attempting to polish this turd.

Aack!

Now I'm off to see "V for Vendetta" again.

Via Karen De Coster

Belief

"It's easy to see why humans are willing to
fight to the death to defend the memes that
constitute their belief systems. To allow a faith
or ideology to be overthrown would be to abandon
a massive neural fabric into which you've
invested an entire life, a network that cannot
easily be replaced, perhaps that cannot be
replaced at all." -- Howard Bloom ('The Lucifer
Principle')

A little light in a black hole

Pay up now or risk the punishment of a black
hole. There is no light at tunnels end when you
finance your own termination. “Tax Tyranny” is a
means to provide the functional accounting that
pays off the co-conspirators that unleash the
energy force of darkness on a country of blinded
serfs. All that changes is the intensity of the
vigor used to extract the last pound of flesh
from your bone. As the real percentage rate of
across-the-board exaction rises with each year,
the closer to poverty you approach. The dream
for an independent society has long been dead.
What remains is mere life support for comatose
citizens. [My emphasis]

Save your fingers typing about some new and
improved savior or other who will tax only The
Other Guy...or for only what you want to pay for
...or for some Grand New Tax Plan.

You'll find out sooner or later what a waste of
effort and counterproductive that was.

Read.

New solar tech...unplugging from the grid

In a scientific breakthrough that has stunned
the world, a team of South African scientists has
developed a revolutionary new, highly efficient
solar power technology that will enable homes to
obtain all their electricity from the sun.

Now that sounded like typical press-release
hoopla so I asked an acquaintance in the solar
panel business what he knew about this. He said
it was true.

If IFE Solar Systems doesn't do it, someone else
will.

Full report.

Via Bill St. Clair

Dr. Doom

Better name, The Real Dr. Death.

Fuckin' rabid dog in a room full of 'em.

What do you do with rabid dogs?

Pianka then cited the Peak Oil fraud as another
reason to initiate global genocide. “And the
fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I
think we may have to cut back to two billion,
which would be about one-third as many people.”

His numbers are all over the place but the
numbers aren't important. The freak is...Dr. Eric
R. Pianka, verbally making the former death squads
following the orders of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and
Pol Pot look like amateurs.

Now, just in case some of you following my screed
for any period of time may have the impression
that I would support genocide, that's not true.

I will not initiate harm to anyone.

And I'm going to do something I've never done here
before.

I have a few commenters who might, just might,
applaud this rabid dog.

My blog, my rules. Your blog, your rules.

Anyone supporting him will be deleted from the
comment section.

Read.

...much more about Dr. Eric R. Pianka from an insider.

More GM news

The world's largest automaker, whose debt is
close to the gross domestic product (GDP) of
Belgium, lost more than $10 billion last year and
is facing a bankruptcy that would reap
devastation in the financial markets.

Full article.

Via Sunni.

From a whisper to a roar

But again, don't take my word for it. Listen.
Listen to the noise-makers, and see how few
seriously believe them these days, see how that
noise evokes an apathetic and ever-dulling
stereotyped response, adrenal fear/anger burnout,
"Yeah, whatever, yawn, same old same old."
Listen to the background instead, pay attention
to what's coming through the chinks in the wall.
Example: lotta buzz, these days, about "V for
Vendetta." Why is there such a buzz? Because it
should never have been made, and Everybody Knows
It. Ponder, just for a moment, the implications
of the motto "People should not fear their
governments--governments should fear their
people," appearing in front of God and everybody
on the teevee screen, where it might actually be
seen, by children or heart patients, actually
playing in a movie theater, with all its icky
anarchy and tinfoil battiness and all that, right
out where decent people can just go and watch it
if the mood strikes them, why, it's un-American.
This film is the fart at the tea party that
punctuates perfectly the pompous silliness of the
whole affair, and is to me the harbinger of the
Zeitgeist of the near future.
...
They pound little drums for Liberty all across
the planet, and slowly those drums are coming
into synchronization of their own accord,
converging on one single, pure harmonic, the low
seismic thrumming of Truth and self-fulfilled
prophecies that even the oblivious are feeling
and swaying to. These people are wise and canny;
they do not need the State, and feel no love for
it in their breasts, and will not be there to
prop it up when it begins to fall under its own
weight. And that is, perhaps, the greatest
danger they pose; that while they may not lift a
hand to harm they sure won't lift a hand to help,
that they will, at the very end, the last
extremity, that crucial hour when all good men
must come to the aid of their Crown so that the
unthinkable prospect of an outbreak of
uncontrolled human activity can be stifled, will
finally render unto those panic-stricken,
directive-spewing, impotent toadies of Caesar
begging for assistance and compliance just that
which is due them, the immortal wisdom of the fat
sage Cartman: "Screw you guys, I'm going home."

I raise my glass to the fat sage.

Damn, things is hotting up, ain't they.

Full essay.

Party's over, hangover time

Behind all the wailing, ranting and gnashing of
teeth in the link below this jumped out:

But behind the private-is-preferable theory is
the immediate reality that governments don’t have
– or are unwilling to raise – the billions needed
to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

Ma Nature's a bitch.™

And no one remembers the grand ribbon cuttings at
the glorious openings of those bridges and
highways or the pomp and ceremony brought by the
pols to those inaugurations.

The idea of robbing Alice to pay Bob died quietly
in its sleep one nite and no one noticed. Instead
of Alice continuing the quilt trip and dutifully
paying her taxes, she packed her bags and went
on a trip of her own. She's now living in the
Caribbean taking in the sun on the beautiful
white sand beaches, sipping piña coladas and
living on the interest provided by those "rapacious"
bankers mentioned in the link...tax free.

Then the pols went to the credit markets and the
bankers said, "Fine. We've got Alice to pay."

Bwahahahahah.

Cheers, Alice.

By the way, you're going to want to see how much
infrastructure is being sold or leased by the former
tax-collectors just to pay the bankers and bond
holders.

See it here.

A revelation

Had an interesting conversation with a
friend of a zombie acquaintance t'other day.

It went like this...

While I was conversing with the zombie's
friend, the zombie continued to blather on while
we were conversing. We both ignored him.
What he was going on about, I have no idea. Like
I said, we ignored him.

What drives some to drivel while others converse
without paying attention to the drivelers?

Why would one be interested in continuing when no
one's listening? (The zombie driveler never
noticed that he was talking only to himself.
They're built that way.)

What would be the point? Why not find something
else to do or someone else who's genuinely
interested in what you had to say? Life is
short.

Some talk or write to just hear or read themselves.
Many will not stop until they have The Last Word.

It's been a long time coming, my revelation:

Ignore anyone who won't converse. They are
irrelevant to you. They're showing that they care
nothing about what you might have to say.

And they will have a piece of you by wearing you
down if you let 'em. (Pols, lawyers, doctors
teachers and other "experts" from afar are pros
at this.)

Why let them?

They're easy to ignore. Takes little effort but
considerable concentration.

Let them have the last word while you ignore them
or continue your conversation with someone who is
interested in listening then responding on the
current topic.

Is there any sense in trying to get across to the
yakkers to trade, treat or travel? (As far as I
know Heinlein said that first.)

And such is all of life, ain't it.

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