Another shell game in play

Expect to see many more...see this if you don't know
how that game is played.

At the recent high-level confab of the North American Forum in Banff, an assistant U.S. secretary of state chaired a panel that featured a presentation by Prof. Robert Pastor, author of a book promoting the development of a North American union as a regional government and the adoption of the amero as a common monetary currency to replace the dollar and the peso.

Read.

Proposed Ordinance asks Each Household to Have a Firearm

Crap.

The headline says "asks". Further in the article it
states "requires".

Which is it?

Greenleaf, Idaho -- All Americans have the right to bear arms. Some towns have even gone as far as to require each household to have a gun. Now a small Idaho town is contemplating a similar idea-- it's called the Civil Emergencies Ordinance. And although gun ownership is just one piece of this ordinance, it's the part that's getting the most attention.

This ordinance is just as idiotic as one prohibiting
firearms.

Full article.

Planet lice

They're everywhere, sacrificing themselves to "some
higher good" as determined by "their betters".

Really sick shit. Palestinians don't have a
monopoly on this either:

As officially stated, the underlying ethos of the Palestinian curriculum is "built on the principle of breeding the individual on the basis of serving society as a whole." Translated, that means breeding kids who believe suicide and murder are noble, who believe it's noble to create a society where the individual reaches his highest stage of development by extinguishing his own individualism, his own existence.

The whole story.

Ripped from Uncommon Sense.

What's Fred Smoking?

The United States is an uneasy, frightened country, yet aggressive, truculent, and looking for trouble—which it finds. Fear: Terrorists are everywhere, like cockroaches and governmental cameras. Citizens should watch each other on the subway and rat out suspicious behavior, such as speaking a language other than English. People need to go through metal detectors in county courthouses, because the government is scared of them, and get spied on by the government to protect them against the ever-present danger of…of, well, the unspeakable and unspoken angst of existence. And so, in the customary manner of large scared bullies, the country lashes out, at Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Afghanistan, Venezuela, wherever.

I like bringing this up again because few have noticed:

Who's gonna pay for all that?

...In school, low-IQ teachers try to make little boys into girls and expel them if they play soldier and say Bang. Then the Pentagon recruits these transvestite artifacts and sends them off to shoot people they’ve barely heard of. What a plan. What clarity of vision. What consistency.

Zombies united.

Full rant.

The bald-assed truth

I know something that very few—almost none—of the previous generation did. Forget all the political and philosophical divisions and false distinctions that we're accustomed to thinking about. An early intuition I once had, that libertarianism is not an ideology, but the absence of one, was correct. Differing ideologies simply provide differing excuses for government behavior that is always the same.

In the end, you can't get around it.

Government is about stealing.

From the august federal level down to the petty criminals who run whatever city you live in, It's [sic] about stealing and absolutely nothing else.

So if you're a Republican, a Democrat, a Green, or a libertarian mini-statist, what you're admitting to the whole world is that you're a thief. You're admitting to your neighbors that you want to steal their money, their houses, their weapons, their jewelry, and their children.

You're admitting that, if they won't cough up in a manner that appears comfortingly voluntary, you'll send your thugs (because you lack the balls to do it yourself) to beat them up, kidnap, or kill them.

Full rant.

Ripped from Sunni.

Posting frequency - a note

I post almost every day at least once unless I
announce some time off. If there's a gap of
several days between posts, chances are your
browser is bringing up a cached copy.

Emptying your cache then clicking the
reload/refresh icon at the top of your
browser should correct the problem.

The Constitution and The Reality

Definitions of constitution:

• revered founding document that creates and anoints the state
• miraculous invention that satisfies the popular craving for justice
• tablets that place the state, legislatures, and laws at the heart of a society
• a compact that renders politics respectable
• an illegitimate document of no authority that claims to provide society’s fundamental rules and principles of government. Lysander Spooner.

A constitution replaces the priests and judges of old, while fertilizing new unheralded forms of tyranny. A constitution legitimizes political conflict within agreed upon boundaries.

Like the blob in the movie The Blob, "an alien lifeform [that] consumes everything in its path as it grows and grows," the constitution makes the growth of the state an inevitable proposition. Eventually, as the political dynamics play out, the constitution fades into the shadow of an impotent shield quite different than the sacred tablets promised; leaving the hapless public only with remnants of words and feelings, their shield having been forged into chains. At this point, the constitution becomes a hope that people dream of going back to, a secular Garden of Eden.

Read.

Get the proof

"No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.” If we can get people to realize this truth of Thoreau’s regarding religion, if we can get them to demand proof of the outrageous claims made by all of the “revealed” religions, it’s just a matter of time until they will demand proof from the governments of the world for such things as WMD, why paying taxes is necessary, etc. Proving the “revealed” religions wrong is easy. Proving the governments wrong is also easy. The hard part is instilling in people the ability of independent questioning. To do this, we need to demonstrate to them that if you openly question Oz, your limbs will not magically fall off. Once this is done, once people get used to independent thought and action, everything else will fall into place.

Read.

Get smart...the recipe

ANU researchers Dr Kaarin Anstey and Dr Bryan Rodgers found that people who had drunk moderate amounts of alcohol (14-28 standard drinks a week for men and 7-14 standard drinks a week for women) performed significantly better than those who were heavy drinkers (over 28 and 14 standard drinks for men and women respectively) and those who rarely or never drank. This relationship was found in participants in their 20s, 40s and 60s.

Anything to rationalize my bar bill is fine by me.

Full study.

The Freedom Paradox

Tyrannical, intrusive government enlarges the State, but it simultaneously weakens it. Many empires have collapsed under their own weight, from over-expansion and too many obligations. Big government is like an athlete on steroids, but for the long-term viability of the State, less is more.

How so? Smaller government reduces the capacity of the State for waste, fraud, and abuse. The people are then more inclined to trust it more, and to give it their allegiance. Also, the State would have the ability to marshal more resources when they are really called for.

I can't argue with that. Can you?

On the other hand, the history of The State is that
it grows til it destroys itself with its growth. Small
government advocates are fighting a losing game
if history repeats itself this time.

See it all.

Woe is them, Part VI

In 2003, a whistle-blower forced San Diego to
reveal that it had been shortchanging its city
workers' pension fund for years, setting off a wave
of lawsuits, investigations and eventually criminal
indictments.

The mayor ended up resigning under a cloud.
With the city's books a shambles, San Diego remains
barred from raising money by selling bonds. Cut off
from a vital source of cash, it has fallen behind
on its maintenance of streets, storm drains and
public buildings. Potholes are proliferating and
beaches are closed because of sewage spills.

...and a shit storm is on the way. Other states have
similar problems.

Full article.

Dedicated to the small forest creature

I love a good metaphor...

Best for small forest creatures to assert
themselves amongst the shadows and towering
trees of the forest. Those bold ones that insist on
taking the struggle with the predator out into the
open savanna are likely to be eaten or, worse yet,
be captured and made to work for the predators
secretly in their devious plans.

Among the millions of bloggers I will continue to be
a 'small forest creature' with few hits everyday.

How about you? If you're not already blogging,
join the Small Creature Revolution.

See this short piece.

Fred. A dangerous criminal

I’m going to tell you how I entered the
underworld, and became a money launderer, and
international drug wallah, and remorseless
criminal, just like Carlo Gambino or Bin Laden
or Condoleezza Rice. Yes. I am now of one blood
with Pablo Escobar. It is a service of the Anglo-
Irish Bank. I imagine that my picture can be
seen on wanted posters in European post
offices.

Shortly after Fred posted this article he got a call
from Anglo-Irish Bank welcoming him to his new
account.

Ahhh. The Power of the Keyboard and the net.

This kind of response from complaints about
bummint will take a bit longer. They don't consider
us "customers". Many will not jump thru their hoops
to do what Fred or Anglo-Irish Bank did.

Meanwhile, hawala is alive and well, going around
the hoops.

Make the connections. Draw the conclusions.

The terrorists win.

Read Reed.

Commerce lockdown

"For any transaction above as little as Rs50,000
[$1,100], Indian banks ask for a host of documents
these days, ranging from proof of residence to
income-tax clearance certificates and even
reference documents to ascertain that my supplier
in Egypt, because he is from a Muslim country, is a
legitimate dealer of marble," said Santosh Rathi,
who imports marble from Cairo. "Even a money
transfer for a simple thing like rent payment
through the banking channels requires reams of
documentation."

Until the fateful day of September 11, 2001, moving
money abroad or within was easy.

The Psychopaths have won. Physical Dark Age to
follow this insanity.

Do you have your plot of ground picked out? Your
donkey? Your wooden hoe and pitchfork?

But, where there's a will, there's illegal. Most people
won't bother.

Full article.

Fred Reed's related experience to follow...

The Circus, Part IV

Fine entertainment value for anti-statists...

Hard to believe...or is it?

NSA, CIA in inter-agency spy-down

The NSA conducted a three-year, six million dollar
operation that used undercover agents to spy on
suspected al qaeda terrorists who were actually CIA
undercover agents conducting a three-year, six
million dollar operation to spy on suspected al
qaeda terrorists who were actually NSA undercover
agents spying on them.

Commendations will be passed out to all concerned.

See the other reports.

The Kleptocracy, alive and well

A former Assistant Secretary of Housing blows the
whistle...

In 1997, we did an analysis for a group of
investors in the Philadelphia area. We estimated
that the return on investment to taxpayers on total
federal investment -- subsidies, operations and
financing -- was negative. The majority of federal
taxation and investment was lowering the
Philadelphia share of the GNP. So the problem is
not just that the government spends more than it
taxes. There is an insidious shift from high return
functions to low and negative return functions. The
two dollars that Washington is spending is not
generating four dollars or even the one-dollar that
it is taking out for taxes. That means the local
economy is losing five dollars from the
proposition. Let's look at this in the context of
HUD.

HUD has a program called Hope VI, which is the
construction of new public housing. Here is how the
money works on Hope VI. We tax people who make
$36,000 a year. We then take the money and use it
to build housing that costs $150-250,000 (inclusive
of all overhead, etc) per apartment unit, which we
use to warehouse people who make $10,000 a year or
less in a manner in which they are unlikely to
become taxpayers. This generates a large number of
jobs, profit, and private equity for a group of
lawyers, accountants, developers, consultants and
others who tend to make substantially in excess of
$36,000, say anywhere from $75,000 to $500,000 or
more a year. In the HUD programs, a surprising
number of them went to Harvard, Harvard Business
School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and last but
most special, Harvard Law School. If not Harvard,
someplace more like it than the University of
Tennessee agricultural school.

A few years back I took the pricings on the HUD
defaulted mortgage portfolio to the head of Hope
VI. I explained that HUD had substantial single-
family inventory in those same communities. Empty
single-family homes could be bought and repaired at
a fraction of the price of new construction of
public housing by private developers. The HUD
official said, "but then how would we generate fees
for our friends?" You just have to love a woman who
is that honest.

Full report that covers far more than HUD.

So many distractions, so little time

What is relevant is what solves the problem.
If we had thought through real relevancies,
we would be on Sirius by now. — Peter Medawar

Coming soon...by default

The Bogeyman Industry

Fear-peddling is very much in danger of becoming
monopolized by the state, which long ago realized
that keeping people perennially frightened was
the most effective method of maintaining them in
a huddled and obedient mass. From the primitive
tribal chief who was able to convince his
neighbors of the threats posed by the “Nine Bows”
across the river, to today’s political shakedown.

...

We are told, on a daily basis, that our lives
are under constant threat of attack from
terrorists. But if this is so, where are these
supposed terrorists? President Bush and his
defenders have been bleating that their expanded
police and surveillance powers are keeping
terrorists out of the country, a proposition that
is rendered laughable by the daily influx of
immigrants from Central America! If it has been
so easy for millions of people to enter this
country in spite of determined government efforts
to prevent it, what efficacious mechanisms has
the Bush administration put in place to keep out
terrorists? Nor does the government’s performance
in New Orleans suggest to any thoughtful person
that it is capable of making an effective
response to any alleged danger. Artists with their
terrorist phantoms, fear has been the essential
organizing principle of politics.

Full essay.

It's the refineries, stupid

THE world has an abundant supply of oil, and high petrol
prices are just the reality of a globally traded commodity, ExxonMobil Australia chairman Mark Nolan said today.

Here's what was missing from that report:


Distractions are us.

Here's a good discussion of the reasons.

Why does almost everyone avoid bringing this
up?

Read.

The Great Tapeworm

Following this [Scott] incident, the government of California realised the need to reform the incentive structure motivating such asset forfeiture. California no longer permits its agencies to use property they seize. Perhaps this will be the first tiny faltering step towards restoring the protection of private property rights, that most sacred obligation of a government.

Illusions abound here.

Government is force. That's the only way it will
survive until it's time to commit suicide. It has no
incentive to protect property, only to take what it
needs to live, i.e. it's parasitic...the world's largest
tape worm, if you will, and as it's grown beyond
any that have come before, its needs are without
limit.

It's needs are now more than the host can supply.

If those aging boomer-surfers in the Nutty State,
can't use the property they seized, what has
fundamentally changed ? You're still standing in the
street wearing your scivvies and possibly a watch.

The writer talks much about 'abuse' of property
seizure. How does one 'abuse' a process, an
abstraction? How does one make the process of
theft compassionate?

Best to grab your ass, your assets and vote with
your feet before the whole country looks like
a ghost town after the gold ran out.

See the whole rant.

Woe is them, Part V

From the cratering hedge funds, to the faltering dollar, to the fizzling housing bubble, western-style capitalism is in the advanced stages of collapse. Deregulation and liberalization have only hastened its decline.

Laid off on "deregulation". He loves to repeat the
lack of "leadership" in the economy, as if to say,
"If only I were in charge. I'd lay the hammer down
and all would be right with the economy." Hoards
of academics are spouting the same nonsense as
if The Economy were regulable. The historians will
do likewise, knowing in their heart of hearts that
just That Very Special Person(s) could have made
the hurt go bye-bye.

They and the author of the piece below don't even
have the target in sight, let alone having a bead on
it.

Nothing in the article mentions Amurika's Bankruptcy,
as if it didn't exist. Neither was mentioned the Fed's
hiding of the M3 money figures which it just recently
started to do. Just what is the Fed trying to hide?

Full article.

The Circus, Part III

Today is September the 8th. Tomorrow is September the 9th. One of these days you’ll look around and it will be November the 3rd. Uh huh. And all along the way funny shit is going to start happening. You can rely on it. It’s going to get funnier and stranger by the day. It won’t even make you shake your head at a Monster Truck-Pull Tennis Match. Uh uh. That will be what passes for normal.

The Master of Ceremonies may change, the
animals will run in different circles than before
but the clowns will still be sporting the same tired
old suits, make-up and oversize shoes until the
paymaster walks off.

See the whole rant.

Wussy children

In many ways Americans are bad children; but what a shame it is that, in the face of Mother State, they cannot be defiant ones.

Indeed, but putting yourself in Ma State's face is not
even necessary.

Simply ignoring her is much more effective and has
less chance of raising The Pigs' hackles.

There are also other ways.

Be creative.

Full post.

Here comes The Glorious "We" again

So I didn't go to town today. But town has come to me. I'm sitting here on my hill trying to write and getting an earful of both the parade and the free band concert after it. Every, single tune a celebration of war. The whole event an endorsement of mindless jingoism. Rockets' red glare and Halls of Montezuma. It's an assault on the senses. And on good sense. (On top of everything else, whoever got the idea that you could "support troops" by having rubber-duckie races and all-you-can eat corn-on-the-cob dinners?)

Why don't people think more about whom and what they support? When did martial music and sloganeering replace brains?

Read.

Ripped from Bill St. Clair

Sniffing out the carcasses

The point: as any Freedomista, anarcho-capitalist, Austrian economist, gun nut, Federal Reserve conspiracy-theorist, gold bug, secessionist, political monkeywrencher, dope-smoking marijuana-reform activist, civil libertarian or other amateur or professional contrarian possessed of even the most rudimentary understanding of his beliefs will tell you: the fundamental human right is the right to be left alone. That right does not evaporate when you pass some hazy income or property-owning threshold, the Marxist version of transubstantiation, a change in quantity becoming a change in quality; it is not contingent upon some bureaucrat's definition of the word "is", or upon how much some other party "wants" something, or upon how much "social utility" can theoretically be gained according to this one totally mind-blowingly erudite and celebrated economist by the simple and painless expedient of temporarily suspending just this one eensy little right in just this one unimportant corner case just this once, pinky-promise; it does not waver in and out of existence upon the crossing or re-crossing of a border, coming and going like the eponymous Karma Chameleon; it is under no circumstances and at no time dependent on the addled whim of any majority or plurality at a vote. It is not ill-defined, it does not exist temporarily or only for sympathetic defendants, it does not have "limits". It is crystal-clear, eternal, universal, and absolute. Most succinctly put: it's just plain so. Somebody who tells you it ain't is sellin' somethin'. Most likely somethin' bad, too. [My emphasis.]

It smells rotten also. I can usually pick it up in the
wind from a mile away even when it's well
deodorized/sanitized.

With a bit of practice you can do likewise.

Hint: It almost always starts with the word, "we".

Full essay.

To Protect and to Serve

...more of the what's-mine-is-mine-and-what's-
yours-is-mine state. Who are they protecting? Who
are they serving?

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case entitled, “United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a “lack of significant criminal history” neither accused nor convicted of any crime.

It was all about the drugs that weren't there.

Justice,(sic) 'murikun style.

See the article.

Ripped from Catallarchy.

An observation

Anyone who hasn't pegged their laugh meter by
now on the current War on ______________ (fill in the blank)
has some serious perceptual and conceptual skills
problems.

Listening to the righteous, wanting to make the
necessary changes by voting Democrat, Green,
Libertarian or, as yet, some unnamed party pegs
my own laugh meter. Self-flaggelation is a funny thing
to watch.

It's too late.

Always has been.

Go have a beer and wait for The Fall.

Junk food for longevity

..."George Johnson, considered California's oldest living person at 112 and the state's last surviving World War I veteran, had experts shaking their heads over his junk food diet.

"He had terrible bad habits. He had a diet largely of sausages and waffles," Dr. L. Stephen Coles, founder of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday." ...

Oooha.

Why not eat what you like? You too can live to over
a hundred.

Full article.

Ripped from anselpixel

The Shekel Illusion

Were we anything resembling a free market society, private producers would earn much more than government-sector consumers. But as documented by Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, the typical tax-fattened federal drone makes twice as much as his private sector counterpart:


“The Bureau of Economic Analysis released data this month [August] showing that the average compensation for the 1.8 million federal civilian workers in 2005 was $105,579 – exactly twice the average compensation paid in the US private sector, $53,289.”

One might wonder what these 'poor' folks are gonna
do when The Feces Collides with the Ventilator,
thinking they're gonna be fired.

Not gonna happen. Nobody's got the spine to fire
them while there's a glimmer of a shekel in the
kitty.

Their check will just stop coming as happened in
the Former Soviet Union when it went broke.

Those of you receiving any government check
might want want to do some advance planning.

Read.

That fine blog is going under my links section.

Thanks to Vache Folle.

Kleptocrats of the world, unite

...better known as The Wanta Plan.

Follow the bouncing ball here, folks. This is some
kind of strange. This kind of money will be easy to
disappear simply because it's unbelieveable
that it was ever there.

Ambassador Leo Wanta's righteous quest to repatriate $4.5 trillion back into the U.S. economy has taken a twisted and disturbing turn for the worse, according to Michael C. Cottrell, treasurer of AmeriTrust Groupe, Inc., the corporation formed to distribute the money to the American people. Cottrell said James R. Wilkinson, deputy national security advisor for communications, last Thursday signed off on the release of the money being held in a Clearing House Interbank Payment System credit account (CHIPS), an account credited to Goldman Sachs and Co. at Citibank.

There's a whole lot more to the story here, here and here.