40% ain't gonna get it

Paul says that he'd slash the size of government by 40 percent, a dramatic restructuring by any account. As I've written before, people may respond positively to the idea of limited government in the abstract, but when it comes to specifics most Americans love big government and most (though certainly not all) of what it does. They want a government that will educate their children and put out forest fires and make sure that big chemical companies aren't poisoning their water. They expect cheap student loans and meat inspections and smooth highways, and even the lowest of "low information" voters know they're not going to get that stuff from the private sector.

It's still time to say it again, and again...

Where else will it come from?

The Tooth Fairy?

Full report

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $1,000 Trillion?

Long & loaded with many good links.

Now even an infusion of cash doesn't propel the market anymore. The Dow Jones behaves irrationally. Thanks to the PPT (Plunge Protection Team). The economy as a whole has been rather stagnant in the West. Major European economies are on life support. They cannot overcome their costly social programs and the flood of (clandestine) immigration which is as bad as in the U.S. In a Forbes article we read that France has been in chronic deficit for 15 years. In 2005, Standard & Poor's said it may downgrade the credit ratings of Germany and Italy, two of Europe's largest economies, unless their governments rein in spending and cut debt. In 2007, German unemployment remains stuck at 16.5% and in 2006 Berlin was reported as bankrupt. Further Italy was described as the real sick man of Europe by The Economist in 2005 whatsoever. The credit crunch has also taken hold in Australia where personal debt is worse than during Great Depression. The situation is equally dire in Britain, where house prices are even more overvalued (than in the US). A spectacular crash cannot be ruled out, the IMF warned last month.

Full article.

State capitalism & central banks going down

This isn't mortgage-backed junk that's being sold, but highly liquid bonds that are usually easy to cash in. The ECBC's action is a sign of pure desperation and indicates that credit paralysis has infected the entire euro banking system.
...
That's bad. The mechanism for converting covered bonds into cash has broken down.

See the numerous state sponsored solutions
listed, all to become giant failures.

Read.

The Hierarchy is dead

...and Humpty Dumpty is no longer a fairy tale...

One million UK homeowners face a 60 per cent jump in mortgage rates

More than a million homeowners face a jump in mortgage payments of up to 60 per cent when their cheap fixed-rate deals end.

Analysts fear the impact will result in a surge in repossessions.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders is so concerned that it has taken the extraordinary step of suggesting that some homeowners should sell their property rather than risk losing it.
...
It comes as the UK's third largest buy-to-let mortgage firm said it was facing funding uncertainties today.

The update from Paragon - whose costs have soared following the summer credit crunch - alarmed investors as shares in the company tumbled by almost half.

Read.

Managed debates

...a look at Disneyland...

A new study by the watchdog group Media Matters has found that Democratic and Republican candidates have been asked few questions about their views on executive power, the Constitution, torture, wiretapping, or other civil liberties concerns during the first 17 presidential debates. According to Media Matters there has been only one question about wiretapping. Not a single question about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or renditions. The words "habeas corpus" have not once been spoken by a debate moderator. Candidates have also not been asked about whether telecoms should be granted immunity over their role in domestic spying. Last week's debate ended with Senator Hillary Clinton being asked whether she preferred diamonds or pearls. The question was asked by a UNLV student who has since said that she was forced by CNN to ask that question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

And still, there are a passel of fools that
think there's a political solution to all this.

Read.

Thanks to Rick White.

Choose your neighborhood carefully

The first thing that happened after owners moved out of foreclosed homes in Slavic Village was that squatters and looters moved in, according to Mark Wiseman, director of the Cuyahoga County Foreclosure Prevention Program. "In the inner city, it takes about 72 hours for a house to be looted after it is vacant," he said.
...
Long-time Slavic Village resident Joe Krasucki had celebrated his 78th birthday last spring, when, late in the evening, he heard some noise and went out for a look. Reports said he'd had run-ins with local gangs before. A neighbor's abandoned house had already been stripped of its aluminum siding and, according to Rokakis, Krasucki thought the looters were back, working on his home. Outside, he was attacked and badly beaten. He died some days later.

Time for breaking out the 12guage pump sawed-off,
sporting a pistol grip and double 00 buckshot, a fine
protection device, capable of turning a zombie into a
crowd.

Read.

The Great Chinese Inflation

From 1937 to 1949, prices rose dramatically but to different degrees in the various regions of China, because of war-related scarcities and destruction, and the uneven impact of the monetary expansion. As one very rough indicator, we can use the wholesale price index of Shanghai during this period, with May 1937 equaling 1.

By the end of 1941 the Shanghai wholesale price index stood at 15.98. By December 1945 it had reached 177,088, and by the end of 1947 it was 16,759,000. In December 1948 the index had risen to 36,788,000,000, and in April 1949 it was at 151,733,000,000,000.

The value of China’s paper money on the foreign-exchange market reflected this huge depreciation of the currency. In June 1937, 3.41 yuan traded for one U.S. dollar. By December 1941, on the black market 18.93 yuan exchanged for a dollar. At the end of 1945, the yuan had fallen to 1,222 to the dollar. And by May 1949, one dollar traded for 23,280,000 yuan.

...one example of The Big Picture here.

Read.

They don't want you free. Ruuuuuuuuuuun!

I sincerely regret to inform you that about 8:00 this morning a dozen FBI and Secret Service agents raided the Liberty Dollar office in Evansville.

For approximately six hours they took all the gold, all the silver, all the platinum and almost two tons of Ron Paul Dollars that where just delivered last Friday. They also took all the files, all the computers and froze our bank accounts.

We have no money. We have no products. We have no records to even know what was ordered or what you are owed. We have nothing but the will to push forward and overcome this massive assault on our liberty and our right to have real money as defined by the US Constitution. We should not to be defrauded by the fake government money.

But to make matters worse, all the gold and silver that backs up the paper certificates and digital currency held in the vault at Sunshine Mint has also been confiscated. Even the dies for mint the Gold and Silver Libertys have been taken.

See it all.

Update on this massive theft.

Time to hear an apology for the Great Terror in the Soviet Union

...the greatest crime in modern history, and bloodiest genocide, have almost vanished from our collective memory. Last week marked the 70th anniversary of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in which tens of millions were murdered or imprisoned.

Full article.

Digging for hope

More than anything, the 37-year-old Taibbi believes that investing any emotion in the ideals of American democracy is “digging for hope in a shit mountain.”

Full interview.

Doom of the worst sort

The catalogue of fiscal ailments now facing the country is too long to list. We'd need a ledger the size of a small encyclopedia. There's been a stampede away from the dollar even though it's already lost over 60 per cent of its value since Bush took office and even though central banks around the world will lose their shirts if it collapses. They don't care. They're getting out while they can.

All fiat currencies eventually fail but the US$ is different.

We haven't seen the failure of a world reserve currency
since the Fall of Rome.

We know what happened after that.

Nobody has a clue how fucking bad it's gonna get.

Nobody.

Full article.

Note: I stand corrected. The British Pound
was the world's reserve currency for a time.

Thanks to pietr for pointing that out.

Are you ready?

Ma nature's a bitch.™

Zombie alert

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

The End of Power

When the organized religion of Power, known as
Communism (more properly called Statism), shall
have destroyed all values, and reduced the
individual to a nonentity, will its overthrow by
moral force be accomplished. In degrading the
individual it destroys itself, simply because the
degraded individual loses interest in production
and ceases to provide the wherewithal for the
State. As the State rots away from malnutrition,
the individual begins to reassert himself in
something called Civil Disobedience, Passive
Resistance, or some other kind of revolution, and
the contest is all in his favor. Freedom comes when
Caesar is no longer able to maintain his legions. --
Frank Chodorov, Out of Step (pdf)

They failed

"This description provides clear evidence that the U.S. Gold Reserve is in play. Gold has been removed from U.S. Treasury vaults and placed on deposit, presumably in the couple of bullion banks the Treasury has selected to assist with its gold price-capping efforts. Gold placed on deposit gets loaned out by these bullion banks, and then sold into the spot market to try capping the gold price."

They failed.

Full report.

V for Vendetta Televised Speech

The War on Different is added to the list

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

Full post.

If it isn't one neurosis, it's another

Those who practice politics have always understood how their systems depend upon a popular attraction to the status quo; how their power feeds upon a neurotic fear of change. There is always some one or some thing that can be hypothecated into a threat that will cause humans to solidify into a controllable herd, to be directed to whatever ends their puppet-masters have in mind. “Infidels,” “communists,” or “terrorists,” provide just a smattering of the fear-objects held up to frighten men and women into collective obedience.

Full essay.

Why a Dark Age is imminent

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Full post.