rEVOLution now world-wide

Whether or not Ron Paul wins is now irrelevant...

His ideas will.

Democracy my ass...

ES&S isn't singled out in the report. The researchers, among them computer scientist Matt Blaze, examined source code and hardware of touch-screen and optical scan machines from two other vendors as well -- Premier (formerly known as Diebold) and Hart InterCivic. They found vulnerabilities in the various systems that would allow voters and pollworkers to place multiple votes on machines, to infect machines with a virus and to corrupt already cast votes.

Highly recommended.

Anarchy reigns

My mysterious tipster tells me that there is a rumor inside the Beltway that during a recent PDB, or Presidential Daily Briefing, the subject of Ron Paul was raised. The rumor goes that President Bush made a comment about Ron Paul becoming President, and Vice President Dick Cheney snapped, "If he gets too close, we will just kill the son of a bitch."

See it here.

Bank on it

Neofeudalization: A process whereby entire cities or neighborhoods within complex cities, become tightly controlled walled enclaves disconnected from the wider polity.

Full post.

When contract law goes out the window

These are some of the hazards of suspending law as applied to financial markets, which can only function on the basis of contract law. Once contract law goes out the window, so does the faith of parties with reserve capital in lending out capital at interest. If the interest rate can be changed arbitrarily or capriciously by third parties, then those with capital would be better off buying gold or impressionist paintings or Manhattan apartments or private armies for protecting their Hampton estates, than lending money at interest established by contract.
...
And Goldman Sachs executives pass out multi-million-dollar checks to the wizards who "innovated" an ingenious way for the rest of their country to commit financial suicide.

That last would have been impossible without
a complicit Big Santa, the Federal Reserve Bank.

Full post.

Breakthrough in solar panel prices

Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.

“With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.”

According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

That's not the real news.

Centralized power generation will be the new
dodo bird...extinct at some point.

A few panels on your roof and away you go,
off the grid.

Ooooha.

Of course it's a little more complicated than
that.

Read.

Sitting Bull is smiling in his grave - paybacks are a bitch

Washington D.C. – Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today in Washington D.C. following Monday’s withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government. The withdrawal, hand delivered to Daniel Turner, Deputy Director of Public Liaison at the State Department, immediately and irrevocably ends all agreements between the Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians and the United States Government outlined in the 1851 and 1868 Treaties at Fort Laramie Wyoming.

Full story

Map of Lakota nation.

What you probably won't see on the 11 o'clock news.

Ooha.

Highly civilized Inuits

Most psychopaths are male, although the reasons for this sex difference are unknown. Psychopathy seems to be present in both Western and non-Western cultures, including those that have had minimal exposure to media portrayals of the condition. In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe “a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”

Full report.

The End of Consumer Credit as We Know It

When businesses borrow to make investments, those investments generate returns which enable the principal and interest to be repaid. When individuals borrow to consume, no investment is made and the loans can only be repaid out of reduced future consumption. As a result, business loans, especially when collateralized by real assets, are likely to be repaid, while consumer loans, collateralized by nothing but a promise to consume less in the future are much more likely to end in default. As lenders finally figure this out, consumer credit will dry up, and the American economy will enter a prolonged and severe recession. Unfortunately, an economy that lives by consumer credit will die by it as well. Hopefully a more viable economy will eventually rise in its place.

You'll have to read the whole article to see
the case Peter Schiff makes for this assertion.

Another look at insanity

Our institutionalized thinking – which you and I, alone, have produced and are capable of changing – has turned us into the reactive beings eager to man the barricades of whatever conflicts the established order chooses for us. I suspect that if the present administration were to declare Lapland part of the "axis of evil," most Americans would accept such a characterization, and turn upon neighbors who displayed reindeer Christmas decorations as "terrorist-sympathizers." To voice any doubts to the contrary would be to entertain the possibility that the very core of their identities is grounded in lies.

Full essay.

Ron Paul, passing out a red pill...

...but only one.

Since Christ was a corporal...

The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts. And then to the army, and finally the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors. --Plutarch (46 A.D.-127 A.D.) Historian of the Roman Republic 821_clip14

See the rest of this fine piece.

The Little Barbarians

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late." --Thomas Sowell

This generation appears to be the Uncivilized
One.

Or was it the Baby Boomers?

Most older people feel it's the youngest one.

You?

A message from the Radical Center

No, I'm not voting for him, or anyone else, but he desperately
needs to be heard...

Deck the Malls With Dirty Nukes

Ho-Ho-Ho. Halloween has now ushered in the year-end shopping season (formerly known as Christmas). We're supposed to deck the malls with boughs of holly. So it's a bit surprising that ABC News has picked-up (uncritically) a (sic) Associated Press "report" that Slovakian First Police Vice President Michal Kopcik has thwarted the black-market sale of what Kopcik says is about a pound of almost pure [98.6%] Uranium-235.

According to AP-ABC;

"Experts say roughly 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium or plutonium is needed in most instances to fashion a crude nuclear device. But they say a tiny fraction of that is enough for a dirty bomb a weapon whose main purpose would be to create fear and chaos, not human casualties."

Where do you suppose mainstream-media reporters find their nuclear weapons "experts"?

Read.

You might like to check the author's credentials here.

The Supercharged Stock Market: An Object Lesson in the Perils of Coercion

Naturally, the problems which arise from coercion are inevitably ascribed to voluntarism. State manipulation of the stock market is ignored; the resulting instability is invariably blamed on the free market – thus paving the way for additional (and ridiculous) regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Executives can now be sent to jail for a single mistake by a single accountant – but no government executive loses his job over the slaughter in Iraq!

...or their other fuck-ups.

The whole thing.

It gets worse

We are looking at liabilities in the 600 TRILLION range, not billion. We are looking at unwinding 600 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities at all levels of the global economy. Braying Bernie and his Fed can't print enough money to cover it. The entire economic system can't comprehend it, much less deal with it. Once you look at the harsh realities underlying the global and domestic economies you realize we are like the people sitting in their cars on that bridge in Minneapolis. Take care of yourself since you can't expect any help from the system.

Read.

The Myth of Man the Killer

To end that scourge, we must get beyond the myth of man the killer and learn to trust and empower the individual conscience once again; to recognize and affirm the individual predisposition to make peaceful choices in the non-sociopathic 97% of the population; and to recognize what Stanley Milgram showed us; that our signpost on the path away from mass violence reads "I shall not obey!"

Read.

Turtles all the way down

Now, in economic terms. You must show:

1. The private market is erring.
2. The political marketplace will yield a result that fixes the corresponding private market error.

The second requirement is usually ignored. In fact, it was for a long period of time assumed that the government was a perfect actor with perfect information. These assumptions were wrong. Once this was realized, the field of public choice economics emerged, which discussed in detail why the political marketplace has its own errors. I believe the second requirement has never once been fulfilled in the history of mankind, and that is why I am an anarchist.

Full essay.

"Free enterprise can't be justified because it's good for business -- it isn't. It can only be justified because it's good for society. ... Markets aren't perfect, they're not even very good. They're just better than anything else." -Peter Drucker

...in a few small, walled towns

Roberts warned that the potential destruction of the dollar as the world's reserve currency could eventually return us to a system of barter, completely altering the landscape of the economic structure as we know it.

...with a short period of gold and silver
as currency in between, I expect.

Barter could only be avoided if enough
people used the "hard" currencies. Perhaps
for a while. Then their prices go so high,
(relative to trashed currencies) nobody's
buying or selling them, only using them.

That's only one possibility.

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive - and a few are enough to carry on.
--H. L. Mencken

Full article.

A fine guffaw

"(...) the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night (...)" --H. L. Mencken

Ripped from deletedbytomorrow