Sunday, October 20, 2013

Bait and Switch?

WND EXCLUSIVE
Billy Graham sounds alarm for 2nd Coming
Famed evangelist sees signs 'converging now for the 1st time'


Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly “biblical prophecies are being realized.”

Bachmann is small fry compared to Natanyahu in power and influence, yet nobody becries Obama and McCain wanting to attack Syria and Iran for him...guess the media just threw Bachmann under the bus as a distraction for the real centers of power.....

Bachmann has no plans to run for re-election, but the other war mongers are a different story....

In the late nineteenth century an American movement had the end of the world set at a specific date, and we all survived with no harm done...if these people are of God then it will happen, if not, they will come to nothing and be forgotten.,,,

(Full Article)

Friday, October 18, 2013

Current Reading List

As a result of reading Albert Jay Nock's The Freeman Book, available as a pdf from The Ludwig Von Mises Institute I just re-read the last chapter of Kapital by Marx and am not in the middle of Democracy Vs. Socialism by Max Hirch...Hirch gives a nice demolition of Socialism as it stood at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, as well as a concise overview of the Austrian Theory of Subjective Value....

Below is an except from The Freeman Book with some required reading for consideration.....


He might perhaps best see what sort of thing the radical has to offer in this line, by beginning with the last chapter, which is all he need ever read, of Marx’s “Kapital”; then reading carefully the “Grossgrundeigentum und Soziale Frage” of Franz Oppenheimer, the same author’s “Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie,” and then the “Protection or Free Trade” of Henry George. This lay-out of provender will give him most plentifully what he says he wants, “something solid for both the friends and the enemies of the new regime to set their teeth in.” It is something indeed so solid that those who hitherto have undertaken to bite it have simply broken their teeth. Henry George, in a preface to the fourth edition of “Progress and Poverty,” a book which sets forth the same “detailed plan of reconstruction which meets every test of reason,” says what could be said of very few books, “I have yet to see an objection not answered in advance in the book itself.”
Perhaps our correspondent, at the end of this exercise, will see that radicals have been quite forward to “accept the obligations of careful, methodical and constructive thought.” They have assumed no monopoly of those obligations or of the ability to discharge them; they desire the production and exchange of thought to be quite as free as the production and exchange of goods. But they have done well enough, possibly, not quite to deserve the implication that they habitually shirk those obligations. It seems unfortunate, perhaps a little unfair, that our correspondent should disparage the “apostles of the new order,” without knowing at least a little of the best that those apostles can do. He would, for example, find a great deal of careful, methodical and constructive thought applied to the most modern conditions and our very latest problems, in the solid treatise called “Democracy versus Socialism,” by the Australian economist, Max Hirsch; and if he can summon energy to chew his way through seven chapters of the most highly concentrated and most highly nutritious pemmican ever put before mankind, he will find it in Franz Oppenheimer’s little volume, hardly more than a pamphlet, called “The State.” It is solid food-value, if one can worry it down, but it is very, very rough.


--The Freeman Book pg 106 To Whom it May Concern 

An answer to a letter asking for a logical explanation of radicalism....

Monday, October 14, 2013

Where are they gonna back all of it up?

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally
Washington Post


Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.


Is a key feature of the illness known as paranoia an obsession with finding connections that are not there?


The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle.”

Even with that metaphor standing on its head, isn't it still folly?

The picture can also be misleading, creating false “associations” with ex-spouses or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years. 


The same way a suspicious spouse might make everything into evidence of an affair?


The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points “all over the world,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program. “None of those are on U.S. territory.”

So the NSA has to have the despotic power they are supposedly saving us from?


When information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus,” the official added, “the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.”

Now the presumption of guilt stands on its head......


A senior U.S. intelligence official said the privacy of Americans is protected, despite mass collection, because “we have checks and balances built into our tools.”

NSA analysts, he said, may not search within the contacts database or distribute information from it unless they can “make the case that something in there is a valid foreign intelligence target in and of itself.”


And since it is a secret if that is happening, or even how that works, we just have to take his word on it.....


Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in August that the committee has less information about, and conducts less oversight of, intelligence gathering that relies solely on presidential authority. She said she planned to ask for more briefings on those programs.

Don't feel bad that you don't know what is going on, no one in DC really does either.....


The volume of NSA contacts collection is so high that it has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories, forcing the agency to halt its intake with “emergency detasking” orders.

Now it begins to sound like the show Hoarders.....


Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

All that money and they don't have spam filters? Or just too pathological to miss out on anything?


(Full Story)

Who Needs Love When Benifits Are on the Line.....

When Life Partners Should Marry to Benefit from Social Security
PBS

Jo Anne De Varges -- Racine, Wisc.: Like many boomers, my "life" partner and I chose not to get married, preferring to keep our finances separate. Twenty years in, at ages 61 and 60, we are wondering if we should reconsider tying the knot due to Social Security benefits.

There is a good case in all of this for the government to treat the married and unmarried equally, of course every slave is begging for the approval from their betters in the form of a license.....

I guess next from PBS, a guide to successful gold digging for young women..... 



The Guys We Back Don't Always Engage in Car Bombings, But When They Do.....

In Syria, four of seven kidnapped Red Cross, Red Crescent aid workers are released
Washington Post

The use of car bombings in the conflict has increased, but most have been carried out against regime targets, usually by jihadi fighters among the rebels.

It is good to know that the Rebels Washington wants to back usually don't engage in terrorism

He was quoted as saying that one abandoned site was in rebel-held territory and that in other cases, routes went through opposition-controlled areas, preventing access because rebels have not promised cooperation.

I wonder why they don't want to cooperate, and why the policy of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" isn't applied to them the same way it is to US citizen.....


(Full Story)

Freedom, It's Not Just for Silicon Valley Anymore....

Silicon Valley stays quiet as Washington implodes
Computer World

The valley may vote overwhelmingly Democratic in elections, but it has a very strong libertarian streak -- it doesn't want Washington interfering with its business and start-up culture.

Too late for that, if we are to believe Edward Snowden......

Rogers argued that the politics of Washington are antithetical to Silicon Valley's core values. "The very way it works, Washington undermines the free minds and free markets that are the cornerstone of Silicon Valley's success,"

Those are the universal precursors to any human being's success.....

"The metric that differentiates Silicon Valley from Washington does not fall along conventional political lines: Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal, right versus left," Rogers said.

"It falls between freedom and control.


Again, this is the ageless human struggle....even the early sociologist Karl Marx recognized that......

Rogers has been one of but a few Silicon Valley business leaders to speak critically about the country's broad political direction. Former Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove has been another vocal leader.

They must have been left out of the Surveillance Complex dole.....

The benefit of speaking up is questionable. Said one tech lobbyist on background: "Is rational pressure and discussion going to make irrational people act rationally?" 

This guy is a lobbyist and he has such a naive grasp of politricks as this?

pg. 2

The tech industry doesn't like dealing with Washington, but spends mightily for the privilege. The industry's lobbying spending grew from $40 million in 1998, when Rodgers gave his speech, to $133 million last year, according the Center for Responsive Politics.

So we now collectively pay $133 million in protection money when we buy technology just to keep the goon squad out of the labs?


It appears there is actually a secessionist movement in Silicon Valley according to this. Must be tired of passing all that over head on to us....

Thank God the USDA and FDA Weren't There To Make Sure He Ate Right.....

Man recalls eating squirrels to survive alone in California forest
L. A. Times

"I knew my dad would do what he needed to do to survive, even if it meant eating squirrels or the occasional bug,” Penaflor’s son, Jeremy, told the Ukiah paper.

And here is the value in taking your kids camping and teaching them to hunt and fish....teaching them how to grow plants and garden is also a plus.....


As Penaflor spoke to KTVU outside, he was at times emotional when he recalled his story of survival.

"Three squirrels are dead because of me," he said.


Oh, the horror!!!  Have we really conditioned people to be so alienated from nature that they can no longer partake in it......


(Full Story)