"People judge you by
your performance, so focus
on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality.
Some people aren’t used to an environment
where excellence is expected."
- Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward, 1987
I am an astronaut!
NASA themed corn mazes...
Water balloons in zero G...
Reliving the arcade days...
Silly dog likes to sleep...
Anyone for some medicinal weed?
Avoid these food additives...
Creating shellter for crabs...
Eat your sea vegetables!
Because bears like their veggies!
Abolish the Fed!
Rare white wombat...
There is no plan to fix the economy...
I am not superstitious...
Einstein's theory of UFOs...
Bad movie titles...
Beware of rBGH...
The alien genetic takeover humanity...
Top 10 secret evil societies ...
Governments don't like criticism...
Defying gravity...
Quirky science tricks...
Don't quit...
Classic pinup girls...
Back flip craziness...
Healing with light...
Chemtrails exposed...
9/11's most controversial photo...
Going to turn your brown eyes blue...
How to have an extraordinary life...
All vitamin D isn't created equal...
Do you have some toxicity in your mouth?
Walt Disney is the devil...
Healing with light part II...
Even dentists are speaking out against fluoride!
Extraordinary Life...
Murmuration...
How not to be scammed by those you are protesting against.
The Genetic Conspiracy (about Monsanto) part 1 of 3
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To buy or not to buy organic...
Conventional Fruit and Vegetable Pesticide Loads
Certainly helpful to your decision about which vegetables should be purchased organic and which conventional veggies may be safe, is the measured pesticide loads found on conventionally-farmed fruits and vegetables.
Of the 43 different fruit and vegetable categories tested by the Environmental Working Group and included in their Shoppers’ Guide to Pesticides in Produce, these 12 fruits and vegetables had the highest pesticide load, making them the most important to buy or grow organic:
- Peaches
- Apples
- Sweet bell peppers
- Celery
- Nectarines
- Strawberries
- Cherries
- Lettuce
- Grapes (imported)
- Pears
- Spinach
- Potatoes
- Broccoli
- Eggplant
- Cabbage
- Banana
- Kiwi
- Asparagus
- Sweet peas (frozen)
- Mango
- Pineapple
- Sweet corn (frozen)
- Avocado
- Onion
What to make of Occupy Wall Street...
"The Occupy Wall Street movement is gaining tons of momentum and is likely to continue picking up steam in the weeks and months ahead. Americans are angry, but they aren't exactly sure what they are angry about, and they don't know for sure with whom they should be angry. It is easy for them to point their fingers at Wall Street, but Wall Street is in no way responsible for the financial crisis our country has today.And what exactly is causing our economic problems? In short: inflation. Both the creation of new money unbacked by productive activity -- literally, conjured up from nothing at the whim of a central banker -- and the artificially low cost of borrowing to expand the amount of debt...again, thanks to central bankers buying government debt with the money they create in order to shove interest rates down.
"NIA believes that Occupy Wall Street protesters need to be educated to the facts and truth about the U.S. economy and what is truly causing our economic problems."
Inflation erodes the value of savings. It causes middle-class wages to rise more slowly than prices over time. The well connected -- mainly, commercial banks -- get the money first and benefit, while their spending of the new money causes prices to rise. Everyone else has to beg and hope for cost-of-living increases to their wages.
Inflation also causes asset bubbles that tend to benefit the rich while wiping out the middle class and poor, who pile into bubbles just in time to be left holding the bag.
In other words, inflation is causing the things that have people revolting in the streets. And central banks cause inflation.
"What utter drivel. Right out of the playbook of a goose-stepping sociopath like Ayn Rand. The fact is rather than sitting at a computer terminal all day long, pounding away nonsense in support of a capitalist kleptocracy, these 'Occupiers' are actually doing something constructive, and this is key, OUTSIDE the rigged political system. That is why the powers that be (including, apparently, you) fear them so much. These folks, at the very least, know that the LAST place they should be is 'seig heiling' to the Rand playbook by 'making some money.'"Ouch.
First, Ayn Rand would have neither goose-stepped nor seig heiled to anything. She was as ardently against the Nazis' violent corporatist fascism as she was the communists' totalitarian command economy. Her paeans to selfishness aren't a call to theft and violence. They're a dramatization of the importance of ownership -- starting with self-ownership -- and the drive to improve one's own condition, leading to a better quality of life for all.
Second, capitalist kleptocracy? Last we checked, capitalism was about making money by adding value and meeting consumer demand, not about stealing anything. In fact, capitalism demands a sacred respect for property rights, starting with the individual's ownership of himself.
(Capitalism was named by its enemies. We're starting to prefer the term "propertyism.")
The political system is the one eager to move around other people's money. And it's "political money" in the form of the monopolized currency issued by a government-backed central bank, which has resulted in the impoverishment of the middle class that the Occupiers are so up in arms about. It's also something that we at the Whiskey Bar are up in arms about (and in an upcoming issue, we'll propose a way for you to do something about it...and protect your wealth...in time for the Fifth of November)...
But we notice not a little sentiment among the Occupiers not just to stop the theft, but to redirect it.
We understand the anger behind the protests. We just worry about whom the protesters are blaming...and about some of the usual solutions that are floating through their heads. As Tim Staermose of The Sovereign Man writes:
"The anger is understandable. But it's infuriating to so many of these protesters railing on YouTube against the free market, moaning how capitalism has pillaged the poor for the benefit of the rich.We were sorely hoping that the collectivist and redistributionist spirit would be exorcised from the movement, perhaps with the help of that other populist movement who are angry at the same things. On this, David Franke says:
"Nothing could be further from the truth. There hasn't been a free market in money and banking for a century. The central bank/fractional reserve system is the biggest cartel in the history of economics. It's nothing but big government price rigging.
"How can anyone argue we have free markets when the price of money is set by decree? An unelected board of governors at the Federal Reserve simply decides the price of money, and that's that.
"Nearly EVERYTHING in our credit economy is driven from this number -- mortgages, business purchases, trade finance, government spending...and it affects almost everyone on the planet. This is not a free market, it's an economic dictatorship."
"When the protests first began, conservatives and Tea Partiers should have descended on New York to seek to influence the movement in the right direction. From what I have read and seen, some members of the Ron Paul Revolution have been trying to do just that. But the Tea Partiers have reacted like, well, conservatives. And now the opportunity has probably been lost. Occupy Wall Street has been taken over by the liberal branch of the establishment -- the labor unions -- just as the Tea Party has been taken over by the conservative branch of the establishment -- Washington insiders. The union bosses and conservative power brokers saw their opportunity and took it."And Ralph Benko already said it in his article "Occupy Wall Street: Contempt of Political Class"...
"An article datelined Madrid, titled 'As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around the Globe: Many Are Driven by Contempt of Political Class.' Contempt of the political class? Sounds like...the Tea Party Patriots...Welcome to the party, #OWSers!"Welcome to the party, indeed, comrades. We have a common enemy. And it's not Wall Street. Or greed.
It's a flexible currency that is constantly being created, and in which we're all forced to transact.
As it stands now, there seems to be awareness, perhaps even a growing awareness, in the movement about what the real source of the trouble is. We hope that the protesters stop being angry at Wall Street and, instead, look behind the curtain at the forces that corrupted Wall Street.
Yes, we mean the central bank again.
Regards,
Gary Gibson
Managing editor, Whiskey and Gunpowder
THE GLOBAL PROTESTS ...
… A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY INSIDE AN ENIGMA
by David Icke
I am seeing the mentality of what is called the political 'Left’ – which includes the core of the ‘Greens’ – much in evidence in these protests. This mentality thinks it is informed and streetwise about global events when its myopia makes it a manipulator’s party trick.It sees the world in black and white when the world is multi-coloured. It sees an ‘us’ and ‘them’ on either side of an easily definable line based on background, income bracket and voting preference. Filmmaker Michael Moore is a classic, or at least that is the persona he promotes. Democrats good (or better) and Republicans bad; The Left is good, the Right is bad.
The fact that all these different political ‘sides’ are directed by the same force to give the illusion of ‘choice’ is beyond them to comprehend, not least because they don’t want to comprehend it. To do so would shatter their black and white world view of Left v Right and that is the comfort zone they don’t want to surrender. But they must to take this forward.
Michael Moore and so many others of his ilk – including many of those in the Wall Street-type protests – will have enthusiastically supported Barack Obama in 2008 when he was the most obvious fraud you could ever imagine.
If they are continuing with that same black and white ‘us and them’ naivety today – and some are because I have seen them – then they may as well go home. The system will have them for breakfast, dinner and tea.
The Left mentality cannot see the global conspiracy because it can only see the us and them. To accept the existence of a Hidden Hand they would have to accept that the Left is being manipulated by the same force that manipulates the Right and the Centre. Many can’t handle that and so it is dismissed by reflex action.
| Bill Bonner | ||
| Zombie Wars | ||
Like education and health care — and most charitable activity — spending on ‘defense’ is not subject to market pricing. So, you never know if you’re getting your moneys’ worth. As time goes by, spending on ‘defense’ becomes spending for a variety of purposes that have little to do with ensuring the safety of the nation or its people. One congressional district wants a military base to provide jobs. Another is hoping a local company gets the contract to build a new software system. Still another produces airplanes. One man wants a sinecure. Another wants to boss people around. Still another hopes for a contract without competitive bidding. The Pentagon is the world’s biggest spender. It uses more gasoline. More steel. More food. More of just about everything than any other organization on the planet. The military budget was $685 billion last year. But that was just the beginning of it. Hundreds of billions more were spent to support intervention efforts all over the globe — including foreign aid, trade missions, embassies, spooks, and other meddlers. Altogether, we have seen estimates as high as $1.2 trillion per year as the cost of maintaining the US imperial agenda. It is easy to believe. The total cost of the Iraq war alone is now being estimated at as much as $3 trillion to $6 trillion. The higher number was proposed by Nobel Prize winning professor Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University. This makes it more expensive than WWII, which adjusted for inflation, cost $3.6 trillion. It also means that the Iraq war will have a price tag about even with the 2008- 2011financial bailout, said to cost about $5 trillion. What do you get for that kind of money? The financial bailout zombified much of the economy. Businesses that should have closed their doors were able to keep the lights on. Managements that proved they were incompetent were given bonuses and kept on the job. Industries that needed to be shaken up became even further entrenched. The same thing has happened in the defense industry. Real wars have been replaced by zombie wars...started by zombie strategists...and pursued by zombie military men. Zombie wars are never won. Nobody really cares who wins anyway, for there is nothing really at stake. Zombie wars cost a fortune; they go on forever; they produce nothing. Zombie industries look out for themselves. They don’t care whether they do any good or not. The war in Iraq has now lasted twice as long as WWII...at a cost of $3,000 per second. Four thousand four hundred and eighty US troops have been killed and 32,000 wounded...many of whom will need care for the rest of their lives. The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that Iraqi casualties have totaled more than 640,000. Without market pricing you never know whether you’re doing any real good or not. But we can guess: Pentagon spending is even less productive then spending on education or health. Dwight Eisenhower was a career military man. He knew how susceptible the defense industry was to zombification. In his farewell address, he warned: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”Then, in 1961, the US faced a real, belligerent foreign enemy. The Soviet Union was an aggressive imperial power that had recently defeated Nazi Germany. Many thought its centrally planned economy would permit it to overtake the US in terms of wealth as well as military power. But today, in real terms, the US spends more than twice as much as it did when Ike gave his speech. How come we spend so much today? Is the world really a more dangerous place? The Soviet Union renounced communism in 1989. It admitted that its system was a failure. It also admitted that it could not compete with the US militarily or economically. China had made the same sort of admission nearly a decade earlier. Without giving up its lip service to communist political ideology, it conceded that collectivism as an economic system was a mistake. “To get rich is glorious,” Deng Xiaoping is credited with saying, making nonsense of the whole Marxist creed. But as the external threats disappeared, theorists developed reasons for actually spending more, not less, on defense. Then, the defense industry hit the jackpot with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers. The Bush administration panicked. It started the ‘war on terror’ and blundered into war with Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the events of 9/11. The 2001 terrorist attacks allowed the defense industry to put the nation on a war footing, shifting substantially more of the nation’s wealth towards the “military industrial complex” even without a real war. We have seen estimates that Pentagon and domestic policing contracting now accounts for 40% of all US manufacturing (honest, market-based contracting has moved to China!) Billions and billions more were spent, as if the nation’s survival were at stake (the only thing really at stake was the continued prosperity of the zombified military establishment). Here’s how it works: money from the federal government is handed out to military contractors, who then recycle some of it back into the political process. Campaign funds, lobbying, pimping by retired generals and admirals...the money gets around. A general, for example, might insist that the Pentagon needs a new weapons system. Then, in retirement, he might find that he is a valuable consultant to the company that makes it. He might earn far more than his military pension. Likewise, a congressional flunkey might help push through a new weapons system...and then find his services in demand in the defense industry, where he is regarded as a key “political expert.” In 2010, the defense industry employed more than 1,000 lobbyists, double-teaming every member of Congress. It spent $144 million on lobbying activity and contributed $22.6 million to political candidates in the last election cycle. Now that a “super-committee” has been set up to curb federal spending, the military zombies can better target their efforts. According to analyst William Hartung, military contractors gave $1.1 million to the 12 members of the super committee in the last two elections. And twenty-two former staffers of super committee members now work as defense industry lobbyists. |
Peace, love and happiness...until next time...
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