“News is what someone, somewhere is trying to suppress; the rest is just advertising.”~~ Lord Northcliffe
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.” ~~ Thomas Jefferson
The Killshot...The End...
Innocents Betrayed...The True Story of Gun Control...
Performance packs a jolt...
Has anyone said this shit?
Some cool Google Maps mashups...
The old pull the tablecloth trick...
Preserved baby wooly mammoth...
Mystery Babylon and the Coming Darkness...
How to fly underwater...
Anti-doggystyle...
Rome ~~ Two Against One...
Video game art...
Harmonica genius... (props to Greg)
Typewriter types colors...
Beautiful time lapse over Hawaii...
Solar paint...
Flags of the future...
Inspirations of mathematical art...
United States of Beer!
Flapping the jacks...
Your price guide to everything...
How to be a coffee snob...
Awesome food sculptures...
The story of Lord NorthCliffe...
Bank of America...too crooked to fail...
Using turntables to make spirographs...
Hi-tech toilets...
Insect stick hatching...
The Synagogue of Satan...
Never wake a sleeping ninja cow... (props to Bryan)
What if Dr. Seuss wrote The Call of the Cthulhu?
Introducing artist Anatoly Kontsub...
We allow China to loot US...
Top 10 strange things about our universe...
They might be giants...
Galactic atlas...
50 most disgusting movie moments...
The TSA is worthless...
Introducing artist Paul X. Johnson...
Having a big brain might not be good...
How to reclaim our freedom...
Introducing artist Erwin Madrid...
Military inspired design and housewares...
He who controls the money...controls the law...
We suck...and the numbers prove it!
Chemtrails...the facts...
Knowledge
Ballparks of Baseball
'Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd.' With the arrival of warmer weather, sports fans thoughts usually turn to America's favorite sport, baseball. Today's feature is a unique tribute to ballparks of the Past (a must for anyone looking for a trip down memory lane), Current and Future. You'll find just about everything that you'd like to know about these hallowed fields of major league baseball, both those used by the American League and the National League, their history, background and architecture. The Features section provides News, Webcams as well as such practical information as Seating Charts, Attendance, Tickets and Directions. You can read others' impressions of their Ballpark Experiences and even add you own if you're so inclined!
11 Simple Ways to Avoid Burnout
Posted by Dr. Mercola |
Stay fresh and productive using these 11 burnout-busting tips from Lifehack:- Schedule regular social activities Remember when you used to spend time with people you were neither working with nor sleeping with? You watched movies, ate meals, played games, and went on trips. You were active and you had fun! You can regain some of that emotional fulfillment by contacting some of your old pals and scheduling regular activities.
- Follow a fitness plan If you want to avoid burnout, resurrect that New Year’s Resolution and figure out what it takes to get you exercising on a regular basis. Apart from all the physical benefits of exercise, you’ll enjoy the mental satisfaction of knowing that you’re taking good care of yourself again.
- Pursue a hobby Pick a hobby that has little or nothing to do with what you spend most of your week doing and pursue it with passion! A hobby that uses an entirely different skill set can provide your heart and mind with a satisfying break from the weekly grind and set you on a good path for increased productivity.
- Volunteer Nothing brightens the soul or warms the senses like giving to another for no reason other than to give. If you’re feeling run down by life, seek out somebody less fortunate than yourself and work to help them.
- 5. Write a manifesto Have you forgotten what you want out of life? It’s easy to lose track of time and even easier to forget about what makes us glad to be alive. What can you do to bring back that focus? Take a day or perhaps an entire weekend and write a manifesto, a declaration of purpose, for yourself.
- 6. Ask for help Whether your struggle is with a particular part of a project or with something general, like time management, asking for help will get you to a solution faster than you could ever hope to alone. If you want to avoid burnout, you’ll need to swallow your pride on occasion and reach out for help.
- Make others laugh You’ll find it hard to be glum and entertain unhappy thoughts when the people around you are excited and happy to be near you.
- Make an escape list An “escape list” is a list of everything you’d need to do in order to escape a situation that’s driving you nuts. In a work context, your escape list might include things like turning in a final presentation or asking for a raise.
- Embrace a morning ritual Are you starting your day on the wrong foot by waking up late, rushing about, and skipping out the door at the last minute? Try slowing down your morning instead.
- Stop making excuses Once you’ve given up on blaming others you’ll start seeing more of the good in your life.
- Be accountable The trick is find somebody you can trust to give the down and dirty on what you’re trying to do and how you’re moving forward. For best results, have your accountability partner NOT be a relative or somebody you’re dating. They typically won’t have the capacity for objective review of your progress. People who love you will often make excuses for you, and you want to avoid excuses at all costs.
Thoughts from Steven Wright...
1. A lot of people are afraid of heights. not me, i'm afraid of widths.
2. Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.
3. Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while i was a suspect.
4. Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.
5. For my birthday i got a humidifier and a de-humidifier... i put them in the same room and let them fight it out.
6. George is a radio announcer, and when he walks under a bridge... you can't hear him talk.
7. How young can you die of old age?
8. I had to stop driving my car for a while... the tires got dizzy.
9. I have an answering machine in my car. it says, i'm home now. But leave a message and i'll call when i'm out.
10. I have an existential map. it has 'you are here' written all over it.
11. I have the world's largest collection of seashells. i keep it on all the beaches of the world... perhaps you've seen it.
12. I installed a skylight in my apartment... the people who live above me are furious!
13. I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
14. I like to reminisce with people i don't know.
15. I live on a one-way street that's also a dead end. I'm not sure how I got there.
16. I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.
17. I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.
18. I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. you couldn't park anywhere near the place.
19. I was at this restaurant. the sign said "breakfast anytime." so I ordered french toast in the Renaissance.
20. I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
21. I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
22. I went to a general store but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.
23. I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.
24. I wrote a few children's books... not on purpose.
25. I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
26. I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
27. If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
28. If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?
29. If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?
30. If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?
31. If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?
32. If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?
33. Last week the candle factory burned down. everyone just stood around and sang happy birthday.
34. There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.
35. Tinsel is really snakes' mirrors.
36. What's another word for thesaurus?
37. When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.
38. You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
We are all going to hell in a shopping basket
By Robert Reich
It is far too easy to blame the crisis of capitalism on global finance and sky-high executive salaries. At a deeper level the crisis marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens. And since most of us occupy all four roles, the real crisis centres on the increasing efficiency by which we as consumers and investors can get great deals, and our declining capacity to be heard as workers and citizens.
Modern technologies allow us to shop in real time, often worldwide, for the lowest prices, highest quality, and best returns. Through the internet we can now get relevant information instantaneously, compare deals and move our money at the speed of electronic impulses. Consumers and investors have never been so empowered.
Yet these great deals come at the expense of our jobs and wages, and widening inequality. The goods we want or the returns we seek can often be produced more efficiently elsewhere by companies offering lower pay and fewer benefits. They come at the expense of main streets, the hubs of our communities.
Great deals can also have devastating environmental consequences. Technology allows us efficiently to buy low-priced items from poor nations with scant environmental standards, sometimes made in factories that spill toxic chemicals into water supplies or release pollutants into the air. We shop for cars that spew carbon into the air and tickets for jet aeroplanes that do even worse.
Other great deals offend common decency. We may get a low price or high return because a producer has cut costs by hiring children in South Asia or Africa who work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, or by subjecting people to death-defying working conditions. As workers or as citizens most of us would not intentionally choose these outcomes but we are responsible for them.
Even if we are fully aware of these consequences, we still opt for the best deal because we know other consumers and investors will also do so. It makes little sense for a single individual to forgo a great deal in order to be “socially responsible” with no effect. Some companies pride themselves on selling goods and services produced in responsible ways but most of us don’t want to pay extra for responsible products. Not even consumer boycotts and socially responsible investment funds trump the lure of a bargain.
The best means of balancing the demands of consumers and investors against those of workers and citizens has been through democratic institutions that shape and constrain markets. Laws and rules offer some protection for jobs and wages, communities, and the environment. Although such rules are likely to be costly to us as consumers and investors because they stand in the way of the very best deals, they are intended to approximate what we as members of a society are willing to sacrifice for these other values.
But technologies are outpacing the capacities of democratic institutions to counterbalance them. For one thing, national rules intended to protect workers, communities, and the environment typically extend only to a nation’s borders. Yet technologies for getting great deals enable buyers and investors to transcend borders with increasing ease, at the same time making it harder for nations to monitor or regulate such transactions.
Goals other than the best deals are less easily achieved within the confines of a single nation. The most obvious example is the environment, whose fragility is worldwide. In addition, corporations routinely threaten to move jobs and businesses away from places that impose higher costs on them – and therefore, indirectly, on their consumers and investors – to more “business-friendly” jurisdictions.
Finally, corporate money is undermining democratic institutions in the name of better deals for consumers and investors. Campaign contributions, fleets of well-paid lobbyists, and corporate-financed PR campaigns about public issues are overwhelming the capacities of legislatures, parliaments, regulatory agencies and international bodies to reflect the values of workers and citizens. The US Supreme Court has even decided that, under the First Amendment to the Constitution, money is speech and corporations are people, thereby opening the floodgates to money in politics.
As a result, consumers and investors are doing increasingly well but job insecurity is on the rise, inequality is widening, communities are becoming less stable and climate change is worsening. None of this is sustainable over the long term but no one has yet figured out a way to get capitalism back into balance. Blame global finance and worldwide corporations all you want. But save some of your blame for the insatiable consumers and investors inhabiting almost every one of us, who are entirely complicit.
Whiskey and Gunpowder
by Jeffrey Tucker
February 19, 2012
Auburn, Alabama, U.S.A.
What a Lovely Day for the Total State
Ah, what a weekend, with blue skies, singing birds, buddy cherry blossoms, and the government's announcement that it has totalitarian control over everything. Wait, what was that last thing? It was an Executive Order released late Friday that no one on the planet seemed to notice until about 30 hours later. It is unnumbered but called "National Defense Resources Preparedness."
Let's call it NDRP. The first I heard of it was Sunday morning. Something called The Examiner had a write up about this order in which which President Obama would, in the event of an emergency or even in "peacetime," assume control of all energy, food, water, people -- the whole of the material and natural world as we know it! -- and claim the right to requisition professions to serve the state.
Nuts, right? Some more of the conspiracy stuff that has lately been clogging up the web. By 6am, there was still only that one news story, but there were 463 forum discussions, and 1,410 blog commentaries. Six hours later, there were 8 news stories (none of them from a mainstream source), plus 712 forum discussion, and 3,640 blog commentaries. Oh, and an uncountable number of Tweets.
How could all these paranoids be yammering on about something that hadn't even been conformed by the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC? No wonder the government has such trouble governing this nation of gullible oddballs.
There was only one problem: this link. Here is the order itself as hosted by the White House. You can read it with your own two eyes. It was issued Friday evening, March 16, 2012, the last day of Spring break for many colleges, just as most news shops had closed up for the week, and people were otherwise planning barbecues and beach outings.
Here at WhiteHouse.gov is where we find the announcement that "The United States must have an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency," and so therefore it must assume all control of energy, food, water, health care, equipment, and, of course, people
Yes, you read that last one correctly. The Executive Branch claims it can perform a civilian draft people of "outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants, or organizations."
The authority cited in the document is the Defense Production Act of 1950, another dictatorial imposition but that happened to have Congressional approval. The dictator this time was President Truman. It allowed him to requisition every manner of resource to fight the Korean war, to draft people into war, and enabled the executive to impose wage and price controls at will.
This was the Act that Senator Robert Taft spoke about on the campaign trail in 1952. He regarded it as unconstitutional, illegal, and totalitarian, nothing more than an attempt to reclaim the total state of World War II as part of the regular powers of the state in all other times. He said it was the surest sign that we had lost our moorings as a nation.
Historians of the period regard this act as the thing that cemented in place the political culture of the Cold War, in which the government accumulated ever more weapons of mass destruction, instituted the draft, went to war with whomever and wherever, presumed total control over all industry, all while the civilian population lived in fear of nuclear holocaust.
It is no different today: an unconstitutional power grab piled on top of a previous unconstitutional power grab piled on top of previous cases. So far as I can tell -- and the real experts really need to get involved here to explain the details -- there is very little new here at all except that perhaps the claim that the government can force everyone into slavery without compensation, plus the addition of a strange role for the Federal Reserve.
Part II, section 301.b says: "Each guaranteeing agency is designated and authorized to: (1) act as fiscal agent in the making of its own guarantee contracts and in otherwise carrying out the purposes of section 301 of the Act; and (2) contract with any Federal Reserve Bank to assist the agency in serving as fiscal agent."
This suggests that any federal department that is part of the executive branch can make a separate deal with the Fed to print as much money as the agency needs to do whatever it wants, without having to ask Congress for any kind of special allocation. It is also possible that this power already existed.
As the day progressed, a number of people from the "responsible" portion of the blogosphere began to say pretty much the same thing. This is nothing new. It is merely an update of what existed previously. There was an update in 1994 and one under every previous administration. There is nothing to see here: this is business as usual for the executive branch.
It's being going on for sixty years. Make that eighty. Make that one hundred if you count the wartime central planning of World War I. Actually, take it back further to the Civil War, when Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers. Or go back to the Adams administration, which criminalized sedition during a war fever over France.
True, the water in which the frog is being boiled is perhaps slightly hotter than before but don't blame Obama coming up with the idea for frog soup! True, this point has some relevance for those who would try to score some political victory at the expense of the Democrats alone. What I don't get is why this background is supposed to bring comfort to anyone who has in mind the broad interest of human liberty.
What is true now was true in 1994 and true in 1950 and true in 1932 and true in 1917. Anyone with a love of human liberty should be alarmed by the presumption of totalitarian control at anytime, and especially during their own times when there might be something we can do about it.
These powers might be old as the hills, and the battle between power and liberty is the core drama of human history, but there is a major difference this time: we have digital media that allows us to see this stuff with our own eyes.
That's what makes the difference.
Have you noticed that very few people in the mainstream media ever directly criticize the Federal Reserve? But why should that be the case? Criticizing top politicians from both major political parties has become a national pastime. Most Americans love to throw mud at either the Republicans or the Democrats. But we are told that the Federal Reserve is "above politics" and that it is absolutely vital that the Fed remain "independent". The reality is that the Federal Reserve has more control over the performance of the U.S. economy than the president even does, and yet most Americans never spend much time thinking about the Fed at all. It is almost as if someone has instructed us to "ignore the man behind the curtain" and most of us just blindly obey. With the economy in such a mess and with the national debt exploding so dramatically, isn't it about time that we had a national conversation about the performance of the Federal Reserve? Isn't it about time that we evaluated whether the Federal Reserve is doing a good job or not?
Today I came across a Bloomberg article that was full of endless praise for the secretive Jekyll Island conference in 1910 that developed the plan for the Federal Reserve system.
The following is a very brief excerpt from that article....
But has this "powerful new financial system" really performed well for the American people?
The Federal Reserve system has now been in place for about 100 years. That is certainly long enough to evaluate how well it has performed.
So has the Federal Reserve done a good job?
Well, one of the things that the Federal Reserve is charged with doing is to protect the value of our currency. In other words, they are supposed to keep inflation under control.
In that regard, the Federal Reserve has failed miserably. The U.S. dollar has lost 96.2 percent of its value since 1900, and almost 100 percent of that decline has come during the Federal Reserve era.
The other half of the Federal Reserve's "dual mandate" is to keep unemployment low.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Fed has failed there too.
In the United States today, there are less jobs than there were a decade ago even though we have added more than 30 million more people to the population since then.
The average duration of unemployment in the U.S. is about 40 weeks, and if you gathered together all of the unemployed people in America in one place, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.
So, no, the Federal Reserve is not doing a good job of keeping us all employed.
We are also told that the era before the Federal Reserve was created was a time when great "financial panics" happened on a regular basis and that the Federal Reserve was created to stop them from happening.
So has the Federal Reserve been effective at preventing financial panics?
Well, current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has openly admitted that the Federal Reserve helped cause the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And there have been 10 separate economic recessions since 1950.
So that is not a really great track record.
In addition, it seems very clear that the foolish low interest rate policies of the Fed fueled the massive housing bubble that plunged the U.S. economy into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression when it finally crashed.
Shouldn't the Federal Reserve receive some criticism for that?
Of course one of the biggest problems with the Federal Reserve is that it is a perpetual debt machine.
If you do now know where our money comes from in the United States, please see this article. The Federal Reserve system was designed to perpetually expand the money supply and to perpetually expand U.S. government debt.
On both counts, it has performed brilliantly.
When the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. national debt was less than 3 billion dollars.
Today, it is more than 5000 times larger.
What is the appropriate word to use when something is 5000 times worse than it used to be?
At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $15,416,323,644,046.76.
We are passing the biggest debt in the history of the world on to our children, and it is increasing at a rate of 150 million dollars an hour.
When will the American people finally wake up?
When you simply look at performance, the truth is that it is really hard to deny that the Federal Reserve has been a complete and total nightmare for the United States.
But instead of shutting it down, Congress has been giving the Federal Reserve even more power. The Dodd-Frank bill gave the Fed significant new powers and substantial new responsibilities, and the Fed has been exercising those new powers in almost complete secrecy.
The following comes from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal....
Does that sound very "democratic" to you?
Why should the Federal Reserve have more power over the economy than anyone else in America?
Why should the Federal Reserve be "above politics" and "above criticism"?
Unfortunately, central banking is one of the few things that almost every nation on earth can agree on.
Did you know that all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank?
Sadly, the vast majority of the people out there have no idea that central banking is just a giant money making scam.
Central banks are allowed to create money out of thin air which is then lent to national governments. In turn, the citizens of those nations have to pay higher taxes in order to pay the interest on those debts.
Central banking is a way to systematically take wealth from the citizens of a nation and transfer it into the pockets of those that enjoy getting rich by lending money to governments.
When it comes to taking money out of the pockets of the American people, the Federal Reserve is definitely doing a good job.
Our entire economic system is based on debt, and such a system is inevitably going to fail eventually. We need to shut down the Federal Reserve and quit using debt-based currency.
We need to educate the American people about where money comes from and about why central banking is so destructive.
Please share this article and other articles like it with as many people as you can.
Together, we can make significant difference.
Peace, love and happiness...until next time...
2. Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.
3. Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while i was a suspect.
4. Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.
5. For my birthday i got a humidifier and a de-humidifier... i put them in the same room and let them fight it out.
6. George is a radio announcer, and when he walks under a bridge... you can't hear him talk.
7. How young can you die of old age?
8. I had to stop driving my car for a while... the tires got dizzy.
9. I have an answering machine in my car. it says, i'm home now. But leave a message and i'll call when i'm out.
10. I have an existential map. it has 'you are here' written all over it.
11. I have the world's largest collection of seashells. i keep it on all the beaches of the world... perhaps you've seen it.
12. I installed a skylight in my apartment... the people who live above me are furious!
13. I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
14. I like to reminisce with people i don't know.
15. I live on a one-way street that's also a dead end. I'm not sure how I got there.
16. I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.
17. I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.
18. I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. you couldn't park anywhere near the place.
19. I was at this restaurant. the sign said "breakfast anytime." so I ordered french toast in the Renaissance.
20. I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
21. I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
22. I went to a general store but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.
23. I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.
24. I wrote a few children's books... not on purpose.
25. I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
26. I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
27. If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
28. If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?
29. If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?
30. If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?
31. If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?
32. If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?
33. Last week the candle factory burned down. everyone just stood around and sang happy birthday.
34. There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.
35. Tinsel is really snakes' mirrors.
36. What's another word for thesaurus?
37. When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.
38. You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
We are all going to hell in a shopping basket
By Robert Reich
It is far too easy to blame the crisis of capitalism on global finance and sky-high executive salaries. At a deeper level the crisis marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens. And since most of us occupy all four roles, the real crisis centres on the increasing efficiency by which we as consumers and investors can get great deals, and our declining capacity to be heard as workers and citizens.
Modern technologies allow us to shop in real time, often worldwide, for the lowest prices, highest quality, and best returns. Through the internet we can now get relevant information instantaneously, compare deals and move our money at the speed of electronic impulses. Consumers and investors have never been so empowered.
Yet these great deals come at the expense of our jobs and wages, and widening inequality. The goods we want or the returns we seek can often be produced more efficiently elsewhere by companies offering lower pay and fewer benefits. They come at the expense of main streets, the hubs of our communities.
Great deals can also have devastating environmental consequences. Technology allows us efficiently to buy low-priced items from poor nations with scant environmental standards, sometimes made in factories that spill toxic chemicals into water supplies or release pollutants into the air. We shop for cars that spew carbon into the air and tickets for jet aeroplanes that do even worse.
Other great deals offend common decency. We may get a low price or high return because a producer has cut costs by hiring children in South Asia or Africa who work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, or by subjecting people to death-defying working conditions. As workers or as citizens most of us would not intentionally choose these outcomes but we are responsible for them.
Even if we are fully aware of these consequences, we still opt for the best deal because we know other consumers and investors will also do so. It makes little sense for a single individual to forgo a great deal in order to be “socially responsible” with no effect. Some companies pride themselves on selling goods and services produced in responsible ways but most of us don’t want to pay extra for responsible products. Not even consumer boycotts and socially responsible investment funds trump the lure of a bargain.
The best means of balancing the demands of consumers and investors against those of workers and citizens has been through democratic institutions that shape and constrain markets. Laws and rules offer some protection for jobs and wages, communities, and the environment. Although such rules are likely to be costly to us as consumers and investors because they stand in the way of the very best deals, they are intended to approximate what we as members of a society are willing to sacrifice for these other values.
But technologies are outpacing the capacities of democratic institutions to counterbalance them. For one thing, national rules intended to protect workers, communities, and the environment typically extend only to a nation’s borders. Yet technologies for getting great deals enable buyers and investors to transcend borders with increasing ease, at the same time making it harder for nations to monitor or regulate such transactions.
Goals other than the best deals are less easily achieved within the confines of a single nation. The most obvious example is the environment, whose fragility is worldwide. In addition, corporations routinely threaten to move jobs and businesses away from places that impose higher costs on them – and therefore, indirectly, on their consumers and investors – to more “business-friendly” jurisdictions.
Finally, corporate money is undermining democratic institutions in the name of better deals for consumers and investors. Campaign contributions, fleets of well-paid lobbyists, and corporate-financed PR campaigns about public issues are overwhelming the capacities of legislatures, parliaments, regulatory agencies and international bodies to reflect the values of workers and citizens. The US Supreme Court has even decided that, under the First Amendment to the Constitution, money is speech and corporations are people, thereby opening the floodgates to money in politics.
As a result, consumers and investors are doing increasingly well but job insecurity is on the rise, inequality is widening, communities are becoming less stable and climate change is worsening. None of this is sustainable over the long term but no one has yet figured out a way to get capitalism back into balance. Blame global finance and worldwide corporations all you want. But save some of your blame for the insatiable consumers and investors inhabiting almost every one of us, who are entirely complicit.
Whiskey and Gunpowder
by Jeffrey Tucker
February 19, 2012
Auburn, Alabama, U.S.A.
What a Lovely Day for the Total State
Ah, what a weekend, with blue skies, singing birds, buddy cherry blossoms, and the government's announcement that it has totalitarian control over everything. Wait, what was that last thing? It was an Executive Order released late Friday that no one on the planet seemed to notice until about 30 hours later. It is unnumbered but called "National Defense Resources Preparedness."
Let's call it NDRP. The first I heard of it was Sunday morning. Something called The Examiner had a write up about this order in which which President Obama would, in the event of an emergency or even in "peacetime," assume control of all energy, food, water, people -- the whole of the material and natural world as we know it! -- and claim the right to requisition professions to serve the state.
Nuts, right? Some more of the conspiracy stuff that has lately been clogging up the web. By 6am, there was still only that one news story, but there were 463 forum discussions, and 1,410 blog commentaries. Six hours later, there were 8 news stories (none of them from a mainstream source), plus 712 forum discussion, and 3,640 blog commentaries. Oh, and an uncountable number of Tweets.
How could all these paranoids be yammering on about something that hadn't even been conformed by the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC? No wonder the government has such trouble governing this nation of gullible oddballs.
There was only one problem: this link. Here is the order itself as hosted by the White House. You can read it with your own two eyes. It was issued Friday evening, March 16, 2012, the last day of Spring break for many colleges, just as most news shops had closed up for the week, and people were otherwise planning barbecues and beach outings.
Here at WhiteHouse.gov is where we find the announcement that "The United States must have an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency," and so therefore it must assume all control of energy, food, water, health care, equipment, and, of course, people
Yes, you read that last one correctly. The Executive Branch claims it can perform a civilian draft people of "outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants, or organizations."
The authority cited in the document is the Defense Production Act of 1950, another dictatorial imposition but that happened to have Congressional approval. The dictator this time was President Truman. It allowed him to requisition every manner of resource to fight the Korean war, to draft people into war, and enabled the executive to impose wage and price controls at will.
This was the Act that Senator Robert Taft spoke about on the campaign trail in 1952. He regarded it as unconstitutional, illegal, and totalitarian, nothing more than an attempt to reclaim the total state of World War II as part of the regular powers of the state in all other times. He said it was the surest sign that we had lost our moorings as a nation.
Historians of the period regard this act as the thing that cemented in place the political culture of the Cold War, in which the government accumulated ever more weapons of mass destruction, instituted the draft, went to war with whomever and wherever, presumed total control over all industry, all while the civilian population lived in fear of nuclear holocaust.
It is no different today: an unconstitutional power grab piled on top of a previous unconstitutional power grab piled on top of previous cases. So far as I can tell -- and the real experts really need to get involved here to explain the details -- there is very little new here at all except that perhaps the claim that the government can force everyone into slavery without compensation, plus the addition of a strange role for the Federal Reserve.
Part II, section 301.b says: "Each guaranteeing agency is designated and authorized to: (1) act as fiscal agent in the making of its own guarantee contracts and in otherwise carrying out the purposes of section 301 of the Act; and (2) contract with any Federal Reserve Bank to assist the agency in serving as fiscal agent."
This suggests that any federal department that is part of the executive branch can make a separate deal with the Fed to print as much money as the agency needs to do whatever it wants, without having to ask Congress for any kind of special allocation. It is also possible that this power already existed.
As the day progressed, a number of people from the "responsible" portion of the blogosphere began to say pretty much the same thing. This is nothing new. It is merely an update of what existed previously. There was an update in 1994 and one under every previous administration. There is nothing to see here: this is business as usual for the executive branch.
It's being going on for sixty years. Make that eighty. Make that one hundred if you count the wartime central planning of World War I. Actually, take it back further to the Civil War, when Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers. Or go back to the Adams administration, which criminalized sedition during a war fever over France.
True, the water in which the frog is being boiled is perhaps slightly hotter than before but don't blame Obama coming up with the idea for frog soup! True, this point has some relevance for those who would try to score some political victory at the expense of the Democrats alone. What I don't get is why this background is supposed to bring comfort to anyone who has in mind the broad interest of human liberty.
What is true now was true in 1994 and true in 1950 and true in 1932 and true in 1917. Anyone with a love of human liberty should be alarmed by the presumption of totalitarian control at anytime, and especially during their own times when there might be something we can do about it.
These powers might be old as the hills, and the battle between power and liberty is the core drama of human history, but there is a major difference this time: we have digital media that allows us to see this stuff with our own eyes.
That's what makes the difference.
Perpetual Debt Machine: U.S. National Debt Is 5000 Times Larger Than When The Federal Reserve Was Created
Have you noticed that very few people in the mainstream media ever directly criticize the Federal Reserve? But why should that be the case? Criticizing top politicians from both major political parties has become a national pastime. Most Americans love to throw mud at either the Republicans or the Democrats. But we are told that the Federal Reserve is "above politics" and that it is absolutely vital that the Fed remain "independent". The reality is that the Federal Reserve has more control over the performance of the U.S. economy than the president even does, and yet most Americans never spend much time thinking about the Fed at all. It is almost as if someone has instructed us to "ignore the man behind the curtain" and most of us just blindly obey. With the economy in such a mess and with the national debt exploding so dramatically, isn't it about time that we had a national conversation about the performance of the Federal Reserve? Isn't it about time that we evaluated whether the Federal Reserve is doing a good job or not?
Today I came across a Bloomberg article that was full of endless praise for the secretive Jekyll Island conference in 1910 that developed the plan for the Federal Reserve system.
The following is a very brief excerpt from that article....
Although it may seem shocking to watch the 112th Congress, there was a time when national leaders were swift and decisive in getting things done. In November 1910, in the space of less than two weeks, a group of government and business leaders fashioned a powerful new financial system that has survived a century, two world wars, a Great Depression and many recessions.
But has this "powerful new financial system" really performed well for the American people?
The Federal Reserve system has now been in place for about 100 years. That is certainly long enough to evaluate how well it has performed.
So has the Federal Reserve done a good job?
Well, one of the things that the Federal Reserve is charged with doing is to protect the value of our currency. In other words, they are supposed to keep inflation under control.
In that regard, the Federal Reserve has failed miserably. The U.S. dollar has lost 96.2 percent of its value since 1900, and almost 100 percent of that decline has come during the Federal Reserve era.
The other half of the Federal Reserve's "dual mandate" is to keep unemployment low.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Fed has failed there too.
In the United States today, there are less jobs than there were a decade ago even though we have added more than 30 million more people to the population since then.
The average duration of unemployment in the U.S. is about 40 weeks, and if you gathered together all of the unemployed people in America in one place, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.
So, no, the Federal Reserve is not doing a good job of keeping us all employed.
We are also told that the era before the Federal Reserve was created was a time when great "financial panics" happened on a regular basis and that the Federal Reserve was created to stop them from happening.
So has the Federal Reserve been effective at preventing financial panics?
Well, current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has openly admitted that the Federal Reserve helped cause the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And there have been 10 separate economic recessions since 1950.
So that is not a really great track record.
In addition, it seems very clear that the foolish low interest rate policies of the Fed fueled the massive housing bubble that plunged the U.S. economy into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression when it finally crashed.
Shouldn't the Federal Reserve receive some criticism for that?
Of course one of the biggest problems with the Federal Reserve is that it is a perpetual debt machine.
If you do now know where our money comes from in the United States, please see this article. The Federal Reserve system was designed to perpetually expand the money supply and to perpetually expand U.S. government debt.
On both counts, it has performed brilliantly.
When the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. national debt was less than 3 billion dollars.
Today, it is more than 5000 times larger.
What is the appropriate word to use when something is 5000 times worse than it used to be?
At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $15,416,323,644,046.76.
We are passing the biggest debt in the history of the world on to our children, and it is increasing at a rate of 150 million dollars an hour.
When will the American people finally wake up?
When you simply look at performance, the truth is that it is really hard to deny that the Federal Reserve has been a complete and total nightmare for the United States.
But instead of shutting it down, Congress has been giving the Federal Reserve even more power. The Dodd-Frank bill gave the Fed significant new powers and substantial new responsibilities, and the Fed has been exercising those new powers in almost complete secrecy.
The following comes from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal....
While many Americans may not realize it, the Fed has taken on a much larger regulatory role than at any time in history. Since the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul became law in July 2010, the Fed has held 47 separate votes on financial regulations, and scores more are coming. In the process it is reshaping the U.S. financial industry by directing banks on how much capital they must hold, what kind of trading they can engage in and what kind of fees they can charge retailers on debit-card transactions.
The Fed is making these sweeping changes—the most dramatic since the Great Depression—almost completely without public meetings.
Does that sound very "democratic" to you?
Why should the Federal Reserve have more power over the economy than anyone else in America?
Why should the Federal Reserve be "above politics" and "above criticism"?
Unfortunately, central banking is one of the few things that almost every nation on earth can agree on.
Did you know that all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank?
Sadly, the vast majority of the people out there have no idea that central banking is just a giant money making scam.
Central banks are allowed to create money out of thin air which is then lent to national governments. In turn, the citizens of those nations have to pay higher taxes in order to pay the interest on those debts.
Central banking is a way to systematically take wealth from the citizens of a nation and transfer it into the pockets of those that enjoy getting rich by lending money to governments.
When it comes to taking money out of the pockets of the American people, the Federal Reserve is definitely doing a good job.
Our entire economic system is based on debt, and such a system is inevitably going to fail eventually. We need to shut down the Federal Reserve and quit using debt-based currency.
We need to educate the American people about where money comes from and about why central banking is so destructive.
Please share this article and other articles like it with as many people as you can.
Together, we can make significant difference.
Peace, love and happiness...until next time...
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