Month: January 2012

I was recently quite discouraged to find all my normal media outlets–Drudge, Lucianne, The Blaze, and Yahoo–failed entirely to devote time to the significance of the authorization included in the most recent Defense appropriation for our military to detain and hold, indefinitely, American citizens deemed by someone somewhere to be engaged in “terrorist” activitiy. Since this includes what they are guessing you MIGHT have done, given the chance, we have entered the world of Minority Report, minus accurate psychics. We must assume for now that this power will not be abused, but the question must be asked: at what point do Americans stop being protected by the Constitution? The plain answer: NEVER. Even traitors are covered under the Constitution, and entitled to their due process.

Thus I have added infowars.com to my daily reading, since this is the sort of thing they cover. Huffington Post had it as well, but I can’t stomach that place. They censor everything–they would not even grant me ONE post–and twist the news their way.

Since I guess it makes more sense, I’ll link the piece I started out intending to post on a separate post.

For someone with a reasonably high IQ, I can be remarkably stupid. When I became self employed 3-4 years ago, I had my tax returns done by an accountant, and didn’t think too much of them.

Recently, however, I HAVE been looking at them, and one interesting fact emerges: I have to pay 15.3% of my income in FICA–which is to say Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and who knows what. This is over and above whatever my income tax is for my income level. You can read about it here: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=98846,00.html

I want to burrow this in your brain: ALL OF US PAY THIS. People who flip burgers at Wendy’s. Waiters. Gas Station attendants. Every man and woman who works for an income in this country pays nearly 15% of every paycheck to support programs which are bankrupt and cannot possibly exist in their current forms 15 years from now, which is to say the soonest any person in the prime of their working career could expect to get any of that money back.

People don’t see this for two reasons. First, the money is taken out before the check gets cut. Second, and more importantly, is the bastards in Washington have very cleverly required your employer to pay half of it. That means that they are sending money on your behalf to Washington that never shows up on a statement anywhere that you would see.

THIS IS MONEY THEY COULD HAVE PAID YOU. If they had not paid you, they could have used it for business expansion. Overall, economy wide, this would very clearly lead to business growth and growth in overall income.

There are just so many TRICKS these people play. Most all of us work nearly half the year to pay the salaries and benefits of people who contribute something close to NOTHING to our overall economy. The military, police, fire: yes, we need them. The rest of it though: throw it on the trash bin and leave me the hell alone.

The word fascist is becoming less repugnant to me in describing our current governmental order. In that regard, we need to keep in mind that the man who first ran FDR’s New Deal more or less WAS a Fascist, being a keen admirer of Mussollini. We need to remember that the man who coined the term “New Deal” was an ardent admirer of Lenin’s Soviet Union, and thought the rich should, if no lesser remedy presented itself, be shot. This is history, not hyperbole. And the programs they created remain with us.

Don’t fool yourself: simply because we have not YET faced large scale disaster does not mean it cannot happen. Hitler was considered a joke–a bad joke–by most Germans, until they found they had to keep a copy of Mein Kampf on their tables to stay out of jail or worse.

There are days I want to get the hell out of a nation capable of the stupidity that put Obama in office, and which tolerates the continued daily new assaults on our freedom. But where would I go? As bad as it is here, it is much worse in almost every other nation on Earth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/gop-monetary-madness.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1221-L23&nl=el

For the record, I personally never predicted hyperinflation. It is plainly the case that the bulk of money creation happens through the fractional reserve banking system, and banks are not loaning out much money. We are PRIMED for hyperinflation, but that will only happen if the economy starts expanding significantly again, and that will only happen if we have a non-Socialist in the White House.

For the rest, though, Krugman is plainly wrong. The Fed caused the bubble AND the crash that started the recession of 1929. Herbert Hoover and to a much greater extent FDR EXTENDED the recession into a massive depression through idiotic monkeying with the economy that had never been tried before, which failed utterly–creating by far the worst Depression America has ever experienced–and which is only considered successful because of ideologically motivated hacks like Krugman who write the economic histories. Put bluntly, all socialists think FDR’s policies SHOULD have worked, so they proclaim them as successful, and ignore and bury all evidence to the contrary.

Here is the simple fact about Austrian economics: it is based on the latent idea that all money creation is theft. If they did not quite put it that way, it was understood. Gold is capital. You have to buy it. You have to save money, and invest it. Fiat money is not capital. It is created ex nihilo, and the power to do so is the power to summon wealth to you without creating it, without contributing ANYTHING to our actual sum of productive capability, intellectual or physical.

Let me offer up an example that to my mind is quite stunning. We are in the course of building and deploying a new class of aircraft carriers, the Ford class: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford_class_aircraft_carrier. Research and development for the class of carriers was about–I just closed the link–about $14 billion, and each carrier actually build will be, after cost overruns, about 10 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it? There are an army (navy) of people looking this thing over, making sure the government doesn’t get screwed by the contractors. Congress has to approve these expenditures, at least in terms of allocating money to the DoD.

Compare that to the decision of Ben Bernanke to create $600 billion ex nihilo. That is the equivalent of 600 [edit: make that a mere 60] state of the art aircraft carriers, of the sort no nation but perhaps China would even contemplate building. This money was created, again, FROM NOTHING. Zip. They write the check, and now it can be cashed.

Who was this money given to? We don’t know. Can we ask? Yes, but we get only fragmentary reporting, after the fact, and that only because a Socialist–Bernie Sanders–was for once asking good questions, and got reporting inserted into the supposed Wall Street reform bill. I say supposed, since we can assume from the fact that the large firms on Wall Street supported it, that they viewed it as a competitive advantage.

THIS IS LUNACY. We have unelected people created incomprehensibly large amounts of money whenever they want, giving it to whomever they want, and doing so without supervision or even adequate reporting. From what little we do know, they are not even confining their activities to our borders, and are bailing out banks around the world.

Anyone who fails to condemn this very simply is not capable of the operation of common sense; or, they are aspiring totalitarians.

At 76, plainly this could be a factor. Yet, it could also be an asset. Towards the end of your life, do you become more or less concerned with appearances and your reputation? The fact that he is in his twilight years could well be argued to increase his claim that he will do what no American President has done to any significant extent in this century–at least since Harding: dramatically decrease the size AND POWER of the Federal Government.

I will add, too, that with regard to the newsletter issue, the best policy is to deny, deny, deny. We all know the game that is being played, and you can only win it with evasion and dishonesty. It was the Clinton policy, and if he were running, Clinton would easily be reelected today. Even if confronted with video to the contrary, he needs to deny, deny, deny, then focus on the fact that he is not and never has been a racist, but that our current President plainly has, speaking in his own book in a derogatory way about his maternal grandmother as a “typical white woman”, spending his time hanging around radicals, and in particular spending hours weekly with the demonically racist and hateful Jeremiah Wright.

I try to avoid hyperbole, but waking up this morning I see both that a provision has been inserted into the most recent National Defense Authorization to seize and hold without Miranda, without Habeas Corpus, and without limit, anyone American citizen SUSPECTED of being an accomplice to, or participant in FUTURE terror acts. Essentially, any American can be detained without due process for any reason indefinitely. The military can do body snatches, and make people disappear, legally, just like they used to do all over Latin America.

This is unfuckingbelievable. That the goddamn idiots supposedly representing our interests signed on to this is simply inexplicable. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it is truly beyond my capacity to understand how anyone could fail to see how this power could be abused, and how PATENTLY unConstitutional is it.

Here is a link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alton-lu/the-national-defense-auth_b_1180869.html

What is further inexplicable to me is why it is on HuffPost and not Drudge and The Blaze and Lucianne and Foxnews.

We need to be clear: OF COURSE the law will apply initially only to people like whoever they blew up in Yemen. Bad guy. His death was a benefit to the world. I get that. But if there is no DUE PROCESS in place, what is to prevent a situation like that in Enemy of the State, where an innocent person is targeted for political reasons, and not reasons of national security? What, in other words, is to prevent someone with the inclination and capacity for secrecy to do so from creating literal gulags in the American hinterlands, or transferring political opponents to Guantanamo Bay? My argument for Gitmo all along was these were bad people and they were NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS. With citizenship, though, you get all the RIGHTS which are enumerated under the Constitution, which include the right to a trial by jury.

Then I read our fucking First Amendment rights are under attack, in another foolish bill sponsored by Democrats: http://copyrightem.com/internet-copyocalypse-senate-bill-968-online-threats-to-economic-creativity

The pretext for this bill–and that is all it is–is that foreign nations are allowing the piracy of copyrighted materials–typically presumably movies and music–and that we need a means to stop this. However, the powers invested in the Attorney General in this bill are large, and largely discretionary. In pondering that, consider that he was quite willing to countenance the murder of a Border Patrol agent so that he could work to undermine the right to gun ownership in this country. He is an unprincipled asshole, with an anti-freedom agenda.

In effect, he can DECLARE a website to be a “pirate” website, and shut it down, with substantially NO supervision. This is a patent violation of the First Amendment. The way our system is supposed to work is you bring suit against someone for violating the law, go through due process, THEN you get them shut down. This is how it is supposed to work. It is not that there are procedures by means of which you can shut down offending websites.

This goes way, way too far.

What a crappy way to start the day. These things are quite real, and they are not getting covered by ANY media to the extent their potential importance warrants. Huffpost hit story one, but not story two.

Again: I understand the theoretical underpinnings of both laws. If the people governing us were saints, we would need NO legal restrictions on them, as they would invariably do the right thing. But reading history is a terrifying thing, and it is abundantly clear that large things start as small things. When Hitler’s party won roughly one third of the vote–the largest single segment, but far, far short of a majority–he was put into a Cabinet as Prime Minister with a lot of other ministers who were expected to check him, and subject to a Chancellor–Paul Hindenburd–who could veto him. Little by little, though, he took power, took power, took power, and eventually upon Hindenburg’s death was able, through trickery, to assume “emergency” powers that he never afterward relinquished.

I choose not to believe in organized conspiracies, but this sort of shit makes me worry. For his part, I can’t believe Romney will do ANYTHING serious to shake the status quo. He will say what he needs to say to get elected, make some cosmetic alterations in office, but we will have to count ourselves lucky if after 2 years in office we have our monthly borrowing down to $100 billion a month. That is not the scale of change we need. Yes, he may stop Obamacare, but the extent of the disaster we face will not be much altered by simply slowing the pace of the wreck.

Most of us think some period of seven days a week, 10-12 hours a day of work is hard. It isn’t. Our deployed soldiers pretty much ALWAYS work 7 days a week, and at a rock bottom minimum 10 hours a day. When on longer patrols, they go out 48 hours straight at a time. The guys I talked with last night said they only got about 5 hours of sleep on average for the year they were there, and keep in mind their days not infrequently included getting shot at, and witnessing and inflicting death.

A Seabee I talked with said they worked 12 on/12 off for his year there (7 days a week, of course) and got rocketed nearly every afternoon. Since it was always just after the late afternoon mosque meeting got out, it was predictable, so not really dangerous (they of course had bunkers/shelters), but that the concussion rockets in particular still shocked your system. No doubt no few of them literally crapped their pants, which is not at all a sign of anything but an organic reaction to severe stress.

Our men and women are professionals. Of course there are all sorts of gripes and genuinely bad decisions, but the rank and file still warrants our admiration.

As I see it, there is likely no more sure means of learning to conquer self pity than service in the military. We know so little of how hard they work because they don’t bitch about it. They bitch about overall strategy, specific individuals, the rules of engagement (if fired on, they can only fire back if someone gets hit), but never in my experience the hours of work, which are staggering by civilian standards.

I was talking with a group of infantry guys that had literally just gotten back from Afghanistan. One of the more lovely details of Afghan behavior they mentioned was that pedophilia is apparently endemic. Men rape boys often, and not even their own kids.

As I look at this, several things seem clear. First, Afghanistan has no weapons of mass destruction, and no ready means of getting them. Second, no attacks have originated out of there in ten years, other than of course local terror attacks on Afghanis themselves. Third, if we left completely, it is unclear to me that any serious national security threat would emerge.

While I do not think leaving completely would be prudent, I will say again that I think we should bring 2/3rds of our men back. This was the plain sentiment of these guys. The Taliban deserved to get hit for what they did in facilitating the attacks by Bin Laden’s team (who must have had help from an as-yet unidentified entity, as I have argued often). But it is not our job to civilize a nation that in large measure remains very primitive and rooted in ancient customs.