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Week of 08/27/17

• 45’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan highlights once again the disastrous, persistent consequences of militarism and imperialism.
  
• Speaking of militarism, imperialism, and general dumbassory, the pentagon has admitted the average number of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan at any given time is much higher than initially thought.  Officially, there are 8,400 American troops in the country as part of Operation Resolute Support and U.S. Forces Afghanistan. But the defense department says the actual number may be as high as 12,000.  That’s nearly a 50 percent increase, and doesn’t take into account the 4,000 extra troops#45 is reportedly planning to deploy. According to the Pentagon, the increased numbers are due to units transitioning in and out of deployment, as well as soldiers on temporary duty shorter than 120 days, who weren’t previously counted.  James Mattis said last week that even he wasn’t sure what the total number of troops serving in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan was. “We had to change how they were accounting for them, because there were so many different pockets,” Mattis said. “We in this building couldn’t figure it out. I had to change the accounting process because we couldn’t figure out how many troops we had there.”
  
• Microsoft made a splash in the world of dedicated AI hardware today when it unveiled a new system for doing high-speed, low-latency serving of machine learning models. The company showed off a new system called Brainwave that will allow developers to deploy machine learning models onto programmable silicon and achieve high performance beyond what they’d be able to get from a CPU or GPU.  Researchers at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California showed a Gated Recurrent Unit model running on Intel’s new Stratix 10 field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip at a speed of 39.5 teraflops, without batching operations at all. The lack of batching means that it’s possible for the hardware to handle requests as they come in, providing real-time insights for machine learning systems.  The model that Microsoft chose is several times larger than convolutional neural networks like Alexnet and Resnet-50, which other companies have used to benchmark their own hardware. Providing low-latency insights is important for deploying machine learning systems at scale. Users don’t want to wait long for their apps to respond.  “We call it real-time AI because the idea here is that you send in a request, you want the answer back,” said Doug Burger, a distinguished engineer with Microsoft Research. “If it’s a video stream, if it’s a conversation, if it’s looking for intruders, anomaly detection, all the things where you care about interaction and quick results, you want those in real time,” he said.
  
• It’s no secret that Latin America is rife with violence. A recent ranking from the Citizen's Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice (CCSPJP) further illustrates this point with the top 10 most violent cities in the world being exclusively located in Latin America. Additionally, Latin America has the dishonor of having 43 of the 50 most violent urban centers located in the region.  These shocking levels of violence can be attributed to several factors — corruption, failed drug war policies, and the lack of rule of law in the region.  But there is one elephant in the room that is largely ignored in the discussion of crime in Latin America: the stringent gun-control laws present in these countries.  While the previously mentioned factors cannot simply be discounted, the lack of coverage on Latin American gun control policy is rather alarming.  Countries like Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela feature some of the most draconian gun control policies in the region. With crime rates at already high levels, gun control simply makes matters worse for law-abiding citizens fearful of criminals.
  
• There is a common naïve view among many conservatives — and other supporters of a bloated military establishment — that foreign policy is made as part of a rational process in which foreign threats are assessed, and then requests are made to Congress to fund projects that "keep America safe."  This credulous approach to foreign policy — expressed by many millions of "red-blooded" Americans who fancy themselves as the hard-nosed, realist "adults in the room" — ignores the immense amount of domestic political power wielded by the military and its allies in the private sector. The advocates of this view instead defer to the belief that the military's current drive for ever-more spending and military build-up in Afghanistan is based on revelations about the "real threat" in Afghanistan, and that the military is driven only by a selfless desire to "kill terrorists."  Meanwhile, American policy aimed toward perpetual occupation of Afghanistan has little to do with actual defense of the North American mainland, and much more to do with domestic politics.  This is what American policy amounts to in Afghanistan. No clear objective has ever been stated for the occupation there, while one of the world's biggest sponsors of Islamic terrorism — Saudi Arabia — remains on the Best Friends list. 
  
• Chris Calton looks at the history of opium use around the world. The tale takes us to baby farms in Victorian England, 19th Century China, and even one of the most prominent examples of fake news from the Washington Post.
  
• Russia and the U.S. are not in a state of cold war despite Washington’s attempts to impose its will on Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said.  “I do not think that we are engaged in a new ‘cold war’ because there [are] no reasons for the ‘cold war’ in its old sense – there is no confrontation between systems, ideologies, [there is] no fight for the domination of ideas,” Ryabkov said.  At the same time, he pointed out that the U.S. was trying to impose its will on Russia.  “Unfortunately, there are increasing attempts of the United States to dictate its will in relations with Russia and to make our country change its political course, also with the use of the banned methods,” Ryabkov added. Speaking to Japanese and Chinese media outlets, the Russian official said that strategic stability, arms control and non-proliferation of weapons of weapons of mass destruction were the topics where Moscow-Washington dialogue was possible. “Unfortunately, the dialogue is extremely slow under the new administration, but we hope that in near future the corresponding contacts will resume,” he added.
  
• A doctor who evaluated American and Canadian diplomats working in Cuba diagnosed them with conditions as serious as mild traumatic brain injury and damage to the central nervous system, CBS News said on Wednesday, citing medical records it reviewed. The diplomats had complained of symptoms including hearing loss, nausea, headaches and balance disorders after what were described as "incidents" that began affecting them in Havana beginning in late 2016, CBS News said.
  
• “How come the South is said to have fought for slavery when the North wasn’t fighting against slavery?”
  Two days before Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th President, Congress, consisting only of the Northern states, passed overwhelmingly on March 2, 1861, the Corwin Amendment that gave constitutional protection to slavery. Lincoln endorsed the amendment in his inaugural address, saying “I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.”  Quite clearly, the North was not prepared to go to war in order to end slavery when on the very eve of war the US Congress and incoming president were in the process of making it unconstitutional to abolish slavery. Once people become brainwashed, especially if it is by propaganda that serves power, they are more or less lost forever. It is extremely difficult to bring them to truth. Just look at the pain and suffering inflicted on historian David Irving for documenting the truth about the war crimes committed by the allies against the Germans. There is no doubt that he is correct, but the truth is unacceptable.  The same is the case with the War of Northern Aggression. Lies masquerading as history have been institutionalized for 150 years. An institutionalized lie is highly resistant to truth.
  
  Education has so deteriorated in the US that many people can no longer tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse or justification. In the US denunciation of an orchestrated hate object is a safer path for a writer than explanation. Truth is the casualty.Tha   truth is so rare everywhere in the Western World is why the West is doomed. The United States, for example, has an entire population that is completely ignorant of its own history.  As George Orwell said, the best way to destroy a people is to destroy their history.
  
• The Pentagon took the unprecedented step of denouncing neo-Nazi extremists involved in the protests at Charlottesville. But what about Washington's support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine? Or for radical jihadists in Syria? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan in the 1970s?
  
• How do you make America great again?  Increase the impoverishment of suffering millions - it's worked SO well in the past.
  
• The idiocy continues as ESPN cancels ASIAN announcer Robert Lee's broadcast of University of Virginia football game.  Because stupid.
  

Week of 08/13/17

• Wesley Messamore puts out a great piece on North Korea.
  
• Police in the United States are breaking records in 2017 by killing a record number of the same people they claim to serve and protect, and there is no change in sight under the current administration.   In 2017 alone, police have killed 746 people in the U.S., according to the Killed By Police database, which puts this year on pace to become the deadliest year on record. In contrast, in the first seven months of 2016, police killed 714 people; the number was slightly higher in 2015 with 725 killed; and it was noticeably lower in 2014 with 663 killed and in 2013 with 353 killed.
  
• Bitcoin surpassed $4,000 today, reaching its latest milestone and setting yet another all-time high.
  
• Silicon has been the backbone of processors for decades, but it's rapidly approaching its physical limits: making a chip on a process smaller than 5 nanometers is usually impossible without introducing problems. How is Moore's Law for chip complexity going to survive? Stanford researchers have a solution: augment it with materials that outdo silicon where it counts. They've pinpointed two semiconductors, hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide, that can be made extremely thin (just three atoms thick) while self-insulating far more effectively than silicon. You could get transistors that are 10 times smaller than the smallest you get from silicon alone -- 5nm chips would seem bloated compared to what's possible with these diselenides.
  The scientists stress that you'd still need silicon, but the combination of these new materials with silicon could still lead to far more complex processors, much longer battery life, and other advantages that usually come with shrinking transistor sizes. Moore's Law can't last forever (the laws of physics won't allow it), but this could delay the inevitable for many years.
  
• Terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.  Defense Secretary James Mattis warned North Korea in stark terms on Wednesday that it faces devastation if it does not end its pursuit of nuclear weapons, because the U.S. is obviously the only country that should be allowed to have nuclear capabilities.  “The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Mattis said in the statement, referring to North Korea.  “The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.”  #SSDCountry
  
• #45 has no concept of free markets.  And while I do tease people who are pro-war on drugs, who are also using prescription opiates, my thoughts on drugs do not change - no one should be kidnapped, robbed, or held hostage for ingesting a substance, of their choosing, prescribed or otherwise.  #45 blames #44 for the opiod epidemic, as if presidents have any control over anything.  See also: Brother of Afghan leader said to be paid by CIA, Afghanistan's multibillion dollar heroin trade, Afghan opiate use doubles since 2005, Billion in US aid fails to stem Afghanistan's growth as world's heroin supply.
  
• The Kurds of the Middle East, though embraced by much of the West as idealistic freedom fighters, have committed a range of human rights abuses, mainly targeting non-Muslim minorities. Their dark history of violence includes kidnapping, enslavement, and genocide.
  
• Cop shoots pet goat beloved by children at petting zoo because "it was either me or the goat."
  
• A flat tax is not more 'efficient' than a tax system with loopholes.  A frequently repeated claim is that loopholes in the tax code are “inefficient.” A more efficient tax, economists say, is a flat and all-encompassing tax that is inescapable. Why? Because this means no one will waste resources on tax planning and thus tax avoidance. In other words, more resources will be used in production, which is better for the “economy.”  Leaving the moral and ethical argument about tax avoidance aside, the efficiency argument too is completely wrong. It shows how much economists have deviated from understanding what they supposedly try to learn about: the market.
  
• While it is entirely fair to say that more crime justifies a greater police presence in a segment of a city, that crime does not — or, rather, should not obviate the constitutional rights of the people who live in that area. If statistics showed there were more child pornography producers and distributors in white neighborhoods, the police would not be justified going door to door to intimidate presumptively innocent residents to get consent to search their computers to combat child pornography. Residents would be outraged to be treated as criminal suspects and intimidated to surrender their rights. Yet the GRU eviscerates Fourth Amendment protections for young black men walking down the street as policy, irrespective of any racial prejudice by the officers.
  
• Thus, we ask whether or not the continued obsession with “diversity” and all of the enforcement of the PC codes will cut into Google’s viability as a profit-making firm, or if Google’s efforts actually will make the company stronger (as its current management insists). Is this, as the advocates of the Silicon Valley “diversity” claim, simply “good business” practice, or will it undermine the long-term efficiency of these firms, adding unnecessary costs, creating workplace strife, and ultimately resulting in disaster?  It is more than just promoting what would be a culture of fear. Google spends more than $100 million a year on “diversity” issues, yet there is a reason that the company’s demographic makeup does not mirror that of the USA, and it isn’t due to misogyny or racism. The problem is that the managers at Google and in Silicon Valley have come to believe that appeasing modern Social Justice Warriors is more important than growing their firms and being profitable. In the end, these firms will have neither profits nor social justice.
  
• The US has always used its alleged "humanitarian" missions as a means of exploiting foreign lands and foreign populations. Nevertheless, political pressure from US voters — who credulously continue to see US foreign policy as morally high-minded — has often limited the full extent to which the US government has been able to get away with using military occupations as a means of enriching the US government and its friends.   ny plan that resembles the "East India Company model" — employed to finance the operations of military contractors — would simply be another nail in the coffin of American moral authority in international affairs.   If the supposed goal of US policy in Afghanistan is to "fight terrorism," then a new policy of corporate-monopoly-exploitation will hardly contribute to that goal. Indeed, such a move would likely increase hostility toward the United States in a variety of ways.   nd, of course, there's no more reason to believe privatization will bring about an end to the conflict any more than the much-lauded "surge" and more than a decade of military occupation. 
  
• As far as I can tell, there are only two federal crimes specified in the US Constitution: counterfeiting and treason. That’s a far cry from today’s world, where almost every real and imagined crime has been federalized, underscoring that the whole document is a meaningless dead letter, little more than a historical artifact. Even so, that also confirms that the Constitution was quite imperfect, even in its original form. Counterfeiting is simple fraud. Why should it be singled out especially as a crime? (Okay, that opens up a whole new can of worms… but not one I’ll go into here.) Treason is usually defined as an attempt to overthrow a government or withdraw loyalty from a sovereign. A rather odd proviso to have when the framers of the Constitution had done just that only a few years before, one would think.  The way I see it, Thomas Paine had it right when he said: “My country is wherever liberty lives.”  But where does liberty live today? Actually, it no longer has a home. It’s become a true refugee since America, which was an excellent idea that grew roots in a country of that name, degenerated into the United States. Which is just another unfortunate nation-state. And it’s on the slippery slope.
  
• Everyone who believes in freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association, in freedom of exchange of ideas, must oppose and prevent this new race collectivism and its accompanying “progressive” linguistic totalitarianism from imposing a new dark age of diminished human discourse.  The wit, charm, creativity and humanity of words and the ideas expressed through them, must not be stunted and then petrified by those who wish to reduce individual human beings to collectivist categories of ideological control and command. Liberty of thought, deed, action and association is too precious to be lost to these latest coercing and intimidating thugs of the human mind.
  
• In the modern legal system, the victim of the crime gets punished twice. In the case of a robbery, for example, the victim gets robbed by the thief and then, if the criminal is actually arrested and imprisoned, the victim gets robbed again by the government to fund the incarceration. This makes the case for a prison industry suspect in a free market legal system. But many libertarians make the case that in a libertarian society, free market prisons would emerge. As with so many things, history is able to offer some insights into the issue.
  
• Civil asset theft also provides an easy way for the IRS to squeeze more money from the American taxpayer. As the growing federal debt increases the pressure to increase tax collections without raising tax rates, the IRS will likely ramp up its use of civil asset forfeiture.   Growing opposition to the legalized theft called civil asset forfeiture has led 24 states to pass laws limiting its use. Sadly, but not surprisingly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is out of step with this growing consensus. After all, Sessions is a cheerleader for the drug war, and civil asset theft came into common usage as a tool in the drug war.
  
• The reason employment is not the key to economic growth.
  
• Unlicensed pet sitters are the latest victim of New York's regulatory state.  This is yet another example of how a state agency is attempting to save us from ourselves. As mentioned above, currently, there are limits on state authority in terms of who has to have a license for pet sitting, but why? Why is it acceptable for someone’s neighbor to care for their pets? The neighbor hasn’t has any type of training, presumably. There is no certificate telling everyone that all is well. What about the “health” and “safety” of pets in these situations? Taken further, what about the well-being of horses kept on someone’s farm, or animals raised for food? Potentially, there is no end in sight for this “solution” that seems to be looking to find a “problem.”
  
• For the past two weeks the residents of Seattle have been witnessing a very strange occurrence. Day after day, a nondescript aircraft has been flying circles over their city, and the government hasn’t fully explained why it’s in the area. It’s been identified as a CN-235, and its only marking is an Air Force serial number. What we do know about the aircraft is that it is decked out with highly advanced surveillance equipment.
  
• A judge worth his salt, in San Francisco, in the first known ruling of its kind, has halted federal prosecution of two North Coast marijuana growers because congress has prohibited the "justice" department from interfering with states' medical marijuana laws.  Anthony Pisarski and Sonny Moore pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiring to possess and grow marijuana on a farm in Humboldt County and faced a three-year prison sentence under federal guidelines.  But judge Richard Seeborg suspended further proceedings in the case this week and said the prosecution was barred by restrictions congress first added to the "justice" department's budget in late 2014 and has renweed ever since.
  
• Social Security requires a bailout that's SIXTY times greater than the 2008 emergency bank bailout.
  
• Federal prosecutor investigating visa fraud in Wasserman Schult'z district shot himself in the head - but no gun was found. "Detectives and a medical examiner found Whisenant had shot himself in the head, Hollywood police said. Police searched for two blocks north and south of the crime scene but couldn’t find the gun or any other weapon."
  
• Federal court rules that citizens have no right to film politicians and police in public. While the topic of filming the police —of particular interest to law enforcement accountability activists, First Amendment advocates, and others concerned for decaying free speech rights — appeared in federal court before, Laughrey’s ruling goes against precedence established by the First, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits, which decided the Constitution guarantees the right to film public officials in public settings, as long as recording does not interfere. 
  
• According to a recent Pew Poll, the United States is viewed by the rest of the rest of the world as the greatest threat to world peace. Is the rest of the world tiring of the US global military empire, and how might it end?
  
• Saudi Arabian security forces flatten a Shia town - 20,000 residents flee.   They use tanks against the citizens who live there, this Saudi crackdown on described as 'renovation.'   People in the U.S. speaking out here.
  
• #ThrowbackThursday  A 12-year-old girl visiting relatives in Georgia caught in a cafe when bombs began to drop, notes that she was running from Georgian troops, thanks Russian troops.  She spent the night in her uncle's basement, then fled north to Russia to catch a flight back home, to California.Don't forget about the US being there...  they were doing military exercises starting in July.  Funny how the US always seems to be around for this stuff. 
  
• US and NATO angry because Putin visits Abkhazia, vows to protect them from NATO and Georgia.
  
• Introduced as the Make Identifiable Criminal Rounds Obvious (MICRO) Act last month, the proposal would strip the ability of federal firearms licensees to sell pistols that do not carry the controversial microstamping technology. Brown’s measure, entered as HR 3458, prohibits FFLs from manufacturing, selling, or transferring semi-auto handguns, unless they are capable of microstamping ammunition.
  
• Steady improvements in American life expectancy have stalled, and more Americans are dying at younger ages. But for companies straining under the burden of their pension obligations, the distressing trend could have a grim upside: If people don’t end up living as long as they were projected to just a few years ago, their employers ultimately won’t have to pay them as much in pension and other lifelong retirement benefits.
  
• Cisco-owned cybersecurity firm Talos Intelligence first spotted a campaign using Konni malware directed at North Korea on July 6, just days after a missile test launched by North Korea on July 3. At the time, Talos said the campaign appeared “directly related to the launch and the ensuing discussion of North Korean missile technology.”
  
• Last week, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy and the company he currently backs, Ionic Materials, unveiled a solid-state alkaline battery design that they claim would be cheaper and safer than the lithium-ion battery.
  
• Fifteen volunteer firefighters have been arrested in Sicily on suspicion of starting wildfires and reporting non-existent blazes so they could earn €10 (£9) an hour for putting them out.  Police in Ragusa province, in the south of the Mediterranean island, said the fire department became suspicious when it emerged that the auxiliary brigade had responded to 120 incidents compared with just 40 tackled by other volunteer teams over the same period.
  
• There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.
  
• CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou: Jeff Sessions is extending Obama's war on leaks.CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou: Jeff Sessions is extending Obama's war on leaks.
  
• The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.  Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the US Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized. 
  
• Report on the economic well-being of US households in 2016.
  
• Dr. Bennet Omalu, a neuropathologist and expert in the study of the effects of concussions, recently reacted to the study that found 110 of 111 former NFL players who had their brains donated suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). He said that letting children play football is the definition of “child abuse,” and doesn’t believe there is any way to make the sport safer.  “Someday there will be a district attorney who will prosecute for child abuse [on the football field], and it will succeed,” Omalu said during an event in New York, according to Sports Illustrated. “It is the definition of child abuse.
  
• Yesterday's nuclear brinkmanship between #45 and Kim Jong-Un may have terrified much of the rest of the world, but the military industrial complex rubs its hands with glee. Profits are way up since the first Korean long-range missile test in July.
  
• Daniel McAdams examines some little-noticed provisions of the Russian sanctions legislation and discovers it could justify a crackdown on free speech. The justification? Criticism of the U.S. government's foreign policy is equal to spreading Russian propaganda. Some have even suggested that criticizing the Federal Reserve or violations of civil liberties is spreading Russian propaganda because it "weakens faith in the U.S. government."
  
• In a recent interview with RT (below), Paul said that “we’re hearing the same type of war propaganda” in regard to North Korea as Paul recalls hearing as a United States House of Representatives member leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Who benefits from the lies? Paul points to “the people who make a lot of money off of war, not only the people who sell weapons but also the people who gather up the oil and the natural resources.”
  
• Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics now have the answer to this question. They have shown that it’s not just inherited DNA that regulates gene expression in human offspring; it’s also inherited epigenetic instructions.In addition, scientists have shed light on the biological consequences of this inherited information, proving that a mother’s epigenetic memory plays a vital role in her offspring’s development and survival.
  
• "The dollar is now off ten percent since #45 was inaugurated."  Check out Peter Schiff's debate in regards to Why #45 is a hypocrite on the economy.
  
• Surprise, surprise: Tyrant endorses tyrant.  In other news, taxation remains theft, and the state is violent and oppressive.
  
• Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal wants to give $500 million US dollars to care for wounded Ukrainian soldiers.  The proposed legislation for the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative is part of this year’s defense bill.The average US serviceman is making only $19,000 per year.
  
• A Virginia high sent a disturbing letter to parents and students announcing they would be selecting students for Advanced Placement and honors classes at least partly based on skin color, a concerned parent told news agencies, “Through our collective work, advanced classes such as AP and Honors will have proportional representation,” read the letter. “Proportional representation is 40% White, 35% Hispanic, 12% African American, 10% mixed race.”
  

Week of 08/06/17

• The cost of an NFIP policy averages about half of what would be a market rate. Congress actually mandates this inaccurate pricing method. In 2014, it hastily revoked a few tentative steps at reform after constituents complained loudly when the NFIP tried to charge something approximating market rates for flood insurance.
  
• The man who came up with the safe password rules admits he was WRONG.
  
• Almost bankrupt Illinois has 63,000 employees making $100,000 or more (that is cash salary, not including benefits and pensions).
  
• American consumers just hit a scary milestone: the highest credit card debt level in history.
  
• Like her predecessor, Eric Holder, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch used an email alias to conduct government business.
  
• One day after someone threw an explosive device into the window of a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, the state’s vast array of Muslim advocacy groups joined its governor in condemning the bombing as an “act of terrorism.”   Just in case you need the definition, terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.   Just change the word 'mosque' to 'church,' or 'movie theater,' or 'grocery store' if you are still unsure.
  
• The online streaming service that specializes in outer space, Slooh, just announced that it will be offering free streaming of planetary objects and astronomical phenomena. Previously, to view objects in the sky through Slooh's telescopes and streaming service, you had to sign up as a member on its website, which would run you $5 per month.  Slooh operates a global network of telescopes, including multiple on Mount Teide of the Canary Islands and three in La Dehesa, Chile, two locations that have some of the best viewing conditions in the world. Slooh also partners with other observatories around the planet to livestream astronomy events through state-of-the-art telescopes.  To watch Slooh's livestreams, simply register for free on its website. You will be asked if you want to pay for a membership, but you can just click "Continue Exploring the Community" to gain access to the livestreams, blog posts, and images featured on Slooh. However, a free registration will limit the number of photos you can have, and there is actually a pretty cool reason to sign up as a paid member: You get to pick what to point the telescopes at.
  
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Week of 07/30/17

• I wonder if these people ever really listen to themselves talk.  The U.S. Pacific Fleet commander [Adm. Scott Swift] said Thursday he would launch a nuclear strike against China next week if # ordered it, and warned against the military ever shifting its allegiance from its commander in chief.   I guess Admiral Swift has not read the Constitution about regarding war power Nor has he heard of the Nuremberg principals that just following orders doesn't justify war crimes like starting a nuclear holocaust.  Admiral Swift thinks just following orders is a fine reason to initiate nuclear holocaust "irrespective of the risk of incinerating untold masses of said civilians, Americans included (as there would be an inevitable Chinese response)."
  
• A town's entire police force quits, the purge didn't happen...   a lot of fishing, without begging permission and extortion, did.  Sadly it won't last, the state always ruins a good thing - new jackboots to be hired to loot and pillage for the state soon.
  

Week of 07/23/17

• Joseph Rago, young Wall Street Journal reporter, known for speaking out against national healthcare, found dead of unknown causes at 34.  "Obamacare is a government program designed to control the masses and enrich the oligarchs."  (See also: medicaid and medicare, government regulation of insurance, big pharma, etc...).
  
• The world's only decent politican has died.  Stubbs, Talkeetna, Alaska’s honorary cat mayor and beloved by Alaskans and tourists alike, has died at the age of 20 according to the animal’s owners. 
  
• CIA Director Pompeo reminds y'all that ISIS isn't the only blowback we created.
  
• FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator.
  
• Massive gold discover in Austrailia?  “Novo” or the“Company” is pleased to announce that it has found in situ gold nuggets up to 4cm long in primary conglomerates from its first trench at its Purdy's Reward prospect and has collected a bulk sample of these gold-bearing conglomerates for analytical test work. The sample originates from a one meter thick reef near the top of an 11 meter thick stacked sequence of mineralized conglomerate horizons. Purdy'sRewards is part of an 8 km trend that has now been identified by Novo to be highly prospective for conglomerate gold mineralization considered analogous to the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
  
•  In a tirade against Russia based news outlets RT and Sputnik, #45’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo blasted Russia for interfering not only in the 2016 US Presidential election but “the one before that and the one before that”. This would imply that Russia helped install #4 in the White House even after his severely anti-Russian foreign policy became well known.
  
• Tom Woods presents the opening lecture at Mises University 2017.  "What I learned from Murray Rothbard."
  
• Contrary to popular perception, not all of the money approved as part of the federal government’s emergency effort to save the American financial system in the fall of 2008 went to the big banks. Some of it – nearly $10 billion, all told – went to support the government’s “hardest hit” program, meant to help forestall foreclosures in 18 states.  And unsurprisingly, nearly a decade after the program was signed into law, government investigators are finding that much of this money was squandered by state governments. Money initially earmarked to help troubled homeowners struggling with underwater mortgages was instead spent on demolitions meant to boost prices of surrounding homes and help ward off crime in city neighborhoods. Except the money was often squandered by state governments, disproportionately robbing poor citizens in cities like Detroit of a program meant to save them from homelessness.
  
• One day after new white house communications director Anthony Scaramucci scoured through his Twitter account, deleting any tweets (mostly critical of #45) that could be a "distraction" for the white house, on Sunday morning the former Goldman employee pledged that as one of his first steps, he would "take dramatic action" to halt the biggest problem plaguing the #45 white House: the endless torrent of leaks.
  "I will take dramatic action to stop those leaks," Scaramucci told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" adding that while he could not control leaks coming from the intergovernmental agencies, he would take action in the White House communications department.  "If the leaks don't stop, I’m going to pare down the staff because it's not fair to the president, to America, and to the people in government" he threatened while adding that "everyone can stay if the follow protocol against the leaks."
  
• The corn con: The renewable fuels program was sold to the public as an energy independence measure but has proved to be a motorist dependence measure. American drivers are at the mercy, not of OPEC, but the EPA – and the politically connected businesses that are gaming the EPA’s RIN rigmarole.  It’s not good for the environment – and it’s very bad for our wallets.
  
• A Michigan man will serve jail time after being charged and convicted in connection with handing out jury nullification fliers in front of the Mecosta County courthouse.  For more information on jury notification, check out FIJA.org.
  
• A mentally ill California man was sent to the UC Davis Medical Center Burn Unit with severe third degree burns after being held down on searing hot pavement by Citrus Heights police officers.
  
• Back in June, the white house held a technology summit to discuss modernizing the government’s technology—and ahead of it, the administration’s director of strategic initiatives Chris Liddell noted that only “three to four percent” of government operations are currently on the cloud. Liddell, the former chief financial officer at Microsoft, said that the white house’s goal for the summit was to cultivate a “government tech” industry in the private sector. Whether that nudges disparate companies into a coalesced niche more visible to the main cloud market, and to the public at large, is anyone’s guess.
  
• CIA chief warns, "Wikileaks is plotting to take down American any way they can."  "What sort of America can be taken down by the truth?"  replied Assange.
  
• The Canadian government begins tracking, rewarding "good behavior" with "carrot points."  Video is from 2010, disturbing presentation of the "Skinner Box." 
  
• MOSCOW (Sputnik) — In early July, Siemens created a task force team to investigate reports about the transfers of turbines produced by Siemens Gas Turbines Technologies, a joint venture with the Russian Power Machines company, to the Crimean peninsula. On Friday, the company said that all four of its turbines intended for the project in Taman were illegally delivered to Crimea. MOSCOW (Sputnik) — In early July, Siemens created a task force team to investigate reports about the transfers of turbines produced by Siemens Gas Turbines Technologies, a joint venture with the Russian Power Machines company, to the Crimean peninsula.  On Friday, the company said that all four of its turbines intended for the project in Taman were illegally delivered to Crimea.
  
• US weaponizing oil sanctions to insurrect Venezuela?  Stimulate chaos, crash economies, promote suffering.  Crash, plunder, and control the aftermath.  Standard US foreign policy...  and people still believe "they hate us for our 'freedom'."
  
• 
  

 Week of 07/09/17

• Ron Paul "We As Americans Should Really Question WHO THE ENEMIES ARE!" (23:55)
  
• The unmarked vehicles arrived in the morning. More than 20 armed agents poured out.  Hours later, Mii’s Bridal & Tuxedo was out of business after serving customers for decades.  Its entire inventory of wedding gowns and dresses as well as sewing machines and other equipment were sold at aucton.  The hastily-called sale held inside the store netted the IRS about $17,000 — not enough to cover the roughly $31,400 in tax debt alleged, court records show. The balance is now likely unrecoverable.  Mii’s, a small Garland business owned by an elderly immigrant couple from Thailand, was never accused in court of violating any federal laws.  In other news, taxation is still theft, and your government punishes those who strive to succeed in providing goods/services, at good prices, creating employment, and economic growth.
  
• Further proof that scientists do not watch things like Jurassic Park, Outbreak, The Fly...  The Walking Dead...
  
• Some Colorado election officials say they’ve seen an uptick in the number of voters requesting to end their voter registration after Colorado’s chief election official announced he would turn over public voter data to a commission convened by #45 to investigate elections.
  
• Comey appears to be in serious trouble, because according to a blockbuster report from The Hill, in addition to the leaked memos, Comey also leaked classified information in gross and direct violation of FBI rules and regulations. 
  
• A woman in north Minneapolis says a city police officer responding to a home burglary alarm Saturday night shot her two dogs. Warning: Graphic video.
  
• Was LBJ and the  CIA involved with Mossad in sinking USS Liberty in 1967 so LBJ could have the U.S. military invade Egypt and overthrow Nasser?   In the 2002 BBC Documentary the members of the USS Liberty, including her Captain, surely think so.
  

Week of 7/02/17

• Linksys tells customers how to remove CIA surveillance tools.
  
• A recent surge in breakdowns, delays and overcrowding at New York’s subway system — in conjunction with a steady stream of rate hikes — has left many New Yorkers fuming and seeking answers.  Answer?  Privitization.  When you allow the free markets to work, you have competition which means YOU are going to have companies vying for your business with better customer service, better products/services, and lower prices. 
  
  

Week of 06/25/17

• Jeff Sessions Reefer Madness: He noted that as marijuana laws and federal sentencing guidelines have been relaxed, violent crime rates have increased. He noted that “In 2015, the United States suffered the largest single-year increase in the overall violent crime rate since 1991.” That is also true, but it is highly misleading, to say the least. It is like claiming that you have never dealt with the Russians only to find out that you have dealt with the Russians on several occasions and then used a semantic trick to prevent yourself from going to jail.
  
• Moar military! 
  
• #45 flip flops for the neo-cons.
  
• Though Yanez was found not guilty for killing Castile  the video remains to tell the truth. That police officers can all too often escalate a situation to the point of no return.  Furthermore, police officers need to really readdress the purpose for such minor vehicle stops. Is taking a life, or losing yours, worth stopping someone for a burnt out tail light? It should be noted that there was a 4 year old in the back seat of the car during this incident.  What would have happened if that four year old was murdered?  Probably nothing, just like what happened here.
  
• #45 says he will soon introduce legislation that immigrants to America should not receive welfare benefits for at least five years. The new measure will stipulate that “those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years.”  Instead of doing away with welfare for EVERYONE, and letting charities and churches help those in need, as they should, as they do, he insists on continuing to rob the public - like his predecessors.  Voluntary charity > forced charity.  Google voluntaryism.
  
• A "shocking" report came to light early this year about a massive FBI database that has been collecting millions of faceprints of American citizens – for years.Known as the Next Generation Identification system, since 2014 the FBI has amassed more than 50 million images scoured from facial recognition alone; and, as reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the images have merged into the FBI’s legacy database of fingerprints and other identifiers to create a centralized hub of surveillance.    Ask me again why I do not have a government-issued picture ID of any kind.
  
• Just when you thought our Syria policy could not get any worse, last week it did. The U.S. military twice attacked Syrian government forces from a military base it illegally occupies inside Syria. According to the Pentagon, the attacks on Syrian government-backed forces were “defensive,” because the Syrian fighters were approaching a U.S. self-declared “de-confliction” zone inside Syria. The Syrian forces were pursuing ISIS in the area, but the U.S. attacked anyway.
  
• Japan’s coast guard is investigating why it took nearly an hour for a deadly collision between a U.S. Navy destroyer and a container ship to be reported.
  
• EPIC has sent a statement to the House Appropriations Committee in advance of a hearing on the FBI’s budget. EPIC urged the Committee to examine the FBI’s Next Generation Identification program. EPIC explained that the program “raises far-reaching privacy issues that implicate the rights of Americans all across the country.” The FBI biometric database is one of the largest in the world, but the Bureau proposed to exempt the database from Privacy Act protections. EPIC and others supported strong safeguards for the program. In an early FOIA case against the FBI, EPIC obtained documents which revealed high error levels in the biometric database. EPIC has recently filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for information about the agency’s plans to transfer biometric data to the Department of Defense.
  
• The Ukrainian government and pro-Russia separatist rebels have agreed to a new cease-fire, the Washington Post reported June 21. A spokeswoman for Ukrainian government envoy Leonid Kuchma said a cease-fire in the east would start on June 24 to allow residents to begin harvesting crops. Occasional attempts to achieve a lasting cease-fire have been launched over the last couple of years but so far none has been sustained.
  
• Last month, the money supply growth rate in the United States fell to a 104-month low, rising by 5.91 percent. This is the lowest growth rate recorded since July 2008 when the growth rate was 5.24 percent.
  
• North Korea has reportedly approached both South Korea’s new president, and China’s foreign ministry on making a proposed deal, in which North Korea would agree to a temporary freeze of all nuclear and conventional missile tests, in return for the US reducing its military footprint on the Korean Peninsula.
  
• As we have reported stories on hundreds of HPV vaccine injuries and deaths over the past few years, one statement we hear over and over again from the victims is: “I just trusted my doctor.” Katy  says that if one is already infected with HPV your chances of getting cervical cancer increase by 44% after you receive the vaccine.  Nine months later, she was found with stage 2 cervical cancer.  Asha relates how her life was destroyed after receiving the Gardasil vaccines.  Within 2 weeks after receiving the last Gardasil shot she was diagnosed with ITP, a blood disorder, and one of the known potential side effects of Gardasil. She is now in the early stages of developing leukemia. 
  

• The Profiling Project, an independent, nonpartisan group, has released a lengthy report of its probe into the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich. The findings are summarized in the report:
  1. Seth’s death does not appear to be a random homicide.
  2. Seth’s death does not appear to be a robbery gone bad.
  3. Seth death was more likely committed by a hired killer or serial murderer.
  4. There may be additional video surveillance of the crime and crime scene.
  5. The resolution of prosecuting the individual(s) responsible appears to be hindered both actively and passively.
  6. Seth’s killer(s) most likely remains free within the community.
  
• Dumb kid, in typical dumb kid fashion, does an extremely dumb thing, winds up dead.  In other news, why on earth would you ever go to North Korea?
  
• lol  Remember after the tea party ended how people were calling themselves 'tea party,' and were praising Paul Ryan?  The idiot speaks on 'transformational' tax reform. “As the world changed, our tax code has remained stuck in neutral,” Ryan said. “It has ballooned to 70,000 pages of rules and regulations that few people today actually understand. There is an old line about this: Our tax code is about five times as long as the Bible, but with none of the good news.”  Funny how most who speak of the Bible seem to completely ignore the "thou shalt not steal" part.  #taxationIStheft
  
• In a shocking development, on Wednesday Saudi Arabia’s King Salman appointed his 31-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman (his eldest son from his third wife) as crown prince, placing him as first-in-line to the throne and removing his nephew, 57-year-old Mohammed bin Nayef - the country’s counterterrorism czar and a figure well-known to Washington - from the royal line of succession, relieving him of his post as Interior Minister, and stripping him from all his titles.
  
• The Pentagon wasted as much as $28 million over the past decade buying uniforms for the Afghan army with a woodland camouflage pattern appropriate for a tiny fraction of that war-torn country, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
  
• If Sessions were truly interested in fighting crime, he'd end the war on drugs.  But he's not, so the blue line grows thicker.
  
• Does he feel that his historic release of government documents showing how the NSA spies on all of us, constantly, without a warrant, has had a positive effect on freedom?
  
• Speaking to the German Press Agency on Monday, Hans-Peter Bartels, the Germany Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces, called on the 28-nation bloc’s militaries to unite into a single armed force.  “We are currently disorganized, technically fragmented and duplicate structures unnecessarily,” Bartels said, as quoted by the Telegraph. “We do not want to go down the solitary national path anymore. Not in Germany, not in the Netherlands, not in the Czech Republic and not in Italy.”  “In the end, there will be a European army,” he stated.
  
• Baby Steffan died June 8, 2017 after court-ordered life support removal. Parents, family devestated.  Now fate of older sister is in the hands of the state - great idea sense it ended SO well for baby Steffan.  
  
• Why is capitalism good?
  
• Jeff Sessions’s memo reads as an announcement that it is no longer the business of the federal government if American citizens’ rights are violated by those sworn to protect them and empowered with lethal force to do so. When local governments violate the basic constitutional rights of citizens, Americans are supposed to be able to look to the federal government to protect those rights. Sessions has made clear that when it comes to police abuses, they’re now on their own. This is the principle at the heart of “law and order” rhetoric: The authorities themselves are bound by neither.
  
• Left-leaning communists hold $32 MIL in special elections, losing to right-leaning commies.  That's a lot of money for piddly, no account differences.
  
• To libertarians, this is a tragedy. Even for many supporters of the Drug War or at least some regulation of narcotics, Ulbricht’s punishment was far from proportionate to the crime. But the consequences of Ulbricht’s ruling and the underlying problems with our justice system that allowed it do not end there. The Drug War has created an environment for our justice system that frequently places people in a position where they are pressured to go to jail, even if they’re innocent, for fear of suffering an even greater sentence if they choose to fight for their freedom, and Ulbricht will now serve as the go-to example for defense attorney’s warning clients to avoid going to jury trial at all costs.
  
• NYPost article on the 'administrative state' (aka government) killing 'democracy,' (aka mobrule). 
  

Week of 06/18/17

• Commie tries to take out other commies, misses.
  
• The majority of lawmakers sponsoring legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour do not pay their interns, according to a report from the Employment Policies Institute.  the analysis conducted by the Employment Policies Institute shows that the majority of the lawmakers who have co-sponsored the measure do not pay their interns a wage at all. The study found that of the 184 lawmakers who supported the bill, 174, or 95 percent did not pay their interns.  Bernie Sanders, for example,  is the only lawmaker who pays his interns at $12 an hour, which is still less than what he and others demand for the private sector.
  
• According to Yonhap, North Korea's top envoy to India on Wednesday offered a conditional moratorium, i.e. halt, on his country's nuclear and missile tests in what was said to be an "apparent bid to hold talks with the United States." While the North Korean offer is conditional, its "demands" are hardly outrageous.
  
• Some people are angry that some parents want to put their tax dollars to work in their own area, where their own children are. 
  
• Central banks mad and want to stop cryptocurrencies. 
  
• After years of crying about D socialized medicine, R socialized medicine to be revealed.  They want a vote in just one week of people getting a chance to look at it. Nobody has any idea what is in it- it has all been in secret so far. D socialized medicine had a year of hearings and discussions before it was voted on.  #praiseGOV for mob rule.
  
• ‘What we’re talking about is a mass of government that survives beyond administrations, but that is not responding to the politics of the people. This belongs to not a particular political party, but it serves across parties... across administrations.’  Snowden suggests it’s not the voters or the politicians tasked to carry out their will, rather it’s “this larger constellation of influential groups and actors who are able to subvert and shape the decisions of these congressmen... or presidents.”
  
• Twenty-five years after they were convicted of a crime that never happened, Fran and Dan Keller were formally exonerated on June 20 in Austin, Texas.  The couple’s prosecution in 1992 was part of a wave of cases across the country amid an episode of mass hysteria known as the Satanic Panic. Beginning in the 1980s, accusations flew that the childcare industry had been infiltrated by bands of Satanists hell-bent on brainwashing and sexually abusing young children. The Kellers’ exoneration closes a decades long chapter of profound injustice for a couple that paid an exceptionally high price for the credulousness of local law enforcement.
  
• The US has no right to fly into Syrian airspace where it shouldn’t be and set boundaries but should mind its own business. Otherwise, it is an act of aggression." - Ron Paul
  
• Sunday, 97% percent of voters in Puerto Rico voted in favor of joining the United States as the 51st state. The governor of Puerto Rico will now send two senators and five representatives to request statehood from Congress.
  
• Canada’s Senate passed the Justin Trudeau Liberals’ transgender rights Bill C-16, which puts “gender identity” and “gender expression” into both the country’s Human Rights Code, as well as the hate crime category of its Criminal Code by a vote of 67-11. The bill now only needs royal assent from the House of Commons to pass into law.  Critics warn that under Bill C-16, Canadians who deny gender theory could be charged with hate crimes, fined, jailed, and compelled to undergo anti-bias training.
  
• A 30-year-old pregnant woman called police for help.  Instead of helping, they killed her in front of her kids.
  
• Nostalgia seems to be very popular in Washington. While the neocons and democratic party hard-liners have succeeded in bringing back the Cold War with Russia, it looks like #45 is determined to take us back to a replay of the Bay of Pigs.
  
• 
  

Week of 06/11/17

Week of 06/04/17

• Birmingham, Alabama: Teens in Gardendale are in for a rude awakening this summer when it comes to cutting grass. According to the city's ordinance, you must have a business license.  Welcome to the world of theft of your earnings, kiddos.  Google voluntaryism now.
  
• With the month of June now here, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its jobs report for the month of May. The picture isn’t too bright.
  
• #45 wants to make sure children of slain police officers don't have to put their "dreams of college on hold" due to bureaucracy.  "No longer. It's unacceptable, and it's going to end today."  Meanwhile us regulars will continue to be taxed to death to pay for the monopoly on security, and the college funds of the children left behind.  #taxationIStheft  #thickblueline
  
• Once top-secret documents reveal that the Obama administratipn routinely violated Americans’ privacy while conducting “overseas” surveillance over the past five years.
  
• In some cases, collateral that has been pledged simply doesn’t exist. In others, it disappears as borrowers in financial distress sell the assets. There are also instances in which the same collateral has been pledged to multiple lenders, i.e. rehypothecated. "One lawyer said he discovered that the same pile of steel was used to secure loans from 10 different lenders" Reuters reports. And while China was able to brush off its "ghost collateral" problems three years ago when it still had substantial debt incurrence capacity, and debt/GDP was about 100% lower, now that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the Ponzi scheme - by definition - running, especially with the recent crackdown on shadow banking, the pervasive collateral problems are about to become a huge headache for Beijing again: with the mainland facing its slowest growth in over a quarter of a century, defaults are mounting as borrowers struggle to repay their loans.
  
• Russian News Agency TASS Announced Today That the Central Bank of Russia Intends to Develop a National Cryptocurrency.
  
• Read an excerpt from Gershon Shafir’s latest book, “A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict,” which investigates the strategies, policies, and historical continuities that promoted Israel’s colonization of Palestinian territory. In this excerpt Shafir seeks to answer the question, why has the occupation lasted 50 years? “Israeli colonization, to paraphrase William Faulkner, is not dead; it isn’t even past. The tools of colonization, honed before 1948 to a sharp edge, and subsequently deployed within Israel’s new boundaries, were available and ready to be pressed into service in the territories newly occupied in 1967,” Shafir writes.
  
• To lower health care costs, try freedom: As Congress debates the American Health Care Act, its members should remember the benefits in cost and quality generated by the free market. What Americans need is not another complicated insurance scheme, but a return to health care that patients pay for themselves.  For the past several decades, government intervention has pushed Americans to pay for more of their medical expenses with insurance. The result is that medical costs rose 118 percent from 1992 to 2012.
  
• Attorney Elizabeth Lee Beck’s office received a call just before 5PM on Thursday from an individual who was apparently using a ‘robotic and genderless’ voice changing device, sniffing around with questions about the DNC lawsuit filed over cheating in the 2016 election.  And whose number showed up when the law firm turned around and googled the number from the caller ID? Why, who else but Debbie Wasserman Schultz’ Aventura office.
  
• Real federal taxes per capita have more than doubled since John F. Kennedy served as president — and argued for lower taxes.
  
• The National Security Agency recently made headlines by promising to reduce the amount of information collected on American citizens. Specifically, the agency promised to no longer use Section 702 of the FISA Act -- which was intended to allow the NSA to conduct surveillance of foreigners -- to spy on Americans who happened to be mentioned in a conversation between the foreign target and another American citizen. So this is a step forward, right? Judge Napolitano's piece can be found here.  Patrick's here.
  
• A former TSA leader is among the latest candidates #45 is considering for FBI director.
  
• A longshot California proposal to replace insurance companies with government-funded health care for all of the state's residents could be paid for with a sales tax hike and a new tax on business revenue, according to a report released Wednesday.The report said those taxes would generate $106 billion annually. It was made public by the influential California Nurses Association as the state Senate faces a Friday deadline to vote on the bill, which outlines how a single-payer health care system would function but does not say how it would be funded.
  In a study commissioned by the nursing union, researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst suggested a 2.3 percent sales tax and a 2.3 percent gross receipts tax, which would apply to all corporate revenue. Poor residents would get a tax credit to offset the higher sales tax.
  
• Republicans and Democrats have a good thing going when it comes to increasing the size and power of government. They have the Good Cop - Bad Cop routine down pat.
  
• Man fined $4,000 for 'liking' defamatory posts on facebook.
  
• Following yesterday's official (if less credible and focused mostly on SOEs) manufacturing and non-mfg PMI reports from China's National Bureau of Statistics, both of which came either in line or slightly better than expected, moments ago Caixin/Markit reported its own set of Chinese manufacturing data, and it was far more disappointing: at 49.6, not only did it miss expectations of 50.1, but by printing below 50, the operating conditions faced by Chinese goods producers deteriorated for the first time in nearly a year. As shown below, this was the first contractionary print sine last June when China's massive, anti-deflationary fiscal stimulus kicked in.
  
• The reason we sleep goes far beyond simply replenishing our energy levels every 12 hours - our brains actually change states when we sleep to clear away the toxic byproducts of neural activity left behind during the day.  Weirdly enough, the same process starts to occur in brains that are chronically sleep-deprived too - except it's kicked into hyperdrive. Researchers have found that persistently poor sleep causes the brain to clear a significant amount of neurons and synaptic connections, and recovering sleep might not be able to reverse the damage.
  
• Bonus! Self driving cars will double as mobile Big Brother surveillance platforms.
  
• Federal government regulations cost each US family around $15,000 in 2016 - that's not including the millions of international, state, county, and local government regulations. 
  
• It may seem unusual that an economist would talk about culture. Usually, we talk about prices and production, quantities produced, employment, the structure of production, scarce resources, and entrepreneurship.  But there are certain things that economists can say about the culture, and more precisely, that economists can say about the transformation of the culture. So what is culture? Well, to put it simply, it is the way we do things. This can include the way we eat — whether or not we dine with family members on a regular basis, for example — how we sleep, and how we use automobiles or other modes of transportation. And of course, the way we produce, consume, or accumulate capital are important aspects of the culture as well.
  
• How 1989's invasion of Panama set the stage for 25 years of endless war.
  
• Secretive group of global power brokers the Bilderberg Group set to gather in Virginia to mull #45 era including elder statesman Henry Kissinger (Kissinger said of military men: they are "dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.") and NATO secretary.
  
• North Carolina lawmaker, Walter B. Jones, seeks redemption for war votes, "Asking God to forgive me."  Yet, he continues to draw a paycheck and choke hold the free markets with government monopolies, using tax money to pay for it all.  Remember, "thou shalt not steal?"  Just me?  Anyone?  #taxationIStheft
  
• A judge called a New Hampshire man a "bully vigilante" and sentenced him Wednesday to more than seven years in prison for his role organizing armed backers of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy after a standoff with U.S. agents in 2014.  Gerald "Jerry" DeLemus became the first person sentenced for his ties to the confrontation that became a rallying cry for those who want vast stretches of federal land in the U.S. West put under local control. Eighteen others are in custody.
  
• In 1800, you had to work, on average, one hour to obtain ten minutes of artificial light. Today, this same hour allows you to buy 300 days of light. In 1900, one kilowatt-hour of electricity cost one hour of work. This costs five minutes of our time now. Buying one cheeseburger in McDonald’s required 30 minutes of hard labor in 1950. This same sandwich now costs about three minutes of your life. 
  
• Military spending is the biggest waste of federal tax dollars ever. Both political parties are equally complicit.  The militarism scam is the best-kept secret in American politics.
  
• New American research suggests that metabolic disease, particularly type 2 diabetes, could be linked to bacteria that penetrate the mucus lining of the colon.
  
• Washington, D.C. lobbyist and attorney Jack Burkman [has filed] a lawsuit Wednesday to force the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to release information regarding the murder of Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich. . .
  
• This article is part of a three-part series called “The ‘humanitarian’ destruction of Libya” that analyses the 2011 war in Libya and the motives behind it. The first article contrasts the invented war crime allegations against the Libyan government to the very real underreported war crimes by the insurgents; the second exposes a history of deceptive terrorist attacks on European soil wrongly attributed to Gaddafi and the role of NATO in the war; and the third discusses Gaddafi’s plan at creating a pan-African currency as one of the central motives lurking behind the mainstream explanation of the intervention as a just one that sought to “protect civilians” from a ruthless dictator.
  
• An Illinois teen kills himself rather than facing the prospect of being labeled as a sex offender; all for having consensual sex with another teen and the police officer attempting to scare him with false information.
  
• Last week alone, US and “coalition” attacks on Syria left more than 200 civilians dead and many hundreds more injured. In fact, even though US intervention in Syria was supposed to protect the population from government attacks, US-led air strikes have killed more civilians over the past month than air strikes of the Assad government. That is like a doctor killing his patient to save him.  Do we really believe we are fighting terrorism by terrorizing innocent civilians overseas? How long until we accept that “collateral damage” is just another word for “murder”?
  
• Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, who recently underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, has died at the age of 83, President Juan Carlos Varela said
  
• A University of Utah-led team has discovered that a class of "miracle materials" called organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites could be a game changer for future spintronic devices.  Spintronics uses the direction of the electron spin—either up or down—to carry information in ones and zeros. A spintronic device can process exponentially more data than traditional electronics that use the ebb and flow of electrical current to generate digital instructions. But physicists have struggled to make spintronic devices a reality.
  
• Penn State researchers have created a new hybrid technology that produces unprecedented amounts of electrical power where seawater and freshwater combine at the coast.  "The goal of this technology is to generate electricity from where the rivers meet the ocean," said Christopher Gorski, assistant professor in environmental engineering at Penn State. "It's based on the difference in the salt concentrations between the two water sources."
  
• Google and Facebook are actively trying to stop a proposed law that would force them to acquire consent from users before collecting their personal information.
  

Week of 05/28/17

• One of the cardinal rules of government accounting and rhetoric is to call ant slowdown in the growth rate of government spending a "cut." This gives the impression that less is being spent when more is being spent. It's just that less is being spent than the government had planned on spending otherwise. With the discussion over the #45 budget this week, there's lots of talk of cuts, but it's important to remember that there are absolutely no cuts whatsoever in the actual amount of money the government plans to spend. 
  
• Tax cuts are great when they are actually tax cuts. In a system with a central bank, though, tax cuts are never tax cuts if there are no spending cuts to accompany them. This is because tax cuts without spending cuts simply mean more deficit spending. Unfortunately, it is clear that under #45 the federal government has every intention of spending as it always has. Indeed, #45's administration plans to spend even more than its predecessors by raising military spending without making any sizable cuts to any other program.
  
• Once again, cops are arguing that they need to be allowed to have sex with suspects in order to investigate prostitution allegations. And once again, lawmakers and journalists are acting like exploitation and assault of sex workers by law enforcement is a rare occurrence, rather than a national epidemic.
  
• In this radical and scholarly monograph, Murray N. Rothbard identifies the crucial feature of our educational system that dooms it to fail: at every level, from financing to attendance, the system relies on compulsion instead of voluntary consent. In contrast, a market-based system of schools would adhere to a purely voluntary ethic, financed with private funds, and administered entirely by private enterprise.
  
• If insanity is doing the same thing over and over in the expectation of a different result, then our foreign policy surely qualifies as madness. Since 2001, in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States has been in a state of constant warfare: the Afghan conflict has been ongoing since that time, the longest sustained combat in our history. From Iraq to Syria to Somalia and beyond, US forces and their proxies are engaged in a “war on terrorism” that shows no signs of slowing down, only expanding.
  
•  The scathing review from the Justice Department, which largely focused on a fatally flawed May 2012 operation that sparked calls for the DEA's expulsion from the country, concluded that top federal drug authorities withheld information from the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. DEA officials, according to the report, also blocked Honduran investigators from questioning U.S. agents or examining their weapons.Among the most serious findings in the 329-page report released Wednesday was that the DEA long clung to unsubstantiated assertions that occupants of a passenger boat initially fired on a U.S.-Honduran anti-drug unit, prompting officers to return fire in the chaotic May encounter that left four dead, including a 14-year-old boy.
  
• The National Security Agency under #44 routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before #45 was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.  More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards #44 and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.  #44's administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm.  #45 was elected less than two weeks later.
  
• Mises Cuba has announced that Nelson Rodríguez Chartrand is missing. The organization believes he was taken by state security forces.
  
• When the cable TV sports giant ESPN announced 100 layoffs recently, including letting go a number of high-profile broadcasters, a lot of people took notice, and well they should: things no longer are business as usual in sports broadcasting, and we are not even at the beginning of the end, and maybe not even the end of the beginning.
  
• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz threatened the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police with “consequences” for holding equipment that she says belongs to her in order to build a criminal case against a Pakistani staffer suspected of massive cyber security breaches involving funneling sensitive congressional data offsite.
  
• Moody's Investors Service downgraded China's credit ratings on Wednesday for the first time in nearly 30 years, saying it expects the financial strength of the economy will erode in coming years as growth slows and debt continues to rise.
  
• Fox News retracted a story regarding the 2016 killing of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich after massive outcry over sharing conspiracy theories about the murder.
  
• A Red Bluff, California farmer faces trial in federal court this summer and a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his field and plant wheat in Tehama County. Now ask yourself this question: Do I own my property?
  
• Here's what the media and politicians don't want you to know about the Manchester, UK, suicide attack: Salman Abedi, the 22 year old who killed nearly two dozen concert-goers in Manchester, UK, was the product of the US and UK overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya and "regime change" policy in Syria. He was a radicalized Libyan whose family fled Gaddafi's secular Libya, and later he trained to be an armed "rebel" in Syria, fighting for the US and UK "regime change" policy toward the secular Assad government.  The suicide attacker was the direct product of US and UK interventions in the greater Middle East. 
  
• A criminal suspect in an investigation into a major security breach on the House of Representatives computer network has abruptly left the country and gone to Pakistan. 
  
• A student group at the University of Chicago has published a list of almost 50 demands, including segregation.
  
• A Russian man wanted by the Justice Department on charges connected to hacking U.S. companies now claims the FBI offered him immunity in exchange for accepting responsibility for cyber attacks targeting former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
  
• There are three separate probes of #45 — by congress, the FBI and the newly appointed special investigator Mueller. Shouldn’t there be at least one probe into the likely criminal leaks?
  
• Newt Gingrich claimed that a Democratic National Committee staffer “apparently was assassinated” after “having given WikiLeaks something like … 53,000 [DNC] emails and 17,000 attachments.”
  
• #45 defended himself against allegations he divulged classified information in a recent meeting with Russian diplomats.
  
• North Korea says it’s ready to deploy and start mass-producing a new medium-range missile capable of reaching Japan and major U.S. military bases there following a test launch it claims confirmed the missile’s combat readiness and is an “answer” to #45’s policies.
  
• Congressional technology aides are baffled that data-theft allegations against four former House IT workers — who were banned from the congressional network — have largely been ignored, and they fear the integrity of sensitive high-level information.
  
• #45 "victms first' federal budget.
  
• With all the worry about Russian influence over U.S. elections it’s easy to overlook the many foreign interests working to impact U.S. policy every day–through paid lobbying.
  
• Iran's Hassan Rouhani took barbed swipes at the U.S. and its ally Saudi Arabia on Monday, hitting back at both a day after #45 used his first foreign trip to the kingdom to call for further isolation of Iran.
  
• Rather than ripping it up, as #45 indicated he would do while campaigning, there is now a very real prospect that the re-negotiation could end up making the scheme even worse — especially on the undermining of national sovereignty and self-government. That much is clear from the statements of top officials and swamp creatures within the administration.  #NAFTA
  
• South China Sea: China installs rocket launchers on disputed reef.
  
• If #45 had thrown a dart at the world map blindfolded, he could not have picked a worse stop than Riyadh for his maiden foreign journey. That’s because there isn’t one anywhere on the planet.
  
• Some good news: we have to remember that “the economy” is 320 million people in the US and seven billion people worldwide, most of whom get up every day hoping to improve their economic circumstance. That motivation is very powerful, and often can overcome even the biggest screw-ups by governments and central banks. Short of outright authoritarianism — which is always possible — humans have a tremendous capacity for improving their material lives.
  
• China’s President Xi Jinping had warned Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte that the Chinese would go to war if the Philippines were to drill for oil in a disputed area in the South China Sea, Duterte said in a speech on Friday.
  
• #45 was in Saudi Arabia over the weekend, where he signed the largest US arms sale ever, praised the country's history and record, and declared war on Iran, Syria...and possibly Russia.  How to stop terrorism: 1) Create, arm, fund, cry about, and fight "terrorists," creating more blowback.  2) Create more laws and abc agencies to strip Americans of their freedoms.  3) Insert government propaganda to intensify nationalism and patriotism.  4) Rinse, 5) Repeat.
  
• While Comey is now positioned for history to remember him as the cop who took down #45, or tried to at great professional expense, there should be wariness about lionizing Comey in the way the news media have in recent days. Under Comey, the FBI pushed investigative and surveillance powers to new and controversial limits and employed tactics that were morally and ethically bankrupt.  In short, Comey’s FBI did some terrible things.
  
• #45 to sign $110B arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
  
• How many years do we have to explain how the "war on drugs" empowers criminal gangs and terrorists?
  
• Saudi Arabia’s Salman on Saturday presented #45rump with the Kingdom’s top civilian honor, as the US president began a trip to Riyadh aimed at strengthening security and economic ties.  I wonder if #45 was able to take in a beheading before he left?
  
• Why do neocons and mainstream media keep pushing war and conflict? They face zero risk. This is something new in history. Those who decide on interventionism overseas are never harmed by the interventions. Plus...are we headed for a market crash that makes 2008 look like a picnic? And if so, what will the aftermath look like?
  
• Murray Rothbard once said it is no crime to be ignorant of economics. Likewise, it is no crime to be ignorant of the workings of the internet. But (if I may take some liberty with his quote) it is entirely irresponsible to voice an opinion on Net Neutrality, while remaining in this state of ignorance.
  
• Firefighting isn't what it used to be. Thanks to fire suppression technology, structural fires are now very rare, and statistics show that firefighters rarely fight fires anymore. Mostly, firefighters respond to run-of-the-mill medical emergencies in fancy million-dollar trucks. Governing magazine lays out the change over time:   In 1980, according to the National Fire Protection Association, the nation's 30,000 fire departments responded to 10.8 million emergency calls. About 3 million were classified as fires. By 2013, total calls had nearly tripled to 31.6 million, while fire calls had plummeted to 1.24 million, of which just 500,000 of were actual structure fires. For America's 1.14 million career and volunteer firefighters, that works out to an average of just one structure fire every other year.
  
• There are two things for which there is a good deal of certainty. The first is that the American people support repealing marijuana prohibition, both for recreational use as well as medical uses. A growing number of Americans support reforming prohibition of harder drugs as well. Given demographic factors the percentage of Americans supporting such reforms will continue to grow in the future.  The second thing that is quite certain is that state legislatures will be necessary to ensure that marijuana legalization goes nationwide. This is because many states do not have voter sponsored ballot initiatives and most of the ones that do have already voted. Otherwise we would need federal action to repeal marijuana prohibition or a federal judicial decision that would uproot marijuana prohibition.
  
• Torrealba is a Venezuelan army general who was featured in a leaked audio recording that was just published yesterday.  The recording is of a meeting that took place a few weeks ago in Venezuela in which he and his fellow generals discuss how to keep the civilian population under control.  Torrealba’s solution? Use snipers against his own people.  “There will come a time when we will have to employ them [the snipers] and I want us to be ready for the moment that we have to employ them because the president will not remain at a green [preparation] phase, gentlemen.”
  
• The federal communications commission voted 2-1 to start a process of undoing internet rules, commonly known as net neutrality, promulgated by the Obama-era FCC.
  
• Free markets work if you'd let them:  Family homeless nonprofit forced to choose between government funding and drug-free policy.  Watch the video to learn more about Solutions for Change and why it chose to keep the drug-free policy instead of accepting taxpayer dollars.
  
• The government often pays debt collectors nearly 40 times what they bring in, federal records show. Take the government's rehabilitation program, which targets people who have defaulted on their debt—meaning they missed nine months of payments. If a borrower subsequently makes nine on-time monthly payments of as little as $5 during a 10-month period, their loans are returned to good standing and the default is supposed to be wiped from their credit reports 1 . But the CFPB found that more than 40 percent of these borrowers defaulted again within three years.

Week of 05/21/17

• The Drug War: Will #45's administration OD on authoritarianism?  All signs point to, 'yes.'  Last week Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors in drug cases to seek the maximum penalty authorized by federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Sessions’ order represents a setback to the progress made toward restoring compassion and common sense to the sentencing process over the past few years. Sessions’ action also guarantees that many nonviolent drug law offenders will continue spending more time in prison than murderers.  This is because he has zero grasp of free markets, and believes that he, like all politicians, has a higher claim to the life, liberty, and property of others.
  
• At its core the United States still has $20 trillion in public debt (over 100% of GDP) and an additional $46.7 trillion in net, unfunded future social obligations (like Social Security and Medicare). Plus, the government spends an appalling amount of money, far more than they collect in tax revenue. (In 2016 their total net loss exceeded an incredible $1 TRILLION.) Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers summed it up when he quipped, “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”  The answer is– no one knows. Maybe months. Maybe decades.  Either way, this trend is one of the biggest stories of our time. And though few people want to acknowledge it, it’s already happening.  We now regularly witness government shutdowns, debt ceiling crises, and gross government incompetence. But this is just the beginning.  The national debt is growing far faster than the economy as a whole. And, especially if interest rates continue to rise, the trend will accelerate. It’s simple arithmetic.  So while it seems impossible now, the Greatest Country on Earth will some day have its final show as well. That doesn’t mean the US simply disappears. But it’s foolish to assume that the insolvency of the world’s largest superpower will forever be consequence-free.
  
• This review of Frank D. Graham’s book, Exchange, Prices and Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany 1920–23 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1930) was published in Economica (May 1932).
  All the misfortunes from which Europe has suffered in the last two decades have been the inevitable result of the application of the theories which have dominated the social and economic philosophy of the last fifty years. Our troubles are the upshot of much laborious thought. The German inflation, above all, was the outcome of the monetary and banking theory which for many years had obsessed the men who occupied the chairs of economics at the Universities, the men who governed the financial policy of the Reich, and the editors of the most influential newspaper and periodicals.
  
• Jeff Deist has excellent advice for us: listen to dead economists. He explains how economics has lost its way by trying to emulate the physical sciences and their empirical method. He cites Menger, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard as primary resources for those interested in understanding economics as a “theoretical science.” According to Austrian economists, economic theory is constructed through deduction and not experimentation or mathematical modeling.
  
• WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will not quit releasing pertinent information, even after Sweden announced it’s dropping the rape allegations against him.
  
• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani won a second term in office on Friday, securing about 57 percent of the votes cast in Iran’s carefully vetted and stage-managed presidential election.
  
• The Dallas County Elections Department knew it had a major problem on its hands when residents started went to their mailboxes and noticed they had received “mail-in ballots” they never requested. Dr. Pat Stephens had that very thing happen to her. Then, a few days, later, she had an unwanted visitor. "I got a knock on my door and the guy was saying that he was coming to pick up the mail-in ballots and I told him, 'Well I didn’t order one.'”  So far, over 700 "mail-in-ballots" are linked to applications assisted by a person called "Jose Rodriguez” that have been deemed “suspicious.” Who is this mysterious man? That’s been one of the biggest enigmas in Texas. Until now.
  
• The clowns, animal acts and acrobats of the storied Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus are taking their final bow at an arena outside New York City on Sunday in the farewell performance of the "Greatest Show on Earth" after nearly 150 years.  It wasn't the animal rights group - it was the market.  This is what happens when people get tired of something, they get rid of it.  They do better. 
  
• Chinese government “systematically dismantled” CIA spying operations in China starting in late 2010 and killed or imprisoned at least a dozen CIA sources over the next two years, The New York Times has reported.
  The newspaper cited 10 current and former US officials, who described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades...
  
• Alabama's new "midwife decriminalization bill' actually does the opposite: criminalizes midwives.
  
• "America's Rabbi" compares Assad to Hitler, wants to bomb to stop killing.  Because... he doesn't understand that bombs kill, and has zero concept of US foreign policy..  Is this real life? 
  
• FedRes Williams says gold is irrelevant in the monetary system.
  
• 'I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one,' Nicolas Maduro said.  Don't worry, the way things are snowballing here, we'll have a system just as great in no time.
  
• Fascinating to hear the speech patterns of a southern man from the 1800s. Great clarity for a 101 year old. 
  
• Pennsylvania’s state government is reeling from a scandal involving the exchange of sexually explicit images and other offensive material among judges, prosecutors and other top state officials.
  
• For most economists and financial commentators, the heart of economic growth is the increase in the demand for goods and services. The view is that increases or decreases in demand are behind rises and declines in the economy’s production of goods and services. It is also held that the economy’s total output increases by a multiple of the change in expenditure by government, consumers, or businesses.
  
• During the 2016 presidential election, Bernie Sanders refused to answer questions about Venezuela during an interview with Univision. He claimed to not want to talk about it because he's "focused on my campaign." Many suggested a more plausible reason: Venezuela's present economy is an example of what happens when a state implements Bernie Sanders-style social democracy. 
  
• The CMD’s latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit reveals that total household debt achieved a new peak in the first quarter of 2017, rising by $149 billion to $12.73 trillion — $50 billion above the previous peak reached in the third quarter of 2008. Balances climbed in several areas: mortgages, 1.7 percent; auto loans, 0.9 percent; and student loans, 2.6 percent. Credit card balances fell 1.9 percent this quarter.
  
• [A]n economist who cares about the details of policy implementation will need to pay attention to many details and complications, some of which may appear to be far below their pay grade (e.g. the font size on posters) or far beyond their competence level (e.g. the intricacy of government budgeting in a federal system). It will sometimes appear that the extensive training they received is underused if . . . the theoretical complexities turn out to be second order. On the other hand, they will have a chance to apply their economist’s mind, since many of the details have implications for issues that are an economist’s bread and butter: incentives, information, imperfect rationality, etc. They will also need to be very observant, and keep a close eye on the impact of any change they recommend.
  

Week of 05/14/17

• Ransomware attacks hitting everywhere - except for people with money.  Weird, right?
  
• The US State Department has approved a $2 billion sale of missiles to the United Arab Emirates. The Pentagon says the sale will “contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the US” and won’t alter the “basic military balance in the region.”
  
• It is no accident that the proposal to treat men and women as radically equal, to regulate sexual intercourse by the State, to put infants into public nursing homes at birth and to ensure that children and parents remain quite unknown to each other should have originated with Plato," who cared nothing for freedom.  Neither is it an accident that the same proposals these days are pushed by people who have little to no regard for family or economic law.
• Freedom Is Obvious: Freedom and the Meaner.
  
• Several large regimes have hinted they'll be looking more favorably on bitcoin, leading to record prices for the digital currency.   What do they want?
  
• Is it time to become your own banker?
  
• Yesterday's sudden termination of FBI Director James Comey sent shock waves worldwide. The wildest conspiracy theories were served up in the mainstream media. What no one discusses, however, is that the problem is with the system, not with who happens to run it. Do we really need a national police force?
  
• Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester warned against "moving too slow" on interest rake hikes, implicating that she would prefer that the Fed hike faster than the Fed's current "gradual" approach. Mester is not a voting member, and one of her statements was particularly interesting. She said that if the delay in rate hikes was too long, recession could loom. This is not Keynesian orthodoxy, which teaches inflation and recession are mutually exclusive. This is why, for the Keynesians, inflation is always and everywhere the remedy for recession. It is odd to hear a Fed President argue for rate hikes on the basis that not raising them will lead to recession.
  
• #45’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday was requested by  Vladimir Putin, according to a report.
  
• “If you don’t like it, leave!”  In other news…  a man was sentenced to 4 years in prison for trying to leave the US with cash.
  
• U.S. defense officials said a long-range Patriot missile battery may be deployed to the Baltic region later this year as part of a military exercise.
  
• For Liberty - Re-cut
  
• The U.S. is on year 16 of its war in Afghanistan. There are American troops in Afghanistan that were just 2 years old when this misguided war began.  Not only does the Taliban control most of the country, but another deadly side-effect (no pun intended) has come from this disastrous war: opiate addiction.
  
• For years the company has assured farmers that their weed killing product was absolutely safe to use. As proof, Monsanto touted the approval of the chemical by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  That said, newly unsealed court documents released earlier today seemingly reveal a startling effort on the part of both Monsanto and the EPA to work in concert to kill and/or discredit independent, albeit inconvenient, cancer research conducted by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer.
  
• The late Murray Rothbard thought war and peace was the most important libertarian issue. He argued that war was justified only in response to a direct attack. Interventions abroad to advance supposed American interests or values serve only to advance the power of the Leviathan State and ought to be entirely rejected. By this measure, US foreign policy in the 20th and early 21st centuries has been a disaster. Interventionism, nation building, and wars of choice have caused enormous damage and increased the State's power, just as Rothbard foresaw.
  
• An emergency has been declared at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern Washington after a portion of a tunnel that contained rail cars full of nuclear waste collapsed.
  
• How government meddling and regulations made healthcare so expensive.How government meddling and regulations made healthcare so expensive.
  
• Peoples Bank of China adds no gold to reserves in April.  Total reported PBOC gold reserves stand at 1842.6 tons – same as October 2016.
  
• Meet the old boss, same as the old boss. 5000 troops slated for new Afghan surge.
  
• So let me return, in conclusion, to what I said in the beginning: that the fundamental attitude of true individualism is one of humility toward the processes by which mankind has achieved things which have not been designed or understood by any individual and are indeed greater than individual minds. The great question at this moment is whether man’s mind will be allowed to continue to grow as part of this process or whether human reason is to place itself in chains of its own making. What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”
  
• Any state, no matter how powerful, cannot not rule solely through the use of brute force. There are too few rulers and too many of us for coercion alone to be an effective means of control. The political class must rely on ideology to achieve popular compliance, masking the iron fist in a velvet glove. Violence is always behind every state action, but the most efficient form of expropriation occurs when the public believes it is in their interest to be extorted.
  
• The pope’s favorite straw man: “individualism.”
  
• Social “justice,” and mediocre intellectuals…
  
• The “terrorists,” which are created due to blowback from terrible US foreign policy, the very same that your government arms, funds, and trains… and then fights, are being bombed so heavily, that “we are running out of bombs,” per US admiral Harry Harris.
  
• Just when I think I’ve heard it all…. Here comes “pee privilege.”
  
• John McAfee announces privacy locked-down cell phone:  Do you think that when you power down your phone, that it’s actually powered down?” McAfee asked the Anti-Media audience Thursday. “I would say that 25 percent of you, everybody who’s listening, have malware that intercepts the software function that calls the power down. They intercept it, make the screen go blank, turn off the lights, and you think your phone is powered down. But it’s not. It’s still alive, it’s listening to you, transmitting information.”
  
• Retired lawyer Marvin Siegel of Boxford, Massachusetts, has lived an isolated and heavily-medicated existence, against his will and wishes, after court proceedings in August in 2011 resulted in his being placed under a court-appointed guardianship and conservatorship that his family considers to be unlawful. His meticulous estate planning has been eviscerated, and millions of dollars continue to be plundered from the 88-year-old’s estate.
  He is being held prisoner in his own home, under medical providers that his daughter has termed "24/7 guards." Meanwhile, his daughters Attorney Lisa Siegel Belanger and Devora Kaiser tirelessly advocate for him in the court system, despite those who are working vigorously to shut them out of their father’s life.
  
• Sent to prison by a software program’s secret algorithms.
  
• Nathan Cox  was pulled over by Virginia State Trooper Melanie McKenney in 2012. Nathan — founder of Virginia Cop Block — filmed the stop, filed a FOIA request, and put it all online. Two years later, Nathan received a summons to appear in court — McKenney claimed he had engaged in “defamation.” That suit — for $5,000 — was dismissed.  McKenney then filed a second suit — for $1.35 million. After almost three years of court proceedings, that second suit was tossed as well, but Nathan is now left with about $94,000 in legal fees. If you would like to help with Nate's legal fees:
  

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•  WikiLeaks busts NPR spreading fake news, destroys them on Twitter.
  
• The Library of Congress has one of the largest early porn collections.
  
• Seattle mayor proposes soda tax to “fight white privilege:” Diet drinks, Hizzoner reasoned, were more likely to be consumed by "upper middle class white people." It had become for him "an issue of equity," a way to tackle "white privileged institutionalized racism."
  
• Ever since the U.S. government began to sink its claws into the medical industry a good 50 or so years ago, attempts at reducing costs have failed again and again. This is par for the course whenever government invades an industry.
  
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not suffer fools gladly. Author of several books including The Black Swan and Antifragile, Taleb is known for his incendiary personality almost as much as his brilliant work in probability theory. Readers of his very active Medium page will experience a formidable mind with no patience for trendy groupthink, a mind that takes special pleasure in lambasting elites with no “skin in the game.”
  
• WikiLeaks, itinerant publisher of leaked information of the stripe governments would rather remain hidden, has endured a horrendously negative propaganda campaign from U.S. officials from both sides of the aisle after voluminous caches of documents exposed flagrant, pompous misbehavior at every level.
  
• In a stunning display of disregard for Constitutional protections relating to inmates, federal corrections officers at CCA Nevada Southern Detention Center reportedly stripped Ammon Bundy naked before handcuffing, beating and throwing him in solitary confinement with two dislocated shoulders.
  
• #45 is about to embark on his first foreign trip, where he will stop in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican, before attending a NATO meeting in Brussels and the G-7 summit in Sicily. The media and pundits have loudly wondered why hasn’t he gone on a foreign trip sooner. I wonder why go at all?  What does #45 hope to achieve with these meetings? He who came into office with promises that we would finally start to mind our own business overseas. In December, he said that the policy of US “intervention and chaos” overseas must come to an end. Instead, he is jumping into a region – the Middle East – that has consumed the presidencies of numerous of his predecessors.
  
• North Korea announced that it detained a fourth American citizen over unspecified hostile acts against the country and amid worsening tensions with the U.S.  Pro tip: Don’t go to North Korea. If you leave North Korea, don’t go back to North Korea. 
  
• After New Jersey state troopers arrested Rebecca Musarra for remaining silent, they informed her, "You have the right to remain silent." That should have been a clue that something was amiss with their legal justification for hauling her off to jail.
  
• A new program the Idaho Department of Education is calling “Advanced Opportunities” is being hailed as a “revolutionary” and “free-market” approach to improve student outcomes, it’s just another form of government control.
  
• The U.S. military's experimental X-37B space plane landed on Sunday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years, the Air Force said.
  
• The author is Richard Rothstein, and the subtitle of this excellent and important book is the apt A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  The upshot is that twentieth century segregation had a lot more to do with government restrictions — and not just government toleration — than many of us had thought.  Here is one bit of many: Calling itself the Peninsula Housing Association of Palo Alto, the co-op purchased a 260-ranch adjacent to the Stanford campus and planned to build 400 houses as well as shared recreational facilities, a shopping area, a gas station, and a restaurant on commonly owned land.  But bank would not finance construction costs nor issue mortgages to the co-op or its members without government approval, and the FHA would not insure loans to a cooperative that included African American members.  The cooperative’s board of directors, which included [Wallace] Stegner, recommended against complying with the demand that the cooperative reconstitute itself as an all-white organization, but the membership, attempting to appease the government, voted…to compromise.
  
• One of the Gulf of Mexico’s most iconic fish has also become one of its most politicized, the red snapper. For years now the prized catch has been part of a heated battle between federal regulators, the commercial fishing industry, and charter and recreational fishermen. The result has been fishing seasons consistently shrinking, even as snapper populations grow. On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced its shortest season yet: just three days.  Why so short? Because the NOAA is punishing fisherman for catching more fish than they expected during last year’s 9-day season.
  
• Want to know how government outlaws affordable housing? 
  
• Virtually unnoticed by the majority of corporate media, on Wednesday — in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the FBI’s oversight of an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails — Director James Comey revealed a murky effort as outlined in an undisclosed document by Attorney General Loretta Lynch or her associates to ensure the former presidential candidate would not be charged.
  
• Navy seal killed near Mogadishu – what the hell are we doing there? 
  
• Federal investigators are conducting interviews in Florida regarding accusations Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wife, Jane Sanders, defrauded a bank while serving as president of the now-defunct Burlington College.
  
• There are approximately 55,504,000 Americans on Medicare, which covers the elderly. But there is also an additional 74,506,000 Americans on Medicaid or CHIP. About 11 million of those are dual-enrolled, which means they're on both Medicare and Medicaid. If we pull the 11 million out of the Medicaid count to avoid double counting, we find that there is a total of 119 million Americans on government programs — or about one-third.
  

Week of 05/07/17

• When a high EPA muckety-muck concedes there is a problem with a regulatory fatwa, it is a sure sign there’s a big problem.  There is nothing wrong with the idea of renewable or alternative fuels. That’s not what’s at issue here. The issue is using a good idea to camouflage and justify a rent-seeking rip-off, another crony capitalist con.
  
• In addition to voting for Obamacare Lite Amash also voted to sanction North Korea today.
  
• Several African countries have tried in the past to become tailors and cloth-makers to the world. Nigeria’s northern cities of Kaduna and Kano were once home to textile mills that employed 350,000 people. Yet these factories are now rusting, and employ perhaps a tenth of that number.  This mirrors a wider trend. In 1990 African countries accounted for about 9% of the developing world’s manufacturing output. By 2014 that share had slumped to 4%.
  
• Where once #45 disavowed nation-building and argued “the approach of fighting Assad and [the Islamic State] simultaneously was madness, and idiocy,” now he seems to be teetering on the brink of a regime change project of grand proportions."Same as it ever was, same as it ever was..."
  
• republican socialism > democrat socialism: #Trumpcare, aka you do not own yourself.  Surely you are not surprised that republicans fully support socialism, government-run health care, despite the collapse of the entire system, despite .
  
• Something big happened in the gold market to cause silver hoarding.  The US Mint reacted by 'clipping coins,' and turning on the printing press.  The gold silver ratio of 15-1 set under the bi-metallic standard failed.  Bad money drives out good money.
  
• Pelosi: New socialist healthcare repeal bill is a very "sad, deadly joke," because democratic socialism > republican socialism.
  
• More sin taxes...
  
• North Korea on Friday accused the U.S. and South Korean spy agencies of an unsuccessful assassination attempt.
  
• Ron Paul says pre-emptive war is a pandor's box.  "We have to fight them over there, so we won't have to fight them here."  Was it George W. Bush?  Nope, the statement goes all the way back to Truman.
  
• The great historian of classical liberalism strips away the veneer of exalted leaders and beloved wars. Professor Ralph Raico shows them to be wolves in sheep's clothing and their wars as attacks on human liberty and human rights.  In the backdrop of this blistering and deeply insightful and scholarly history is the whitewashing of "great leaders" like Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, FDR, Truman, Stalin, Trotsky, and other collectivists. They are highly regarded because they were on the "right side" of the rise of the state. But do they deserve adulation? Raico says no: these great leaders were main agents in the decline of civilization in the 20th century, all of them anti-liberals who used their power to celebrate and enhance state power.
  
• Dr. Ron Paul, who served 12 terms in the US Congress and became famous when he ran on a libertarian platform for the republican presidential nomination in 2008, has been on a rampage this spring, excoriating both #45 and the republican-held Congress on one issue after another.
  
• Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS), under fire for its skyrocketing rate of child removals in recent years, was just exposed for a new policy which allowed social workers to secretly record interviews with parents or caregivers suspected of crimes using a controversial and questionable technology meant to detect lying.
  
• More on Arizona DCS: Arizona allegedly medically kidnapped Smith’s daughter while sick in the hospital because she wanted a second medical opinion from a hospital in another state with more experience. They refused to return her daughter and when she fought back, the state took her younger daughter Jameelah in retaliation, changed her name and she was then allegedly abused while in state custody.  Most horrifying of all, Jameelah now seems to have vanished. Heartbroken, Leanna continues to look for her.
  
• Footage of the US military's new toy, a helicopter that'll cost as much as an F-35.  Highlights: It carries 27,000# over 110 miles, has 3 external cargo hooks, a 12' wider cabin, a glass cockpit, and eight extra cup holders. With the new dear, fearless leader in office, we need more monies, for more toys, for more aggressive "nation building," and to "spread democracy."
  
• Justin Burr introduced a bill, NC330, that “provides that a person driving an automobile while exercising due care is immune for civil liability for any injury to another if the injured person was participating in a demonstration or protest and blocking traffic.”   This is all really common sense, like most issues facing people.: Do not play in traffic.
  
• Due to the inability of the people in Alabama to adult, and the wish to force their will upon others, the special election for Alabama's senate seat, local theocrat, Judge Roy Moore, is the "clear front-runner." 
  
• This is an interesting video discussing the implication of the IRS being able to decide whether or not you get to keep your own income, and how much you must give.  P.S.  Taxation is theft.
  
• New York City stole $993 million (fines) in 2016, driven by a spike in quality of life violations. The fines show a 22 percent increase in revenue since 2013, according to the city comptroller.  Total fines collected in fiscal year 2016 jumped to $993 million, a 3.7 percent rise on $957 million collected the year before, and the third record in a row.  City officials handed out nearly 700,000 “quality of life” fines in 2016, for a total of $184 million in fines, representing a growth of 51 percent since 2013, according to data released Wednesday.
  
• Dr. Hoppe's book The Economics and Ethics of Private Property is among the most important modern contributions to libertarian thought. Hoppe, like Rothbard, connects laissez-faire economics to normative libertarian theory with laserlike precision and inexorable logic. Property isn't just a social construct determined by legislative fiat, but rather a necessary component of self-ownership and the foundation of a free society. Hoppe details many of the arguments made in the book during a talk entitled "A World Without Theft", delivered at a Mises Institute event in 2006. This is a fantastic talk you won't want to miss.
  
• William Baumol, former professor of economics at Princeton and NYU, has passed away at the age of 95. Throughout his long career he contributed to many fields in economics, and he leaves behind an influential body of research on numerous topics relating to innovation and economic growth. He will mostly likely be remembered by Austrians, however, for his repeated calls to economists for more research on the role of the entrepreneur—calls that, sadly, have gone mostly unanswered.Baumol was not an Austrian as such, but he did make a number of contributions to economics that Austrians take seriously, especially in the field of entrepreneurship. In particular, his 1990 paper, “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive” is commonly cited in Austrian circles, and remains one of the most influential contributions to the field of economics and institutions. In it, Baumol provides a concise explanation of how institutions channel entrepreneurial talent in society. As he explains, for many centuries and in many different countries, poor institutions, especially in government, rewarded “unproductive” entrepreneurship in areas like politics while penalizing “productive” entrepreneurship in service to consumers. As a result, innovation and growth were uncommon and standards of living were low for most of human history.
  
• Venezuela’s current economic catastrophe is well documented. Conventional narratives point to Hugo Chávez’s regime as the primary architect behind Venezuela’s economic tragedy. While Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro deserve the brunt of the blame for Venezuela’s current economic calamity, the underlying flaws of Venezuela’s political economy point to much more systemic problems.  Observers must look beyond stage one, and understand Venezuela’s overall history over the past 50 years in order to get a more thorough understanding of how the country has currently fallen to such lows.
  
• A grandmother with terminal cancer is in the Sedgwick County Jail because of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in her system while she was driving.  But the THC was in her system because it is in a medication her pharmacist says she needs in order to eat while on chemotherapy.  Angela Kastner has colorectal cancer. KAKE News spoke with her Tuesday night, right before she reported to jail for a 48-hour sentence. She's in jail as a result of a DUI, although she had nothing to drink.
  
• Delta kicks family off plane, threatens foster care for kids.
  
• A passenger going through security at Kansas City International Airport (MCI) recently was asked by security officers to remove all paper products from his bag. Everything from books to Post-It Notes, documents and more. Once the paper products were removed, the passenger had to put them in a separate bin to be scanned separately.
  
• By reading this link, you are now in a tiny elite of people who know anything about the greatest death camp in the history of the world that China became between 1949 and 1976, an experiment in total control unlike anything else in history.  Don't tell me that we've learned anything from history. We don't even know enough about history to learn from it.
  
• #45 deployed high-altitude surveillance drones over North Korea earlier this week.
  
• Tyrants, sans 103 republicans voting no, passed a $11.1 TRILLION spending package to keep mass scale theft, violence, and oppression rolling through September. 
  
• FedRes will likely chicken out on planned rate hikes.
  
• Mike Lee questioning Comey on domestic spying.
  
• Ask Ron Paul: NAFTA, Obamacare, Taxes, State Rights, And More...
  
• Richard Dreyfus talks checks and balances.
  
• Thanks to the continuing role of government in housing production, attempting to meet the needs of renters and buyers continues to be an exhausting quest to deal with an endless assortment of ordinances, mandates, regulations, and plans. The current planners don't want more housing. The government planners only want a certain type of housing. Meanwhile, the renters live in smaller and smaller units, and drive further and further.  
  But there's one thing of which we can be sure. "Capitalism" will be blamed for it all. 
  
• Evidently laughing at dear, fearless leader’s toadie, Jeff Sessions, is a crime.  #praiseGOV
  
• At 2:00 pm Eastern, the FOMC made their policy announcement as their meeting came to an end. As expected the Fed did not raise the Federal Funds rate target at this May meeting. 
  
• One thieving, violent, oppressive, murderous tyrant invites another to visit: "My order is shoot to kill you," Duterte told drug dealers last August. "I don't care about human rights, you better believe me."  #45's reaction to all this, according to the official summary of his call to Duterte, was to praise his Philippine counterpart for "fighting very hard to rid [his] country of drugs, a scourge that affects many countries throughout the world." He then invited murderer Duterte, who according to HRW could be "held liable for crimes against humanity," to visit him at the White House.  *insert Two For Tea*
  
• Comey: Live Senate Testimony.
  
• Ron Paul: Fed actions will soon cause a long-overdue correction.
  
• Just when we thought the enemy of the week was going to be North Korea again. Or maybe Russia. Or Syria. It turns out that Washington’s enemy of this week is…Iran! The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is pushing through a bill slapping additional sanctions on Tehran. While just a couple of weeks ago Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reported to Congress that Iran is meeting its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal, #45 accused Tehran of not abiding by the “spirit” of the treaty. Whatever that is.
  
• For years, excess military equipment has trickled down to state and local agencies. For police departments nationwide, this influx doesn’t stop with armored vehicles, weapons of war, body armor, and camouflage fatigues. More obscure surveillance technologies, once exclusive to federal entities, are now operating freely in many cities. The most intrusive of these devices collect swaths of data–particularly from cell phones–unbeknownst to the target.  Now cities are pushing to regulate and spotlight unchecked police surveillanec.  We'll see.
  
• Stephen Colbert made a funny joke about dear leader.  He is in trouble now.
  
• Jimmy Kimmel does not understand free markets.
  
• And in other news: Bill Nye spends most of his new Netflix show yelling at the audience.
  
• Seven jaw-dropping revelations from hearings on the motion to dismiss the DNC fraud lawsuit.
  
• The root of the current crisis is neither political nor economic but philosophical.  Too many have bought into the lie that government can protect us from life’s misfortunes and stamp out evil around the world without endangering our liberty, our safety, and our prosperity.  Convincing a critical mass of people to reject big government is key to our success.
  
• What would have happened had there been no Iraq War in 2003 and Saddam Hussein had stayed in power? Where would we be today?
  
• California gun owners have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s ban on so-called “large capacity” magazines.
  
• Given how market prices are set, it doesn't follow that rising oil prices lead to general increases in prices. It is more likely that the core driver of general increases in prices of goods and services is money supply (AMS) growth that in turn is driven by central and commercial bank money creation, not the price of oil.
  
• Mattis’ Syria chemical claim smacks of politicized intelligence.
  
• Sad day: Hours before the federal government’s spending authority expired Friday at midnight, the Senate advanced a one-week continuing resolution by voice vote, putting spending on autopilot and avoiding a looming government shutdown.
  
• The US, feeling pressure of encroaching North Korean vessels, has now threatened to make a ghost ship of a North Korean submarine. I mean, we’re the US. No one can just send submarines or planes or anything else to our shores. No one can set up bases in/around our country and make rules about what we can and cannot do. This is America for crying out loud! Oops. I typed that wrong. North Korea, feeling pressure of encroaching American and allied vessels, has now threatened to make a ghost ship of a U.S. nuclear submarine. They are nuts. America does what it wants, when it wants, and other countries had better just get used to it, and accept our greatness, superiority, and rules.
  
• Ron Paul debates former CIA officer on North Korea.
  
• The first freight train to link China directly to the UK arrived in the eastern Chinese city of Yiwu Saturday after covering over 12,000-kilometres (7,500 miles), making it the second-longest route in the world.
  The journey is the latest effort in China's drive to strengthen trade links with western Europe along a modern-day "Silk Road" route.
  
• Gold silver ratio climbs over 7% in April.
  
• China’s plan to subvert the global dollar standard.
  

Week of 04/30/17

• A 19-year-old man has been charged in connection with a shooting that injured two Detroit police officers last weekend. The charges stem from an April 16 shooting in which the young man accidentally shot two police officers who he thought were burglars.  Detroit Police said the teen has shown extreme remorse since the incident happened. Plummer’s father, Vincent Redd, told local station Fox 2 News that his son was still shaken up from an attempted burglary at the house the week before and was only trying to look out for his family.  "He was just the man of the house trying to do the right thing, concerned, worried about his mother and his brother,” Redd said. “He wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. He just wanted to scare him off.”  Plummer appeared back in court on Wednesday, April 25.
  
• #45: "This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier."
  
• #45 proclaimed May 1 as 'Loyalty Day' as a way to "recognize and reaffirm our allegiance to the principles" upon which America was built and express pride in those ideals, according to a release of the proclamation from the White House.   Says the tyrant elected by the mob to head the state that commits mass scale theft, violence, and oppression everywhere, every day.  Another day to blindly worship the state.  Praise GOV.
  
• Alabama police flood capitol, beg lawmakers to keep their unconstitutional slush funds intact.
  
• The most absurd example of progressive pathology during #44's reign was arguably the legal assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor, being continued by #45.
  
• Philippine nut job murderer Rodrigo Duterte urges US nut job #45 to use restraint with nut job in North Korea. 
  
• The pope thinks having the highest claim to your own life, liberty, and property is a bad thing.  Condemns the idea of self-ownership and personal accountability.
  
• Hello, Novartis. The pharmaceutical giant has just been fined $50 million by the government of South Korea for bribing doctors to prescribe the company’s drugs.  And if you believe Novartis is the only one, I got some oceanfront property in Arizona you might be interested in.
  
• “Hey, I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” #45 said. “I’m both. And I’m the only one who makes the decision, believe me.”
  
• The march for science attacks free thought.
  
• Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai on Wednesday revealed his plans for rolling back net neutrality, one of the most controversial items up for consideration at the agency.
  
• Wikileaks Founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange joins the Liberty Report to discuss the latest push by the #45 Administration to bring charges against him and his organization for publishing US Government documents. How will they get around the First Amendment and the Espionage Act? The US government and the mainstream media -- some of which gladly publish Wikileaks documents -- are pushing to demonize Assange in the court of public opinion.  Find out more about the organization and how you can help here.
  
• Central banks’ obsession with price stability leads to economic instability.
  
• "NSA will no longer collect certain internet communications that merely mention a foreign intelligence target," the agency said in a statement. "Instead, NSA will limit such collection to internet communications that are sent directly to or from a foreign target."  NSA also said it would delete the "vast majority" of internet data collected under the surveillance program "to further protect the privacy of U.S. person communications."  I'm sure...
  
• Prosecutors in Florida say a former congresswoman took money from a charitable foundation for poor children and instead used it to pay for concert tickets and Beverly Hills shopping sprees.
  
• James McGill Buchanan is the founder of the New Political Economy called Public Choice. He had devoted his 40-year career to applying the economic tools of methodological individualism and subjectivism to the study of government and political decision making. He has made important and pioneering contributions in the areas of Constitutional Economics, public deficits and debt, the subjective nature of cost, public resource allocation and political theory. In recognition of his many contributions he was awarded the 1986 Alfred Nobel Prize in Economic Science. 
  
• There's a new Torcoin. This is tied in directly with the tor network to make transactions more anonymous.
  
• The Fed has been saying that since the economy was so grand (supported of course by consumer spending — oops), it was time to up the monetary "tightening" efforts. In ad
  
• dition to fed funds rate increases, they are anticipating adjustments to the balance sheet. But this was all dependent on a cooperative economy, which now looks like it's not doing so hot. Which may, to the the dismay of politicians, Wall Street gamblers, and central bankers everywhere, "require" them to keep the monetary juices flowing.
  
• Stand-up comic and libertarian activist Dave Smith joins the Liberty Report in-studio to explain how he uses humor to get the freedom message across. The message of liberty transcends political party affiliations, he points out, when wrapped in humor during his performances.
  
• #throwbackThursday:  John Rappoport on defeating the  new world order.
  
• Richard Nixon, in his effort to silence black people and antiwar activists, brought the War on Drugs into full force in 1973. He then signed Reorganization Plan No. 2, which established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Over the course of five decades, this senseless war has waged on. At a cost of over $1 trillion — ruining and ending countless lives in the process — America’s drug war has created a drug problem that is worse now than ever before.  This is no coincidence.  For years, those of us who’ve been paying attention have seen who profits from this inhumane war — the police state and cartels.  This horrendously corrupt and violent drug war has gotten so bad, that it is getting pushed into the mainstream. In an extremely rare move, A&E Networks, a subsidiary of ABC and the Walt Disney Company, will be addressing the government’s role in the drug war in a four-part documentary series on the History Channel, titled, “America’s War on Drugs.”
  
• April 27 marks the birthday of Herbert Spencer, which is worth noting in several respects. He was a polymath who made important contributions in many areas, including political theory and philosophy. He achieved greater widespread popularity than any other English philosopher, and is thought to be the only philosopher to sell over a million books in his lifetime. In the famous Supreme Court case of Lochner vs. New York, the majority opinion and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissenting opinion both related to him.  More important to me, as someone who desires as broad a canvas for freedom as possible for society, were those he influenced. One was Albert Jay Nock, who, in the Introduction to The Man Versus The State, wrote, "Spencer maintained that the State’s interventions upon the individual should be confined to punishing those crimes against person or property…Beyond this the State should not go. All that the State can do for the best interest of society…is by way of these purely negative interventions upon the Citizen."
  
• Continued big government boondoggles, new big government boondoggles.  Here’s the new boss, same as the old boss.  Y’all were fooled again.
  
• Eminent domain, folks.
  
• Let me guess, because it’s not your property, it doesn’t matter…   amirite?
  
• A fight is raging across Arizona – parents, foster parents, activists, lawyers and even the Arizona Republic are refusing to back down against the state’s apathetic resistance to real, meaningful solutions for its outrageous record as the top state in the nation for child removals.
  
• April 26 marks the anniversary of the notorious Chernobyl Disaster.  On this day, 31 years ago a catastrophic nuclear accident happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, turning the once lively city of Pripyat in the then-Ukrainian Soviet republic into an eerie ghost town.  The Chernobyl accident released 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in World War II.  Contamination from the Chernobyl accident was scattered across 100,000 square kilometers of land, with the worst-hit regions being in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
  
• The so-called war on drugs—actually a war on certain people associated in various ways with certain drugs — has served since the Nixon administration as a major profit center for governments at every level. Owing to the ostensible efforts to suppress the possession, use, and commerce in these drugs, governments have been able to justify great increases in their staffs, budgets, and power. Of all the interest groups that have devoted themselves to propping up this social, economic, and political catastrophe, the government itself stands prominently above the others, especially the police, the prosecutors, the prison guards, and the unions that represent the police and the prison personnel.
  
• Turkish forces attacked US-backed Kurdish forces fighting in Syria and Iraq this week. Dozens of fighters -- who are fighting against ISIS -- were killed. Turkey is our NATO ally. Does the US have a coherent strategy -- or even any idea what it's doing -- in the Middle East?
  
• A bill has been introduced to Florida’s state legislature that would require electronic devices to be manufactured with a government-mandated filter pre-installed. The bill was introduced on April 7th and, if passed into law, would take effect October 2017.
  
• More than a third of Europeans and Americans would be happy to go without cash and rely on electronic forms of payment if they could, and at least 20 percent already pretty much do so, a study showed on Wednesday.
  The study, which was conducted in 13 European countries, the United States and Australia, also found that in many places where cash is most used, people are among the keenest to ditch it.
  
• In other absolutely-zero-percent-shocking news: a poll conducted a few days ago by NBC News / Wall Street Journal, a record 57% of Americans responded that they want MORE government in their lives, and that the government should be doing more to solve people’s problems.
  
• Ron Paul on new Syria sanctions and still unproven gas attack claim: #45 has yet to provide any credible evidence that the gas attack in Syria earlier this month was carried out by Assad, and in the meantime very serious questions about the veracity of White House claims are arising from very credible experts.
  
• An investigation by Washington into steel price dumping by China and other exporters to the United States could trigger retaliatory measures against American finance and high-tech, reports the China Daily.
  
• #45 signs 'Buy American Hire American' executive order, warns on NAFTA – harbinger of higher inflation.
  
• Six sites in D.C., Northern Virginia and Maryland will play host to a “full-scale” terror drill on Wednesday that will include hundreds of volunteer crisis actors, emergency medical personnel, police and fire officials.
  
• #45, just signed an executive order to“determine where the Federal Government has unlawfully overstepped state and local control.”  So... how much is this study going to cost us? 
  
• The Iron Jaws of the Police State: #45’s America Is a Constitution-Free Zone.
  
• Remember when #45 let out a massive truth that should have stopped everyone in their tracks? He said: "You know, back when they did NATO there was no such thing as terrorism."  And who has been telling you this for decades? 
  
• Since 2002, billions of U.S. tax dollars have been spent rebuilding Afghanistan after decades of war. A big chunk of that money pays Afghan soldiers and police. But it turns out a lot of those troops may not, in fact, exist. We investigate how your tax money is being wasted on “ghost soldiers.”
  
• An electronics engineer says he found a flaw in traffic lights. The Oregon engineering board fined him for it.
  
• Doctors could use “artificial wombs” to save premature babies, according to new research published by scientists with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
  
• Candidate #45: I love wikileaks.  “President” #45: Arrest Assange!
  
• As Americans were spending time scrambling to give the IRS their annual protection fee, the court system in the United Kingdom, at the behest of National Health Service bureaucrats, abducted and murdered an 8-month-old baby. This brazen abduction was done in broad daylight with full press coverage and the UK government and courts claimed loudly this was humane and the right thing to do.
  
• Greece is on the hook for a €7 billion debt repayment in July, but may not be prepared to meet the obligation. If Europe doesn't agree to come to an alternative agreement, the IMF may step in and bail them out again.
  
• This week in Congress: Will the Government Shut Down?  We can hope, but probably not.
  
• The real threats to science? Sloppiness, bias and fraud.
  
• Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom.  Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.
  
• Users of Webroot's endpoint security product, consumers and businesses alike, had a nasty surprise Monday when the program started flagging Windows files as malicious.
  
• The newly announced Echo Look is a virtual assistant with a microphone and a camera that's designed to go somewhere in your bedroom, bathroom, or wherever the hell you get dressed. Amazon is pitching it as an easy way to snap pictures of your outfits to send to your friends when you're not sure if your outfit is cute, but it's also got a built-in app called StyleCheck that is worth some further dissection. [...] "All photos and video captured with your Echo Look are securely stored in the AWS cloud and locally in the Echo Look app until a customer deletes them," a spokesperson for the company said. "You can delete the photos or videos associated with your account anytime in the Echo Look App." Motherboard also asked if Echo Look photos, videos, and the data gleaned from them would be sold to third parties; the company did not address that question.
  
• During this time period, there were 355,677 ED visits for injuries by law enforcement, and frequencies did not increase over time. Of these visits, 0.3 percent (n = 1,202) resulted in death. More than 80 percent of patients were men, and the average age of patients was 32 years. Most lived in zip codes with median household income less than the national average, and 81 percent lived in urban areas. Injuries by law enforcement were more common in the South and West and less common in the Northeast and Midwest. Most injuries by law enforcement resulted from being struck, with gunshot and stab wounds accounting for fewer than seven percent. Most injuries were minor. Medically identified substance abuse was common in patients injured by police, as was mental illness.
  
• Terrance Yeakey was under constant pressure for his refusal to go along with official versions of events during and after the OKC bombing; and because of what he saw that fateful day, he was the target of horrific persecution from his "brothers" in law enforecment.  He did not commit suicide.  Sgt. Yeakey’s body was found in a field in El Reno, OK, over a mile away from his abandoned vehicle. There was an extremely large amount of blood found in his vehicle, he had been bound, had rope burn on his neck, ligature marks on his wrists, numerous deep cuts, likely tortured and killed execution-style with a single bullet that entered his right temple at a 45-degree angle. To top it off, no gun was found at the scene of his death — until an FBI agent showed up and suspiciously found a gun in an already thoroughly searched area within 5 minutes of being there.
  
• US government asks public which deparments to axe.  Our answer?  All of them.
  
• Recognize, Resist, Report: America's history of teaching kids to identify with police.
  
• General Motors says it will immediately halt operations in Venezuela after its plant in the country was unexpectedly seized by authorities.  GM (GM) described the takeover as an "illegal judicial seizure of its assets.
  The automaker said the seizure showed a "total disregard" of its legal rights. It said that authorities had removed assets including cars from company facilities. 
  
• Is #45 gunning for yet another major war in the Middle East?  Will US allies follow Washington in new sanctions on Iran even as #45 has reluctantly admitted that Iran is living up to its end of the nuclear deal?
  
• The Associated Press reports The Dow Chemical Co. and two other pesticide makers are pushing the Trump administration to "set aside" the findings of federal scientists who say organophosphates are harmful to about 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species.
  
• Toyota unveils plans to build a fleet of heavy-duty, hydrogen-powered trucks.
  
• Sources say the US is preparing charges to seek arrest of Julian Assange. 
  
• What is the appropriate punishment for a high school student found on campus in possession of a water gun?
  The Autauga County Board of Education, which covers communities near Montgomery, Alabama, decided that a 16-year-old girl with a water gun was in violation of the board’s firearms policy. So Sara Allena “Laney” Nichols received a one-year expulsion.
  
• By certifying Tehran’s compliance in the Iran nuclear deal for at least the next 90 days, #45 is sending mixed messages about an agreement he famously called the “worst deal ever.”
  
• Merc J. Bern & Partners, LLP files lawsuits for a hundred individuals against Merck alleging shingles vaccine, Zostavax, is defective.  The assertions are wide ranging and include plaintiffs claiming to have suffered various side effects which include contracting shingles, chickenpox, high blood pressure, intense neuropathic pain, eye injuries, headaches, dizziness amongst others.
  
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an annual conference his tech company is developing a futuristic new technology, a concept the Russians may have tried to bring to fruition decades ago.
  
• At least 21,587 drug cases will be dismissed because of the broad and blatant criminal misconduct of a Department of Public Health lab chemist.  According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, Annie Dookhan worked for the state in the Hinton lab from 2003 to 2012 testing drug samples submitted by cops, when she was accused of contaminating and falsifying results.
  
• Dementia patients have been offered hope that their memory could be repaired after scientists showed that injecting blood from the umbilical cords of human babies restores brain function.  Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in the US discovered that cord blood contains an important protein which vanishes as humans get older.  It is believed the protein encourages neuroplasticity in the brain, allowing neurons to adapt and communicate more effectively.
  
• The war on marijuana rages on! While marijuana has never killed anyone and has proven medical benefits the police state of the USSA continues to point guns and lock people in cages for using said substance. This was the case outside of Philadelphia last Saturday.
  
• Fannie and Freddie wake up: Ludwig von Mises explained that one government intervention leads to an endless succession of interventions to deal with the effects of the first and subsequent interventions. Ultimately, it comes down to two choices. “Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way,” Mises wrote.
  These mortgage sales are years overdue, proving Mises’s point, there was no middle way to solve the housing crisis. Capitalism could have worked its magic years ago and set underwater homeowners free. If lenders were allowed to fail and mortgages traded at market clearing prices, more homeowners would have kept their homes and there would be no squatting epidemic today.
  
• #45 has apparently changed his mind about eliminating the crony Export-Import Bank, opting to “reform” the swamp rather than drain it.
  
• $&#% @*! he won't be doing it live at Fox anymore.  O'Reilly out...
  
• The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and The Mises Institute held a joint conference in Lake Jackson, Texas.   Peace is popular amongst the people, despite our war hungry federal government.  At first, the conference was set up to discuss the slight possibility that (just maybe) #45 would pursue a more peaceful foreign policy than his recent predecessors.  Little did we know that #45 would squash that idea just two days before the conference began.  #45's rash and reckless decision to bomb Syria gave all of the scheduled speakers an extra jolt to provide passionate defenses for the ideas of peace and non-interventionism. You can watch Ron Paul's speech on war and peace here.  The entire conference here.
  
• 04/24 commemorates the deportation of Armenian intellectuals on 24 April 1915 from Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals were arrested that day. Eventually 2,345 prominent Armenian leaders were detained.  The event has been described by historians as a decapitation strike, which was intended to deprive the Armenian population of leadership and a chance for resistance.  These detainees were later relocated within the Ottoman Empire. Most of them ended up murdered by the government.This was just the beginning. Eventually 1.5 million Armenians were rounded up, men, women, children, and the elderly and systematically murdered in forced death marches through the Syrian desert and in concentration camps.
  

Week of 04/23/17

• Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat – an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work.
  
• Central Bank of Russia Added 800,000 Ounces (24.882 tons) of Gold To Reserves in March.  Russia’s central bank holdings were at 1679.687 tons of gold at end of March 2017; the sixth most of any nation.
  
• To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.  Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.
  
• Thursday's U.S. missile attack on Syria must represent the quickest foreign policy U-turn in history. Less than a week after the White House gave Assad permission to stay on as president of his own country?  What's next?
  
• Rex Tillerson openly threatened Iran yesterday, accusing the country of sending troops to fight in Syria and of destabilizing the region. He vowed that the US would solve the Iran problem and not leave it to the next US Administration. Another war?
  
• Washington's "Rebels" Bomb Civilian Evacuees Leaving "rebel" siege villages on Aleppo Outskirts to heading toward government controlled areas.  The attack targets mostly Shia and some Christians and killed 100+ including many woman and children. "It is obvious that the suicide attack was committed by al-Qaeda in Syria. No government aligned element could have crossed into rebel held territory. The government aligned forces have not committed any suicide attacks while al-Qaeda as well as Ahrar al Sham have committed hundreds. This was a "rebel" suicide attack, likely by al-Qaeda, against government aligned civilian refugees. ... But the BBC, CNN and other western media will not tell you that.CNN called the massacre "a hiccup."
  
• Wisconsin congressman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. defended his decision to help repeal broadband privacy rules by telling a constituent, "Nobody's got to use the Internet." An anonymous reader quotes the 73-year-old congressman:  "And the thing is that if you start regulating the Internet like a utility, if we did that right at the beginning, we would have no Internet... Internet companies have invested an awful lot of money in having almost universal service now. The fact is is that, you know, I don't think it's my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold. My job, I think, is to tell you that you have the opportunity to do it, and then you take it upon yourself to make that choice... That's what the law has been, and I think we ought to have more choices rather than fewer choices with the government controlling our everyday lives."
  
• Bose knows what you're listening to.  At least that's the claim of a proposed class-action lawsuit filed late Tuesday in Illinois that accuses the high-end audio equipment maker of spying on its users and selling information about their listening habits without permission.  Combined with the registration information, that gave Bose access to personally identifiable information that Zak and other never agreed to share, the complaint says. Listening data can be very personal, particularly if users are listening to podcasts or other audio files that could shade in information about their political preferences, health conditions or other interests, the complaint argues.
  
• #throwbackThursday: The failed war on drugs.
  
• #throwbackThursday:  "George Bush deep into CIA drug trafficking." - Ron Paul
  
• North Korea threatens US with "super-mighty preemptive strike."   More here.
  
• The racist history of minimum wage laws: In 1966, Milton Friedman wrote an op-ed for Newsweek entitled "Minimum Wage Rates." In it, he argued "that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books." He was, of course, referring to the then-present era, after the far more explicitly racist laws from the slavery and segregation eras of United States history had already been done away with. But his observation about the racist effects of minimum wage laws can be traced back to the nineteenth century, and they continue to have a disproportionately deleterious effect on African-Americans into the present day.
  
• #throwbackThursday:  Remember that time the US government spent over $500m on fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos that tracked location of viewers? 
  
• DHS Head to America: Shut Up, Be Terrified, and Do What You’re Told
  
• Today,  April 19, 1993, the US government massacred a group of religious folks on their own property, including women and children) and tried to tell the public that they set themselves on fire.  CS gas forced the heels of one little girl to touch the back of her head.
  
• If the International Monetary Fund does nothing else at its meeting that starts Thursday in Washington, it would be nice to see it — or someone — answer the Ron Paul question: Why do its articles of agreement actually prohibit members from linking their currencies to gold?
  
• Iran meets treaty obligations, but #45 wants to revisit sanctions anyway.
  
• The law began by stepping in to protect children from abusive parents. Today in Great Britain the government chose death for a baby with two parents, whom the judge himself described as showing “absolute dedication to their wonderful boy, from the day that he was born.”  Government gets used to taking away our natural rights. Sometimes the slope is slow and gradual and sometimes it’s a rapid slip and slide.
  
• Busting the “free college” myth.  Remember, taxation is still theft, even if it is currently benefiting you.
  
• Audit the Fed recently took a step closer to becoming law, when it was favorably reported by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This means the House could vote on the bill at any time. The bill passed by voice vote without any objections, although Fed defenders did launch hysterical attacks on the bill during the debate as well as at a hearing on the bill the previous week.  One representative claimed that auditing the Fed would result in rising interest rates, a stock market crash, a decline in the dollar’s value, and a complete loss of confidence in the US economy Those who understand economics know that all of this is actually what awaits America unless we change our monetary policy. Passing the audit bill is the vital first step in that process, since an audit can provide Congress a road map to changing the fiat currency system.
  
• I wonder how long before people realize that “voting for freedom,” is much like “fighting for peace”?  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a historic referendum Sunday that will greatly expand the powers of his office, telling opponents who promised to challenge the results: "It's too late now."
  
• The last country the US liberated is now openly trading slaves.
• Board chairman of the Mises Institute Lew Rockwell joins Ron Paul on Tuesday's edition of 'The Ron Paul Liberty Report' to discuss #45's administration's stance on regime change in Syria. "Who is it that says Assad has to go?  Why does Assad have to go?"
  
• The Fed has created an additional intervention — purchasing debt instruments. These purchases have expanded the Fed’s balance sheet to almost $4 trillion, a major market distortion. Some economists justify these interventions as necessary during times of crisis but, in the long run, Fed actions lead to inflation and massive federal debt, which will, if not corrected, lead to another financial crisis.
  
• As #45 reportedly considers "kinetic military action" against North Korea, we must look at how we got to this point. What are we doing in the region? Is a US first-strike the solution to North Korea's nuclear ambitions?
  
• According to a report by South Korea's primary news outlet, Yonhap, the Pentagon has directed a total of three US aircraft carriers toward the Korean Peninsula, citing a South Korean government source.
  
• The former Federal Election Commission chairwoman Ann M. Ravel says that political speech must be controlled on social media. She presented her remarks in a speech at UC Berkeley, calling for regulations against “fake news.”  Speaking at an event called “Future of Democracy,” Ravel argued the proliferation of “fake news” and political advertising on platforms like Facebook influenced elections. She warned that the lack of disclosure by the creators of these campaigns was becoming a huge problem.
  
• Massachusetts legalized cannabis, but cops keep arresting folks anyhow.
  
• Has #45 lost control of the pentagon?
  
• #LEAKED: WikiLeaks has released evidence showing that the CIA ordered agents to hack French presidential favorite Marin Le Pen in an effort to thwart her soaring popularity.Agents working within the CIA’s human intelligence (“HUMINT”) and digital espionage (“SIGINT”) service were tasked with targeting all French political parties in the seven months that preceded the 2012 French election. ... “Specific instructions tasked CIA officers to discover Sarkozy’s private deliberations ‘on the other candidates’ as well as how he interacted with his advisors
  
• Walking around Mumbai it’s common to see some lovely, older buildings (pre 1920s perhaps) that are n a great state of disrepair. A well maintained building can last for hundreds of years so why are these buildings falling apart? The answer is rent control. Bombay passed a rent control act in 1947 that froze rents at 1940 levels.
  
• “We’ll never put a dent in federal spending when so many ‘rinos’ want to keep after-school welfare programs.”  As usual, politicians AND voters don’t consider welfare, welfare, if it benefits them.  Psst…  public school is also welfare.
  
• “We’ve reached the point where state actors can penetrate rectums and vaginas, where judges can order forced catheterizations, and where police and medical personnel can perform scans, enemas and colonoscopies without the suspect’s consent. And these procedures aren’t to nab kingpins or cartels, but people who at worst are hiding an amount of drugs that can fit into a body cavity, these tactics are about degrading and humiliating a class of people that politicians and law enforcement have deemed the enemy.”
  
• Our communism is better than yours: baby boomer communism > millennial communism.  In other news, propaganda works.
  
• The banking industry abuses its customers worse than United Airlines.
  
• Ron Paul: The U.S. doesn’t need to be in Syria.
  

Week of 04/16/17

• #45 delivered an Easter message.  We have a message for him and all who advocate, defend, enforce, excuse and support government:  You are for signs, and wonders, and miracles.  You are NOT for fear or destruction – not destruction of life or spirit.   The state is theft, violence, and oppression.  Repent now, on this Easter day, and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
  
• Sadistic commentators and voters hail death and destruction.  Cable news hosts gushed, "Trump became president of the United States tonight!’ On MSNBC, Brian Williams called the bombing ‘beautiful’ three times in less than a minute. Sen. Lindsey Graham (one of the ‘women of the Senate,’ according to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) compared Trump to Reagan. The New York Times headlined an article, ‘On Syria Attack, Trump’s Heart Came First."  Fareed Zakaria’s joy over the bombing seemed to indicate that, for him, it was practically an erotic experience. And this weird bloodlust wasn’t limited to the liberal precincts of the commentariat – far from it. When we dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan, Kimberly Guilfoyle practically had an orgasm over at Fox News. Sitting there in her low cut red dress, her breasts heaving with passion, her lips parted, and an ecstatic smile plastered on her heavily made-up face, she hailed the bombing as if it were the climax – so to speak – of a pornographic movie: “America is back!”  How disgusting and sad...  Happy Easter.
  
• Today is Tax Day in America. When April 15th happens to fall on a weekend, the IRS generously permits us to extend the filing ritual until the following Monday. But since Monday was a holiday in the District of Columbia known (without irony) as Emancipation Day, we all enjoyed an extra bonus day to comply. And for the most part, comply we do: the voluntary compliance rate, defined by the IRS as taxes timely paid as a percentage of taxes owed in aggregate, is nearly 82%. Compare this with Italy, for example, where tax evasion is a national pastime. For a nation born out of tax resistance, we Americans tend to grumble but not revolt.
  
• There is alarming epidemiological and experimental data on possible carcinogenic effects from long term exposures to low intensity microwave radiation.
  
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is attempting to reverse a court decision that they say could potentially lead to immunity for foreign governments who spy, attack, and even murder Americans.
  
• In the sad saga of the War on Drugs, police carry out countless raids on the homes of people who’ve committed victimless “crimes” of possessing substances deemed illegal by the State.  Ohio cops almost got their chance to throw this hardened criminal into a cage for having five grams of a plant concentrate, but were forced to stop harrassing a man, and return his medicine.
  
• Audit the Pentagon: One of the benefits of being an extremely powerful lobby in Washington is the ability to live off the taxpayers without ever having to tell the taxpayers what you they with their money. This includes two of the most powerful lobbies in DC: the Fed and the Pentagon.1 In recent years, thanks to Ron Paul, the "Audit the Fed" movement has gained a high profile in Washington and continues to be an election issue. Far less salient, however, is the issue of Auditing the Pentagon.  And, unfortunately, like the Fed, the Pentagon is able to quash efforts to make the massive military establishment more transparent and more accountable in its spending. 
  
• Graphene has been used to turn seawater into clean drinking water. The graphene sieve was shown to filter common salts from the water, and scientist say the technology could be scaled up – potentially providing hope to the millions of people around the globe who have limited access to clean water.
  
• We’re now three months into the new administration and more than a year on from the start of a powerful late-cycle monetary stimulus (otherwise described as “the Yellen Put” in which all planned rate rises for 2016 were halted) b Federal Reserve. But, we haven’t heard a whimper from the Republicans over Fed Res’s extremely timid efforts at ending it’s ultra-easy-money policy. They have been focused instead on socialized medicne and the border adjustment tax. Meanwhile in the marketplace Fed-watchers are back to business as usual — deciphering every word and dot plot change from the leading monetary bureaucrats still at their posts. 
  
• #45 told chief executives of major companies on Tuesday that his administration is working on an infrastructure plan worth $1 trillion or maybe more, because he doesn't understand the free markets.  With free markets you would have job creation and employment opportunities.  Why?  Because you don't have a government monopolizing them.  With free markets you have competition, which means quality goes up, pricing goes down, and no one is forced to pay for or use services they don't need or want.
  
• "We can now close the case on who leaked that confidential, market-moving data to Medley global back in 2012: it was Richmond Fed's Jeffrey Lacker, who previously was expected to retire in October, and is resigning immediately."
  
• Less than two weeks since the collapse of republicans’ plan to repeal and replace #44's socialized healthcare, with their own socialized healthcare, lawmakers and white house officials have revived talks aimed at crafting a socialized health care bill that can make it through congress.
  
• 
  

Week of 04/9/17

• Flashback: In 1988 U.S. D.I.A. cleared Saddam of gassing Kurds and blamed Iran.
  
• #Logic: Syrians killed Syrians, so now we have to kill Syrians, to keep Syrians from killing Syrians.
  
• A replication of one of the most widely known obedience studies, the Stanley Milgram experiment, shows that even today, people are still willing to harm others in pursuit of obeying authority.  Not sure why that's surprising, as people continue to line up to ensure that mass-scale theft, violence, and oppression are forced on everyone - including themselves.
  
• The U.S. Central Command recently announced that troop numbers in Iraq and Syria will no longer be reported to the public.
  
• The syringe slides in between the thumb and index finger. Then, with a click, a microchip is injected in the employee's hand. Another "cyborg" is created.  What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish startup hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and startup members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.  The injections have become so popular that workers at Epicenter hold parties for those willing to get implanted.
  
• By all means, we should let the Syrian people decide who will be their president, even if they choose someone we don’t like. Syria was never a threat to the United States and the 2011 US intervention has destroyed the country. Interventionism has horrible consequences and no victories to show for itself. It is time for all the US troops to just march back home.
  
• Three lessons learned from Wisconsin’s war on foreign butter: In February, a number of Irish citizens were surprised to find out that selling Kerrygold butter — a line of butter produced in Ireland — is a criminal offense in Wisconsin.
  
• Rep. Maxine Waters listed as "the most corrupt member of congress" by the citizens for 'responsibility and ethics' in Washington.  If they did an accurate and complete list, they would have listed every government employee, elected and hired.  That'd be a really long list.  Imagine the business and job opportunities that would be available if the government didn't have a monopoly on everything.
  
• WikiLeaks’ latest Vault 7 release contains a batch of documents, named ‘Marble’, which detail CIA hacking tactics and how they can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages. The tool was in use as recently as 2016. ...
  "The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages."
  
• Why special interests sacrifice the future for short-term gain: Those who want government to pickpocket others for them go to great lengths to claim special worthiness. However, not only does what they want punish innocent parties, but many of those harmed are future members — often a much larger number — of the “special” groups proponents claim to care so deeply about. That unwarranted harm and the glaring inconsistency between rhetoric and future reality justifies thinking far more carefully about such policies before buying into the propaganda.  That goes for ALL of the various government ponzi schemes, warfare, and welfare we are currently forced to pay for.
  
• Ron Paul on free market medicine.  And here.
  
• Moscow and Beijing join forces to bypass US dollar in global markets, shift to gold trade.
  
• GreenSurance is a first of its kind community serving people who want natural medicine for primary care. What has never been done is now being done. Change in health care and quality of life means no health program is complete without conventional and alternative medicine. This is what GreenSurance provides to health qualified members, a health program that includes access to all medicine through our 'better than health insurance alternative.'
  
• According to a justice department report the DEA steals more cash than ALL burglars combined.   Does that mean any purchases here are 'receiving stolen property?'  Asking for a friend...
  
• A Chinese company’s plans to acquire U.S. money transfer giant MoneyGram is raising fears that the communist government in Beijing could gain sensitive intelligence on Americans’ personal and financial information — including data on thousands of government employees and military personnel.  The purchase by Ant Financial, which is partially owned by the Chinese government, also poses a test for the 42-year-old Treasury Department oversight body that has been asked to review the deal to determine any security risks.
  
• Where is #45’s noninterventionism? He believes in multinational military action. At times he suggests that such action must always be linked to his expansive notion of “national interest,” but in his first major campaign speech on foreign policy he went further: “We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.” None of this comes close to noninterventionism.
  
• Drone attacks are something Americans hear about from a great distance, as a controversial and deadly tool of US foreign policy. But if a new bill passes, Americans in one state might come a bit closer to understanding what it’s like to have weaponized drones flying overhead...  because that's what we need.
  
• Cyber-Gulf of Tonkin: The “cyber-security” firm that everyone is depending on to make the case for Russia’s alleged “hacking” of the 2016 presidential election, CrowdStrike, has just retracted a key component of its analysis – but the “mainstream” media continues to chug along, ignoring any facts that contradict their preferred narrative.
  
• A State Department employee was arrested Tuesday for maintaining and concealing extensive contacts with the Chinese government. Candace Marie Claiborne, described in a federal lawsuit unsealed Wednesday as a "U.S. State Department employee who possesses a Top Secret security clearance," was charged with "obstructing an official proceeding" by making false statements to authorities and hiding "numerous" contacts with foreign intelligence agents, identified later in the text as two Chinese spies.
  
• #WIKILEAKS: Vault 7: part 3: How the CIA covered its tracks giving hack tools to insurgents.
  
• If government can just take your property from you, is it really your property to begin with? Eminent domain is legalized theft and #45 is a big fan. Ron Paul defends individual liberty, property rights, and voluntary interactions on today’s Myth-Busters.
  
• Central banks are completely oblivious: Sometimes, when central bankers talk, they reveal within the very same discussion a sign of complete obliviousness. The ECB's Peter Praet recently gave an overview of monetary policy and price stability. By way of reminder, price stability refers to the central bank's efforts to keep the prices we pay from dropping lower. This would be terrible.
  
• Elderly Abused at 1 in 3 Nursing Homes: Common problems included untreated bedsores, inadequate medical care, malnutrition, dehydration, preventable accidents, and inadequate sanitation and hygiene, the report said.
  
• There is not a single crisis or potential crisis across the globe where the Trump foreign policy team has not escalated toward military conflict. Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, and more. Will this massive escalation bring victory? Or yet more perpetual war until bankruptcy?
  
• I thought this was worth a separate thread as this is a great idea. If we the consumers now have to jump through various hoops to try to protect our internet searches, we should make sure politicians have to do the same. For those who don't hilarity will happen.
  
• Ron Paul on Fox Business yesterday: Do the police need more fire power?
  
• For planned obsolescence to work, you’ve got to keep the conveyor belt rolling. And most of all, prevent anyone from getting off.  It is a problem if people “cling” to their old cars instead of regularly trading them in – ideally, to be crushed – for new ones – hopefully, heavily financed.  But how to get rid of the old cars when people decline to get rid of them voluntarily?  Democratic politicians in Oregon have just the thing.  It is House Bill 2877 and – if it becomes law – it will impose heavy taxes on cars 20 years old or more to the tune of $1,000 payable every five years, in perpetuity – unless the owner obtains Antique Vehicle registration and tags for the vehicle.
  
• Compared to the general population, advocates of a minimal state and those of a stateless society overwhelmingly agree on a vast majority of political issues. I wish to argue here that there should be at least one more agreement between them than there traditionally has been: policing services need not be monopolized by the state and would be more efficiently provided by the private sector.
  
• Los Angeles, home to one of the least affordable housing markets in North America, is now proposing to expand rent control to "fix" its housing problem.  As with all price control schemes, rent control will serve only to make housing affordable to a small sliver of the population while rendering housing more inaccessible to most. Specifically, city activists hope that a new bill in the state legislature, AB1506, will allow local governments, Los Angeles included, to expand the number of units covered by rent control laws while also restricting the extent to which landlords can raise rents. 
  

Week of 04/02/17

• Ask an average American who makes a habit of following government-mouthpiece corporate media about interference in national elections and you’ll likely elicit a nebulous response concerning Russian hackers and a plan to install #45 in the White House — but you probably won’t hear a single syllable pertaining to United States government’s actual attempts to do the same.
  
• In his recent Guardian article, David Cameron, the former UK prime minister and newly appointed Chair of the Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development, argued that it is right for the United Kingdom to continue to give aid to developing and unstable countries. Mr. Cameron argued that it is the responsibility of the UK government to give aid supporting developing countries as not only is it the moral thing to do, but it is also in the interests of the UK.  Following on from Mr. Cameron's article, I would like to argue for a better way in which the UK can help less developed countries and also advance its own interests: free trade.
  
• Verizon is joining with the creators of a tool called "Evie Launcher" to make a new app search/launcher tool called AppFlash, which will be installed on all Verizon phones running Android. The app provides no functionality to users beyond what Google Search does. It does, however, give Verizon a steady stream of metrics on your app usage and searches. A quick glance at the AppFlash privacy policy confirms this is the real purpose behind it: "We collect information about your device and your use of the AppFlash services. This information includes your mobile number, device identifiers, device type and operating system, and information about the AppFlash features and services you use and your interactions with them. We also access information about the list of apps you have on your device. [...] AppFlash information may be shared within the Verizon family of companies, including companies like AOL who may use it to help provide more relevant advertising within the AppFlash experiences and in other places, including non-Verizon sites, services and devices."
  
• To solve the problem of stubbornly high unemployment rates in lower-income areas, Yellen has some ideas. Spoiler: there's nothing about halting the Central Bank's interest rate manipulation, which destroys capital by misallocating resources and makes economies less wealthy. There's also nothing about the effect of minimum wage laws on those trying to find work, but who are priced out of the labor market.
  
• The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been long been skeptical of the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) approach to regulating how Internet service providers (ISPs) use subscriber data. We filed comments expressing our concerns to the FCC in July 2016, before the agency adopted the rule, and again in March 2017. The FCC’s privacy rule, adopted by the agency in October 2016, regulates broadband providers’ data security practices and dictates how providers must obtain consent from their subscribers before collecting or disclosing user information. Last week, the Senate passed a Congressional Review Act resolution to rescind the misguided rule, while the House of Representatives is set to vote on the joint resolution on Tuesday afternoon.
  
• On a news story, the term "aggressive individualism" was used to describe the apparent evil that exists at Uber. It was used by Jennifer Chatman, a business school professor at UC Berkeley. It was on a story about diversity reports, which most large tech companies produce, but was absent so far at Uber.  Uber is under the gun for not being diverse enough.
  
• “We’re not going to retrench into our corners or put up dividing lines,” Ryan said after a meeting with Republican lawmakers. “There’s too much at stake to get bogged down in all of that.”  The renewed focus on repealing Obamacare came after Ryan decided to withdraw the House GOP’s health care bill Friday, a decision made after it became clear there wouldn’t be enough votes to pass it.
  
• A mother who asked TSA agents at DFW International Airport for alternative screening for her son with special needs said they were "treated like dogs."
  
• Thomas Massie speaks during markup of H.R. 24, Audit the Fed 3/28/17.
  
• Why do you think there are so many buckets of cash pouring into the IoT hope-to-be-a-market? The Big Corporations don’t expect to make a big profit on the devices themselves, oh no. News flash: the Big Money in IoT is in Big Data. As in, Big Data about everything those sensors are learning about you and your nasty habits that you hide from your neighbors.  The value of Big Data, after all, aren’t the data themselves. “Fred’s car told Fred’s thermostat to turn on Fred’s hot tub” doesn’t interest anybody but Fred and perhaps his hot date (if he’s lucky). The value in Big Data, you see, are in the patterns. What shows you watch. What apps you use. Which ads influence your buying behavior. The more IoT you have, the more Big Data they collect, and the more Big Data they collect, the more they know about how you behave. And once they know how you behave, they know how to control how you behave.
  
• Four years ago a police chase ended in bloodshed but that isn’t the only the only detail of importance. The pistol the police claimed Jerel Stanfield reached for before they shot him, was used in the murder of William Simpson on Easter Sunday and Hakim Momon and William Davis.  Forensic evidence may have proved that the pistol was used to end the lives of those three individuals but how the weapon ended up at the scene is a bit more ambiguous. Stanfields attorney believes the officers planted it and officers with the Fresno Police Department are confused at how the weapon “appeared” at the scene.
  
• During the time Eddie was in custody he sustained injuries that left him unconscious and unresponsive with severe blunt force trauma to the head, which caused an aneurysm, and two broken arteries among other injuries. He was put on life support for 48 hours after being transferred by Harris county to Ben Taub hospital in Houston. No family was allowed to see him despite the fact that doctors were unsure if he would make it through the night because he was technically still in custody. Even though he was unconscious from emergency brain surgery to relieve pressure from his head, he was handcuffed to the hospital bed as if he were a danger to others. Currently Eddie has tubes draining blood from his skull and is being kept in the ICU. His outcome is still unsure as we take it day by day praying for his recovery. This is an innocent man with previous mental and physical disabilities that did not deserve to be beaten within inches of his life. His voice needs to be heard.
  
• Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) shows an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official colluded with Monsanto to manipulate and prevent key investigations into glyphosate’s cancer-causing potential. Taxpayers’ money has essentially been used to help shield chemical companies from liability and obstruct consumers’ ability to prove damages.  Emails also show EPA official stopped a glyphosate investigation by a Department of Health and Human Services office on Monsanto’s behalf — a feat he bragged should earn him a medal.
  
• Sean Spicer revealed during Wednesday’s press briefing that they were caught off guard by Devin Nunes’ Wednesday press conference, in which he stated #45’s personal communications may actually have been collected by the #44's administration during the 2016 election.
  
• "The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism." - Murray Rothbard
  ​WikiLeaks may have finally done what many small and anti-government advocates have only dreamed of. They exposed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for what it is: a bloated government bureaucracy that has grown much too large to be restrained.
  
• Keynesian economics has witnessed a remarkable resurgence since the crisis of 2008. The inability of mainstream economics to predict or explain the crisis led many economists to become skeptical of its core macroeconomic tenets. Several have turned the clock back to the ideas of Keynes to make sense of the housing bubble and the ensuing recession.
  
• Former Vice-President Dick Cheney told an audience yesterday that he was certain that Russia interfered in our election and that such interference in other people's elections is an "act of war." Is that also true when we do it?
  
• Government’s meddling in the healthcare business has been disastrous from the get-go.  Since 1910, when Republican William Taft gave in to the American Medical Association’s lobbying efforts, most administrations have passed new healthcare regulations. With each new law or set of new regulations, restrictions on the healthcare market went further, until at some point in the 1980s, people began to notice the cost of healthcare had skyrocketed.  This is not an accident. It’s by design.
  
• Drinking tea cuts the risk of cognitive impairment in older people in half, but the news is even better for those who are genetically at risk of Alzheimer's. In people who carry the APOE e4 gene, tea reduces the risk by as much as 86 percent.
  
• Nine years later, Greece is still in a debt crisis…
  
• #45 signs Cruz-Rubio NASA bill.  How much money flushed?  $19.5 BILLION.  That's cool, though, right?  Just tax some more. Hell, just print some more.
  
• World War II might therefore be considered, from one point of view, as a coalition war: the Morgans got their war in Europe, the Rockefellers theirs in Asia. Such disgruntled Morgan men as Lewis W. Douglas and Dean G. Acheson (a protégé of Henry Stimson), who had left the early Roosevelt administration in disgust at its soft-money policies and economic nationalism, came happily roaring back into government service with the advent of World War II. Nelson A. Rockefeller, for his part, became head of Latin American activities during World War II, and thereby acquired his taste for government service.
  
• Arizona challenges the fed's money monopoly; history shows that, if individuals have the freedom to choose what to use as money, they will likely opt for gold or silver.  Of course, modern politicians and their Keynesian enablers despise the gold or silver standard. This is because linking a currency to a precious metal limits the ability of central banks to finance the growth of the welfare-warfare state via the inflation tax. This forces politicians to finance big government much more with direct means of taxation.
  
• The problem with parental leave: Once again, good-intentioned policies that ignore the laws of economics only hurt those who they were originally intended to help.
  
• End the state's monopoly on policing.
  
• As usual, people who like to force government on others do not like government forced on them:  “I am someone that is for limited government, so I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say I’m for limited government but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies,” said Tomi Lahren. “Stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well,” she continued.
  
• We found out five years later from Edward Snowden that the US government viewed Section 702 as a green light for the mass surveillance of Americans. Through programs he revealed, like PRISM, the NSA is able to collect and store our Internet search history, the content of our emails, what files we have shared, who we have chatted with electronically, and more.  That’s why people like NSA whistleblower William Binney said that we know the NSA was spying on #45 because it spies on all of us!
  
• House Russia Hearing: Revelations or more speculation?
  
• For the first time, the director of the FBI publicly revealed that the bureau is conducting a counterintelligence investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the presidential election and whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
  
• Ohio parents disagree with school over ADHD diagnosis and lose their 7-year-old son to CPS.
  
• Why did the Fed raise its benchmark interest rate when inflation is still running below the Fed’s target, workers wages have hardly budged and the economy is not even growing at 1 percent?
  
• On 15 March, the Federal Reserve (Fed) raised the federal funds rate by 0.25 basis points, bringing the band of the official rate to 0.75 – 1.00 percent. The move was widely expected. However, the market seemed surprised when the Fed reaffirmed that it would stick to its plan to raise rates no more than three times this year because inflation has already taken off. In February, the consumer price index was up 2.7 percent compared to last year, while the “core inflation rate” stood at 2.2 percent — well above the 2 percent mark typically seen as the level of “targeted” inflation. As a result, the current short-term interest rate in the US, when adjusted for current inflation, stands at around minus 1.7 percent.
  
• America is hardly a bastion of free trade.
  
• Officials are considering releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in Houston as part of the fight against the insects known to carry diseases such as the Zika virus.  The Houston Chronicle reports that Harris County, Texas, officials are negotiating with a British biotech company, Oxitec, to release mosquitoes that have been genetically engineered to produce offspring that die.
  
• In a stunning lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for 9/11, the families of 800 victims have filed a lawsuit accusing the Saudis of complicity in the worst terror attacks on American soil.  The legal action, filed in federal court in Manhattan, details a scenario of involvement by Saudi officials who are said to have aided some of the hijackers before the attacks.
  
• Ron Paul: There will be major corrections in the market.
  
• Idaho boy injured, his dog killed, after being hit with US wildlife service "cyanide bomb."
  
• Damascus kindly requests Washington to stop blowing up its infrastructure, bridges, dams, etc...
  
• The president and CEO of the West Alabama Boys and Girls Club is behind bars, accused of possessing child pornography.  Anthony Dellon "Tony" Bush, 42, was arrested Sunday night, said Northport police Assistant Chief Keith Carpenter. He is being held in the Tuscaloosa County Jail with bonds totaling $200,000.
  
• How the media manipulates the world into war.
  
• A profound shift in the federal government’s stance on cannabis was marked by subtle changes made this month to one webpage. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, now has a webpage titled Marijuana as Medicine. Prior to March 2017, it was titled Is Marijuana Medicine?
  
• Scientists at Oxford say they've invented an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans.
  The system, which has been trained on thousands of hours of BBC News programmes, has been developed in collaboration with Google's DeepMind AI division.  "Watch, Attend and Spell", as the system has been called, can now watch silent speech and get about 50% of the words correct. That may not sound too impressive - but when the researchers supplied the same clips to professional lip-readers, they got only 12% of words right.
  
• MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Russian lower house of parliament, the State Duma, has approved a proposal to launch an investigation into U.S. media organisations that operate in Russia, it said in a statement posted on its web site late on Friday.
  
• 
  

Week of 03/26/17

• Anarchists in Portland, Oregon have taken to the streets – to fix the roads! Proclaiming that “We Will Fix the Roads,” anarchists are fixing potholes on city streets and reporting on it on social media.
  
• David Rockefeller, the famous banker and philanthropist with the family name that controlled Chase Manhattan bank for more than a decade and wielded vast influence around the world in the world of finance, has died on Monday morning at his home in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. He was 101.
  
• NC-4th Cir. Court rules cops can sic dogs on you even if you are innocent and pose no threat.
  
• Hannity allegedly turned on the weapon's laser sight, causing a red dot to appear on Williams' body, according to the network, which said it confirmed the October incident between Hannity and Williams, who is also a contributor to The Hill, with three sources.  The sources told the outlet that the off-camera incident disturbed Williams and others present, though Hannity was merely showing off, according to the report.
  Remember that time he whined about snowballs?
  
• Just as 21WIRE reported last week – the US mainstream media are still black-balling any substantial reporting about US boots on the ground in Syria. Instead, America’s media are obsessing over Trump’s tax returns, various Russian conspiracy theories, and Michael Flynn’s Moscow public speaking engagement in 2015. 
  
• As detailed in a report from Tony Webster earlier this week, a Hennepin County judge has granted the Edina Police Department an extraordinary degree of access to citizens' Google history, as cops attempt to crack the case of an attempted wire transfer fraud.
  
• “We’re going to build a big, beautiful wall — and Mexico is gonna pay for it,” was one of #45’s campaign mantras. However, as Americans who don’t have political short-term memory loss will remember, politicians break promises once they’re elected. Such is the case with #45’s promise to make Mexico pay for his “great” wall.  You’re paying for it, not Mexico, and #45’s newly released White House budget has made it official.
  
• How the fed operates - and why it's a problem.
  
• March 13, the Colorado House passed a proposal to limit residential pot grows in an effort to force more patients into the regulated marketplace.  Because they are idiots and believe they have a higher claim to your life, liberty, and property.
  
• #45/Saudi Collusion: laying plans for more war in the Middle East.
  
• According to new figures released by Customs and Border Patrol, the number of electronic devices searched at the border has jumped by five times between 2015 and 2016. Device searches this year appear to be well on pace to exceed last year’s totals as well.
  
• Ron Paul, the prominent libertarian communicator and three-time US presidential candidate, declared this week in a Fox Business interview that it is “fantastic” that WikiLeaks revealed on Tuesday thousands of US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents and files. Speaking with host Kennedy, Paul further says that the information exposed “indicates that liberty is in big trouble” and states his concern about there having been insufficient media coverage of the information.
  
• Further proof that Jeff Sessions is completely out of touch with reality, “I’ve heard people say we could solve our heroin problem with marijuana,” he said. “How stupid is that? Give me a break!”  After his speech, Sessions told reporters he was “dubious” of medical marijuana in general.
  
• Officers in a burgeoning Navy bribery scandal called themselves the Lion King's Harem, the Wolfpack, the Cool Kids and the Brotherhood. They scouted for others who might also accept sex, trips and other lavish perks from a Malaysian defense contractor known as "Fat Leonard" in exchange for classified information.
  
• Due to Wikileaks and other whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, the activities of intelligence agencies have increasingly come to light.  In turn, even some of the more outlandish charges against intelligence agencies appear increasingly plausible.  For those who have studied the de-classified history of intelligence agencies, however, new revelations should not be very surprising. The history of CIA antics, for example, is anything but tame.
  
• As government continues to stumble through the health crisis that it created, Ron Paul discusses what’s being done, what should never be done, and of course, the solution to the crisis.
  
• The US is sending special forces, SEAL Team 6, drones, B-52s, etc to South Korea. Military exercises will include practicing killing the North Korean leadership. Will such exercises provoke a North Korean response? What happens next? What about the Chinese?
  
• Syria's army high command said in a statement on Friday Israeli jets breached Syrian air space early in the morning and attacked a military target near Palmyra in what it described as an act of aggression that aided Islamic State.  It said its air defenses shot down one of the Israeli jets over what it called "occupied ground" and damaged another.
  
• The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit today held that foreign governments are free to spy on, injure, or even kill Americans in their own homes–so long as they do so by remote control. The decision comes in a case called Kidane v. Ethiopia, which we filed in February 2014.
  
• The leaders of the House Intelligence Committee asked the three leaders of the intelligence community about any time during the last seven months of the Obama administration whenever any of its agents and officials improperly named, or "unmasked," and disseminated the identities of American citizens picked up in intelligence collection.
  
• In late 2016, the government’s spin machine made it a point to feature “pizza gate,” only to mock anyone who would ever believe it to be true. The thought that high-level government officials in the U.S. would or could ever be involved in sex-trafficking or pedophilia was presented as far-fetched conspiracy theory, only believed by the fringe elements of society. But as The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous occasions, pedophilia involving high-level government officials is becoming the norm rather than the exception.
  
• Fed hikes rate - stagflation ahead?
  
• A new study reveals that a commonly consumed painkiller, wrongly considered "harmless" by millions, is probably causing thousands of deaths from cardiac arrest each year.  According to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is a leading cause of death among adults over 40 in the United States and other countries, with about 326,200 people experiencing an out-of-hospital SCA each year in the US alone; nine of 10 victims of SCA will die.
  
• #45 has released what was being touted as a "skinny" budget, meaning that it would put federal spending on a diet. Would that that were true. The blueprint, which doesn't engage with entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security and other forms of "mandatory" spending at all, simply balances cuts to various parts of the government with increases to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In fiscal 2017, the government plans to spend around $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending (this is spending that is voted on every year; the rest of the federal budget is essentially on autopilot). Under #45's plan, it will spend that much again in 2018. Overall federal spending will still come in around $4 trillion.  "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
  
• Yes governments can steal your gold and kill the people, that doesn’t mean they can control either. Look at what is happening in India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government spent 16 months trying to persuade Indians to deposit their jewelry in the bank to earn interest, in an effort to curb soaring imports of the precious metal. But the program has only lured a tiny fraction of the $900 billion of gold that families and temples are estimated to have stashed away. On the other hand, Modi’s controversial decision to withdraw all high-value banknotes did the job instead.
  

Week of 03/19/17

• #45's TSA launches 'enhanced' groping procedures.
  
• #45's executive order to rearrange the executive branch.
  
• 8 ways big pharma is robbing you blind.
  
• #45 gives CIA power to launch drone strikes.
  
• New Hampshire house passes bill banning support for warrantless federal spying programs.
  
• Why #45’s Syria “surge” will fail.
  
• #45's administration is reportedly changing the rules of military engagement to give the generals more authority over attacks in areas not in the heat of battle. What does this do to civilian control of the military?
  
• A flurry of dramatic property and civil rights-related trials are taking place across the western U.S. in federal courts, in which defendants, including independent media representatives, are charged with up to 17 crimes each, from trespass to terrorism.  They are facing up to 94 years for reporting federal abuse. 
  
• How #45's immigrant grandfather once begged not to be deported.
  
• On homegrown terrorism, “If you take away the undercover cases to see what are the real organized terrorism cases, we’re not seeing it,” Greenberg said. “What do we have? The threat is different from what we’re being told.”  For more FBI-created "homegrown terrorism," look here, and here.
  
• #LEAKED: The CIA published an internal "users guide" and "developers guide" for malware that targets every major personal computing platform from Mac to Windows to Linux to Solaris.   See here, and here.  It's called HIVE. In addition information on the CIA being able to remotely control personal electronic and embedded devices as well as getting unauthorized access to Exchange (email) databases is included.  See here, and here.
  
• How the Twilight Zone can make you a better person.
  
• A ProPublica analysis has found for the first time that doctors who receive payments from the medical industry do indeed tend to prescribe drugs differently than their colleagues who don’t. And the more money they receive, on average, the more brand-name medications they prescribe.
  
• Amish Grandpa farmer found guilty on ALL counts involving his homemade salves – faces up to 48 years in prison.
  
• The US government now has less cash than Google.
  
• Almost four years in the making, in a highly anticipated verdict published earlier today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected the the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust exchange traded fund (ETF).
  
• Alabama Mom laments how DHR stole 2 years of daughter’s life over cell phone dispute.
  
• Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, has confirmed that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions, the press service of the Russian institution told TASS on Thursday.
  
• Intercepted is live from the SXSW Festival in Austin with Edward Snowden joining via video feed from Moscow.
  
• GOA on Trumpcare, aka ObamacareLite: Bill must be amended to eliminate anti-gun aspects.
  

Week of 03/12/17

• #45 seeking $54B increase in defense spending.
  
• Last month's deadly commando raid in Yemen, which cost the lives of a U.S. Navy SEAL and a number of children, has so far yielded no significant intelligence, U.S. officials told NBC News.
  
• WAPO hires John Podesta.
  
• On Thursday last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said he “believe[s] that we will see greater enforcement” of the federal laws against recreational marijuana.
  
• Study finds primitive tribe eating "paleo" diet has best heart health in the world.
  
• Rep. Tom Garrett, R-5th, introduced legislation Monday that would federally decriminalize marijuana, according to a news release from his office.  The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2017 would take marijuana off the federal controlled substance list if it is passed.
  
• Scientists reportedly say that the world’s only sample of metallic hydrogen, which was touted as potentially revolutionizing technology, has disappeared.
  
• Judge says California must release papers discussing risk of cellphone use.
  
• In a complaint filed March 11 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, more than 200 relatives of the slain claim nothing short of “a campaign of terror” was carried out by paramilitary groups in Colombia’s Uraba region to maintain control of vast banana plantations owned by Chiquita. The plaintiffs, who are identified only as John and Jane Does, go on to claim that former Chiquita CEO Cyrus Freidheim and manager Charles Keiser violated U.S., Colombian and international laws against torture, extrajudicial killing and other “crimes against humanity” by directing the activity. 
  

Week of 03/05/17

• How Peter Thiel’s palantir helped the NSA spy on the whole world.
  
• Muhammad Ali, Jr. illegally detained at Florida airport on suspicion of being a Muslim.
  
• The Pentagon wants to expand the military's ability to battle Al Qaeda-linked militants in Somalia, potentially putting U.S. forces closer to the fight against a stubborn extremist group that has plotted attacks against America, senior U.S. officials said.
  
• How do 700 tobacco farmers uncover a highly secretive criminal operation generating millions of dollars in fraudulent cigarette sales? By going into business with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), as they sold millions of dollars of cigarettes, the number one cause of preventable death, that’s how. And the operation may be as scandalous and controversial as the famed Fast and Furious gun running program with which the ATF was also involved.
  
• Eye scans at the airport?
  
• Questioning the privacy policies of data-collecting cars.
  
• Russia on Tuesday cast its seventh veto to protect the Syrian government from United Nations Security Council action, blocking a bid by Western powers to impose sanctions over accusations of chemical weapons attacks during the six-year Syrian conflict.
  
• Sessions wants the science on cannabis, well here it is.  Also, please see the reports on THIS site.
  
• The sole permanent US military base in Africa is getting a new neighbor. It’s the Chinese, who are building their first military base outside of Chinese territory. The Chinese are the largest investors in Africa and have been heavily involved in anti-piracy efforts near Djibouti, where the two bases will be a few miles from each other. The neocons will point to this development as an example of how the US must be even more forwardly deployed to block Chinese expansion, but a more likely explanation is that the Chinese move is in response to repeated US destabilization moves in the region, including the war in Yemen, the war on Libya, and elsewhere. But will the new neighbors get along?
  

Week of 02/26/17

• The legacy of death and misery from the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan continues today, and, once again, Dick Cheney plays a central role.  A new book by Joseph Hickman, a former U.S. Marine and Army sergeant, titled “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers” details how soldiers and local civilian populations were exposed to constant streams of toxic smoke from the burning of waste.
  
• Alabama DHR destroys another family:  All that Shanley wanted for her 20th birthday on February 22 was to get her son back from DHR, and to no longer be considered a foster child herself. Ashton was born while Shanley was in foster care, and when she was kicked out of her foster home last summer at the age of 19, she was not permitted to take her son with her. Alabama social workers tell her that she cannot get him back at this time because they still consider her a foster child, even though she is legally an adult, living on her own with both a job and an apartment.
  
• “We’re also going to put in a budget request for our beloved military and we will be substantially upgrading all of our military -- offensive, defense, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before," says #45 at CPAC.  “Nobody’s going to mess with us, folks, nobody,” he said. “It will be one of the greatest military buildups in American history.”    Looks like #45 is going to continue the foreign policy of #44, who continued the foreign policy of #43.  So instead of standing ovations, those people should be booing, and instead of bitching about #45, #44 supporters should be cheering.
  
• The racist roots of minimum wage laws.
  
• Stingray technology shows ongoing tension between privacy rights and safety.
  
• This foam stops bullets cold and pulverizes them to dust.
  
• Governor Steve Bullock (D) of Montana has vetoed constitutional carry again.  The governor says the idea of allowing individuals to decide for themselves whether they are eligible to carry concealed weapons is absurd.
  
• White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Thursday suggested the Trump administration will step up enforcement of federal laws against recreational marijuana.   People who go places where marijuana is legal 'medically' have many hoops to jump through, and  long waits for their medical marijuana cards, and some, still, do not meet the criteria to get one at all.  At this point, going where it is legal 'recreationally' is your best bet.  Anyone attempting to advocate, defend, enforce, or support laws to keep this plant out of the hands of people who need it are truly enemies of the people.
  
• Sheik Omar: The death of a "deep state" asset.
  
• In a new filing in Arkansas state court, Amazon (amzn) claimed records from the Echo should receive special protection under the First Amendment since what owners say to the device—and the answers its assistant "Alexa" provides—are a form of free expression.   "At the heart of that First Amendment protection is the right to browse and purchase expressive materials anonymously, without fear of government discovery," said Amazon, adding that Echo voice records could reveal information about a person's health or political views.
  
• Astronomers from NASA and the European Southern Observatory announced Wednesday that four new Earth-sized exoplanets have been discovered orbiting a star about 40 light-years away, and that three may contain liquid water and be able to sustain life.
  
• Every American should be concerned about the Flynn leaks — here's why.
  
• The 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil cost Brazilian taxpayers $4.6 billion, conservative estimates show. But once related expenses covered by the Brazilian government are factored in, the overall costs hit the $12 billion mark, which equates to about 0.72 percent of Brazil’s national budget.  They are now in ruins.
  
• The Pentagon said it wouldn’t use depleted uranium rounds against ISIS. Months later, it did — thousands of times.
  
• Two months into the Philly’s sweetened-beverage tax, supermarkets and distributors are reporting a 30 percent to 50 percent drop in beverage sales and are planning for layoffs.
  
• Alan Colmes passes after a brief illness.
  
• 4th circuit upholds Maryland's 'assault weapon' ban, claims the prohibited guns and magazines are outside the scope of the Second Amendment.
  
• FOMC Minutes: More of the same.
  
• The call for import restrictions, in the name of saving jobs, is politically popular in some quarters. But few talk about the costs. We know there are costs because nothing is free.
  
• Finance as Warfare: the IMF lent to Greece knowing it could never pay back debt.
  
• #Wikileaks releases CIA espionage orders for 2012 French presidential election. 
  
• Wall Street's top regulator is resigning from FedRes.
  
• Led by #45's own personal lawyer. Proposal allegedly includes removing the democratically elected leader of the Ukraine, replacing him with one more pro- Russian and "leasing" Crimea to Russia, you know... typical US foreign policy.
  
• Alan Greenspan admits Ron Paul was right about gold.  In the next issue of The Austrian, David Gordon reviews Sebatian Mallaby's new book, The Man Who Knew, about the career of Alan Greenspan. Mallaby points out that prior to his career at the Fed, Greenspan exhibited a keen understanding of the gold standard and how free markets work. In spite of this contradiction, Mallaby takes a rather benign view toward Greenspan. 
  
• Gen. H.R. McMaster has been named National Security Advisor to #45. How much will his hawkish views on war and geopolitics influence #45's policies?
  
• The US dollar is now overvalued against almost every currency in the world. 
  

Week of 02/19/17

• Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.
  
• Russia sends spy ship near US coast, deploys banned missiles at home, officials say.  CBS here.
  
• New Yale study finds link between vaccines and brain-related autoimmune and inflammation.
  
• Free markets at home the solution to companies moving abroad.
  
• Want to know how much the person calling themselves your representative is spending?
  
• The stock market is soaring and the jobs report gives a rosy outlook. Are we in for good times…or are the hard times just around the corner?  Current euphoria similar to that of 2006 - 2007.
  
• As much as the GOP gripes about socialism and welfare....  they sure like their socialism and welfare.
  
• The political economy of reallocating and reducing Medicaid spending by first increasing it.
  
• It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people – from both parties, across the ideological spectrum – who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.
  
• Politics is full of contradictions. Even if they are not expressed philosophically, party politics in particular exemplify inconsistency.   Take the recent resignation of Trump administration National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Presented by the Trump White House as a matter of eroding trust, the implications amount to what some have called a “political assassination.”
  
• Eagle -vs- drone.
  
• Meet the new "specially protected" class.  #bluesnowflakes
  
• Who will be blamed if the Oroville dam fails?
  
• Ron Paul: the state is a religion.
  
• TSA busted in massive $100 million, 40,000 lb cocaine smuggling conspiracy.
  
• Indiana town, blocked from using eminent domain, uses code fines to run off homeowners.
  
• World’s second largest stockpile of gold leaves the United States.
  
• Now sites can fingerprint you online even if you are using multiple browsers.
  
• #45’s embattled national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned yesterday, following reports that he had misled officials about his contacts with Russia.
  
• http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/31183/
  
• All last week’s court ruling demonstrated was that the interests of health insurance companies are to be protected at the expense of the American people. Unfortunately, that mindset also explains how America’s health system became what it is today. 
  
• The China Meteorological Administration wants to increase rainfall and snow across 960,000 square kilometers of the country. A more effective way of making this happen that doesn’t involve a ritualistic rain dance? Spending $168 million on cloud seeding technology that they hope will allow them to manipulate the weather.
  
• Netanyahu: There is no bigger supporter of Israel than #45; on the agenda at the press conference are some of the region's most volatile issues: the war in Syria, the Iran nuclear file and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  
• Instead of letting the free market handle things, #45 wants to spend more money to go back to the moon.
  
• One of the tallest dams in US (Oroville Dam) is getting close to failure due to heavy California Rains. Govt issued evacuation for 100,000 people downstream as failure is imminent. Guy on the video said could wipe out a 1/4 of California agriculture.
  
• Spencer Williamson, the president and chief executive officer of the Richmond, Virginia-based Kaleo Pharmaceuticals, is under fire after the price of a two-pack of Evzio, a device that treats life-threatening opioid overdoses, skyrocketed from $690 in 2014 to $4,500 today.
  
• A single mother in New York was arrested and her children taken away in January after she decided to homeschool — and some are claiming it’s because the school system lost her paperwork.
  
• It’s becoming difficult to ignore a brazenly open politicization of American policing. This phenomenon excludes the various protests, militarized responses to those protests, and debate choking media both online and on-air. It’s entirely different, and generally not practiced by a majority of police agencies. “We back the badge”, thin blue line, and Blue Lives Matter are charged with polarization, no doubt. They’re inherently different, however, from open endorsements of political parties, and the taunting of an abandoned public.
  

Week of 02/12/17

• Military-grade spy gear flooding local police departments.
  
• Saudi crown prince receives CIA honor for anti-terrorism.
  
• Russia considers giving Snowden to #45, as a "gift."
  
• Do we need to establish a police force in space?  On January 27, 1967, the United States, United Kingdom and then-Soviet Union, signed the Outer Space Treaty. The short, 17-article document serves as a “constitution” for the worlds beyond Earth’s atmosphere. It was ratified October 10 of the same year, which places us in the midst of a yearlong 50th anniversary celebration. To date, 105 countries have since signed it.
  
• "Unimaginable" levels of radiation leaking from Fukushima, 530 sieverts an hour.
  
• 2,000 out of 6,000 federal whistle blowers facing retaliation.
  
• A Brazilian Supreme Court justice called on Friday for the legalization of marijuana and even cocaine to undo the growing power of drug gangs behind a wave of violence that has shaken Latin America's largest country.
  
• "The next financial crisis is likely to revolve around how this debt burden is managed," warns Neil MacKinnon, an economist with VTB Capital in London. "In the U.K., most crises are related to boom and busts in the housing market, where there is an approximate 18-year cycle suggesting that the next bust will be in 2025."
  
• Marijuana home delivery starts in Oregon.
  
• Military officials got #45 to agree to the botched Yemen raid by suggesting #44 would never have had the courage to do it, it has been reported.
  
• The orphan drug act scam: An old drug gets a new price to fight a rare disease: $89,000 a year.  Welcome to big pharma, folks. 
  
• Taxes and red tape  (aka government) keep the marijuaana black market (aka free market) profitable.
  
• Ubaldo Herrera Hernandez, a human rights activist in Cuba and a member of the Cuba Mises Institute, was arrested on February 2nd. Manuel Velazquez Visea, another Cuban libertarian activist, was also arrested. It has been confirmed that other members of Mises Cuba were threatened by security officials after the incident, but no further arrests have yet been made.
  At a time when many Americans and other global leaders have wished to romanticize the Castro regime, this is a reminder of their history of oppression for anyone who longs for freedom.
  
• #45 invites sheriff to 'destroy' Texas state lawmaker who opposes asset forfeiture.  Asset forfeiture, like taxation, is theft.   Here's an entire website devoted to it, selling all the property they steal.
  
• U.S. Judge temporarily blocks #45's immigration order nationwide.  Pro tip: It helps if you stop creating, arming, funding, and training "terrorists."  Also helps if you recognize that you cannot destroy people, places, and things, and not anticipate blowback AND people wanting to escape that.
  
• Politicians are experts at shuffling deck chairs on a sinking ship. As President Trump's tax plan is eventually revealed, here are a few things to look out for.
  
• This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made The Civil Rights Movement Possible, journalist Charles Cobb shows how important guns were not only to leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. but also to many black Southerners who “believed in both nonviolence and self-defense.”
  
• Ron Paul on those who depend on Federal Reserve.
  
• #45 writes another executive order, "inluding, if warranted, legislation defining new crimes of violence and establishing new mandatory minimum sentences for existing crimes of violence against Federal, State, tribal, and local law enforcement officers, as well as for related crimes;"  We wait for a definition of "new crimes."
  
• A local cosmetology student is being investigated for giving free haircuts to the homeless in the Tucson community.  Juan Carlos Montesdeoca has given dozens of free haircuts to the homeless at the Santa Rita Park over the past few months, “Out of the kindness of my heart. Out of the memory of my mom, because she lost her hair."
  
• India shuts down Gates Foundation program over ties to big pharma.
  
• US government's 2016 net loss "more than doubled" to NEGATIVE $1 TRILLION.
  
• Totalitarian Comrade Anthony Kern (Phoenix rep) has introduced bill to force passengers in a motor vehicle to carry identification papers or risk 4 months in jail. 
  
• If the Secretary receives certification by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue that an individual has a seriously delinquent tax debt, the Secretary shall transmit such certification to the Secretary of State for action with respect to denial, revocation, or limitation of a passport pursuant to section 32101 of the FAST Act.
  
• BearTooth: an off the grid network for your smartphone.
  
• NOAA Whistleblower Claims Data Were ‘Adjusted’ to Make Global Warming Seem Worse
  
• Did you REALLY need proof of the false left/right paradigm??  Soros Fund Execs Funded Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John McCain, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham in 2016.
  

Week of 02/05/17

• California attorney Shawn McMillan on why he fights CPS: "They're stealing kids."
  
• Washington, DC—Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) joined 26 Members of Congress in introducing the Return to Prudent Banking Act today.    See Glass-Steagall Legislation.
  
• It is bad, very bad case law for the courts to tell police officers that from a Fourth Amendment standpoint that they may presume: 1) that an armed individual is armed and dangerous, 2)that an armed individual is engaged in clandestine actions, and 3) hat the armed individual waived his 4th Amendment rights.
  
• Researchers examining 44 samples of 30 different vaccines found dangerous contaminants, including red blood cells in one vaccine and metal toxicants in every single sample tested – except in one animal vaccine.
  
• Federal health officials may be about to get greatly enhanced powers to quarantine people, as part of an ongoing effort to stop outbreaks of dangerous contagious diseases.  The new powers are outlined in a set of regulations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published late last month to update the agency's quarantine authority for the first time since the 1940s.  The outlined changes are being welcomed by many health lawyers, bioethicists and public health specialists as providing important tools for protecting the public. But the CDC's increased authority is also raising fears that the rules could be misused in ways that violate civil liberties.
  
• Report: #45, Australian PM Turnbull have tense phone call over Muslim refugees.
  
• #45 threatened in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart to send U.S. troops to stop "bad hombres down there" unless the Mexican military does more to control them, according to an excerpt of a transcript of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press.
  
• More war drums as #45's national security advisor threatens Iran.
  
• Like Saudi Arabia, Israel has a soft spot for Sunni extremism.
  
• Syria rejects Russia's suggestions on autonomous communities in Syria, including Kurds.
  
• When authorities found out that Shona Banda treated her severe Crohn’s Disease with cannabis, they took away her child and are trying to send her to prison for 30 years. But she is fighting back!  You can purchase her book HERE.
  
• Iran to ditch dollar.
  
• KGB chief linked to Trump file found dead amid Kremlin cover up claims.
  
• Graphic film about the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps by the US at the end of the Second World War. It is an in your face look at the ultimate horror.   A view of the aftermath of large scale mechanized slaughter of countless numbers of innocent people, and the shattered survivors.
  
• The Rev. Martin Luther King was an important civil rights leader, but we must not forget that he was an uncompromising opponent of the Vietnam war and of violence in general.
  
• EU wants to limit cash payments, “Payments in cash are widely used in the financing of terrorist activities,” the Commission’s proposal states. “In this context, the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments could also be explored. Several Member States have in place prohibitions for cash payments above a specific threshold.”
  
• Over the weekend, #45 indicated that he would continue in his predecessor’s foreign policy. The US conducted some 31 airstrikes in Syria and Iraq and two drone strikes in Yemen. Will we achieve different results doing the same thing over and over?   Answer: nope.  See: 'blowback.'
  
• Verizon is reportedly in talks to merge with Charter, America’s second-biggest cable company.
  
• Lots more farmers and shepherds anticipated to fill Gitmo under #45.
  
• What happens when doctors only take cash?  Free markets, my friend.
  
• #44 murdered the 16-year-old American boy in Yemen, #45 just murdered his 8-year-old sister.
  
• 81% of the total gain in health care coverage for the first three quarters of 2016 consists of Medicaid enrollment.
  
• US stocks are now the most overpriced since the 2000 crash.
  
• #45 signs executive order for "extreme vetting."  Cites as examples terror attacks on 9/11 and San Bernardino.  Except the 9/11 attackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia which is not on the list and the San Bernardino attacker was US born but had links to Pakistan- also not on the list. It would have had zero impact on those events.
  
• The legislature of the State of Colorado is considering ending its longtime ban on switchblades. You heard that right. In a state where pretty much anyone without a criminal record can purchase a hand gun — and where homicide rates are quite low, mind you — switchblades are verboten. 
  
• John McCain has distinguished himself for his bellicosity, constantly calling for US interventions around the globe. Among the countries that McCain has demanded the US invade, bomb, or destabilize are Syria, Iraq (repeatedly), Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Libya, Kosovo, Nigeria, Bosnia, Iran, Georgia, Sudan, Mali, and perhaps China.
  
• Houthi militants sinks Saudi navy ship in Yemen.
  
• "Trump wants to see fundamental tax reforms and deregulation implemented. However, it's hard to see how these policies, no matter how great they are, could generate enough growth—and hence revenue—to compensate for all that new and old spending. That is why, in four years, Trump may be able to truthfully call himself, not Barack Obama, the biggest debt creator of all time."
  
• SimpleFuel home hydrogen fuel dispenser wins $1M DOE prize.  Guess where that came from.
  

Week of 01/29/17

• Donald has forced through another unconstitutional executive order to begin construction on a wall.  His total disregard for free markets are going to cause higher prices on the following: vehicles, electrical machinery, machinery, optical and medical instruments, fresh and processed veggies, fresh and processed fruit, wine, and beer.  Tariff is just a fancy word for 'tax,' and taxation is theft.  Congrats voters.
  
• Donald has revived the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
  
• The internet outrage machine kicked into high gear this week when President Trump declared his inauguration day a National Day of Patriotic Devotion....sound familiar?
  
• Donald readies a new Pentagon spending binge.
  
• Donald and his OMB pick to continue social security and medicare entitlements.  “Would you agree with me that for younger workers, they may have to work longer when they enter the program to save the program?” Graham asked.  Mulvaney said that he has told his children to “prepare for exactly that.” 
  
• Walter Williams says, "instead of coddling, universities should let kids grow up."  I agree, I also pose that challenge to government and its supporters.
  
• Donald poised to re-open CIA "black site" prisons like those where it detained and tortured terrorism suspects.
  
• Scientists cure diabetes in mice by using cells grown inside rats.
  
• Student extorts $28K from teacher to keep their sexual relationship a secret.
  
• On Jan. 3, outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch secretly signed an order directing the National Security Agency – America’s 60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus – to make available raw spying data to all other federal intelligence agencies, which then can pass it on to their counterparts in foreign countries and in the 50 states upon request. She did so, she claimed, for administrative convenience. Yet in doing this, she violated basic constitutional principles that were erected centuries ago to prevent just what she did.
  
• Mnuchin wants to INCREASE the size of the IRS.
  
• US Navy: A history of corruption and waste.
  
• St. Martinville police hope change comes with the state's new "hate crime" law because being a certain adjective or type of worker makes a crime more hienious.
  
• Elderly Maine couple thrown out after failing to pay property taxes.
  
• Amazon will soon begin accepting food stamps.
  
• Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, the former German newspaper editor whose bestselling book exposed how the CIA controls German media, has been found dead. He was 56.
  
• Facebook censors RT during Donald's inauguration.
  

• Wikileaks endorses Reality Check report on Podesta "Pizzagate" emails, CBS pulls broadcast.
  
• Reality Check report on "Pizzagate" emails.
  
• The FBI and five other agencies probe possible covert Kremlin aid to Donald.
  
• On his way out, Obama bombs Libya one last time.
  
• $9 TRILLION in new spending, thanks republicans.
  
• Congress has passed a budget calling for increasing federal spending and adding $1.7 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. Most so-called "fiscal conservatives" voted for this big-spending budget because it allows Congress to repeal some parts of "Obamacare" via "reconciliation." As important as it is to repeal "Obamacare," it does not justify increasing spending and debt.  More money will be thrown down a hole as we are waiting for the 'replace' part of the repeal and replace.  "Trumpcare" won't be free, either.
  
• “Volunteerism is one of the first things that go by the wayside, simply because people can’t afford it,” Reckner said.  And WHY can't they afford it?  Government hates competition and believes you do not deserve all of the fruits of your labor, you couldn't possibly be smart enough to decide how to spend it.
  
• In 2016, a Johns Hopkins study concluded that the number of preventable medical errors has soared in recent years and is now the third leading cause of death in the United States.
  
• Donald's to-do list for his first day in office is long, and there is nothing about ending the mass scale theft, violence, and oppression.
  
• Scientists have built an AI that is smarter than most adults.
  
• DC teacher union head says, "DeVos is scarier than the klan."  What you SHOULD be concerned about is the fact that your child is forced into 12 years of public education that doesn't prepare them, at all, for real life.  Instead, it teaches them the importance of obedience and subservience. 
  
• Mr. End-the-Energy-Department says he'll "protect science."
  
• Donald signed an executive order on Obamacare, still no word on Trumpcare replacement.
  

Week of 01/22/17

• San Francisco’s two-year community college plans to roll out a cannabis curriculum following California voters’ decision last year to legalize recreational marijuana.
  
• Chinese billionaire Jack Ma says the US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure.
  
• lol  CIA unveils new rules for spying on and collecting info on Americans.
  
• Amazing, these New Yorkers prefer martial law to Trump presidency.  
  
• US government caught massively fabricating student loan default data.
  
• As Murray Rothbard often emphasized, the free market and a peaceful foreign policy are indispensable partners. We cannot maintain a free market if the government engages in a bellicose foreign policy. A powerful and aggressive state constantly engaged in war requires vast resources to sustain it, and “military socialism” is an all-too-present reality.
  
• The $20 TRILLION question:  What will republicans do differently to curb the growth of the debt?  Answer:  Nothing.  They will continue growing the debt and taxing Americans out of their own money, aka, business as usual.
  
• Who is Sturgill Simpson?  He was on SNL and after playing Keep it Between the Lines, he went on to drop truth to the millions of viewers — and most of them had no idea.  As the song starts out, he calls out both oil and heroin, and then how the troops are used as pawns in these wars for profit.  The second part of the song actually addresses why no one even caught the fact that he just exposed war for profit.  h/t to your, sir.
  
• More lulz, Rick Perry regrets call to scrap energy department.
  
• Colorado governor plan to raise marijuana taxes 50%, for school funding.  Because you do not deserve all the fruits of your labor, and obviously, we should keep throwing MORE money down that hole.
  
• Republican lawmakers in five states propose bills to criminalize peaceful protests.
  
• Two more major problems with medicare and social security.
  
• Will McCain's $5 TRILLION military budget make America great again?   See 'theft.'  See 'blowback.'
  
• Manning exposed heinous crimes against humanity being committed by the United States Government, including that  *US troops were raping little boys, in front of their mothers, to get information.   Tomi Lahren thinks truth is bad, that this information should have been kept from you.    *See Blowback.
  
• President-Elect Trump held his first press conference in quite some time. While it may be entertaining to watch him battle with the media, there are some tough and challenging consequences heading our way when it comes to Trump's stated policies. Ron Paul discusses.
  
• National health care to be replaced with... national health care. 
  
• The FBI did pay Best Buy's 'Geek Squad' to spy on Americans. 
  
• Before moving into the White House, Barack Obama described the war on drugs as "an utter failure," candidly discussed his own youthful drug use, criticized our excessively punitive criminal justice system, called for the decriminalization of marijuana, and rejected federal interference with state-authorized medical use of the plant. But with the exception of a crack sentencing reform bill he signed in 2010, Obama's first term was a big disappointment for those who expected him to de-escalate the war on drugs.
  
• A local Republican politician in Connecticut was arrested for allegedly pinching a female employee’s genitals, reports the Westport Daily Voice. Christopher von Keyserling, 71, was arrested Wednesday in Greenwich Town Hall and charged with fourth-degree sexual assault, a misdemeanor. He was released on a $2,500 bond and given a court date of Jan. 25
  
• Bought milk?  You may  be eligible for $70 in these fifteen states.
  
• Apparently Wikileaks is so fake  that the CIA wants to kill Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
  
• Manning is due out in May, rather than 2045.  But why not a full pardon?  Why not now?
  
• Will Trump continue the Bush-Obama legacy? All signs point to 'yes.'
  
• Glenn Greenwald discusses the 'deep state.' 
  
• Trump team in "frequent contact" with Russia despite denying call with Moscow over sanctions.  See 'Logan Act.'
  
• Police hoe new rainbow-painted car will help people report 'hate crimes.'  Because being a certain adjective makes a crime more heinous and you need a special car to handle it.
  
• Jeff Sessions's drug war may end what's left of states' rights.
  
• Much is said and written about crime in the inner cities. President Obama was recently in Chicago to discuss it. The real causes are most often overlooked, however...
  
• House democrats to sit out inauguration, because theft, violence, and oppression is only good when it is labeled with a "D."
  
• Two grieving Alberta families have each been slapped with a $100 carbon tax bill after having a relative cremated, just days after the tax was introduced in that province.  The $100 fee was handwritten on Ed Connon's bill when he paid to cremate his 93-year-old mother, Margaret Connon, who died Jan. 7. The funeral home staff had no explanation for him.
  
• As always, tax payers will foot the inauguration bill. 
  
• Building totalitarianism in Europe - the last coup of Victoria Nuland.
  
• US troops enter Poland, first deployment at Russia's doorstep.
  

• Mexicans are blaming "neoliberalism" for socialism's failures.
  
• Despite tax collection increasing by 50% in the last 9 years, California’s public pension insolvency is forcing Gov. Jerry Brown to propose a dangerously unpopular 42% increase in gasoline taxes and a 141% increase in vehicle registration fees.
  
•  EPA says it can't pay economic damages from mine spill.
  
• According to an article in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, aluminum in vaccines is not safe.
  
• New peer-to-peer video sharing website up.   BitChutes mission is to put people and free speech first. It's free to join and create and upload your own videos to share with others.
  
• Millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did at the same age.  They have half the net worth of boomers, their home ownership rte is lower, and their student debt is drastically higher.
  
• Petition with over 1 million signatures, urges Obama to pardon Edward Snowden.
  
• Congress to consider proposal to raise minimum wage to $100K annually for H1-B visas. 
  
• Clinton global initiative to shut down.
  
• Freenom World is a fast and anonymous public DNS resolver.
  
• Best Buy's Geek Squad accused of being a "branch of the FBI" over hard drive data searches.
  
• New evidence suggests D.B. Cooper may have worked for Boeing.
  
• ​California’s bullet train could cost taxpayers 50% more than estimated — as much as $3.6 billion more.
  

Week of 01/15/17

• Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich ask Obama to free Chelsea Manning.
  
• GOP making Obamacare great again.
  
• Fingerprinting methods identify users across different browsers on the same computer.
  
• Hungarian attack on George Soros  prompts NGO anger.
  
• One final expansion of the surveillance state, as Obama exits the White House.
  
• If Obama grants Manning clemency Assange will agree to US extradition despite clear unconstitutionality of DOJ case.
  
• Protests push Mexico to the brink of revolution, no one is talking about it.
  
• FBI, Justice Department to be investigated over Clinton probe.
  

Week of 01/01/17

• If a Best Buy technician is a paid FBI informant, are his computer searches legal?
  
• Pentagon successfully releases 'smart drone' swarm over California.
  
• December 1, 2016, the FBI becomes the enemy of every computer user and every IT security professional worldwide.
  

Week of 12/25/16

• School-to-Prison Pipeline: New law makes school fights a felony.
  
• Grandstanding in Kansas: Firearms Freedom act not being enforced.
  
• Ralph Raico passed away.
  
• ​NDAA passed again, they also quietly passed the "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act."    Welcome your Ministry of Truth.
  
• Court officials who  jailed a veteren for living off the grid were, "just doing their job."
  

Week of 12/11/16

• Obama is suddenly interested in limiting the sweeping presidential powers he spent 8 years expanding.
  
• Austin police chief says cops need to vet gun owners, "if you know a gun enthusiast, turn them in".
  
• Black Guns Matter educating residents on guns and conflict resolution.
• #LEAKED: Today, Monday 5 December 2016, WikiLeaks publishes an authoritative, searchable archive of 57,934 emails from the personal email address of Berat Albayrak, who is President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's son-in-law and Turkey's Minister of Energy. 
  
• EFF battles misleading, sloppy, secret FBI warrants aimed at the Internet Archive and CREDO.
• ​LipNet: lip-reading AI uses machine learning.​
• Once you teach a computer to see, it can teach itself to hear.
• ​The Department of the Army handed protesters of the Dakota Access pipeline a victory when it announced the project would be re-routed.
  
• ​McCain and Graham seek to gut 9/11 bill to immunize foreign governments funding terrorists.  They specifically said they want to strip the "discretionary state function" provision from JASTA that creates liability for foreign governments funding terrorist groups."
  
• Obama is sending our special ops to fight for moderates who want us dead.  aka: Shampoo, rinse, repeat... 
  
• Who doesn’t want to cure cancer? Under the guise of discovering the cure to cancer, GOP leadership passed an "unpaid-for" $6.3 billion health care spending bill that threw even more money at the HHS, which already spends about $1 trillion a year on health care programs. Once again, conservative members were placed in a tough position between the false choice of either appearing to be against a cure for cancer and some good reforms or creating a lot of wasteful big government programs. ​

​Week of 12/04/16

• Anti-gun activist, David Patraeus up for secretary of state.
  
• Insane Philippine leader, Duterte, compares himself to Hitler and wants to murder people for drug addiction, "There are three million drug addicts (in the Philippines). I'd be happy to slaughter them."
  
• Trump wishes insane Philippine leader, Duterte, success with his brutal war on drugs.
  
• Goldman Sachs poised to return to D.C.
  
• Obama’s last Christmas present to America? A boatload of new regulations.
  
• The UN honors Castro with a " minute of silence."
  
• Has North Korea reopened a prison camp?
  
• Venezuela's nemesis is an Alabama man that sells fasteners at a Hoover Home Depot.
  
• South Korea moving towards cashless society.
  
• Trump, like all politicians, to treat symptoms rather than the disease.  His student loan plan is much like those suggested by Clinton, Obama, and Sanders.  Free advice: if you can't afford it, don't buy it.
  
• Sweden may go cashless.
  
• Zimbabwe, too.
  
• Jackals in the US pushing for cashless society.
  
• Using algorithms partially modeled on the human brain, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have enabled computers to predict the immediate future by examining a photograph.
  
• How to beat camera enforced traffic tickets.
  
• US state department laughs about transparency.
  
• Mob locks up bankers as cash ban crisis deepens.
• ​See how much the earth has changed since 1984.
  
• Nikola One to introduce hydrogen fuel cell electric semi-truck.
• Piano teachers beware: the feds are on to you!
  
• German government plan to seize all farms in crisis.  Back in August, Germany urged its citizens to stockpile food in the event of a crisis.
• ​So now not only will your sons be considered "...dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy,” so will your daughters.
  
• WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange today said the CIA was responsible for paving the way for ISIS as the whistle blowing organisation released more than half a million formerly confidential US diplomatic cables dating back to 1979.
  
• Global leaders urge worldwide drug decriminalization.
  
• Ron Paul: Fake news comes from our own government.
  
• New Report, shows the federal government wastes $247B (BILLION) .  100 examples highlighted here.
  
• When a system upgrade gets you arrested.
  
• The push for 'smart' guns to be forced on everyone.  A National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report, noted that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has used $12.6 million in taxpayer money to develop 'smart gun' technology. Most of the funding—approximately $11.1 million—was provided by NIJ itself and the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Fyi, the Feds have been working on 'smart gun' technology for over two decades (see page 5).
  
• Trump completely disregards private property and insists on locking people up or kicking them out of the country for mussing up particular fabrics.
  
• MIT Report: China turns BIG DATA into BIG BROTHER.  Video here.
  
• India's ban on cash brought down the rupee and their stocks.
  
• FBI and NSA poised to gain new surveillance powers with Trump.
  
• Chernobyl capped for another hundred years.
  
• California regulates cow toots.
  
• The FBI puts out a report listing the seven types of LEOs.
  
• George Borjas remember’s Castro’s demonetization: "Castro quickly found a simple way of confiscating “excess” cash. The currency was changed overnight. And everyone had to turn in their old paper currency for the new paper currency, with some limits being imposed on the amount of the transactions. There was a miles-long line on what I think was a Saturday morning, as the entire Cuban population was turned into beggars for the new currency."
  
• Due to massive inflation, shops in Venezuela are now weighing money rather than counting it–a true paper standard.
  
• As the economy collapses, Venezuelan’s are turning to bitcoin–using free electricity to mine the coins–but the secret police are hunting the miners.
  
• Mugabe launches new currency in "last gamble" for Zimbabwe.   ​
  

Week of 11/27/16​

• U.S. Government website cancer.gov adds page discussing cannabis uses for cancer and other ailments.  (Please see main page for nih.gov reports on cannabis, by illness).
  
• Trump PAC CEO praises Muslim registry, internment camps.
  
• Trump meets with Kissenger (“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy”) about Russia and China. 
  
• DEA is trying to make another plant illegal.
  
• Police deploy water hoses and tear gas against Standing Rock protesters. One woman has her arm severely damaged.
  
• An NSA hub code-named “TITANPOINTE” resides in the middle of Manhattan
  
• India abolishes larger bank notes, to fight 'black money.'
  
• Tim Allen is an ANCAP. 
  
• Trump shifts on at least 3 prominent issues: Climate, torture and prosecution of Clinton.
  
• Bloomberg ran tests on aloe vera gels at CVS, Target, Walmart, and Walgreens - no evidence of any aloe vera.
  
• Great, now even your headphones can spy on you.
  
• If you think common core is idiocy, wait until you see the new standards.
  

Week of 11/20/16

• Mob rule voting in four states to punish low-skill workers and small businessmen with minimum wage hikes.​
  
• Russia quits international criminal court.
  
• 60 Minutes : Westminster Pedophilia Ring  (not to be confused with the one in the U.S.).
  
• The Secret World of US Elections - Julian Assange, full interview.
  
• WAPO to federal government, "all the powers are should belong to you."
  
• Vice: What makes a gun an "assault  weapon?"  lol @ 1:28
  
• Instead of "draining the swamp," the GOP is greasing the wheels, as usual.
  
• “Weakness, Failure, Cronyism, Idiocy: The GOP Is Back in DC.”
  
• TSA employees get cut of stolen money when the DEA are tipped off.
  
• Health inspectors destroy 3000# of barbecue, and fixin's, destined for homeless...
  
• ​The Dutch prison crisis: a shortage of prisoners.
  

Week of 11/​​​​​​​​13/16

• ​Murderer, Janet Reno, dead at 78.  She lived much longer than her victims: Winston Blake, 28, black, British 
  Peter Gent, 24, Peter Hipsman, 28, Perry Jones, 64, Michael Schroeder, 29, Jaydean Wendell, 34, Katherine Andrade, 24, Chanel Andrade, 1, Jennifer Andrade, 19, George Bennett, 35, Susan Benta, 31, Mary Jean Borst, 49,
  Pablo Cohen, 38, Abedowalo Davies, 30, Shari Doyle, 18, Beverly Elliot, 30, Yvette Fagan, 32, Doris Fagan, 51, Lisa Marie Farris, 24, Raymond Friesen, 76, Sandra Hardial, 27, Zilla Henry, 55, Vanessa Henry, 19, Phillip Henry, 22, Paulina Henry, 24, Stephen Henry, 26, Diana Henry, 28, Novellette Hipsman, 36, Floyd Houtman, 61,
  Sherri Jewell, 43, David M. Jones, 38, David Koresh, 33, Rachel Koresh, 24, Cyrus Koresh, 8, Star Koresh, 6, 
  Bobbie Lane Koresh, 2, Jeffery Little, 32, Nicole Gent Little, 24, and unborn child, Dayland Gent, 3, Page Gent, 1, 
  Livingston Malcolm, 26, Diane Martin, 41, Wayne Martin, Sr., 42, Lisa Martin, 13, Sheila Martin, Jr., 15,
  Anita Martin, 18, Wayne Martin, Jr., 20, Julliete Martinez, 30, Crystal Martinez, 3, Isaiah Martinez, 4, 
  Joseph Martinez, 8, Abigail Martinez, 11, Audrey Martinez, 13, John-Mark McBean, 27, Bernadette Monbelly, 31, 
  Rosemary Morrison, 29, Melissa Morrison, 6, Sonia Murray, 29, Theresa Nobrega, 48, James Riddle, 32, 
  Rebecca Saipaia, 24, Steve Schneider, 43, Judy Schneider, 41, Mayanah Schneider, 2, Clifford Sellors, 33, 
  Scott Kojiro Sonobe, 35, Floracita Sonobe, 34, Gregory Summers, 28, Aisha Gyrfas Summers, 17,  and unborn child, Startle Summers, 1, Lorraine Sylvia, 40, Rachel Sylvia, 12, Hollywood Sylvia, 1, Michelle Jones Thibodeau, 18, Serenity Jones, 4, Chica Jones, 2, Little One Jones, 2, Neal Vaega, 38, Margarida Vaega, 47, Mark H. Wendell, 40 @ Waco.   Vicki Weaver, xx, and Sammy Weaver, 14 @ Ruby Ridge.
  
• LEAKED: Spirit cooking.
  
• Socialism kills more babies than war.
  
• 5,200 pentagon employees bought child pornography, investigation halted after 8 months.
  
• Sole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing property for humans, but not corporations.
  
• 
  

Week of 11/06/16

• Sneaky ultrasonic adware makes homes vulnerable to ultrasonic hacking.
  
• The New York Times believes jury nullification to be a bad thing.
  
• Gold eagles soar 287% in October, silver eagles at 128%.
  
• Trump's companies destroyed emails despite court orders.
  
• Blame government, not markets for monopolies.
• Government seized $100K from this family's bank accounts, college savings.
  
• After 15 years of war, new poll shows Americans feel LESS safe. #blowback

• According to FBI statistics the murder rate in the U.S. is a 51 year low.
  
• ​Through November 2, 2016, the federal government has finalized 3,164 final rules, 249 which are deemed 'significant' under executive order# 12866.  
  
• LEAKED: Google reveals Google's strategic plan to help Dems win, track voters.

Week of 10/30/16

• Ever hear of Persistent Surveillance?  It's described as 'Google Live' with 'Tivo' capabilities.  
  
• FDA found manipulating media in favor of big pharma.
  
• Patriot Act at 15: Do you feel safer?
  
• LEAKED: A list of the most damaging wikileaks.
  
• FBI probing new emails related to the Clinton case.
  
• Hillary's #1 aide Huma Abedin: Undeniable ties to terrorists and 9/11 funders.
  
• Google AI invents its own cryptographic algorithm; no one knows how it works. 
  
• Zimbabwe goes down the path of hyperinflation… again.  They simply print more money, pass more laws, and go deeper into debt, sound familiar?  I'm looking at you U.S.A.
  
• Apple's Cook: We're going to kill cash.
  
• FCC imposes ISP privacy rules and takes aim at mandatory arbitration.
  
• Bitcoin as a Chinese capital outflow proxy.
  
• Reps write letter to ask judges to clarify conflicting rules on industrial hemp.
  
• Chaos erupts in courtroom after Bundy brothers, other Oregon occupiers found not guilty on federal charges.
  
• For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.  Leaked AT&T documents here.
  
• According to an article in the Associated Press (AP), the Texas Department of Public Safety, (DPS) considers alleged drunk drivers, pot smokers and child support evaders to be "high-threat criminals.
  
• New regulation could deprive the elderly of private court access.
  
• Is the unemployment number lower than reported?  Of course it is.
  
• The FAA has issued a "No Fly Zone" over DAPL protests in North Dakota.
  
• Big Brother charges editor of Austria's biggest newspaper with 'hate speech' for migrant article. 
  
• Obama administration confirms double-digit premium hikes.
  
• "Whether it be Communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist America, once the people have been successfully conditioned to allow Big Brother to dictate thought, the next step has always been totalitarian rule."
  
• Last week the president of the Philippines signaled his desire to separate from US foreign policy and seek a rapprochement with China. The US is prepared to occupy five military bases in the Philippines and a long-standing mutual defense treaty. What’s next?
  
• Is Eric Braverman seeking Russian asylum?
  
• Two former Rand Paul aides, including Jesse Benton,  involved in British newspaper’s undercover sting, alleging the two attempted to inappropriately funnel international money to a political group supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
  
• Alaska learns the painful side effects of expanding Medicaid under ObamaCare.
  
• Electronic surveillance up 500% In DC area since 2011, almost all sealed cases.
  
• Soldiers told to repay thousands in signing bonuses from height of war effort.
  
• Top anti-marijuana lobby groups in the U.S. as of 2015.
  

Week of 10/23/16

• New Clinton 3% PAYROLL TAX planned for middle class to funnel your money to Wall Street.
  
• America's vassal system of bully diplomacy is falling apart everywhere. “That would undermine the whole rationale behind the rebalance to Asia,” which is to boost US authority.  Yup... ...American diplomacy, as it always has been...
  
• LEAKED:  For those of you who were unaware, your vote really doesn't matter, "There is no U.S. election."
  
• Inflation may be causing long-term rise in unemployment.
  
• "Failure to find a sexual partner is now a disability," is not a prologue to A Brave New World, it is from new guide lines set to be released from  the World Health Organization.
  
• EPA expands power by calling plowed farm fields 'mini mountain ranges,' federal rule could impose wetland permit mandates on plowing a field.
  
• Memories of a lady who beat the government: when the U.S. tried to seize Alice Ramsdell's home 30 years ago, she threatened them with a shotgun. The project proceeded as she stood her ground. But her home is about to be demolished.
  
• China moves forward with its de-dollarization strategy.
  
• USPS worker found dumping bins of mail in the woods - video in link.
  
• At one point passports were a "temporary" war measure.
  
• The horror of endless interventionism.  
  
• Phoenix-based Discount Tire Company and its billionaire owner, Bruce Halle, donate $1M to keep marijuana a felony (also listed:  Bennett Dorrance, Campbell Soup heir @ $10K, Larry Van Tuyl, a Phoenix resident whose family sold its string of car dealerships to Warren Buffett in 2014 @ $100K, and Tucson real estate mogul Donald R. Diamond @ $10K). 
  
• Rigging the Election - Video I: Clinton campaign and DNC incite violence at Trump rallies.
  
• "Overall, our results suggest that investing in secure payments infrastructure can significantly enhance “state capacity” to implement welfare programs in developing countries."
  
• CNN tells viewers it's illegal to view Podesta emails but it's "different" for them. 
  
• Pentagon video warns of "unavioldable" dystopian future for world's biggest cities. 
  
• U.S., other countries issue declaration on export, use of armed drones.
  
• Real Life Robo-Cop: Dubai to have android cops in the near future.
  
• 
  

Week of 10/16/16​​​​

• New study reveals that alcohol facilitates feelings of aggression whereas cannabis diminishes aggressive feelings in heavy alcohol and regular cannabis users, respectively.  #Derp
  
• LEAKED: New email dump is available.
  
• Rates for some Obamacare plans to increase by 36 percent.
  
• Over one million expected to lose Obamacare as insurers quit.
  
• POLICE ARREST MORE PEOPLE FOR MARIJUANA THAN FOR ALL VIOLENT CRIMES COMBINED.
  
• A leaked FBI internal counter-terrorism study and its (not so) surprising conclusions.
  
• Pot for pets?  Of course - please see the main page for nih.gov statistics and studies for everything from pain management to destruction of cancer cells.
  
• So many on addictive opiates for pain, with terrible side effects - Dr. Oz on 'reefer rehab' for prescription opiates.
  
• LEAKED: Clinton knew Saudis and Qatar funding ISIS.
  
• ​Why the new Silk Roads terrify government.
  
• LEAKED: 1,100 more Podesta emails.
• U.S. painting their F/A-18s to match paint schemes of Russian jets in Syria.
  
• LEAKED: In leaked speech, Clinton promises bankers to stand against marijuana legalization, "in all senses of the world."
• Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provided data access for a surveillance product marketed to target activists of color.
  
• Trump needs threats to keep Republicans from abandoning him.
• LEAKED: Only a well-financed concerted campaign portraying him as a bigot can beat Trump.
• Improper recycling could land you in jail: how overcriminalization threatens everyone.
  
• Glenn Beck says dump Trump, electing Hillary, "is an ethical and moral choice."
  
• LEAKED: "we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly."
  
• Survivors of CIA torture describe homebrew electric chair used at Afghan black site.
  
• Another politician wants a draft.
  
• CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance.
  

 Week of 10/09/16

• The state breaks its own laws to save forced national healthcare.
  
• Feds steal 100 million acres of Alaska during summer of 2016.
  
• Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. "intelligence."
  
• US suspends bilateral contact with Russia over Syria.
  
• This is what they were afraid of, Iraqis Use ‘Sue the Saudis’ 9/11 Bill to Sue US for 2003 Invasion
• US Attorney General finally admits marijuana isn't a gateway drug... but prescription pills are.
  
• MOE will conduct training for civil defense with the participation of 40 million people.
  
• “A lot of people said we would go to hell if we didn’t form a government,” said Ignacio Escolar, the editor of the news website eldiario.es. “But we’re still here.”
  
• Gun-show customers’ license plates come under scrutiny as federal agents enlisted local police to scan plates at shows.
  
• Heroes: Veterans on patrol, this time guarding marijuana fields.
  
• The most recent intelligence whistleblower, David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, and the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence says, “Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”
  
• BREAKING: Pentagon caught paying PR firm $540 million to make fake terrorist videos.
  
• RPI: Pentagon caught paying PR firm $540 million to make fake terrorist videos.
  

Week of 10/02/16

• BREAKING: “Tens of thousands” of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.
  
• Wikileaks confirms HIllary sold weapons.
  
• Done in your name: Survivors of CIA's torture-decade describe their ordeals.
  
• EFF to court: don't let US government prosecute professor over his book about securing computers.
  
• The New Nevada: Taxpayer Bucks for Billionaires
  
• Feds to ban leaf used in herbal tea.
  
• Hillary's huge estate tax hike.
  
• President Rodrigo Duterte said Friday that he would like to kill millions of drug addicts in the Philippines, defying international criticism of his country’s bloody war on narcotics and escalating his brutal rhetoric with a reference to the Holocaust.
  
• Licensing/regulation scheme creates trucker shortage, push for driverless rigs.
  
• Three reasons why the banking system is rigged against you.