US the Biggest Threat to World Peace in 2013
By Russia Today
The US has been voted as the most significant threat to world peace in a survey across 68 different countries. Anti-American sentiment was not only recorded in antagonistic countries, but also in many allied NATO partners like Turkey and Greece.
A global survey conducted by the Worldwide Independent Network and Gallup at the end of 2013 revealed strong animosity towards the US’s role as the world’s policeman. Citizens across over 60 nations were asked: “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?”
The US topped the list, with 24 percent of people believing America to be the biggest danger to peace. Pakistan came second, with 8 percent of the vote and was closely followed by China with 6 percent. Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea came in joint fourth place with 5 percent of the vote.
The threat from the US was rated most highly in the Middle East and North Africa, those areas most recently affected by American military intervention. Moreover, the survey showed that even Americans regard their country as a potential threat with 13 percent of them voting the US could disrupt global status quo.
Latin America expressed mixed feelings towards its northerly neighbor, with Peru, Brazil and Argentina all flagging the US as the most dangerous country.
After its numerous threats of a strike on Iran, many countries voted Israel was the biggest threat to prosperity. Morocco, Lebanon and Iraq all chose Israel as the number one danger to world peace.
In the survey participants were also asked: “If there were no barriers to living in any country of the world, which country would you like to live in?” Despite being the perceived largest threat to world peace, the US still topped the tables by a narrow margin of 9 percent.
In general 2013 saw a drop in approval ratings for the Obama Administration. A poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed that 50 percent of those asked thought that the political system in the US needed a “complete overhaul.”
In addition, 70 percent of Americans believe the government lacks the ability to make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014.”
The survey comes two months after the first government shutdown in 17 years in the US which cost the country an estimated $10 billion.
The American government’s credibility was dealt a blow earlier this year when President Obama made a call to strike Syria following a suspected chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government on civilians. The American public and the international community both opposed the action.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/russia-today/the-biggest-threat-to-world-peace/
Sooner or Later, the People Will Accept Secession and Decentralization
By Scott Lazarowitz
Some people think that my writing is a bit sarcastic. Well, my latest articles on LRC haven’t been too sarcastic.
But can you blame me?
I just want you to understand what it is we are up against when our federal government and its employees have a lot of power over us.
And then, perhaps too often my own emotions of fear and anxiety associated with the police state affect the way I express myself. Oh, well.
Now, it’s one thing that the NSA criminally intercepts your new computer or laptop from the online store warehouse to your home, in order to criminally install surveillance spying devices (and they may in fact be making illicit use of pre-installed technologies, and in some cases a manufacturer may be actively involved in aiding and abetting the NSA’s “security” racket although they deny such involvement).
But it’s another thing when U.S. Customs lummoxes go and destroy a virtuoso flutist’s hand-made musical instruments.
Is nothing sacred?
The buffoons mistakenly thought the instruments were banned “agricultural items.”
The musician has to write a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, apparently. How the hell can these bureaucrats reimburse him, after all the hours he labored to craft those specialty instruments?
If ever there were a reason to abolish the USDA, as Ron Paul would like to do, this is it. (And what about the U.S. Customs Service as well? What good have they done for us?)
So the government goons destroyed this musician’s personal property, his means to express his art, and his means toward making a living as well.
Supposedly, the USDA says that the purpose of destroying certain “agricultural items” is to protect us from possible “pests” that could end up destroying our economy. But who are the real pests here?
God forbid these Customs officials might actually have the ability to distinguish between a professionally hand-made musical instrument and a stick. That’s really what it comes down to.
Granted, that particular fiasco didn’t have that much to do with “security,” which is usually what all the government’s property destruction and theft, TSA molesting and groping, and otherwise government incompetence and criminality is to do with.
But this kind of destructive behavior is happening all the time now, all across America. And it seems that Americans are just putting up with it as a fact of life. Alas, attempting to do something about the abuses just seems to be a total waste of time.
Now, I don’t know what to make of the Customs and USDA bureaucratards and the havoc they wreak.
But regarding the NSA’s tyrannical criminality, some people suggest that because the federal government won’t protect the American people from its own predation, the states will have to make new laws for the NSA to follow.
Well, that’s not particularly realistic, given that if the NSA won’t obey the law or the Constitution which the agents have sworn to obey, then why should we expect them to obey any laws passed by the states?
These are yet more examples of the freedom that secession and decentralization would bring about, as Kirkpatrick Sale recently discussed.
I know, a lot of readers reject those ideas, mainly out of fear of risks.
“Leaving the nest,” if you will, is often a big risk and many people would prefer to stay home in the comfort of their “protected” dependence on the big momma government, even if said home is now a prison.
Many people say that, yes they wouldn’t mind getting rid of most of the federal government, including the USDA, Departments of Education and Energy, and the IRS.
“But it’s foreign policy I worry about. We need to be protected from terrorism.”
And I respond by saying that we wouldn’t have the terrorism, including and especially the so-called Islamic-based terrorism, if our government imbeciles didn’t cause it to occur.
But when I assert that, there are just too many Americans who hear “It’s America’s’ fault,” “We asked for it,” even though that it not what I’m saying.
But that is what they hear because a lot of people are ignorant of the real truth of history and current events. Their thinking reflects government propaganda to sell the people what the corrupt bureaucrats want the people to hear.
Sadly, many people really are indoctrinated to react reflexively when hearing suggestions that our own government’s actions before 9/11 (and since then) actually provoked foreigners to want to retaliate or even take extreme measures against civilians out of desperation.
Sadly, many people think it an absurd comparison, the question as to what we would do if a foreign regime invaded our territory, and murdered innocent civilians here and occupied our lands.
To ask, “What would we do if the tables were turned?” implies that our government actually did start a war of aggression against foreigners who were of no threat to us, and that our government murdered innocent civilians and occupies foreign lands.
Most people don’t want to acknowledge the truth of what our government has been doing for many decades.
Even members of the “intelligence” community are out of touch and brainwashed with this myth of “American Exceptionalism.”
Attempts to explain things rationally are discouraged by an easily-manipulated majority of the population who faint at the sight of a military uniform and who approves of door-to-door warrantless searches of their own homes.
Many people are so emotionally incapable of questioning the actions of our so-called leaders, because their unthinking obedience has been so ingrained and reinforced by 12 to 16 years of government-controlled schooling, the American State News Media (a.k.a. mainstream media), and pop culture which consist of the worst of the worst who are idolized by zombies. (“Hmmm. What is this ‘classical music’ thing? Never heard of it.”)
So, rather than having the emotional strength to overcome such self-inflicted enslavement and de-programming oneself from such State-obedience, and confront the fact that our government has been creating and fomenting terrorists overseas and at home to justify the bureaucrats’ fat paychecks and their criminal predations, many Americans instead accept, welcome, celebrate, and worship their own subjugation, the government’s rape of the people’s bodies at airports and elsewhere, its criminal intrusions of their privacy and compromising of their security, and for no good reason.
It is unfortunate that the majority of the American people are going to learn the hard way that our Rulers are not only stupid, but evil.
Perhaps then will the people accept secession!
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/scott-lazarowitz/secession-and-decentralization/
The Long and The Short of Gold Investing
By Peter Schiff
There are two types of gold investors: those trying to make money on short-term market timing and those looking for long-term asset preservation. It was the fear-driven trading of the former that helped gold break $1900 in 2011, and for good reason – stormy markets steer investors to safe havens.
But gold’s fortune has shifted in the past two years, and finishing 2013 down 28% seems to have sealed its fate – at least in the eyes of the short-term speculators. In reality, the same forces that are stabilizing stocks and suppressing gold are also the fundamental reasons long-term investors have been buying gold since the turn of the new millennium. The so-called recovery we’re now experiencing is just a lull in a storm that hasn’t yet abated.
Losing Touch With Reality
From the fiscal cliff at the beginning of the year to the budget stalemate and government shutdown in the fall, the US was not exactly a model of financial stability in 2013. Yet with each of these stories, the markets shrugged off any large dips and went on to reach record high after record high. The stock market exceeded most expectations – the S&P and Dow rallied 29.6% and 26.5% respectively, with the volatility index staying remarkably low.
The official explanation for this market behavior is that the economy really is improving. A growing GDP and improving jobless rate are the leading economic indicators that support this conclusion.
However, the real reason behind 2013′s stability in spite of mixed economic news was the extremely accommodating Federal Reserve policy. Markets have become hyper-aware of this Bernanke Put over the course of the year.
Compare the markets’ taper tantrums earlier in the year to their reaction to the Fed’s December announcement of “taper-lite.”
In both June and August, with the mere talk of tapering, the S&P and Dow tumbled. The assumption was that when the Fed started tapering their Quantitative Easing (QE) program, interest rates would also start to rise. Overvalued stocks plunged in preparation for a higher interest rate environment.
However, this December, when the Fed set an official January date for tapering, these indices did not drop as they had before, but immediately jumped to new highs. Why the different reaction to essentially the same news?
Because the Fed’s December announcement was not the same.
Normal No Longer Means Healthy
The key element of Bernanke’s “taper-lite” was not the $10 billion-per-month cut to QE, but the explicit commitment to maintain low interest rates for the foreseeable future. Bernanke basically guaranteed the fed funds rate would remain near 0% for at least a couple more years.
This commitment to artificially suppressed interest rates ruins the charade that the economy is getting healthier. Why on earth does a healthy economy need the support of free money?
The short-term data may appear good on its face, but people are waking up to the bigger picture of this so-called recovery – namely that it isn’t a recovery at all.
It’s well-recognized now that most new jobs are low-wage, low-skilled placements. Often these are part-time or temporary retail or restaurant positions. This may be why both median income and the percentage of the population employed remain well below pre-crisis levels. The jobless rate has only improved because people have simply given up trying to find employment.
Meanwhile, the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that in the last months of 2013, personal spending rose more than personal income, while the savings rate dropped. In other words, we’re back to digging the hole that caused the Panic of ’08.
This is one of the longest and slowest recoveries the US has ever experienced, but the mantra of Wall Street maintains that all is well because the stock market is up. We’re supposedly returning to normal.
The truth is that “normal” no longer means “healthy” when it comes to the economic stability of the United States. It really means that we are back to where we were prior to the Panic of ’08.
Selective Memory
Only a short-term mindset could ignore the parallels between our economy today and ten years ago. Heading into 2004, the headlines sounded almost identical to today’s, with talk of an improving economy that still suffered from less-than-optimal employment numbers.
More importantly, it was in 2003 that Alan Greenspan cut the fed funds rate to 1% – the lowest it had been for more than 40 years.
We all know how that story ended. Most economists agree that the interest rate policy of Greenspan’s Fed spurred the irresponsible lending practices and speculation that drove the US into a housing crash and then a financial meltdown.
Yet here we are again, with the fed funds rate at record low levels. Nothing has changed in ten years – the supposed recovery we’re experiencing now is simply a product of this endless cheap money.
A Sober Analysis
In times like these, long-term gold investors feel like the designated drivers in the corner of a frat party. It might seem like we’re missing the fun, but we must remember that we’re playing a different game than the short-term speculators.
Our drunken friends have had some cheap thrills in 2013, but this stock market growth rests on an unstable foundation of artificial stimulus and cheap money. We are more interested in waking up without a hangover, a wrecked car, or worse. The longer interest rates remain suppressed, the crazier markets will behave when rates rise. And if Greenspan’s one year at 1% rates helped trigger the crash we saw in ’08, imagine imagine what three years and counting of Bernanke’s/Yellen’s 0% rates portends for the next crash.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/peter-schiff/on-track-for-the-next-crash/
Duck Dynasty Launch their Own Line of Guns as Phil Hatches Plot to Move his Family to Rival TV Network After A&E Bosses 'Humiliated' him Over Anti-Gay Storm
By James Nye and David McCormack
Daily Mail
Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson may have emerged victorious from his recent spat with A&E, but the millionaire patriarch is already plotting revenge on the TV network behind his hit show and reportedly has a plan in the works to move his family – plus millions of dollars of advertising and merchandise revenue – to another broadcaster.
Humiliated by A&E’s recent attempt to silence his conservative religious message, Robertson – whose Duck Commander business is worth an estimated $15 million – is secretly plotting to form his own TV production company so he can jump ship to a Christian channel more in keeping with his views.
Robertson, 67, recently served a short suspension from the hit show after he made homophobic and racially insensitive comments in an interview with GQ.
But a massive outpouring of support from Conservative supporters including Sarah Palin convinced A&E to take Robertson back or risk losing their most important cash cow.
The Season 4 premiere of Duck Dynasty last August drew a record 11.8 million viewers and total revenues for 2013 are estimated at $885 million.
The public support for Pat’s comments have convinced the wily businessman that he and his family could be better served elsewhere on a network more understanding of his views – such as overtly religious TV networks Trinity Broadcast Corporation and Christian Television Network.
He is also reported to be unhappy at how A&E has portrayed the extremely wealthy Robertson clan as ignorant hillbillies.
‘A&E messed with the wrong redneck,’ a source close to the show told the National Enquirer. ‘Phil has agreed to return, but he’s already working on getting out their contracts.’
Back in August the Robertson clan signed a new contract with A&E for $200,000 per episode. That contract is supposed to keep the family tied to the network for several more seasons, but Robertson is confident that he can get them out of it on a technicality after the forthcoming fifth season ends.
‘He’s confident lawyers can find a loophole and get them out of any long-term commitments,’ said the source...
Read more here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2532766/Duck-Dynastys-Phil-Robertson-hatches-plot-family-rival-TV-network.html
Obamacare Should Remind Us We Are Not 'Subjects,' We Are People
By Laura Hollis, CP Op-Ed Contributor
The unveiling of the dictatorial debacle that is Obamacare absolutely flabbergasts me. It is stunning on so many levels, but the most shocking aspect of it for me is watching millions of free Americans stand idly by while this man, his minions in Congress and his cheerleaders in the press systematically dismantle our Constitution, steal our money, and crush our freedoms.
The President, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (with no small help from Justice John Roberts) take away our health care, and we allow it. They take away our insurance, and we allow it. They take away our doctors, and we allow it.They charge us thousands of dollars more a year, and we allow it. They make legal products illegal, and we allow it. They cripple our businesses, and we allow it.They announce by fiat that we must ignore our most deeply held beliefs – and we allow it.
Where is your spine, America?
Yes, I know people are complaining. I read the news on the internet. I read blogs. I have a Twitter feed. So what? People in the Soviet Union complained. People in Cuba complain. People in China complain (quietly). Complaining isn't the same thing as doing anything about it. In fact, much of the complaining that we hear sounds like resignation: Wow. This sucks. Oh well, this is the way things are. Too bad.
Perhaps you need reminding of a few important facts. Here goes:
1. The President is not a king. Barack Obama does not behave like a President, an elected official, someone who realizes that he works for us. He behaves like a king, a dictator – someone who believes that his own pronouncements have the force of law, and who thinks he can dispense with the law's enforcement when he deigns to do so. And those of us who object? How dare we? Racists!
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And while he moves steadily "forward" with his plans to "fundamentally transform" the greatest country in human history, he distracts people with cheap, meaningless trivialities, like "free birth control pills"! (In fact, let's face it: this administration's odd obsession with sex in general - Birth control! Abortion! Sterilization! Gay guys who play basketball! -- is just plain weird. Since when did the leader of the free world care so much about how people have sex, who they have it with, and what meds they use when they have it? Does he have nothing more important to concern himself with?)
2. It isn't just a failed software program; it is a failed philosophy. People are marveling that Healthcare.gov was such a spectacular failure. Well, if one is only interested in it as a product launch, I've explained some of the reasons for that here. But the larger point is that it isn't a software failure, or even a product failure; it is a philosophy failure.
I have said this before: Obama is not a centrist; he is a central planner. And this – all of it: the disastrous computer program, the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, the lies, the manipulation of public opinion, the theft of the public's money and property, and freedom (read insurance, and premiums, and doctors) -- IS what central planning looks like.
The central premise of central planning is that a handful of wunderkinds with your best interests at heart (yeah, right) know better than you what's good for you. The failure of such a premise and the misery it causes have been clear from the dawn of humanity. Kings and congressmen, dictators and Dear Leaders, potentates, princes and presidents can all fall prey to the same imperial impulses: "we know what is good the 'the people.'
And they are always wrong.
There is a reason that the only times communism has really been tried have been after wars, revolutions, or coups d'état. You have to have complete chaos for people to be willing to accept the garbage that centralized planning produces. Take the Soviet Union, for example. After two wars, famine, and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, why wouldn't people wait in line for hours to buy size 10 shoes? Or settle for the gray matter that passed for meat in the grocery stores?
But communism's watered-down cousin, socialism, isn't much better. Ask the Venezuelans who cannot get toilet paper. Toilet paper. ¡Viva la Revolución!
Contrary to what so many who believe in a "living Constitution" say, the Founding Fathers absolutely understood this. That is why the Constitution was set up to limit government power. (Memo to the President: the drafters of the Constitution deliberately didn't say "what government had to do on your behalf.") They understood that that was the path to folly, fear, and famine.)
3. Obama is deceitful. Just as the collapse of the computer program should not surprise anyone, neither should we be shocked that the President lied about his healthcare plan. Have any of you been paying attention over the past few years? Obama has made no secret of his motivations or his methods. The philosophies which inspire him espouse deceit and other vicious tactics. (Don't take my word for it: read Saul Alinsky.) Obama infamously told reporter Richard Wolffe, "You know, I actually believe my own bullshit." He has refused to be forthcoming about his past (where are his academic records?). His own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, told author Ed Klein, that Obama said to him, "You know what your problem is? You have to tell the truth."
Did Obama lie when he said dozens of times, "If you like you plan, you can keep it"? Of course he did. That's what he does.
4. The media is responsible. And had the media been doing their jobs, we would have known a lot of this much, much earlier.
The press is charged with the sacred responsibility of protecting the people from the excesses of government. Our press has been complicit, incompetent, or corrupt. Had they vetted this man in 2008, as they would have a Republican candidate, we would have known far more about him than we do, even now. Had they pressed for more details about Obamacare, Congress' feet would have been held to the fire. Had they done their jobs about Eric Holder, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, NSA spying - or any of the other myriad betrayals of the public trust that this administration has committed, Obama would likely have lost his 2012 reelection campaign. (A fact that even The Washington Post has tacitly acknowledged. Well done, fellas! Happy now?)
Instead, they turned a blind eye, even when they knew he was lying, abusing power, disregarding the limits of the Constitution. It was only when he began to spy on them, and when the lies were so blatant that the lowest of low-information voters could figure it out that they realized they had to report on it. (Even in the face of blatant, deliberate and repeated lies, The New York Times has the audacity to tell us that the President "misspoke.") They have betrayed us, abandoned us, and deceived us.
5. Ted Cruz was right. So was Sarah Palin. The computer program is a disaster. The insurance exchanges are a disaster. What's left? The healthcare system itself. And this, of necessity, will be a disaster, too.
Millions of people have lost their individual insurance plans. In 2015, millions more will lose their employer-provided coverage (a fact which the Obama administration also knew, and admitted elsewhere).
The exorbitant additional costs that Obamacare has foisted on unsuspecting Americans are all part of a plan of wealth confiscation and redistribution. That is bad enough. But it will not end there.
When the numbers of people into the system and the corresponding demand for care vastly exceed the cost projections (and they will, make no mistake), then the rationing will start. Not only choice at that point, but quality and care itself will go down the tubes. And then will come the decisions made by the Independent Payment Advisory Board about what care will be covered (read "paid for") and what will not.
That's just a death panel, put politely. In fact, progressives are already greasing the wheels for acceptance of that miserable reality as well. They're spreading the lie that it will be about the ability of the dying to refuse unwanted or unhelpful care. Don't fall for that one, either. It will be about the deaths that inevitably result from decisions made by people other than the patients, their families, and their physicians. (Perhaps it's helpful to think of their assurances this way: "If you like your end-of-life care, you can keep your end-of-life-care.")
6. We are not SUBJECTS. (or, Nice Try, the Tea Party Isn't Going Away). We have tolerated these incursions into our lives and livelihoods too long already. There is no end to the insatiable demand "progressives" have to remake us in their image. Today it is our insurance, our businesses, our doctors, our health care. Tomorrow some new crusade will be announced that enables them to take over other aspects of our formerly free lives.
I will say it again: WE ARE NOT SUBJECTS. Not only is the Tea Party right on the fiscal issues, but it appears that they are more relevant than ever. We fought a war once to prove we did not want to be the subjects of a king, and the Boston Tea Party was just a taste of the larger conflict to come. If some people missed that lesson in history class, we can give them a refresher.
The 2014 elections are a good place to start. Call your representative, your senator, your candidate and tell them: "We are not subjects. You work for us. And if the word "REPEAL" isn't front and center in your campaign, we won't vote for you. Period."
Link:
http://www.christianpost.com/news/obamacare-should-remind-us-we-are-not-subjects-we-are-people-109165/
Al Gore Forecasted “Ice-Free” Arctic by 2013; Ice Cover Expands 50%
Written by Alex Newman
Self-styled “global-warming” guru Al Gore (shown) and a gaggle of supposed “climate scientists” have egg all over their faces — big time. In 2007, 2008 and 2009, Gore publicly and very hysterically warned that the North Pole would be “ice-free” by around 2013 because of alleged “man-made global warming.” Citing “climate” experts, the government-funded BBC hyped the mass hysteria, running a now-embarrassing article under the headline: “Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’.” Other establishment media outlets did the same.
Well, 2013 is almost over, and contrary to the alarmist “predictions” by Gore and what critics refer to as his “doomsday cult,” the latest satellite data show that Arctic ice cover has actually expanded 50 percent over 2012 levels. In fact, during October, sea-ice levels grew at the fastest pace since records began in 1979. Experts predict the expansion to continue in the years to come, leaving global-warming alarmists scrambling fiendishly for explanations to save face — and to revive the rapidly melting climate hysteria.
In September, meanwhile, data also showed that sea ice levels in Antarctica had expanded to record levels for the second year in a row. Of course, by now, virtually everyone who has been following news about “global warming” — now more often referred to as “climate change” owing to public-relations concerns — also knows that global temperatures have not risen for some 17 years. The spectacular lack of warming demolished all 73 of the “climate models” used by the United Nations to push its controversial theories.
According to the dubious theories and predictions advanced by Al Gore and other alarmists, though, none of this should be happening. Speaking to an audience in Germany five years ago, Gore — sometimes ridiculed as “The Goracle” — alleged that “the entire North Polarized [sic] cap will disappear in 5 years.” While the original video of that particular failed prediction appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet, conservative bloggers managed to track down the same footage from other sources. “Five years,” Gore emphasized again, is “the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear.”
The following year, Gore made similar claims at a UN “climate” summit in Copenhagen. “Some of the models ... suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed in 2009. “We will find out.” Indeed, the bogus prediction appears wildly off the mark, to put it mildly, but the establishment press and Gore apparently do not want the world to find out.
In fairness, Gore was hardly the only hysterical climate-doomsday proponent to be left looking foolish. In December of 2007, the BBC highlighted alleged “modeling studies” that supposedly “indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.” Incredibly, some of the supposed “experts” even claimed it could happen before then, citing calculations performed by “super computers” that the BBC noted “has become a standard part of climate science in recent years.”
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” claimed Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, described as researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School who was working with co-workers at NASA to come up with the now-thoroughly discredited forecasts about polar ice. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be [sic] our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.” Other “experts” quoted in the BBC article agreed with the hysteria.
In the real world, however, the scientific evidence demolishing the global-warming theories advanced by Gore, the UN, and government-funded “climate scientists” continues to grow, along with the ice cover in both hemispheres. In the Arctic, for example, data collected by Europe's Cryosat spacecraft pointed to about 9,000 cubic kilometers of ice at the end of the 2013 melt season. In 2012, which was admittedly a low year, the total volume was about 6,000 cubic kilometers — some 50 percent less than the 2013 total. Polar bear populations are thriving, too.
Across the southern hemisphere, the data have proved even more devastating to what supposed “climate scientists” were caught referring to as their “cause” in the deeply embarrassing ClimateGate e-mails. First, the figures from 2012 showed a record high level of sea-ice cover — more than at any point since records began in 1978. This year set another new record, with ice covering more than 19.5 million square kilometers of ocean around Antarctica by September.
Around the world, meanwhile, record low temperatures continue to make a mockery of “global warming” theories. While anecdotal, to be sure, Cairo, Egypt, just saw its first snowfall in more than 100 years. In the United States there have been thousands of new records for cold temperatures and snowfalls just in the month of December. In an extremely bizarre twist, some “climate scientists” have even started claiming that the freezing temperatures are actually more evidence of “global warming.”
To explain the universally acknowledged lack of warming over the last 17 years in defiance of all UN climate theories, government-funded “climate scientists” and the UN have increasingly touted what critics ridicule as “The Theory of The Ocean Ate My Global Warming.” Under heavy political pressure from the Obama administration and other governments, the UN ran with the theory, despite the lack of any observable evidence to suggest the deep ocean is actually eating the UN’s predicted global warming.
Appearing increasingly detached from reality to independent scientists, the UN claimed in its latest global-warming report to be 95 percent sure that human emissions of carbon dioxide were to blame for rising temperatures. Those claims, now widely laughed at around the world, were made despite the fact that every single one of its computer models has been entirely discredited by the lack of warming for the last 17 years. Many experts are now even predicting global cooling.
Top scientists and experts around the world — even many who have served on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — have been ridiculing the global outfit and its discredited “climate” report. Most governments and dictators, however, continue playing along with what some experts call the climate “charade” or “hoax,” mostly due to built-in incentives and taxpayer funds that help perpetuate the unjustified alarmism.
For third-world dictators, the goal appears to be securing trillions in Western taxpayer money under the guise of “climate” reparations and “justice.” For governments ruling wealthier nations, the end-game seems to be carbon taxes and a planetary “climate” regime with unprecedented powers over humanity. Assembled in Warsaw for the latest UN climate summit, even as the implosion of the “science” behind global-warming theories was accelerating, member regimes agreed to finalize a global climate treaty by 2015.
Polls show that despite hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars squandered on global-warming alarmism, the American public still refuses to widely accept the man-made warming theories advanced by an increasingly discredited UN and its allies. A September Rasmussen survey of likely voters, for example, found that just 43 percent of likely U.S. voters believe alleged “global warming” is caused by human activity. About the same number believe it is not.
Despite vicious attacks and threats — some of it exposed in the ClimateGate scandal — scientists are increasingly jumping off the sinking “climate” ship as well. Even some major governments are working to rein in the out-of-control alarmism, with authorities in Australia, elected in a landslide earlier this year, promising to liberate the nation from “carbon taxes” while quashing much of the taxpayer-funded “global-warming” juggernaut. Calls for prosecuting “fraud” by “climate scientists” are growing, too.
So far, despite hyping the absurd claims five years ago, the establishment press has failed to inform its dwindling readership that Al Gore and his fellow alarmists were proven embarrassingly wrong. No apologies have been forthcoming from Gore, either, and none of the “scientists” who made the ridiculous predictions has apologized or lost his U.S. taxpayer-funded job. In fact, almost unbelievably, the establishment press is now parroting new claims from the same discredited “experts” suggesting that the Arctic will be “ice-free” by 2016.
As Gore put it in 2009, “We will find out.”
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/17207-al-gore-forecasted-ice-free-arctic-by-2013-ice-cover-expands-50
Obamacare: Health Secretary to Dictate How Doctors Practice Medicine
HHS Secretary Sebelius, a bureaucrat with no medical experience, can tell your doctor how to treat patients starting in 2015
Kit Daniels
Despite President Obama’s claim that “you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor,” a little known provision of Obamacare gives the health secretary broad authority to dictate how doctors practice medicine and treat their patients.
If she’s still the health secretary in 2015, Kathleen Sebelius will tell doctors how to practice medicine even though she has absolutely no medical experience.
Starting in 2015, Obamacare will grant the Secretary of Health and Human Services, an unelected bureaucrat with no medical experience, power to decide what treatments are available to patients and if the doctor can perform procedures.
Section 1311(h)(1)(b) of Obamacare reads:
“Beginning on January 1, 2015, a qualified health plan may contract with … a health care provider only if such provider implements such mechanisms to improve health care quality as the Secretary may by regulation require.”
In other words, insurance companies will be banned from doing business with doctors who do not comply with the regulations established by the health secretary – and there’s almost no limit on what these regulations may entail.
“Under President Obama’s health care law, should the HHS Secretary determine that performing mammograms on women younger than 50 violates a standard of care, the provider must comply, regardless of his or her concerns,” Rep. Phil Gingrey, M.D. (R-Ga.) said on the subject. “Failure to do so would allow the Secretary to shut down a medical practice.”
“The powers given to the Secretary are so broad, he or she could literally dictate how all physicians nationwide practice medicine.”
The lawmaker also added that the provision violates “the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, as physicians are trained to treat patients individually and not with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.”
However, Dr. Donald Berwick, an administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obama, deplored that the physician’s focus is “on the acute needs of individual patients” and not on “care for important subgroups” in the name of “social justice,” as reported by Betsy McCaughey.
Berwick’s statement serves as a microcosm of Section 1311(h)(1)(b) and for Obamacare as a whole: the pursuit of centralized planning and collectivism at the expense of the individual.
Rep. Gingrey, one of the few lawmakers who knew about the provision, introduced the Safeguarding Care of Patients Everywhere Act in both 2012 and 2013 to repeal Section 1311(h)(1)(b), but both bills never left the Subcommittee on Health.
Outside of Gingrey’s press release on his bills and a recent article in the New York Post, the provision has generated little media attention.
But by 2015, Americans will be demanding answers for the inevitable loss-of-life due to byzantine regulations and the destruction of the doctor-patient relationship.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obamacare-health-secretary-to-dictate-how-doctors-practice-medicine.html
The Progressives’ Achilles’ Heel
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Progressives (i.e., liberals in the corrupted meaning of the term) love to portray themselves as lovers of the poor. That’s what they use to justify their never-ending, ever-growing welfare-state and regulatory programs.
But as we libertarians have repeatedly shown, the welfare state and the regulated economy actually constitute an enormous attack on the freedom and well-being of the poor.
Minimum-wage laws, which progressives are now planning to make the centerpiece of their upcoming political campaigns, are directly responsible for a chronic 40 percent unemployment rate among impoverished black teenagers.
Expensive regulations prevent the poor from starting businesses.
Occupational licensure laws prevent the poor from entering many occupations and professions.
Income taxes prevent the poor from accumulating the capital nest egg to compete against the big, well-established firms.
Public housing punishes the poor by throwing them out of their home if they earn too much money.
Welfare makes poor people hopelessly dependent on the government.
And some 60 years of the welfare-state, regulated-economy way of life, all we hear from progressives is how desperate the plight of poor in America still is. What better indictment of their system of economic statism than that?
But there is one sure-fire way to expose progressives’ supposed love for the poor. Just ask them the following question: How do you reconcile your professed love for the poor, needy, and disadvantaged with your support of immigration controls?
Believe me. That question will freeze them in their tracks. It is their Achilles heel.
After all, it’s virtually impossible to find poorer people than illegal immigrants. Most of them arrive in American virtually penniless. They are the epitome of the type of people described by Emma Lazarus in the sonnet found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of their teeming shore, the homeless, tempest-tossed.
And yet what do those poor-loving progressives say about those poor immigrants? No, they don’t say what Emma Lazarus said — to send them to us. On the contrary, the progressives join with their conservative brethren and cry — “Keep them out, arrest them, throw them out, send them home, don’t dare let those people come here.”
Periodically progressives attack libertarians for our opposition to the welfare-state, regulated-economy way of life. They say that libertarian opposition to economic statism shows that libertarians hate the poor.
But you’ll notice something interesting about such attacks: None of them ever brings up the subject of immigration.
That’s because libertarians favor open borders, which means the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders. We believe in the right of the poor to cross borders to sustain their lives through labor, to seek a better life, and to earn money to send back to their families.
What better expression of concern for the poor than that?
Notice that we libertarians, unlike progressives, don’t draw a distinction between the foreign poor and the American poor who can vote. For us, a genuine concern for the poor transcends national boundaries and the quest for domestic political power.
Compare the open-borders position of libertarians to the progressive position favoring controlled borders. They say that poor immigrants should have to get governmental permission to come here to work. Never mind that that bureaucratic process takes years. A person could starve to death waiting for a permit.
What happens if an immigrant comes here without the required official government permission? Progressives say: “Raid the businesses where they’re working. Arrest them! Lock them up! Deport them! If they comes back, convict them of felonies and send them to jail.
Like their conservative brethren, progressives say, “The law is the law.” Well, so was segregation. So was apartheid. That doesn’t make it right or moral. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” doesn’t apply just to one’s next-door neighbor. It applies to one’s fellow man.
Progressives sometimes claim to oppose the harsh measures that are sometimes used to enforce immigration controls. That’s disingenuous. Once a government adopts immigration controls, it’s going to enforce them. And since immigrants tend to ignore such controls, the controls inevitably become harsher and more brutal. Opposing harsh immigration enforcement measures is like saying that one favors lightning but not thunder.
If the poor ever come to see that the welfare state and regulatory economy are nothing but a scam to which they have been victimized by progressives, and discover that libertarianism is the best thing that could ever happen to the poor, including immigrants, the statist gig will finally be up and tossed into the dustbin of history, where it belongs. Economic liberty will then be enshrined alongside religious liberty, intellectual liberty, political liberty, due process of law, and other aspects of freedom.
Link:
http://fff.org/2014/01/02/the-progressives-achilles-heel/
Global Warming Alarmists Stuck In Antarctic Sea Ice
Written by Alex Newman
The alarmists set sail for Antarctica with a plan to show the world how badly alleged man-made “global warming” was wreaking havoc across the region. Instead, their Russian-flagged ship was frozen in place after sea-ice coverage hit record-high levels this year. The dozens of global warmists onboard are still stuck as multiple ice-breaking rescue vessels were unable to reach the frozen ship. Climate realists and the alternative press, meanwhile, were quick to ridicule and poke fun at the stranded and beleaguered alarmists. However, the increasingly discredited establishment media has largely failed to notice or report the irony.
The doomed Antarctic “climate research” expedition that ended up being trapped in ice was led by Chris Turney, a professor of “climate change” at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He claims emissions of essential-to-life carbon dioxide — exhaled by all humans — must be drastically curtailed by government to stop “global warming,” which has been non-existent in recent years. The controversial alarmist, who boasts of setting up a “green” business known as “Carbonscape” to profit from increasingly discredited theories underpinning climate hysteria, was on a self-proclaimed mission to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.”
Presumably, being frozen in summer ice was not what Turney and his fellow alarmists had in mind. However, it should not have been entirely surprising. Despite hysterical fear-mongering by the United Nations and self-styled “climate experts,” sea-ice cover in the Southern Hemisphere hit a new record in September of 2013 for the second year in a row, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The latest data show Antarctic sea ice is more than two standard deviations above normal, climate researchers reported.
That is bad news for Turney and the 73 self-styled “scientists,” “journalists,” and crew members participating in the global-warming expedition. According to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), their ship, the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, has been trapped in 10-feet thick ice slabs since December 24. Three vessels with ice-breaking capabilities have attempted to reach the alarmists so far. All of them failed. A helicopter rescue attempt on December 30, meanwhile, was reportedly aborted due to strong winds.
In a failed effort to raise funds for the scheme from the public, the climate alarmists promised potential donors that they would investigate and share information about “environmental changes” taking place in Antarctica. “Crucially this pristine southern polar region is uniquely placed to monitor the health of our planet,” Turley and his associates said. The team also vowed to seek out information on the intersection between “global climate” and the region, claiming — somewhat ironically, in retrospect — that changes were “threatening the stability of Antarctic ice.”
“The Southern Ocean plays a crucial role in global climate and the carbon cycle,” the climate alarmists wrote, adding that “90% of the world’s excess heat trapped by the atmosphere is going into the ocean and changing circulation patterns, threatening to turn the region into a source of carbon, exaggerating future warming.” The expedition, the team leaders continued, would “make detailed measurements on the passage south (e.g. temperature, salinity, carbon) to determine just how sensitive the Southern Ocean is to change.”
As if it could not get any more embarrassing, a video about the trip featuring Turney explained that the “Australasian Antarctic Expedition” — named after another expedition a century ago by the same name led by Sir Douglas Mawson — “will re-trace the route of its namesake to discover just how much has changed over the last 100 years.” Of course, when the video was produced, the “climate scientists,” rather than being stuck in ice, almost certainly had much different “changes” in mind. A hundred years ago, even without modern technology, Mawson’s expedition did just fine.
“We're stuck in our own experiment,” the Australasian Antarctic Expedition admitted in a statement quoted in media reports, almost comically insisting that ice in the region really is melting despite all of the objective and anecdotal data literally all around them. “Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up.” In reality, sea ice in the Arctic is up 50 percent above last year, and in Antarctica, this year saw a new record — the largest sea-ice covering since records began.
As has become typical in everything “climate,” the establishment press has largely refused to tell the truth about the purpose of the expedition — either ignoring the facts altogether, or claiming it was merely a “research” trip. A few have casually mentioned the “climate” connection in passing near the bottom of articles. The avoidance of reality is especially ironic considering that there are taxpayer-funded “journalists” from the alarmist BBC and the Australian ABC, as well as from the almost comically hysterical U.K. Guardian, onboard the ship hoping to capture “evidence” of “global warming.”
“Somewhere far, far to the south where it is summer, a group of global warming scientists are trapped in the Antarctic ice,” noted Newsbusters, a project of the non-profit Media Research Project, which regularly lambastes the media for its poorly concealed biases. “If you missed the irony of that situation, it is because much of the mainstream media has glossed over that rather inconvenient bit of hilarity.” Numerous other commentators have also pointed out the irony, but the establishment press continues to parrot its agenda with little regard for facts — or even humor, apparently.
As the alternative media and independent climate analysts began exposing the truth, critics promptly ridiculed the doomed expedition. Using the Twitter hash tag #ClitanicDisaster, commentators suggested the fiasco was yet another example of attempted global-warming propaganda backfiring in spectacular fashion. “There has been a strong and statistically significant upward trend in climate-change-related public-relations disasters,” wrote University of Sussex economics Professor Richard Tol, who also serves as a professor on the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Others ridiculing the alarmists’ PR mega-disaster Tweeted an altered picture of the ship stuck in ice with its name changed to “An Inconvenient Truth,” a mocking reference to Al Gore’s discredited documentary warning of global-warming doom. “This episode has taken on a heightened comedic fiasco-like quality,” noted meteorologist Anthony Watts, president of IntelliWeather and editor of the prominent climate site “Watts Up With That?” (WUWT). “Now, with such a fantastic failure in full world view, questions are going to start being asked.”
Ironically, essentially the same embarrassing fate awaited other global-warming faithful earlier this year in the Arctic. Basing their trips on absurd “predictions” of an ice-free Arctic summer by 2013 — made by Al Gore, pseudo-environmentalist outfits, the BBC, and assorted “climate scientists” — several ships tried to sail through the Northwest Passage. Instead, they got stuck in the ice and had to be rescued, as the market-oriented environmental organization CFACT noted in a piece headlined “Gullible Green sailors trapped in the Arctic.”
“Global warming campaigners have been stymied by the lack of any temperature increase in the major temperature data sets since the nineties,” CFACT said in another article about the more recent sea-ice embarrassment in the south. “They’ve tried to compensate by feeding the media a steady stream of ‘extreme weather’ stories and with shrill claims about polar ice. However, historical and scientific data show today’s weather to be normal.”
In the real world, despite hysterical warnings of climate doom from taxpayer- and Big Oil-funded “experts,” even premier alarmist institutions and the UN have admitted that the data show “global warming” actually stopped some 17 years ago. Alarmists, somewhat humorously, perhaps, try to explain away the inconvenient facts by citing what critics refer to as “The Theory of The Ocean Ate My Global Warming.” Few independent scientists have bought into the controversial theory, which the Obama administration pressured the UN to include in its latest “global-warming” report. The “science” behind UN global-warming theories, meanwhile, has imploded.
In fact, many experts are now even forecasting global cooling.
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/17277-global-warming-alarmists-stuck-in-antarctic-sea-ice
It’s official: Obamacare debuts with more canceled plans than enrollments...
Sarah Hurtubise
Obamacare may have promised health insurance for the masses. But on its first day, it’s left more Americans without coverage than before the law was passed.
More than 4.7 million Americans had their health insurance canceled as a result of any of the thousand-plus-page law’s new rules, the Associated Press reports, but the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed Tuesday that between federal and state exchanges, just 2 million Americans have signed up for Obamacare coverage. (RELATED: Obama administration announces net loss of at least 3 million insurance plans)
The Obama administration has yet to announce the final tally of full enrollments, which are only confirmed once customers have made their first payment, but Cato Institute health policy expert Michael Cannon warns that not all those who signed up will complete their purchases, potentially leaving the White House with an even lower bottom line.
Even without the full number of enrollments, Obamacare’s current net effect is clearly in favor of cancellations. Millions are already seeing Obamacare’s adverse effects — largely due to more mandates for more services.
The health-care law requires that all insurance plans cover 10 “essential benefits,” eliminating millions of plans that don’t fit the bill and boosting costs for consumers that have to purchase coverage for services they may not want or need.
All plans must include maternity coverage, for example — including plans for men and post-menopausal women. Even customers without children must purchase plans that cover pediatric services. Other newly established essential benefits include hospitalization, mental-health services and preventive and wellness services.
While a grandfather clause allowed plans purchased before Obamacare passed in 2010 to continue, HHS estimated that 40-67 percent of plans would eventually lose their status and cost millions of Americans their insurance plans.
The Obama administration eventually admitted Obamacare’s role in crushing many Americans’ coverage and has scrambled to belatedly make up for it. President Barack Obama first attempted to reinstate the canceled coverage for just one more year, but many insurers chose not to restart already-canceled plans.
Read more here:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/01/its-official-obamacare-debuts-with-more-cancelled-plans-than-enrollments/#ixzz2pBYQMmL3
Feds Preparing For Violence Targeting Social Security Buildings?
Homeland Security spends $58 million on armed guards for just two SSA offices
Paul Joseph Watson
The Department of Homeland Security is spending up to $58 million dollars to hire armed guards to protect two Social Security buildings in Baltimore, measures which some see as preparation for upcoming civil unrest.
According to an announcement on the Federal Business Opportunities website, the DHS awarded Paragon Systems, Inc. a contract “not to exceed $58,620,338.99,” to provide “Protective Security Officer (PSO) services in support of the Social Security Administration (SSA) Wabash Street and Metro West locations within Baltimore, MD.”
According to its website, “Paragon security specialists and officers perform armed and unarmed post/gate control, magnetometer and X-Ray screening, roving foot and vehicle patrols, management of central communications/security centers, CCTV and alarm monitoring, security escort, dignitary protection, security training, threat assessment, emergency preparedness evaluation, vehicle and visitor screening/badging, armory management, and first responder emergency services, including emergency medical technicians.”
Recent indications suggest the feds are becoming increasingly concerned over Social Security buildings becoming a target for irate Americans. The DHS ran a controversial drill in January 2012 dubbed “Operation Shield,” during which FPS agents armed with semiautomatic guns were posted outside a Social Security office in Florida accompanied by sniffer dogs as they checked the ID’s of visitors. The exercise centered around “detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.” DHS officials refused to speak to the media when asked about the drill.
$58 million dollars, even if stretched over a number of years, seems like an awful lot of money to protect just two Social Security buildings, but it fits the pattern of recent spending on armed guards to protect government buildings which led to concerns from some that the feds are gearing up for civil unrest in relation to restrictions in benefits and other entitlements.
Back in November we highlighted how the DHS was looking to hire armed guards with “top secret” security clearances in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
A month prior to that, the DHS’ $80 million dollar outlay on armed guards to protect government buildings in upstate New York prompted Fox News’ Neil Cavuto to speculate that the feds were preparing for violence in response to cutbacks in the food stamp program.
In October it emerged that Homeland Security was set to spend half a million dollars on fully automatic pepper spray launchers and projectiles that are designed to be used during riot control situations.
Some fear that the recent spate of “knockout game” assaults and violent flash mob attacks on shopping malls are signs of spreading discontent. With food stamps having already been reduced, unemployment benefits are also now being cut, a “perfect storm” that could spiral into social unrest.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/feds-preparing-for-violence-targeting-social-security-buildings.html
The FBI Appears To Be Involved In Staging Or Covering Up Active Shooter And Terror Hoax Events Every Six Weeks
It is a known fact that the FBI is the biggest source of domestic terrorism in America. Since there are no legitimate domestic terrorists for these clowns to catch, they are creating them instead. The reason they are engaging in such ridiculous behavior is because they have to justify their pointless and ridiculous jobs. It also serves as a great way to justify different political agendas and boost cable television ratings. For years they have been entrapping useful idiots and masterminding various terror plots. They’ve also been involved in the investigation of various staged hoaxes so the hoax itself can be covered up properly and the official narrative propagated to the masses. Perhaps even more insane is that many of these staged events appear to now be occurring roughly every six weeks. It is true that these events don’t always happen six weeks apart but usually the FBI doesn’t go much longer than two months before they are involved in another highly questionable event. After all, there are undoubtedly a number of logistical challenges that go along with staging these elaborate hoaxes so perhaps they can't always stick to the planned schedule. The guys over at the No Agenda podcast have been observing this phenomenon for quite some time now and it looks like they could be on to something.
Specifically let’s take a look at the latter part of 2013 since it has followed this pattern very closely.
On September 16th 2013 an alleged mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard occurred where 12 people were said to have been killed. The gunman was identified as a civilian contractor named Aaron Alexis. The only proof offered of the incident was surveillance video showing what was said to be Alexis walking through a few hallway areas with a shotgun. There have been no photos or video showing anybody who was wounded or killed by gunshots in the incident. The FBI was heavily involved in this investigation. This incident based upon all the facts provided appears to have been a totally manufactured hoax.
On November 1st 2013 an individual by the name of Paul Ciancia was said to have gone to a security checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport to shoot TSA agents. He was said to have killed a single TSA agent before being shot by police. Despite the fact that the shooting was said to have happened at an airport security checkpoint which would be equipped with multiple video cameras, no video footage of the incident has been released thus far. A couple of police officers were even caught on camera by a news chopper wheeling out a dummy on a wheelchair as if it were a real victim. At a press conference the police announced that they had practiced for this event indicating they had conducted drills depicting this exact same scenario before the live event. The FBI man who stood right behind the police chief appeared to be quite unhappy when he mentioned this at the press conference. This incident based upon the information we have also appears to be a completely staged hoax.
On December 13th 2013 the FBI claimed they stopped a middle aged white man by the name of Terry Lee Loewen from setting off a bomb at the Mid-Continent Airport in Wichita Kansas. Loewen an aviation mechanic at the airport was said to have been sympathetic with Al-Qaeda. According to the official story, Loewen began having an online conversation with someone who he thought was a like-minded individual but actually turned out to be an FBI employee. The FBI had him under constant surveillance and actually provided him with a fake explosive device so that he could launch a suicide car bomb attack at the airport. When Loewen went to the airport with the materials he was arrested. This is despite the fact that there was no proof that he tried to set off the alleged bomb. Despite this supposedly happening at the airport, no surveillance video showing this man doing these things has been made available. His ex-wife described Loewen as easy going and quiet raising further questions about the official story. At the very least, this was a clear cut case of the FBI entrapping this man and masterminding the plot. Even the Wichita Eagle wrote a piece questioning if Loewen was a victim of FBI entrapment. It is also possible that the entire story is a fabrication since much of the evidence is highly questionable.
So in recent history we have three highly suspicious events that appear to have all been staged or covered up by the FBI. These events have all happened roughly six weeks apart from one another. If this pattern continues we should expect another staged hoax with FBI involvement to occur sometime around the last week of January to the first week of February. It should be interesting to see if something happens within that general time frame. If it does we will keep reporting on this phenomenon until the douche bag terrorists at the FBI quit making this operation so obvious.
Link:
http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_FBI_Appears_To_Be_Involved_In_Staging_Or_Covering_Up_Active_Shooter_And_Terror_Hoax_Events_Every_Six_Weeks/31624/0/5/5/Y/M.html
Afghanistan's opium crop sets new records
By Alex Pena
Stars and Stripes
Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan surged to record heights in 2013, increasing for the third straight year in a row and confirming the country’s status as the world’s No. 1 exporter of the opium crop.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s annual Opium Survey, published in November, two factors were behind the rise in cultivation: high opium prices and speculation due to the withdrawal of U.S. and international troops from Afghanistan. Cultivation of the crop spread to two previously poppy-free provinces, Faryab and Balkh, in northern Afghanistan.
In an interview with Stars and Stripes, Yury Fedotov, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said the ability of international organizations to continue working in Afghanistan and combating the trade would partly depend on the size of the international presence after 2014, when U.S. combat troops are slated to withdraw. Whether U.S. and NATO forces remain depends on a bilaterial security with the U.S., which is being held up by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“Many of these activities are linked to the support of (the) international presence in Afghanistan,” Fedotov said. “We need to help Afghanistan to restructure its economy and ensure sustainable development after the withdrawal of foreign forces from this country.”
Eradication efforts throughout the country declined in 2013. A total of 7,348 hectares — some 18,157 acres — of verified eradication was carried out by Afghanistan’s governors, a decline of 24 percent from 2012.
The major uptick in poppy cultivation this year has been an unwelcome reminder of the uncertain allegiances after U.S. troops leave the country. While the UNODC says it has programs in place that are meant to give Afghan farmers an alternative crop choice, those programs have been largely unsuccessful.
“It’s hard for or them to sell their products,” Fedotov said, “while they don’t have such a problem when they’re growing opium poppy.”
And as U.S. troops pass responsibility for security to the Afghan National Security Forces, the flow of drugs from Afghanistan to the rest of the world is likely to continue.
Link:
http://www.stripes.com/news/afghanistan-s-opium-crop-sets-new-records-1.259933
The One, Two, Three Punch: How Youth Will Get Screwed in 2014
1. Increasing minimum wage laws in many cities and states will make more youth unemployable, as the mandated minimum wage will be greater than the marginal revenue product of many youth.
2. Increasing regulations will continue to suffocate many 20-somethings from becoming entrepreneurs, as the costs to meet new regulations will be prohibitive.
3. Obamacare will increase the cost of healthcare insurance for the healthy youth well over what free market insurance would cost.
Avik Roy writes:
And make no mistake: on average, sicker and older people will fare far better under Obamacare than healthy people will. According to an analysis I conducted with colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, older, sicker individuals will benefit most from Obamacare’s exchange subsidies. On the other hand, in many parts of the country, healthier Americans—especially younger ones—will see their premiums double or triple under the law.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/12/the-one-two-three-punch-how-youth-will.html
US Government Orders 14 Million Doses of Potassium Iodide
Huge purchase linked to ongoing Fukushima crisis?
Paul Joseph Watson
The Department of Health and Human Services has ordered 14 million doses of potassium iodide, the compound that protects the body from radioactive poisoning in the aftermath of severe nuclear accidents, to be delivered before the beginning of February.
According to a solicitation posted on the Federal Business Opportunities website, the DHHS asks contractors to supply, “potassium iodide tablet, 65mg, unit dose package of 20s; 700,000 packages (of 20s),” a total of 14 million tablets. The packages must be delivered on or before February 1, 2014.
Potassium iodide helps block radioactive iodine from being absorbed by the thyroid gland and is used by victims of severe nuclear accidents or emergencies. Under current regulations, states with populations living within 10 miles of a nuclear plant are encouraged, but not required, to maintain a supply of potassium iodide.
A search of the FedBizOpps website returns no other results regarding the purchase of potassium iodide from any government agency, suggesting that the DHHS bulk buy of the tablets is unprecedented in recent times.
The ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has prompted concerns that the purchase is connected to the threat posed by radioactive debris washing up on the shores of the west coast or the potential for another natural disaster occurring in Japan which could impact the U.S.
“Governments usually respond to disasters very similarly; first move is to avoid panic,” writes The West Wire. “The Japanese didn’t want to panic the world, or tarnish their honor and now, as a consequence of their reluctance, Japanese citizens and international aid personal find themselves in a horrible state of being.”
“Panic is usually avoided by keeping their citizens as blind to the truth as possible, until confrontation with the truth becomes inevitable. The crucial question at this juncture; “would our government be reluctant about warning us of potential disaster, in an attempt to avoid panic?” 14 million doses of Potassium Iodide say that might just be the case.”
Last month it was revealed that 71 U.S. sailors who helped during the initial Fukushima relief efforts are suing the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) after they returned with thyroid cancer, Leukemia, and brain tumors as a result of being exposed to radiation at 300 times the safe level.
TEPCO has repeatedly been caught lying in their efforts to downplay the scale of the disaster. In September it was confirmed that radiation readings around the power plant were 18 times higher than previously reported by TEPCO. After a tank leaked 300 tonnes of toxic water in August, groundwater radiation readings at the plant soared to 400,000 becquerels per litre, the highest reading since the nuclear accident occurred in March 2011.
Top scientists have warned that if another major earthquake hits Fukushima, which is almost inevitable, it would mean “bye bye Japan” and the complete evacuation of the west coast of North America.
Now that radioactive debris is hitting the West Coast of North America, numerous different animals and sea life are suffering from mysterious diseases, including 20 bald eagles that have died in Utah over the last few weeks alone.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/us-government-orders-14-million-doses-of-potassium-iodide.html
How to Address Growing Poverty? More Confiscation by Government
Kurt Nimmo
CNN, home to the Army’s Fourth Psychological Operations Group, admits the “war on poverty,” launched half a century ago this month, is a dismal failure and more Americans than ever are mired in poverty.
How to reverse this long-running trend? Well, since the problem is all about “income inequality,” the natural solution is to tax the rich, although CNN does not directly say this. Instead, it cites nonpartisan congressional analysts who blame “less redistributive” government for the yawning chasm between rich and poor.
In other words, more confiscation will be required. Not from the 1% that offshores its cash and devises other ways to avoid taxation, but from helpless victims in the millionaire class and the middle class directly below it.
How to accomplish this? Get out the vote… again.
“Statistics do show lower-income people are less likely to vote. According to CNN exit polls, those who made less than $15,000 per year comprised 6% of voters in 2008. More than 13 percent of the overall population fell below the poverty line that year,” CNN reports.
Liberals hope 2016 will be different as they push people like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president. A neophyte politician, Warren is a champion of liberal economic policies.
And progressives believe the election of Democrat Bill De Blasio as Mayor of New York, the world’s financial capital, is a promising sign the nation may be more ready to discuss issues pertaining to poor people.
A populist, De Blasio has stressed a tale of “two cities” theme that illustrated a division of rich and poor.
CNN says establishment Republicans are also looking to court poor people. “Democrats tend to support policies that involve more government and equitable wealth distribution while Republicans tend to back a ‘trickle-down’ approach in which stronger upper and middle class economies benefit the poor,” CNN explains.
“Trickle down” is a buzzword that drives liberals bats. They prefer direct confiscation and never seem to notice that this does nothing to ameliorate the lot of the poor.
“Government’s power and money doesn’t trickle down,” writes Jeffrey Tucker. “It takes money and pours it into ever more bureaucracy and gives it to the elites. Its power grows and grows at the expense of society.”
It looks like a new war on poverty is about to be launched by the establishment. Like the last one, this new boondoggle will not reduce the number of poor people, but it will grow government and create a new class of bureaucrats.
Of course, so long as the economy is the play thing of banksters and their coterie at the Federal Reserve, nothing significant will change, except maybe the rhetoric and a march to the polls where rigged voting machines wait.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/how-to-address-growing-poverty-more-confiscation-by-government.html
How Will The Economy Improve In 2014 If Almost Everyone Has Less Money To Spend?
Michael Snyder
Is the U.S. consumer tapped out? If so, how in the world will the U.S. economy possibly improve in 2014? Most Americans know that the U.S. economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending. If average Americans are not out there spending money, the economy tends not to do very well.
Unfortunately, retail sales during the holiday season appear to be quite disappointing and the middle class continues to deeply struggle. And for a whole bunch of reasons things are likely going to be even tougher in 2014. Families are going to have less money in their pockets to spend thanks to much higher health insurance premiums under Obamacare, a wide variety of tax increases, higher interest rates on debt, and cuts in government welfare programs. The short-lived bubble of false prosperity that we have been enjoying for the last couple of years is rapidly coming to an end, and 2014 certainly promises to be a very “interesting year”.
Obamacare Rate Shock
Most middle class families are just scraping by from month to month these days.
Unfortunately for them, millions of those families are now being hit with massive health insurance rate increases.
In a previous article, I discussed how one study found that health insurance premiums for men are going to go up by an average of 99 percent under Obamacare and health insurance premiums for women are going to go up by an average of 62 percent under Obamacare.
Most middle class families simply cannot afford that.
Earlier today, I got an email from a reader that was paying $478 a month for health insurance for his family but has now received a letter informing him that his rate is going up to $1,150 a month.
Millions of families are receiving letters just like that. And to say that these rate increases are a “surprise” to most people would be a massive understatement. Even people that work in the financial industry are shocked at how high these premiums are turning out to be…
“The real big surprise was how much out-of-pocket would be required for our family,” said David Winebrenner, 46, a financial adviser in Lebanon, Ky., whose deductible topped $12,000 for a family of six for a silver plan he was considering. The monthly premium: $1,400.
Since Americans are going to have to pay much more for health insurance, that is going to remove a huge amount of discretionary spending from the economy, and that will not be good news for retailers.
Get Ready For Higher Taxes
When you raise taxes, you reduce the amount of money that people have in their pockets to spend.
Sadly, that is exactly what is happening.
Congress is allowing a whopping 55 tax breaks to expire at the end of this year, and when you add that to the 13 major tax increases that hit American families in 2013, it isn’t a pretty picture.
This tax season, millions of families are going to find out that they have much higher tax bills than they had anticipated.
And all of this comes at a time when incomes in America have been steadily declining. In fact, real median household income has declined by a total of 8 percent since 2008.
If you are a worker, you might want to check out the chart that I have posted below to see where you stack up. In America today, most workers are low income workers. These numbers come from a recent Huffington Post article…
-If you make more than $10,000, you earn more than 24.2% of Americans, or 37 million people.
-If you make more than $15,000 (roughly the annual salary of a minimum-wage employee working 40 hours per week), you earn more than 32.2% of Americans.
-If you make more than $30,000, you earn more than 53.2% of Americans.
-If you make more than $50,000, you earn more than 73.4% of Americans.
-If you make more than $100,000, you earn more than 92.6% of Americans.
-You are officially in the top 1% of American wage earners if you earn more than $250,000.
-The 894 people that earn more than $20 millionmake more than 99.99989% of Americans, and are compensated a cumulative $37,009,979,568 per year.
It is important to keep in mind that those numbers are for the employment income of individuals not households. Most households have more than one member working, so overall household incomes are significantly higher than these numbers.
Higher Interest Rates Mean Larger Debt Payments
On Tuesday, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries rose to 3.03 percent. I warned that this would happen once the taper started, and this is just the beginning. Interest rates are likely to steadily rise throughout 2014.
The reason why the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries is such a critical number is because mortgage rates and thousands of other interest rates throughout our economy are heavily influenced by that number.
So big changes are on the way. As a recent CNBC article declared, the era of low mortgage rates is officially over…
The days of the 3.5% 30-year fixed are over. Rates are already up well over a full percentage point from a year ago, and as the Federal Reserve begins its much anticipated exit from the bond-buying business, I believe rates will inevitably go higher.
Needless to say, this is going to deeply affect the real estate market. As Mac Slavo recently noted, numbers are already starting to drop precipitously…
The National Association of Realtors reported that the month of September saw its single largest drop in signed home sales in 40 months. And that wasn’t just a one-off event. This month mortgage applications collapsed a shocking 66%, hitting a13-year low.
And U.S. consumers can expect interest rates on all kinds of loans to start rising. That is going to mean higher debt payments, and therefore less money for consumers to spend into the economy.
Government Benefit Cuts
Well, if the middle class is going to have less money to spend, perhaps other Americans can pick up the slack.
Or maybe not.
You certainly can’t expect the poor to stimulate the economy. As I mentioned yesterday, it is being projected that up to 5 million unemployed Americans could lose their unemployment benefits by the end of 2014, and 47 million Americans recently had their food stamp benefits reduced.
So the poor will also have less money to spend in 2014.
The Wealthy Save The Day?
Perhaps the stock market will continue to soar in 2014 and the wealthy will spend so much that it will make up for all the rest of us.
You can believe that if you want, but the truth is that there are a whole host of signs that the days of this irrational stock market bubble are numbered. The following is an excerpt from one of my recent articles entitled “The Stock Market Has Officially Entered Crazytown Territory“…
The median price-to-earnings ratio on the S&P 500 has reached an all-time record high, and margin debt at the New York Stock Exchange has reached a level that we have never seen before. In other words, stocks are massively overpriced and people have been borrowing huge amounts of money to buy stocks. These are behaviors that we also saw just before the last two stock market bubbles burst.
If the stock market bubble does burst, the wealthy will also have less money to spend into the economy in 2014.
For the moment, the stock market has been rallying. This is typical for the month of December. You see, the truth is that investors generally don’t want to sell stocks in December because they want to put off paying taxes on the profits.
If stocks are sold before the end of the year, the profits go on the 2013 tax return.
If stocks are sold a few days from now, the profits go on the 2014 tax return.
It is only human nature to want to delay pain for as long as possible.
Expect to see some selling in January. Many investors are very eager to start taking profits, but they wanted to wait until the holidays were over to do so.
So what do you think is coming up in 2014? Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/how-will-the-economy-improve-in-2014-if-almost-everyone-has-less-money-to-spend
'One Hundred Years is Long Enough. End the Fed' - Ron Paul
By Valentin Mândrăşescu
Former US Representative and spiritual leader of American libertarians, Ron Paul decided to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve system by publishing an essay demanding its abolition.
Ron Paul’s crusade against the Federal Reserve has been going on for several decades. He made several attempts to initiate a Senatorial audit of America’s central bank but has never found enough support even among the members of his own Republican party. Now, the former US Representative for Texas’ 14th and 22nd congressional districts continues his battle against the Federal Reserve by publicly criticizing its failures that hurt the US economy.
Ron Paul is concerned by the fact that Americans don’t want to recognize that “Fed’s growth from a quasi-agent of the Treasury Department intended to provide an elastic currency, to a de facto independent institution that has taken complete control of the economy through its central monetary planning.”
The Federal Reserve botched its stated mission. America’s “private central bank” was created with the stated goal of preventing financial crises such as the Panic of 1907. History proves that the Fed failed multiple times. The Great Depression, the recession of 1973-1975 and the recent financial crisis of 2008 happened on Fed’s watch and its critics argue that the central bank’s actions have exacerbated the damage done to American and global economies. Ron Paul points out that the Federal Reserve monetary policy has long term negative effects: “Now we are reaping the noxious effects of a century of loose monetary policy, as our economy remains mired in mediocrity and utterly dependent on a stream of easy money from the central bank.”
Few American politicians have the courage to say that the Fed does its best to generate profits for a selected group of big banks even if those profits hurt the society as a whole. The former Representative of Texas is one of such politicians. “We know that the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy continues to reap profits for Wall Street while impoverishing Main Street”, he wrote in his essay published by the Free Foundation.
It is a safe bet that nobody in Washington would dare to dismantle the Federal Reserve but when the second wave of the crisis generated by the Fed’s policies hits the US, they won’t be able to say that nobody tried to warn them about the imminent disaster.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/no_author/dont-say-you-werent-warned/
Inequality -- Crisis or Scam
By Patrick J. Buchanan
When President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing in 1972, Chairman Mao Zedong — with his Marxist revolution, Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — had achieved an equality unrivaled anywhere.
That is, until Pol Pot came along.
There seemed to be no private cars on Beijing’s streets. In the stores, there was next to nothing on the shelves. The Chinese all seemed dressed in the same blue Mao jackets.
Today there are billionaires and millionaires in China, booming cities, a huge growing middle class and, yes, hundreds of millions of peasants still living on a few dollars a day.
Hence, there is far greater inequality in China today than in 1972.
Yet, is not the unequal China of today a far better place for the Chinese people than the Communist ant colony of Mao?
Lest we forget, it is freedom that produces inequality.
Even a partly free nation unleashes the natural and acquired abilities of peoples, and the more industrious and talented inevitably excel and rise and reap the greater rewards. “Inequality … is rooted in the biological nature of man,” said James Fenimore Cooper.
Yet for many people, from New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio to President Barack Obama to Pope Francis, income inequality is a curse in need of a cure, as there is today said to be an intolerable measure of such inequality.
But let us first inspect the measuring rod.
Though a family of four with $23,550 in cash income in 2013 qualified as living in poverty, this hardly tells the whole story.
Consider the leveling effect of the graduated income tax, about which Karl Marx wrote glowingly in his “Communist Manifesto.”
The top 1 percent of U.S. earners pay nearly 40 percent of U.S. income taxes. The top 10 percent pay 70 percent. The top 50 percent pay more than 97 percent of income taxes. The poor pay nothing.
Surely, trillions of dollars siphoned annually off the incomes of the most productive Americans — in federal, state and local income and payroll taxes — closes the gap somewhat.
Secondly, though 15 percent of U.S. families qualify as poor, measured by cash income, this does not take into account the vast assortment of benefits they receive.
The poor have their children educated free in public schools, from Head Start to K-12 and then on to college with Pell Grants. Their medical needs are taken care of through Medicaid.
They receive food stamps to feed the family. The kids can get two or three free meals a day at school.
Housing, too, is paid for or subsidized. The poor also receive welfare checks and Earned Income Tax Credits for added cash.
In the late 1940s, our family had no freezer, no dishwasher, no clothes washer or dryer, no microwave, no air conditioning. We watched the Notre Dame-Army game on a black-and-white 8-inch DuMont.
Among American families in poverty today, 1 in 4 have a freezer. Nearly half have automatic dishwashers. Almost 60 percent have a home computer. About 2 in 3 poor families have a clothes washer and dryer. Eighty percent have cellphones.
Ninety-three percent of the poor have a microwave; 96 percent a color TV, and 97 percent a gas or electric stove. Not exactly les miserables.
Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation added up the cost in 2012 of the means-tested federal and state programs for America’s poor and low-income families. Price tag: $927 billion.
There are 79 federal programs, writes Rector, that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, social services, training and targeted education to poor and low-income Americans.
“If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than sufficient to bring the income of every lower-income American to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, roughly $44,000 per year for a family of four.”
Then there are the contributions of churches, charities and foundations.
Where in history have the poor been treated better?
Certainly not in the USA in the 1950s or during the Depression. Why, then, all this sudden talk about reducing the gap between rich and poor?
A good society will take care of its poor. But envy that others have more, and coveting the goods of the more successful, used to constitute two of the seven capital sins in the Baltimore Catechism.
At Howard University in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared, “We seek not just … equality as a right … but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
Yet the only way to make people who are unequal in talents equal in rewards is to use governmental power to dispossess some and favor others.
Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming:
“The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced … to a single principle.”
Get people to believe you are seeking the utopian goal of equality of all and there is no limit to the power you can amass.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/patrick-j-buchanan/crisis-or-scam/
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