Opting Out

Ways in Which Real Life is Like a Dystopian Science Fiction Novel, Part 2 of Infinity

2010-12-08T18:33:00.000-08:00

Your Department of Homeland Security has developed mobile security gateways housed in tractor-trailers that deploy to public events to "establish or supplement security facilities at points of entry." Sensors inside the gateways scan individuals for "behavioral and physiological indications or malintent--or, the intent or desire to cause harm." Someone who plans to blow people up may tend to show certain behavioral traits, say fidgeting, or physiological traits, say an elevated pulse. These sensors would monitor such things. Of course, if you just happen to be nervous, say because you're surrounded by scary cops, dogs, guns, and probes--or you're a petty drug dealer--or you're late on your mortgage payments--and you set off the sensors, that's not a problem! Just step through the door for your interrogation and search, and if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

This is NOT designed to detect weapons. It is NOT designed to verify your identity. Large facilities already have security in place for that sort of thing. This is new. The video says in the very first sentence: "Physiological and behavioral screening technologies." The government intends to READ YOUR MIND.

I'm sure most people will breeze through these things with no problems. They might even think it's kind of neat. But the thing is, I'm worried about getting through them myself. Because when I find myself surrounded by physical reality of the police state, when I realize that we are slaves paying the cost of our own slavery, I get very angry. I've always mustered my best poker face in that kind of situation. What am I to do now? How can I hide my ill-will toward my government when they can read my very thoughts?

Ron Paul for President

2010-07-16T00:08:00.000-07:00

Ways in Which Real Life is Like a Dystopian Science Fiction Novel, Part 1 of Infinity

2010-06-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

There is a plant. When a person burns the flowers and leaves of this plant and inhales the resulting smoke, the person's brain chemistry is altered, often pleasurably. Said activity is against the law. If someone is suspected of said activity, people enter the home of that person. If that person drops to the ground fast enough, he has the privilege of going on living locked in a small room. If not, the other people use complicated pieces of metal that they carry to fire other, smaller pieces of metal into the person's body, killing him instantly.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/17/las-vegas-cop-killing-of-father-to-be-in-pot-raid-reemphasizes-need-for-marijuana-legalization/

Obama is a corporatist, not a socialist

2010-05-05T23:46:00.001-07:00

Where's your liberal leader now?

2010-04-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

Obama's executive order that he attached to the health care bill that bans federal funds for abortion also provides for $50 million per year for abstinence-based sex education. What century is this?

Well, at least he spends money liberally, even if he doesn't govern liberally.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olpB-9Niu8M

Opt out of: two-party politics; left-right paradigms.

Jim Rogers: "The U.S. Government long bond is a bubble."

2010-03-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

Jim Rogers, as far as I can tell, is the smartest man in the world. It's in the way he speaks.

Rogers says Treasury bonds are a bubble.
If he's right, Treasury bond prices will drop.
If prices drop, rates will go up.
If rates go up, interest payments on the national debt go up.
If payments go up, the rate of new borrowing goes up--unless and until spending is cut or taxes are raised.

For you, this may mean higher taxes, fewer government services, greater national debt, and bad performance from your retirement savings.

Opt Out of: Borrow-and-spend politics; personal exposure to US bonds.

Ben Bernanke: "Central Banking is an Art" (that is, not a science)

2010-03-19T01:07:00.000-07:00

Bernanke: "You need some system to set the money supply... Every major country in the world uses a central bank, which must make some decision about the money supply."
Ron Paul: "But then there's no good information for the investor, unfortunately."

Health care reform proposals are a tax on being healthy

2010-03-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

For as long as health care reform has been in the news in its current incarnation, I've been silently opposed to it on principle, certain that somewhere in the thousands of pages of legislation would be at least one provision that I regarded as incompatible with common sense and basic morality, and a non-starter.

Actually, I was aware of one such provision from the beginning: the individual mandate. This says that every person must purchase health insurance or pay a fine. Obama claimed to oppose the individual mandate during his campaign; after all, you can't solve the problem of homelessness by requiring everyone to buy a house. It's too bad he changed his mind.

But the individual mandate is a gimme. It is obviously nonsense despite the fact that it almost certainly will be a provision of anything that is signed into law. I knew I must dig deeper and find something more substantive, more offensive, more asinine to serve as my reason for opposing health care reform. It took me about 15 minutes of reading.

As background, be aware that the House of Representatives and the Senate have each passed a health care reform bill. The differences between the bills must be resolved by a joint House-Senate committee, and the full House and Senate must then vote on the committee resolution. This is the sticking point because the Senate Democrats may not have enough votes for passage now that Ted Kennedy has been replaced by Scott Brown.

The offensive and asinine thing that I found in both the House bill and the Senate bill, which I have never seen mentioned in anything I have read or heard about this debate, is this: health insurance companies will be prohibited from considering your medical history when determining your premium rate. This means that the guy who exercises and eats vegetables, and is healthy because of it, will pay not one cent less than the guy who watches television and eats potato chips, and is sick because of it (all other factors being equal).

This is how Congress proposes to make health care "affordable": by outlawing the common-sense idea that those who exhibit a tendency to get sick should pay more for health insurance. Of course, it will make health insurance more affordable--for sick people. It will also make it less affordable for healthy people. So health insurance for sick people will not be subsidized by the government or taxpayer at large, or the insurance companies, or future taxpayers paying down the national debt. It will be subsidized by healthy people. This is a tax on being healthy and a subsidy on being sick.

In the Senate bill, I also found this gem: variance in insurance premiums on the basis of age and tobacco use will still be allowed, but limited to ratios of 3 to 1 and 1.5 to 1, respectively. This means that a 100-year-old cannot pay more than 3 times as much as an 18-year-old, and a smoker cannot pay more than 1.5 times as much as a nonsmoker. Instead of teams of statisticians with advanced degrees determining how much premiums should vary for such people, a handful of Congressmen have predetermined those numbers. These are taxes on being young and tobacco-free and subsidies on being old and smoking.

We don't make people who build houses on hills pay the same thing for flood insurance as those who build houses on the beach. We don't make 30-year-olds pay the same thing for life insurance as 80-year-olds. Such policies would defy common sense, as do the proposals I've described, which may yet become law.

Why Sarah Palin Will Be the 2012 Republican Nominee for President

2009-11-23T23:34:00.000-08:00

The media started talking about Sarah Palin as a candidate for President even before the 2008 election was over. I've been very confused as to how anyone could consider that a real possibility. But incredibly, her name does not seem to have left the news in the past year, and articles about her viability as a candidate are still published all the time. Like this one. But it has dawned on me why her candidacy would be so good for so many people.

In order for the Republicans and Democrats (Republicrats) to remain in power, each party must offer a candidate so repulsive to so many people that large numbers of voters feel forced to vote against that candidate, i.e. vote for his/her opponent most likely to win, even if that means voting for the "lesser of two evils." Thus, few who are scared by one candidate or the other can bring themselves to vote for a third party candidate, no matter how much more appealing they are.

This is why Palin will be the Republican nominee. If some centrist Republican were offered, many voters would reason, "Well, I voted for Obama on the promise of peace and freedom. That's not happening, so I can't vote for him again. This centrist Republican isn't terrible, but he's no peace and freedom candidate either. I'm voting for a third party!" This would be disastrous for both parties, for the corporatocracy, and for the international war machine. What if Palin were the nominee instead? Our hypothetical voter would likely think, "Shit, we can't have her in the White House. I'm going to vote for Obama and hope the second term is better than the first." And Republican voters think, "Yeah, Palin! The anti-Obama!"

So Palin will be the nominee, and we'll have another 51-49 election, and regardless of who wins, we'll have more war, more poverty, and more injustice. The status quo will continue.

Opt Out of: Two-party politics; voting based on fear; the government war machine.

Bank Bailouts are Class Warfare

2009-11-12T21:29:00.000-08:00

Finance ministers from the Group of 20 met at a golf resort in Scotland this past weekend. At the meeting on Saturday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed "a new tax on financial transactions to support future bank rescues." He supports, in effect, a down payment on the next bailout for bankster assholes who run their businesses into the ground. He said, "It cannot be acceptable that the benefits of success in this sector are reaped by the few but the costs of its failure are borne by all of us." This is happening right now: privatized profits and socialized losses.

If financial institutions were allowed to go bankrupt, the costs of failure would be borne by its shareholders and depositors proportionally to their investment in the business. The very wealthiest would bear the most cost, and the middle class would bear the rest. The poor have savings in cash, not stock, are covered by FDIC insurance, and would not lose a dime. This fair distribution of burden is not permitted to happen.

Instead, the US Treasury issues Treasury bonds, which the Federal Reserve buys with Federal Reserve Notes, which the Treasury uses to purchase banks' toxic assets. The interest on those Treasury bonds is paid with income taxes. Thus the working-class poor are paying to bail out businesses in which they have no equity (stock), and in which their deposits are already guaranteed.

Prime Minister Brown proposes modest reform. If a tax on financial transactions were implemented to provide for a bailout fund, the super-wealthy could take on ever-higher levels of leverage and risk, secure in the knowledge that bailouts are explicitly guaranteed and funded ahead of time. The inevitable cost of periodic failures in these risky investments would be borne in part by middle-class citizens who invest in run-of-the-mill, safe vehicles such as mutual funds. But at least an investment tax would not directly burden those too poor to invest beyond their savings accounts.

Naturally, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner does not like the idea. And he uses doublespeak to say it: "We want to make sure that we don't put the taxpayer in a position of having to absorb the costs of a crisis in the future." What a laugh. What are Congress, Treasury, and the Fed going to do, let their buddies go bankrupt? They have already proven unwilling to do that. Geithner is simply saying, "No thanks, we already have a much better arrangement. Not only are we secure in the knowledge of future bailouts when needed, but we also get to spread the burden of our failures across nearly the entire populace." Privatized profits; socialized losses.

In the march toward fascist tyranny, why take a backward step?

Opt Out of: Passive acceptance of the bubble/bailout economy.

Heaven is made, not attained.

2009-11-08T12:51:00.000-08:00

Bernie Madoff on the $1 Bill?

2009-11-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

Peter Schiff: "Maybe the good news for George Washington is pretty soon we might have to phase out the one-dollar bill because it won't be worth as much as it costs to print it. We probably should put Bernie Madoff's face on there because it would be a more accurate representation of the value of our money."

Brilliant!

www.SchiffForSenate.com

Biking in Tampa

2009-10-20T06:57:00.000-07:00

This sign is on Bruce B. Downs Boulevard in Tampa, directed at southbound bikers in the northbound lane.

I often ride Bruce B. Downs on my bike. Northbound, there is a bike lane the whole way. There is also a sidewalk that goes from narrow and bumpy, to a gap consisting of a dirt path, to wide and smooth. Once you get to the wide sidewalk, you have two good options for bike riding.

Traveling southbound is the problem. Riding on the wide sidewalk, you have three options when you come to the dirt path: 1) ride the path and maybe fall off if you're on a road bike; 2) cross six busy lanes of traffic to get to the southbound bike lane; or 3) ride the wrong way in the northbound bike lane just long enough to get to the narrow, bumpy sidewalk. I always choose option 3. I only need to ride the wrong way for a minute, then the crappy sidewalk for another minute, to get to my street. And apparently lots of other bikers make the same choice, because someone thought it necessary to put this sign up.

My problem is not that the authorities are imperfect in ensuring safety for bicyclists. My problem is that they're spending my tax money to put up signage that illustrates a problem but does nothing to fix it!

Opt out of: Driving everywhere just because it's easy or because bicycling is still unusual in your community.

Revolutionary Act of the Day

2009-10-20T05:05:00.001-07:00

Today I will finally end my relationship with Bank of America. I decided quite a while ago that I must stop giving my business to corporate banks. Today I am one step closer to that goal.

I would eventually have reached this decision based purely on a customer service standpoint. Bank of America nickel-and-dimes me with fees I don't completely understand, they have lousy hours, they are slow to clear deposits, and they pollute my landscape with excessive branches and advertising. My credit union has very limited fees, which are easy to avoid, and all aspects of their service are excellent. I also earn interest on my fee-free checking account, which I think most banks these days are unable to offer.

But of course, to me the problem goes far beyond customer service. Even if those characteristics of BoA and my credit union were reversed, I would still be going to retrieve my money today. I can't allow the profits from my savings to be exported out of my community and into the hands of shareholders and executives. I can't support an industry that helps destroy our economy and then gets bailed out by taxpayers. I can't be complicit in the bubble/bailout economy.

Yesterday, Bank of America managed to get one last insult in. In the years that I've been dealing with them, I've somehow failed to understand that there are no branches in Tampa that you can walk into after 4:00, despite being disappointed by this fact over and over. My tiny credit union is open until 5:00, so why can't Bank of America keep just one of its 17 branches open until 5:00? Oh, maybe it's because they have 17 branches.

Today, I'm going to be there when they open. "Knock knock, bitches! It's nine a.m.! Time to say goodbye to my money!!"

Opt Out of: corporate banking; the bubble/bailout economy.

Selling dollars: Precious metals as the anti-investment

2008-06-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

Industrial economies are a house of cards on the verge of collapse. Most investments made today are destined to be losers. Whether you agree or not, it is likely that you are increasingly uneasy or confused about the security of your savings. The average person seeking financial refuge might be inclined to sell some investment for cash or to delay a planned investment in favor of keeping the cash. This is normal. People all over the world think of their respective currencies as a baseline against which all investments are measured: if something purchased with X dollars is later sold for more than X dollars, the investment is a winner; if less, it is a loser. But this is a dangerous line of thinking that is going to get a lot of people into serious trouble. We must understand the true nature of and inherent danger in our currency in order to avoid disaster.

Wealth is made up of those things, measurable or immeasurable, tangible or intangible, which directly contribute to our well-being. Wealth includes food, shelter, security, family, and community. Money is one step removed from wealth. It is a store of value that facilitates the exchange of material things that make up wealth. The most common money is made of gold or silver, but any physical commodity that satisfies certain criteria can be used as money. Currency is a substitute for money that more completely facilitates the transfer of wealth, largely because, whether paper or coin, it is less massive than the money it represents. It has no significant inherent value. Properly managed, it is convertible to a fixed (or, at least, fairly stable) amount of real money and is therefore still only one step removed from wealth. Investments are two steps removed from wealth. They are purchased with material wealth or currency and may later be sold for greater or lesser amounts. (Certain investments, such as stock in a company with physical capital, may be a form of actual wealth, but this distinction is immaterial to the average investor.)

In the desperately unenlightened view, our dollars are considered wealth in that they themselves are necessary for well-being. This is obviously not true. More commonly, dollars are considered money because we tend to think of them as a stable store of value. However, the dollar's inability to buy a fixed amount of anything is becoming increasingly apparent in our daily lives. This creates a logical disconnect in our minds that is resolved by considering the cost of material wealth to be highly volatile. We maintain that dollars are stable; "food prices" and "gas prices" are out of control.

Of course, the dollar is not stable, nor is any other currency of which I am aware. They are fiat currencies, manufactured by fiat, or decree, of central banks (not governments). An increase in the supply of dollars causes all existing dollars to become correspondingly less valuable; the result is rising prices. Whereas the supply and demand of things like food, oil and gold are affected by blunt forces such as population and weather, supply and demand of currencies are affected by the politically-motivated decisions of the financial elite. Components of wealth and money are fairly stable in value; fiat currencies are not. And yet the common mode of thought supposes exactly the opposite.

Dollars are investments. They are two steps removed from wealth. If I exchange wealth (e.g. food or a house) or money (e.g. gold or silver) for dollars, those dollars may later be exchangeable for more or less wealth or money than I originally gave up--maybe a lot less. Holding onto a dollar instead of exchanging it for some other unit of investment, money, or wealth is a wager on the future performance of the market for dollars.

It is my opinion that the coming years will see a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy as a result of the depreciation of the primary modes of saving for most of us (for the poor, cash; for the middle class, all other investments) concurrent with the appreciation of the primary assets of the super-wealthy (the material components of real wealth and the means to produce them). This is why virtually any investment that one can make today is a sure loser.

The solution is to disinvest. Sell your stocks. Sell your bonds. SELL YOUR DOLLARS. Sell them for gold or silver--real money with stable value. If you had the money to buy factories and farmland, I'd tell you to do that. But even if you did, you probably couldn't afford to hold onto idle factories and farmland during the depression that is coming. You also won't be able to hold onto your current stock in the companies that own those things if you join the swelling ranks of the unemployed. The super-wealthy will buy those shares from the unemployed middle class at fire-sale prices because they can afford to wait it out.

Most of the middle class who own stock probably have most or all of it in a 401(k) or IRA. I'm not aware of any way to hold gold in a 401(k), but there are many IRA administrators who offer the option of holding gold. If you have an IRA, ask the investment company if they offer this option. If they don't, switching is easy. If you have only a 401(k), consider rolling over a portion of it to a new IRA. Or, better yet, find a way to save more of your paycheck and put that toward gold or silver. Other options include buying physical gold or silver from a local coin dealer or purchasing it online at an exchange and storage provider such as BullionVault. In a future post, I may go into more detail on these methods, but if you want to get started right away and need help, just ask me.

Opt out of: the investment house of cards; the safe-dollar mentality.