He closed it for a few days. Then he re-opened it.

The Park Service now has a huge public relations problem. It can choose to enforce its order. It can send in armed men to force the closing. Or it can just ignore this act of defiance.

The media have picked up the story as a human interest story. In this story, the Park Service is the villain — a bureaucratic agency trying to force the Republicans in the House to raise the debt ceiling. “Shut it down!” This mentality led to the closing of various Washington monuments. It has backfired on the senior-level bureaucrats who came up with this policy. First, a bunch of World War II vets removed the barriers, and walked into the monument area. Now a restaurant owner is doing the same thing.

What’s a bureaucrat to do?

It is significant that the restaurant owner is taking his stand in Yorktown. This makes the Park Service’s PR problem even worse. Yorktown is where George Washington, with help from the French fleet, defeated General Cornwallis in October 1781. That defeat ended Great Britain’s resistance to the American Revolution. The Park Service wants to be seen as George Washington. Instead, it is being seen as Cornwallis. It is going to lose this PR battle. It’s the bureaucratic world turned upside down.

This confirms North’s law of bureaucracy: “Some bureaucrat will eventually enforce a regulation to the point of utter imbecility.”

Continue Reading on www.cbn.com

Wallis lives in Washington, D.C. So, I suppose “we” could mean residents of the city.

But is there something else about Washington, D.C. that would make the Pope’s presence especially beneficial? Does Washington, D.C. have some special situation that makes its need more relevant than (say) Sheboygan, Wisconsin?

Wallis thinks so. Washington, D.C. is the seat of the federal government. There is enormous power in Washington, D.C. and Wallis has been working for 35 years to get his hands on it — his hands, and his followers’ hands. If you doubt me, click here.

This has hampered his ability to hear. When the Pope says “church,” Wallis hears “Congress.”

Let me demonstrate this. Wallis quoted a statement by the Pope.

“How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary–that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind……In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.”

Read the rest of the article

Why are they doing this? Because they can. They can let the voters back home know that they are taking a stand. They identify themselves as anti-ObamaCare. They can run on this platform in November of 2014.

Once the bill is rejected, they will have to calculate how long they can continue to refuse to vote for the debt ceiling. Will they last beyond the time when the Treasury Department can no longer cook the books by playing games with federal retirement funds?

Will they eventually capitulate? Yes. Again, they are making a symbolic gesture: “We don’t like the deficit.” Do they hate it so much that they are willing to shut down or make $700+ billion a year in spending cuts? No. They will catch too much opposition from voters who are on the dole.

The public does not care about the deficit. They care about free goodies, and they care about taxes. They have not allowed the federal government to collect as much as 21% of GDP — not even in 1944, during World War II.

The deficit is perceived as make-believe: free money. The voters have shown that they do not care. But they want their free goodies, and they will not tolerate federal taxes.

The House Republicans are taking a stand where voters are unwilling to let them take a stand at voters’ expense. “We want goodies! We want goodies!” If the Federal Reserve has to create money to buy over half the deficit, who cares? Not voters, who have never heard of the Federal Reserve. Not academic economists, who are employed by it or hope to be. The FED employs 20,000 people, using free money to pay them.

So, how long will House Republicans continue to take a stand? Until the polls indicate that they will lose in November 2014.

On October 1, enrollment in the exchanges is to begin. But hardly anyone knows how to enroll yet. The computer programs are not ready. The confusion has not yet hit. The sense of betrayal has not yet hit Obama’s poll numbers.

If Republicans can hold out long enough for resentment against the program to spread, they win politically. They can hold out longer. But at some point, they will capitulate. That’s what the uncertainty is all about. It’s about the timing of their capitulation. If they wait too long, we could get a Democrat-controlled House in 2015. Pelosi would be back in power. The Pelosi-Reid-Obama team would run the country for two years. What might come out of that?

In November, both parties want to run on this slogan: “We told you so.” The Democrats want to run on “We told you so about Republicans’ hostility to the middle class.” Republicans want to run on “We told you so about how bad ObamaCare is.”

That’s what the House’s fight is really all about. They can make their point before the government really does start cutting spending enough to create backlash in November. Then they will decide that enough is enough. They will vote for another continuing resolution.

The fight will be over how long the continuing resolution is for. From the Republicans’ viewpoint, the shorter, the better. They will then get to complain about ObamaCare every few months. The Democrats want a long extension. That will be what the fight will boil down to. But the House Republicans will capitulate.

She wants gun registration. She wants crazy people identified before they can buy guns. But the crazy man who shot up the Navy Yard had clearance. He walked onto the Yard well armed. The Navy had cleared him.

Is this a case for shutting down Navy yards? Using Feinstein’s categories, it is. I mean, if the U.S. Navy is incapable of screening out crazy people with guns, isn’t it time to have a debate in Congress over the continued existence of the Navy? This is the logic of Diane Feinstein.

CNN reports the following.

Navy officers knew that Aaron Alexis had been arrested in 2004 for shooting out the tires of a car — in a blackout fueled by anger — and yet they admitted him into the Navy and granted him security clearance anyway, a senior Naval officer told CNN.

“It appears as if investigators were aware of the incident, interviewed him and were satisfied that it did not preclude granting the clearance,” the officer said.

Read the rest of the article

Anyone who fails to do this could be fined or sent to jail.

The city chosen is Winchester. You think the politicians are not sending a message? If there had been a Kentucky city called Glock, they would have chosen it instead.

If the politicians get away with this, it is expected that the program will be imposed in every county in the state.

The preliminary report does not indicate that the governor has signed the bill into law.

If this does not lead to protests in Kentucky, gun-control lawmakers around the United States hope to get every state to impose this requirement.

Then, when confiscation day comes, the police will know where every gun is, other than those owned by criminals, who will not register their guns.

This is a trial balloon. The politicians will keep extending this law until they receive opposition sufficient to threaten their re-election.

Continue Reading on nationalreport.net

He offers this as evidence. The price of gold today is higher than the future delivery. Normally, the commodity futures price is higher for any commodity. Why? Because the seller wants to get paid for gold storage fees and the interest rate. But when there is heavy demand for delivery, the price of a commodity reverses. This is called backwardation. Today’s gold market in in backwardation. The one-month forward price is lower. Turk says we have seen this before: late 2008.

After the Lehman collapse there was a rush for liquidity, and gold is one of the most liquid assets. So it was aggressively sold into November of 2008, when the selling pressure ended as gold went into backwardation for a couple of days. And as proof that the baby was thrown out with the bath water, gold climbed from $717, at its November 2008 low, to $1,000 by February 2009. And it kept climbing for two more years.

This condition did not last long.

In contrast, the backwardation that ended Monday prevailed for a totally unprecedented and record breaking 40 trading days. During that time, gold rose from $1,200 to over $1,430. It was a spectacular jump in price. But with gold again below $1,400, the backwardation has re-appeared.

Why does this situation exist? On the surface, it does not make sense. There are no free lunches in life, such as storage fees.

Where are the arbitrageurs? Why haven’t they stepped in to take the easy profits? All they have to do, Eric, is sell their physical metal and simultaneously buy it back for future delivery at a cheaper price. Plus, they have use of the proceeds from their sale to invest. They also avoid storage costs while they own paper gold — a promise to pay gold in the future — instead of physical metal. For the big gold players it is easy money laying right there on the table, in plain sight for everyone to see. So why don’t the big players take the advantage of the arbitrage?

Is it because they fear the promise to deliver physical gold to them in the future will be broken? Do they value a tangible asset more highly than a financial asset? Do they believe the reward for holding physical metal is greater than the potential of a short-term profit?

We of course do not know the answer to these questions, but one thing is clear, this new backwardation illustrates that physical metal remains scarce, or in other words, it is being held in strong hands. It is therefore going take much higher gold prices to entice these strong hands to part with their metal and instead hold some depreciating national currency.

Remember Max’s law. Max Blumert was the father of Burt Blumert, who owned the Camino Coin Company for 50 years before he died. “Buy the best. Pay cash. Take delivery.”

Continue Reading on kingworldnews.com

“Does anyone seriously believe that people who are prepared to defy the laws against murder are going to obey laws against owning guns or large-capacity magazines?” — Thomas Sowell

I have watched the debate over gun control for almost 50 years. I have heard opponents of gun control invoke this argument. I do not recall having heard any gun control advocate respond to it. They ignore it. They pretend that no one has raised the question.

The voters accept this line of non-reasoning.

The voters generally favor some kinds of gun control. They do not favor outright bans. Only the hard-core gun controllers do this in the USA. The degree of gun control that prevails in the English-speaking world outside of the USA is not acceptable in the USA. But there is support for gun controls, although not gun control.

Gun control is like drug control: no one expects drug control to eliminate the use of illegal drugs. But voters do not want to admit that government control over drugs is a pipe dream. They take the same view on gun control. They don’t want to admit that the state’s intervention is making things worse for liberty. Liberty therefore must be sacrificed. The state must be said to have the power to control activities that the public privately accepts but publicly feels compelled to oppose.

I will re-write Sowell’s statement.

“Does anyone seriously believe that people who are prepared to defy the laws against smoking marijuana are going to obey laws against the use of cigarette paper to roll their own joints?”

Defenders of drug laws — who are very often opponents of gun control — respond to this question in the same way that defenders of gun control respond to Sowell’s other question.

Results: more laws, more government intrusion, larger budgets for bureaucrats, less liberty, and more play-pretend argumentation.

Basically, it boils down to this. Drug dealers are not going to obey laws that supposedly control guns.

If you want to get drug dealers to stop buying guns, then you had better vote to de-criminalize drugs. But liberals want to criminalize guns, and conservatives want to criminalize drugs.

If you think this argument makes no sense, then don’t expect liberals to respond to this argument: “People who are prepared to defy the laws against murder aren’t going to obey laws against owning guns or large-capacity magazines.”

Did you ever think about the chronology of drug laws in America? They parallel the licensing of physicians, which created a high-income cartel, which is justified on this basis: “We don’t want the general public to be able to buy drugs. So, we need state licensing of physicians to write prescriptions.”

It’s all about cartels. If you want to promote the creation of a high-income cartel, it’s easy. Get the state to outlaw something that most people want, and then license a group of specialists to sell it. This will also lead to the creation of an unlicensed, outlawed cartel, which also sells the item. That second cartel buys guns to defend its turf. The first cartel gets people with badges to buy guns to defend its turf.

Cartels want above-market income on state-protected turf. This takes guns. The debate is over who gets to carry the guns legally, and who will carry them illegally.

The House of Representatives may decide to let Obama’s immigration reform bill die. The House doesn’t kill it. It just lets it sit.

This caught my attention: an article with the catchy title, “Obama’s Immigration Nuclear Option: Stopping Deportations Unilaterally.”

When it comes to the idea of a political nuclear war between the President and the House of Representatives, I get all tingly.

If that happens, advocates of immigration reform have another idea: They’ll push Obama to press the button on the immigration-reform nuclear option.

The option commonly referred to by immigration reformers as “Plan B” would see the president take executive action to prevent undocumented immigrants from being deported — along the lines of the deferred-action program the administration created for “Dreamers” last year. It wouldn’t be a panacea, and it wouldn’t give them citizenship. But such an action could at least spare some from the constant threat of deportation. And perhaps just as important, it could exact major political revenge on Republicans, galvanizing the Hispanic electorate against them and further hurting their image with the fastest-growing segment of voters.

By now, you know the phrase “undocumented immigrants” is MediaSpeak for “illegal aliens.”

Obama does not have to enforce the deportation law. He can just sort of forget to enforce it. That would be round one of the “nuclear option.”

But that might not end it. Spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, according to the U.S. Constitution. (You remember the Constitution, don’t you? That’s the document that says that Congress must declare all wars.) The House might sort of forget to provide any funding for the laws that President Obama decides to enforce.

What would be President Obama’s nuclear response? How could he force the House to provide the funding?

He could get out his teleprompter and deliver a speech against the House for not funding the laws of the land. Then Boehner could do a YouTube video on enforcing the laws against illegal aliens.

Then Obama could threaten to tell the Secretary of the Treasury to stop cooking the books and admit that the debt ceiling was breached on June 1 — something the President has refused to do.

Then the federal government would shut down.

That’s why I get all  tingly.

I don’t think it will come to nuclear war. One side or the other will surrender. Obama and Boehner are both very good at strategic capitulations. It’s President Sequester vs. Congressman TARP. Both of them are willing to eat a mud sandwich or two.

Continue Reading on www.theatlantic.com

But then, every so often, reality intrudes.

In 1999, slightly more than 52 percent of teens 16 to 19 worked a summer job. By this year, that number had plunged to about 32.25 percent over June and July. It means that slightly more than three in 10 teens actually worked a summer job, out of a universe of roughly 16.8 million U.S. teens.

“We have never had anything this low in our lives. This is a Great Depression for teens, and no time in history have we encountered anything like that,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “That’s why it’s such an important story.”

Summer is traditionally the peak period of employment for teens as they are off from school and get their first brush with employment and the responsibilities that come with it. Falling teen employment, however, is just as striking in the 12-month numbers over the past decade.

The picture these teen employment statistics provide looks even worse when viewed through the complex prism of race. Sum and colleagues did just that, comparing June and July 2000 and the same two months of 2013. In 2000, 61.28 percent of white teens 16 to 19 held a job, a number that fell to 39.25 percent this summer. For African-Americans, a number that was dismal in 2000, 33.91 percent of 16 to 19 year olds holding a job, fell to a staggering low of 19.25 percent this June and July.

It wasn’t terribly better for Hispanics, who saw the percentage of employed teens fall from 40.31 percent in the two-month period of 2000 to 26.7 percent in June and July 2013.

One of the more surprising findings of Sum’s research is that teens whose parents were wealthy were more likely to have a job than those whose parents had less income. Some 46 percent of white male teens whose parents earned between $100,000 and $149,000 held a job this summer, compared with just 9.1 percent of black male teens whose family income was below $20,000 and 15.2 percent for Hispanic teen males with that same low family income.

That finding is important because a plethora of research shows that teens who work do better in a wide range of social and economic indicators. The plunging teen employment rate is likely to mean trouble for this generation of young workers of all races.

Something must be done, liberals insist. But what?  Liberals have an answer: raise the minimum wage!

Continue Reading www.mcclatchydc.com

Not only are the plants much bigger but they are largely disease-resistant, meaning huge savings in expensive fertilizers and harmful pesticides.

Extensively tested in Ireland and several other countries, the inexpensive water treatment technology is now being rolled out across the world. The technology makes GM obsolete and also addresses the whole global warming fear that there is too much carbon dioxide in the air, by simply converting excess CO2 into edible plant mass.

Developed by Professor Austin Darragh and Dr JJ Leahy of Limerick University’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science, the hardy eco-friendly technology uses nothing but the natural elements of sunlight, water, carbon dioxide in the air and the minerals in the soil.

The compact biscuit-tin-sized technology, which is called Vi-Aqua – meaning ‘life water’ – converts 24 volts of electricity into a radio signal, which charges up the water via an antennae. Once the device is attached to a hose, thousands of gallons of water can be charged up in less than 10 minutes at a cost of pennies.

Speaking about the new technology, Professor Austin Darragh says:

“Vi-Aqua makes water wetter and introduces atmospheric nitrogen into the water in the form of nitrates – so it is free fertilizer. It also produces the miracle of rejuvenating the soil by invigorating soil-based micro-organisms.

“We can also make water savings of at least 30 per cent. When the water is treated it becomes a better solvent, which means it can carry more nutrients to the leaves and stem and percolate better down into the soil to nourish the roots, which in turn produces a better root system. Hence the reason you need less water and why you end up with larger and hardier crops,” explains Professor Austin Darragh.

Extensively tested in Warrenstown Agricultural College, the technology is being hailed as a modern day miracle.

Continue Reading on www.independent.ie

The Secretary of the Treasury says that it will not hit the ceiling until mid-October. The BBC reports this.

The country’s borrowing limit is currently capped at $16.7tn (£10.7tn).”Extraordinary measures are projected to be exhausted in the middle of October,” Mr Lew said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and other lawmakers.

“At that point, the US will have reached the limit of its borrowing authority, and Treasury would be left to fund the government with only the cash we have on hand on any given day,” he said.

The cash balance at that time is forecast to be about $50bn, which Mr Lew said, would be “insufficient to cover net expenditures for an extended period”.

He said: “Operating the government with no borrowing authority, and with only the cash on had on a given day, would place the United States in an unacceptable position.”

This warning is silly. The U.S. government has obviously been over the limit ever since late May. The world knows this.

On August 14, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) ran this story.

(CNSNews.com) – The Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service (FMS), which publishes both the federal government’s official Daily Treasury Statement and its official Monthly Treasury Statement, is reporting that in July the federal government ran a deficit of $98 billion but that the federal government’s debt remained exactly $16,699,396,000,000 for the entire month.The FMS said that the deficit went up $98 billion ($97,594,000,000) in the Monthly Treasury Statment for July, which it released on Monday.

At the same time, the FMS said the debt stayed at exactly $16,699,396,000,000 in its Daily Treasury Statements, which are published every business day. The Daily Treasury Statements show the daily value of the federal government debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress.

At the static $16,699,396,000,000 level that the Treasury reported for every day of July, the debt was just $25 million below the legal limit of $16,699,421,000,000 that was set in a law passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.

If Treasury’s daily statements were to declare that the government had borrowed an additional net $98 billion to cover the $98 billion deficit the Treasury declared in its monthly statement for July, the Treasury would be conceding that the government had already surpassed the legal limit on the debt–and has been violating the law by continuing to borrowing additional money.

Instead, even as the Treasury was running up the $98-billion deficit it reported in the July Monthly Treasury Statement, every one of the 22 Daily Treasury Statements published for July said the Treasury had closed out the previous business day with exactly $16,699,396,000,000 in debt.

The Daily Treasury Statement for Aug. 12, released Tuesday afternoon, says the debt remained stuck at exactly $16,699,396,000,000 during the first 12 days of this month, too.

On May 17, the first day the Treasury reported that the debt had hit exactly $16,699,396,000,000–and was thus just $25 million below the legal limit–Treasury Secretary Lew sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner saying he was beginning to implement what he called “the standard set of extraordinary measures” to prevent the Treasury from exceeding the legal limit on the federal debt.

Since Lew sent that letter–announcing that he would use “extraordinary measures”–the debt has remained stuck at exactly $16,699,396,000,000 for 87 straight days.

That includes all 31 days in July when Lew’s Treasury says it was running a $98 billion deficit.

When Lew stops using “extraordinary measures” to keep the debt at exactly $16,699,396,000,000, the government will have another debt-limit crisis.

There is no way that the debt simply stopped growing. There is no good reason why the government cannot report this same figure from now on. If the government can legally cook the books from May 17 until today, and promises to cook them until mid-October, and no one in Congress asks how, then why not for two more months, two more years, or forever? Congress merely needs to ignore the cooking process. It already has. Why not indefinitely?

Read the rest of the article

I made an assumption: the evil side of housing vouchers will be apparent to conservatives in a way that school vouchers are not.

Conservatives also oppose food stamps. Yet food stamps are vouchers. I showed this, too.

I made a second point: vouchers are a favorite solution to economists who follow Milton Friedman. Friedman favored pseudo-market solutions in the name of free enterprise.

Austrian School economists have not been taken in by this approach. They see vouchers for what they are.  Lew Rockwell wrote the following back in 2000.

Another California voucher initiative, Proposition 38, is headed for defeat. And it will happen for the same reason that big-government spending programs are failing in state after state. Taxpayers have rightly become very stingy with their money. They don’t like politicians stealing it and spending it on new redistributive schemes. If and when the voters have anything to say about it, they say no. That the establishment conservative movement is backing this one will make no more difference in 2000 than it did in 1996.

Why should this surprise anyone? It shouldn’t, but we are still going to be put through four months of Voucher Hell, listening to liberal opponents tell us that Prop. 38 will destroy public schools (oh sure!) and conservative partisans tell us that government spending is the answer to all education woes, so long as the right people get the money. They will trot out data, pseudo-scientific policy studies, speeches from think tank blowhards, and racial victimologists of all sorts, and it will be pure torture. But in the end, Californians will see that Prop. 38 means more school spending and maybe more school taxes, and will vote it down.

The voters did vote it down.

The question is this: Why do conservatives and Chicago School economists keep returning to the pseudo-market vouchers program in the name of liberty? Vouchers will extend the power of any government that issues the vouchers into the operations of every private institution that accepts the vouchers. Yet conservatives keep touting vouchers.

This is because conservatives are always looking for a way to make coercion more efficient. They don’t like vouchers when vouchers clearly extend government power into areas where the government does things conservatives don’t like, such as government housing and government food subsidies. But they are all for efficient government when it does something they like, such as tax-funded education. They think government will be less intrusive. They are wrong. It will be more intrusive. Why? Because it will use vouchers to impose government rules and regulations on every organization that accepts the money.

They know this is true with respect to federal aid for higher education. But they turn a blind eye when it comes to government control over private schools, kindergarten through 12th grade.

With mean average income, the incomes of the rich skew the figure upward. Not with median income.

After four years of the Federal Reserve’s tripling of the monetary base, Americans are worse off today.

What’s that? Worse than in the supposed bottom of the recession? Yes. This report tells the story. Household income is down 4.4%.

Based on new estimates derived from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), real median annual household income, while recovering somewhat from the low-point reached in August 2011, has fallen by 4.4 percent since the “economic recovery” began in June 2009. Adding this post-recession decline to the 1.8-percent drop that occurred during the recession leaves median annual household income now 6.1 percent below the December 2007 level.

Sentier Research supplied these figures. Here is the company’s assessment. “Based on our data, almost every group is worse off now than it was four years ago, with the exception of households with householders 65 to 74 years old.”

This means we were far better off in 2007, before the recession began. What are the numbers?

After adjusting for changes in consumer prices, median annual household income declined during the officially-defined recession from $55,480 in December 2007 to $54,478 in June 2009. During the “economic recovery”, as the unemployment rate and the duration of unemployment remained high, median annual household income continued its decline, reaching a low point of $50,722 in August 2011. As of June 2013 median household income had recovered somewhat to $52,098 (seasonally adjusted estimates).

It gets worse. It turns out that Greenspan failed, too. We are worse off than in 2000.

Compared to January 2000, the beginning point for our monthly statistical series, median annual household income is now lower by 7.2 percent. (All income amounts in this report are before-tax money income and are presented in terms of June 2013 dollars).

You knew you were not doing better. Obama has told you otherwise. So has the Federal Reserve.

They lie. They never factor in purchasing power — what the Federal Reserve has done to the dollar.

Next month, a new movie will hit the theaters, Money for Nothing. Go see it.

Continue Reading on www.sentierresearch.com

You will also learn about why father Phil, 40 years ago, turned down an NFL contract. His college back-up quarterback, Terry Bradshow, did not.

Also, if you want to learn about precocious entrepreneurship in action, Phil tells the story about Willie, who is now the CEO of Duck Commander.

This weekly story of one family’s resistance to yuppie culture has captivated millions of people. These are Good Old Boys. They are also entrepreneurs. Anyway, Willie is. And Phil was. Now he just gets that monthly dividend check. So he goes hunting.

With guns.

America’s universities are staffed by untenured professors and part-timers. There is going to be a move to even more part-timers.

Greg Mankiw is one of the most influential academic economists. He teaches at Harvard. He ran this letter on his blog.

I have been teaching multiple sections of economics for four years now at several Colleges and Universities in the State of Indiana. I have also been a frequent user of your texts in the classes that I teach.With the implementation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) these institutions are giving notification to their part-time faulty that their individual teaching schedules will now be limited to three sections. At the college this will likely result in the cancellation of 20-25% of the class sections in economics, and I would assume other areas will have a similar result. The students are not fully aware of the situation and many will be surprised that their desire to get a college education is now being impacted by the need to avoid the full implementation of the ACA.

Regardless if you are a Republican or a Democrat I would hope full-time faculty would voice their concern regarding the impact the implementation of the ACA could have on the attainment of higher education for the current student population and upon the lives of the dedicated part-time faculty that have been devoted to serving this student population.

My hope is that if faculty across the nation brought this to the public attention that we as a nation could have a more open and complete dialogue regarding the course we wish to set as a nation.

Too late. Too liberal. Too bad . . . for them.

Politics are settled at the margin. There’s no doubt that older people, at the margin, are a very large swing vote. But they have never had anything like the majority. This was especially true in 1935, when the New Deal voted to set up the Social Security system. The nation was a young nation at that point, because the birth rate had been high almost from the beginning of the nation.

The appeal of Social Security was this: the state would guarantee retirement. The state was going to substitute its power to collect taxes from workers, and it would use this power to guarantee everybody a free lunch. Only the free lunch would start at the age of 65.

Overwhelmingly, the public got on board. Overwhelmingly, the public is still on board. The Social Security system has always been a promotion directly aimed at existing workers. This is because existing workers are the overwhelming majority of the voters in this society.

A lot of people blame the old folks for having acted as a political special-interest group to make certain that it gets its money. But understand this: this special-interest group, like all special-interest groups, never had the ability on its own to get this legislation passed. Furthermore, this special-interest group does not have the votes in order to sustain this continuing drain on the Treasury without the help of the overwhelming majority of people who are paying into the program.

For some reason, because the special-interest group now acts as a special-interest group, conservative critics forget the obvious, which is that this special-interest group was created by the original legislation, and that legislation was voted for by workers who were still in the labor force. The Social Security system, like the Medicare system, is beloved of younger workers, because they think they’re going to get a free lunch from the government when they’re older, and this enables them to spend less money now for their retirement years. They love it. They figure somebody else is going to pay for their retirement, and they think they’re going to dig deep into somebody else’s wallet.

This is a Ponzi scheme. But Ponzi schemes are incredibly popular with people. This is why they grow so fast. Think of Bernie Madoff. People loved to get in. They begged to get in. Madoff realized early that it was this insatiable desire for outsiders to get in that was his sustaining factor. Without this, the thing would have blown up much earlier.

People believe in something for nothing. They believe the state is a healing institution. They do not want to save for their own retirement. They do not want to become responsible for themselves. If possible, they want to make certain that their parents are supported by the state permanently. They don’t want that obligation now. They are convinced that whatever they pay into the Social Security system and the Medicare system is minimal compared with what it would probably cost them personally to save for their retirement and also to pay for their parents’ retirement. They love both programs.

Read the rest of the article

Washington is also bankrupt and has been for years. Just like Detroit, successive administrations and Congresses from both parties have spent decades hiding the real magnitude of our county’s fiscal liabilities.

The debt Uncle Sam publicly acknowledges — official federal debt in the hands of the public — is now $12 trillion. But the true measure of our debt — the one suggested by economic theory — is the fiscal gap, which totals $222 trillion. The fiscal gap is the present value of all future expenditures, including servicing outstanding official federal debt, minus the present value of all future receipts.

Detroit’s main means of hiding its true liabilities was discounting its future obligations at a rate far higher than appropriate, thus giving the appearance that less saving was needed to cover the shortfall.

Washington’s dirtier trick has been to keep virtually all of its future liabilities off the books, which creates the vast ocean separating the fiscal gap and the official debt. Decisions about what debts to put on and what debts to keep off the books are not grounded in economics; this duplicitous accounting is grounded in linguistics.

The different checks my 68-year-old friend Paul receives from the U.S. Treasury are a good example. Except for the amounts, the greenish-yellowish checks are identical, with “U.S. Treasury” printed in majestic old English font and a lovely engraving of the Statue of Liberty. One of these periodic checks is for Paul’s Social Security benefits. The other is for interest and principal on his U.S. Treasury bonds. Each comes like clockwork. Each is owed to Paul in every economically meaningful sense.

The difference between the two is that the present value of the checks for interest and principal is carried on the government’s books, whereas the present value of the checks for Social Security benefits is not.

If anything, the Social Security benefits, and not the Treasury bond payments, should be recorded as official debt. The chances that Uncle Sam will renege on Paul’s Treasury bonds (large gobs of which are held by Chinese and other foreigners), via inflation if not outright default, are much greater than the chances it will stop paying his Social Security benefits. If you doubt this, ask the 38 million American voters organized with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) how they’d react to a cut in their Social Security benefits.

Continue Reading on www.pbs.org

Most students will flunk these exams. This is inevitable. The results in New York are the canary in the coal mine. The failure rate was 69%. Blacks and Hispanics failed at an 84% rate. Parents are up in arms.

The common core curriculum will not redeem the public schools. It will instead expose the public schools as utter failures. This will not be tolerated by local politicians, who take the heat for the failures in public schools. They will demand that the educrats turn down the heat.

The tests are in the first stage of a roll-back. The Obama Administration is blaming the sequestration.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in civics, U.S. history, and geography have been indefinitely postponed for fourth and twelfth graders. The Obama administration says this is due to a $6.8 million sequestration budget cut. The three exams will be replaced by a single, new test: Technology and Engineering Literacy.

Because technology and engineering are not taught as part of any high school curriculum, the exam can be dumbed down. In contrast, history and civics exams are mandated by all school systems in high school. Here are the exams that reveal how well the schools are doing. So, these will be dropped.

“Without these tests, advocates for a richer civic education will not have any kind of test to use as leverage to get more civic education in the classrooms,” said John Hale, associate director at the Center for Civic Education.NAEP is a set of national tests of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders that track achievement on various subjects over time. Researchers collect data for state to state comparisons in mathematics, reading, science, and writing. The other subjects only provide national statistics and are administered to fewer students. The tests provide basic information about students but do not automatically trigger consequences for teachers, students, and schools.

Got that? Student failures do not lead to negative consequences for incompetent teachers. That is the kind of examination system teachers prefer.

Students have historically performed extremely poorly on these three tests. In 2010, the last administration of the history test, students performed worse on it than on any other NAEP test. That year, less than half of eighth-graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and only 1 in 10 could pick a definition of the system of checks and balance on the civics exam.

This is the core curriculum which the public schools promise to deliver, and which they taught in 1920. They have spent 90 years abandoning this original curriculum. There is no way that they will ever restore it in a system of compulsory education. Few students were compelled to attend high school in 1920. The smart kids who whose parents wanted them to have a core curriculum sent them to high school. Most parents let their children drop out.

Take a look at this 1912 exam from the 8th grade.

The core curriculum is real — just not in public schools.

The third indispensable element in building the new prosperity is closely related to creating new jobs and halting inflation. We must protect the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary stability around the world.In the past 7 years, there has been an average of one international monetary crisis every year…

I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States.

Now, what is this action — which is very technical — what does it mean for you?

Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation.

If you want to buy a foreign car or take a trip abroad, market conditions may cause your dollar to buy slightly less. But if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American-made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.

The effect of this action, in other words, will be to stabilize the dollar.

So, it would stabilize the dollar. This, from the man who told the media in November 1962, after his defeat for Governor of California, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.” If you want to see the decline of the dollar since 1971, click here.

Nixon unilaterally abolished the monetary agreement established in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. At that meeting, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western nations established a new monetary order. It would be supported by the United States Treasury. The United States Treasury would guarantee that any central bank or foreign government could buy gold from the Treasury at a price of $35 per ounce.

The goal of the Treasury was simple: to get foreign governments to hold Treasury debt instead of gold. Because Treasury debt was supposedly as good as gold, foreign governments and central banks could hold Treasury debt instead of holding gold. This enabled the United States government to run fiscal deficits, and foreign governments and central banks financed a portion of this debt. They did so by creating their own domestic currencies out of nothing, and then using these currencies to buy U.S. dollar-denominated debt, meaning U.S. Treasury debt. It was a nice arrangement. Foreign governments and foreign central banks gained an interest rate return on holding treasury debt, which they could not get by holding gold. Yet the dollars that they were being promised by the Treasury were supposedly as good as gold.

On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon declared for all the world to hear that the dollar was not as good as gold. From that day forth, foreign governments and central banks could no longer get gold from the Treasury at a fixed price of $35 an ounce. Nixon broke the promise, and thereby opened the possibility of extensive monetary inflation by the Federal Reserve. From that point on, the Federal Reserve did not have to worry about the possibility that the price of gold would rise in private markets, and that central banks would find it profitable to buy Treasury gold at $35, and put it in their own vaults.

This had nothing to do with Americans. Americans could not legally own gold bullion in 1971. That did not become legal until January 1, 1975. So, the focus was on the foreign value of the dollar in relation to gold. That value had fallen, and so there was a run on the Treasury. Foreign central banks were demanding gold at $35 an ounce, which was why the price was being kept at this low rate. They could get the gold at $35 an ounce from the Treasury. But, in August 1971, it became clear to the Treasury secretary that this could not go on much longer. If the drain of gold reserves continued, within a few years, there would be no gold remaining at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Actually, the gold would have been there, but it would have been allocated to different owners. The United States government would have lost ownership.

It was this decision that made it possible for Arthur Burns and the Federal Reserve to expand the money supply rapidly, in order to overcome the Nixon recession. That recession was the worst one since the end of World War II. The federal government ran back-to-back deficits of $25 billion a year. In 1970 and 1971, this was considered a gigantic failure on the part of the federal government. Nobody had heard of such deficits ever since the end of World War II. How times have changed.

Read the rest of the article

Then there is unslick Willie. Washington insiders want him to run for Congress.

Yes, it’s Willie Robertson, CEO of Duck Commander, the nation’s largest duck call company. He is one of the stars of Duck Dynasty.

Do I watch Duck Dynasty? You bet. I said why months ago.

It turns out that the Congressman from his district in Monroe, Louisiana has had enough. He will quit next month. That will force an off-year election. Some political activists want Willie to run.

Why? He would have to expose himself to the pressures of a political campaign. What if he wins? He will have to give up the family business. He have to will leave Duck Dynasty. To do what? To be the lowest man on the totem pole in Congress. He will have to learn about sitting in obscure House committees.

Also, no more duck hunting.

If ever a man should skip politics, it’s Willie Robertson.

Tell them no, Willie.

Continue Reading on washingtonexaminer.com

After months of meetings and fundraising, they launched the Beacon Hill Village, a nonprofit membership organization that provides free or low-cost services to seniors who have chosen to live in their own homes.

The services include social clubs, weekly exercise classes and lectures, transportation to doctors’ offices and grocery stores and access to reduced-fee home medical care and home repair services.

Beacon Hill Village now boasts 400 members and the concept has spread to other communities across the country. There are about 100 “villages” to date, with another 200 in development, according to the national organization that helps establish these networks. Each one is formed and governed locally, tailored to the specific needs of that community.

Continue Reading on www.pbs.org

New York State got the test results. Across the state, 69% could not pass in English, and the same was true for math. It was worse in New York City.

Last year, with easier exams, 55% passed. So, the much-heralded core curriculum tests have exposed the schools as massive failures. This will not be allowed to continue. Either the tests will be made easier or else the tests will be abandoned. Count on it. No test is ever allowed to expose tax-funded bureaucrats as total incompetents, year after year.

Candidates for mayor blame Mayor Bloomberg. But mayors have no say in education. The education bureaucracy is untouchable.

No one knows what to do. They are in panic mode.

Watch the videos. Parents are outraged. School officials are in hunker-down mode.

The top educational official in the country is the Secretary of Education. She says this: no problem! Parents should not be alarmed, she says. The test results will “give a clear picture of where our students are on the trajectory toward college and career readiness.” Yes, they do. The kids are not ready.

Then, she added, don’t blame tax-funded education. No, no, no. “The lower proficiency rates that we will see . . . do not reflect that teachers are teaching less or students are learning less.”

The tests in fact show that the dumbed-down tests before gave a misleading picture. They did not reveal the total failure of today’s tax-funded schools. The new tests do.

Watch the videos. No one knows what to do.

The first video shows that the reporter can’t do math. He says the scores were down 25% to 30%. The scores were down 25 to 30 percentage points, not percent. They were down from about 55% pass to 30% pass. That is a decline of 45%.

Drudge is a conservative. The liberal reporters who dismissed Drudge as an amateur back in 1998, when he scooped the industry with his report on the Lewinsky affair are in new lines of work. Who’s got the last laugh now?

As soon as it was announced that The Washington Post would be bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, shares rose by 5%. This means that investors trust the abilities of a man with zero experience in running a newspaper more than they trusted the liberal family that owned the paper for four generations. This was a vote of “no confidence” against the existing owners.

It means that investors had already figured out that the newspaper was headed for oblivion. They could see that nothing that the Graham family had done in two decades had reversed the fiscal bloodletting. The newspaper had been worth billions back then. The whole deal will fetch only $250 million today.

Shares did not rise 10% or 20%. Investors are still not convinced that Bezos can reverse the decline. But there is at least some hope that a man with zero experience cannot mismanage the operation any worse than the Grahams did.

One by one, newspapers are disappearing. Young adults do not read them. There is no future to them. Funeral by funeral, their doom is sealed.

Liberals thought they would shape public opinion by controlling the flow of information and opinion. They were wrong. The World Wide Web is killing them. Craigslist has killed revenue from classified ads. The Drudge Report has killed local newspaper loyalty.

Does the liberal press have a future? Not as good as the Drudge Report, surely, or Craigslist.

That afternoon, the bombshell hit: the Graham family is selling The Washington Post for a paltry $250 million to Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos has no background in running a newspaper. He just thought it would be a kick to own one. Well, I am sure it will be.

The Post has been the flagship for Beltway liberalism for two generations. It was second only to The New York Times in its influence in American journalism.

If the peripheral Boston Globe was worth $1.76 billion in 1993, and $70 million today, think of what the Post was worth in 1993.

The Grahams were presiding over a doddering patient with a catheter. They sold out just in time. By hanging on for two decades, they walked away from a fortune. They wound up selling to an billionaire who owns the largest mail-order operation in the world. He is taking on the project the way that rich men play with hobbies in their spare time.

Bezos now has two options (1) do nothing new, and serve as the captain of the Titanic; (2) change the entire operation. In either case, liberalism has suffered a major hit.

I think Bezos will play the first role. He is imitating the career of Ted Turner, who sold to AOL, and watched Time Warner shrivel. Turner thought AOL was the wave of the future. Bezos thinks his knowledge of how to run a gigantic mail-order Walmart will enable him to get the doddering patient off the catheter. He won’t.

The reporters who work for the Post are in the wrong profession. Their peers in Boston could do nothing. They sat their until most were fired, one by one. They will suffer the same fate. The industry is a buggy whip.

The industry was liberalism’s trifecta: newspapers, television networks, and the school system. Two are bleeding red ink. The third soon will be, as online education enables students to live at home, take courses online, graduate with accredited degrees, and pay $15,000 in tuition, total. A widely accepted estimate is that half of all American universities will go under over the next five decades. It won’t take anywhere near that long. The no-name private colleges will go under first, Cutbacks in tax funding will complete the procedure. Legislators will figure out that they can fire two-thirds of the faculty and replace them with online lectures and low-paid, untenured professors and graduate students to grade written exams.

All that liberalism will have left is the public school system, K-12. This dinosaur has been caught trapped in the tar pit ever since 1963, when SAT scores peaked. Online education is invading today. The American Federation of Teachers is on the defensive. In 50 years, the suburban schools will be online. Competition will demonstrate that the public school bureaucracies cannot compete.

Liberalism made entrepreneurial decisions on where the future was headed. The World Wide Web is taking the world in a different direction. It is leaving liberalism behind.

Liberals call this process of ideological decentralization “Balkanization.” I call it the break-up of a cartel that can no longer compete on the free market.

August 5, 2013 was a great day.

Continue Reading on dealbook.nytimes.com

Buchanan is generally rated by American historians as among the worst Presidents in American history. This has been true ever since 1948.

Credit, or blame, for the first scholarly ranking of the presidents usually goes to Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who conducted a poll for Life magazine in 1948. He asked 55 specialists in American history to rate the presidents as great, near great, average, below average, or failure. Abraham Lincoln topped the list, followed by George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Claiming the cellar of that list were Warren G. Harding and, in ascending order, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Calvin Coolidge, John Tyler, Benjamin Harrison, and Herbert Hoover.

U.S. News updated this in 2010. The bottom: Andrew Johnson. The next-to-last: Buchanan.

Polling of conservative and liberal historians produced the same result for the best: Lincoln. So, the two worst were the men who preceded and followed Lincoln.

My conclusion: do not send your child to major in American history in college. I speak as someone with a Ph.D. in the field.

Lincoln made a decision to bring the South back in because, as he said in his first inaugural address, he wanted to make certain that the union could collect tariffs.

In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.

It was not this phrase that made him the supreme master of rhetoric, but it surely identified him as a faithful Republican Party office-holder in 1861.

He fought the war for tariffs, and yet he is regarded as the greatest President of American history. The historians make this assessment by means of a 150-year strategy: they never mention why he fought the war. He said why, but they refuse to cite his first inaugural address. They elevate his second inaugural to holy writ: “with malice toward none, with charity to all” — and high tariffs. It cost about 750,000 lives, but he surely was able to secure those tariffs.

Buchanan attempted to avoid Civil War. Johnson attempted to heal the country after the Civil War, and the Republicans in Congress kept him from doing this. They impeached him in the House, and almost convicted him in the Senate. He was not in charge of his office.

Why blame Buchanan? It is typical of liberal historians that they give him low marks. They blame him because he was unable to settle the issues that were facing the country with regards to secession. It was under Buchanan that the John Brown raid took place in 1859. After that, there was no possibility that the Republican Party could come into power and not produce secession. Everybody knew it in late 1860. Buchanan knew it. He did his best to keep the lid on, but it was obvious by 1859 that the election of 1860 would probably lead to the breakup of the United States.

People forget how important the John Brown raid was. It was the central event of 19th-century America. Brown believed that he could create the momentum for a slave uprising. This was the number-one fear of slave-owners in the South. They took them seriously. Even more important, they took seriously the wave of pro-Brown editorials in the big-city Northern press. They really believed that the North was fomenting revolution in the South. Brown created that belief. It was by far the most important single act of political terrorism in the history United States.

Buchanan was glad to get out. By the time he left, the South had seceded. He was the President of a country that had broken apart. The country no longer existed as it had in the previous November. What was Buchanan to do? He was at the end of his term. Was he the man to invade the South? Why would he do that? Lincoln had the responsibility, not Buchanan. Lincoln was the reason why the South had seceded. What was Buchanan going to do to persuade the South not to secede, since it was the election of Lincoln that had persuaded them to secede?

Then there was Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge was the last president of the United States whose presidency was not assumed to have been the main cause of the events of his presidency. There were two presidents in the 20th century who attained that position: William Howard Taft and Coolidge. Nobody associates Taft’s name with the Taft era. There was no Taft era. There was the era of four years, in which a man who had never previously been elected to political office served as President of the United States. He served in between two radicals: Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He is not known for having done anything.

We think of the 1920s as the roaring 20s, but nobody blames Coolidge. He is assumed to have served as a figurehead President, which is exactly the kind of President he wanted to be. He believed in a limited presidency. Under him, the economy boomed. Under him, there were no major scandals. There was no war. He left office just in time to avoid the Great Depression, and it seems quite likely in retrospect that he knew it was coming. He privately referred to Hoover as “the wonder boy.” He had no use for him. The economy came crashing down on Hoover’s head instead of Coolidge’s.

Ben Bernanke impresses me as a man who may yet become Buchanan. He may not get out with his reputation intact. At best, he will achieve a kind of Coolidge legacy, but only by tripling the monetary base, 2008-today. He was the wonder boy. He is trying to get out as fast as he can. Under him, the country suffered the worst economic setback since the Great Depression. He used the printing press to bail out some large banks and a few over-leveraged investment firms. He served as Hank Paulson’s silent potted plant. He addicted the American economy to what amounts to hyperinflation of the monetary base. The commercial banks are not lending. The recovery is barely functioning. The economy has sustained its worst performance since the Great Depression. He has been in charge the entire time.

He is trying to get out with his reputation intact. He is likely to make it, and whoever follows him will likely not make it.

For the most part, Greenspan escaped. He is no longer regarded as the Maestro, but Bernanke is the man who presided over the policies that led to the crisis of 2008. It was really Greenspan’s fault, but he was out of office long enough so that the roof caved in on Bernanke. It will be interesting to see how long the roof is maintained after Bernanke’s departure.

By Chris Powell

Note by Lars Schall:

Yesterday, I wrote the following to the Bank of England:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,my name is Lars Schall, I am a freelance journalist for finance from Germany.

Related to this news item posted at the web site of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA:

http://www.gata.org/node/12854,

I would like to ask if it’s true, as Mr. Alasdair Macleod said, that there has been a big reduction in the bank’s gold holdings from the bank’s annual report in February to the “more than 400,000 bars” now claimed in the “virtual tour” on the bank’s Internet site? Moreover, I would like to ask specifically if you could tell me the gold holdings reported in the annual report and the gold holdings currently or on a recent date?

Kind regards,Lars Schall.

I received today an answer from the press office of the Bank of England. However, I am not allowed to quote from that e-mail, since it said at the beginning: NOT FOR QUOTATION OR ATTRIBUTION. Yet, take a look at this post by GATA’s Chris Powell; what I got confidentially, he got officially…

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

The Bank of England refuses to explain what appears to be a huge discrepancy in its accounting of the gold it holds in custody, a difference of as much as 1,200 tonnes between the total reported in the bank’s annual report in February and the total reported in a “virtual tour” of the bank posted this month at the bank’s Internet site:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/info/virtualtourapp.aspx

Continue Reading on www.larsschall.com

It used to be on the Change.gov site. Now it’s not.

For more details, click the link.

Continue Reading on www.techdirt.com

He delivered a remarkable speech on July 23 at a meeting held by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. This is a standard Democratic Party Beltway organization: pro-union, pro-global warming, pro-green, pro-big government. But on civil liberties, it is on the side of rolling back the federal government in general and the NSA in particular.

Wyden’s speech was a summary of how the NSA has provided incorrect information to Congress and the public. He did not say “lies,” but this is what he clearly meant. He admitted that Snowden — unnamed — blew the whistle on the NSA. Snowden provided evidence of the extent of the data collection, which the NSA’s director had categorically denied to Congress had been going on. Wyden’s speech is the best summary I have read on the extent of the NSA’s systematic deception of Congress.

He ended his speech with these words:

We find ourselves at a truly unique time in our Constitutional history. The growth of digital technology, dramatic changes in the nature of warfare and the definition of a battlefield, and novel courts that run counter to everything the Founding Fathers imagined, make for a combustible mix. At this point in the speech I would usually conclude with the quote from Ben Franklin about giving up liberty for security and not deserving either, but I thought a different founding father might be more fitting today. James Madison, the father of our constitution, said that the the accumulation of executive, judicial and legislative powers into the hands of any faction is the very definition of tyranny. He then went on to assure the nation that the Constitution protected us from that fate. So, my question to you is: by allowing the executive to secretly follow a secret interpretation of the law under the supervision of a secret, nonadversarial court and occasional secret congressional hearings, how close are we coming to James Madison’s “very definition of tyranny”? I believe we are allowing our country to drift a lot closer than we should, and if we don’t take this opportunity to change course now, we will all live to regret it.

The NSA — secret budget — is using a secret law and a secret court system — the FISA-authorized court system — to construct a truly Orwellian apparatus for spying on the American public. Members of Congress are not legally able to reveal any of this. He said that he cannot legally speak of what he knows. Were it not for Snowden, he made clear, he could not have spoken about what he knew before Snowden went public.

He thinks the American public is becoming more aware of this, and more hostile.

Last month, disclosures made by an NSA contractor lit the surveillance world on fire. Several provisions of secret law were no longer secret and the American people were finally able to see some of the things I’ve been raising the alarm about for years. And when they did, boy were they stunned, and boy are they angry.You hear it in the lunch rooms, town hall meetings, and senior citizen centers. The latest polling, the well-respected Quinnipiac poll, found that a plurality of people said the government is overreaching and encroaching too much on Americans’ civil liberties. That’s a huge swing from what that same survey said just a couple years ago, and that number is trending upward. As more information about sweeping government surveillance of law-abiding Americans is made public and the American people can discuss its impacts, I believe more Americans will speak out. They’re going to say, in America, you don’t have to settle for one priority or the other: laws can be written to protect both privacy and security, and laws should never be secret.

On the next day, July 24, the House of Representatives voted down an amendment to cut the NSA’s budget — the official one, not the real one, which is secret. It was Nancy Pelosi who made the difference. She carried the NSA’s water. The failure of Congress to make a token cut in the National Security Agency’s official budgeton July 24 was a green light for the NSA to spy on all Americans, forever.

Congress knows that the voters do not care enough to mobilize against the Patriot Act, which is the heart of the surveillance state. They also know that most House members are immune from the voters. Gerrymandering works. They also know that they, personally, are not immune from the NSA’s monitoring of their telephone calls, emails, and other communications. They can count the votes. They know who is on top. The surveillance state is on top.

The surveillance state is now unstoppable politically. Legally, there is no possibility that it will be rolled back. It is now the non-law of the land. Wyden thinks the voters may roll it back. They won’t. It is unstoppable politically.

But this does not mean that it is inherently unstoppable. On the contrary, it is eminently stoppable. It will be stopped. Economics will stop it.

Read the rest of the article

Sadly, the links are not easy to access. You must start with the latest link and work backwards, click by click. There is no easy series of links: Part 1, Part 2, etc.

The series is on this: “What the mainstream media failed to report.” They failed to report a great deal.

He is an extract from Part 7.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

ZIMMERMAN VERDICT PART 7: WHY THE JURY DIDN’T LEARN ABOUT TRAYVON MARTIN

Wednesday, July 24th, 2013

The discovery materials which the defense finally received from the prosecution after a long and arduous fight revealed Trayvon Martin to be deeply into drugs, and a young man who reveled in street fighting, and more.  (Didn’t seem to have much respect for women, either.) None of that was allowed in.

The reason tracks to something found in the Federal Rules of Evidence in the Rule 404 series, particularly Rule 404(b).   Among other things, it means that prior bad acts of the person you harmed, IF THEY WERE NOT KNOWN TO YOU AT THE TIME YOU HARMED HIM, cannot be used by you to defend inflicting that harm. This is because, being unknown to you, they had no part in your decision to act as you did, and it is that act and that decision for which you are being judged at trial.

Some courts have disagreed with that. The Massachusetts State Supreme Court in two precedent cases, and the Arizona State Supreme Court in one, have ruled that if the deceased had attacked people previously a manner similar to how the defendant described being attacked by him, that the jury SHOULD be allowed to know. (There was reference in the discovery materials to Martin having punched out a school bus driver.) There is no such precedent in Florida that I know of.  State Supreme Court decisions from other jurisdictions do not bind on other states, but can be used as persuasive argument during a pre-trial motion in limine to allow such evidence. . . .

Back in 1984, I was on the defense team as an expert witness called by two of the finest attorneys I’ve ever worked with, the great Roy Black and the brilliant Mark Seiden. Mark and I later served two years together as co-vice chairs of the forensic evidence committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, and Roy’s courtroom accomplishments are legend. It would be worth your time to read Roy’s autobiography “Black’s Law.” In the 1984 trial, Roy and Mark defended Miami Police Officer Luis Alvarez against Manslaughter charges in the shooting death of one Nevell “Snake” Johnson. (There were interesting parallels between that case and Zimmerman’s. An officer of Hispanic descent had shot a 20-year-old black man who was reaching for a gun as that officer and another attempted to arrest him. The shooting triggered a race riot. A scapegoat was needed. Janet Reno, then State’s Attorney there, indicted the cop.)

In that case, the state had portrayed the late Mr. Johnson as a perfect specimen of innocent young manhood, and this is what opened the door for the judge to consider the 40-page memorandum of law that Black and his team put before the bench.  The judge set aside 404(b) to allow the defense to rebut that characterization, and the jury got to hear an elderly black woman describe the terror she had experienced when Nevell Johnson had made her the victim of an armed robbery. To make a long story short, Alvarez was acquitted. (Which triggered another race riot, but that’s another story.)

The lead prosecutor in Zimmerman, Bernie de la Rionda, was too smart to open that door. I understand why Judge Nelson did not allow evidence of prior bad acts by Trayvon Martin to go in front of the jury.  Interestingly, though – at the very end of the trial, when it was too late for the defense to do much of anything about it – second seat prosecutor John Guy made the state’s final argument to the jury, a soliloquy rife with references to Martin, who was much taller than the man he attacked, as a “child.”  “Child” was also used in this respect by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg after the verdict, and was Martin family lawyer Ben Crump’s refrain from the beginning.

Yet the Trayvon Martin who emerged from the state’s reluctantly-provided evidence, the evidence the jury didn’t see, was something else entirely. (Discovery available here.)

Continue Reading on backwoodshome.com

A recent article explained that the theory’s defenders are doing their best to come up with a plausible explanation. It’s the ocean.

Huge amounts of heat – equivalent to the power of 150 billion electric kettles – are being continuously absorbed by the deep ocean, which could explain why global warming has “paused” over the past 10 to 15 years, scientists have concluded in a series of reports to explain why the Earth’s rate of warming has slowed down.

I see. The ocean is a new factor. It was never there before. But now, without warning, it is sopping up heat like a Bounty paper towel in a TV ad.

What the GW proponents need is a theory of “what’s new.” But a British newspaper reporter dutifully reports this with a straight face.

Here is the political problem facing the GW crowd.

Global average temperatures are higher now than they have ever been since modern records began. However, after a period of rapid temperature increases during the 1980s and 1990s there has been a significant slow-down since the turn of the century, leading some sceptics to claim that global warming has stopped.

A scientific assessment of the planet’s heat balance has found that the most likely explanation for the recent hiatus in global warming is the continual absorption of thermal energy by the huge “heat sink” of the deep ocean many hundreds of metres below the sea surface, according to scientists from the Met Office.

If this is the most likely explanation, they have a problem. It’s called public skepticism.

Senior climate scientists said that they had always expected periods when the rate of increase in temperatures would level off for a few years and emphasized that the last decade was still warmer than any previous decade, with 12 of the 14 hottest years on record occurring since 2000.

Who are these “senior climatic scientists”? Where and when did they go into print with this prediction, namely, that temperatures would level off for 15 years? Where, precisely, did they say that the ocean would start causing this, when it never had before? We need specifics here. We do not get any.

Professor Rowan Sutton, a climate scientist at Reading University, said the temperatures have levelled off in the past, the latest example being in the 1940s and 1950s when sulphate pollutants from the post-war boom in industrial production may have acted as a shield against incoming solar radiation.

“Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause. The global average surface temperature has not increased substantially over the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said.

Some people call it “return to normal.”

“Climate scientists absolutely expect variations in the rate at which surface temperature will rise….but that is not to say we understand all the details of the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said.

Is that what they expect? For how long have they expected this? How long do they expect it to last? For as long as the world’s oceans act as a heat sink? That could be a very long time.

What is the problem they face? This:

The problem for the Met Office is to explain why the rate of increase in global temperatures has declined in recent years while concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have continued to accelerate. Sceptics claim that this shows there is not a strong link between the two, whereas climate scientists insist that rising carbon dioxide concentrations are largely responsible for the rise in global temperatures.

Skeptics are winning the argument. That’s because the global warming crowd is clearly grabbing at straws. The ocean is not a good place to find straws.

The most likely explanation for the current pause is that excess heat trapped by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being transferred from the atmosphere to the oceans where it is being transported down to deeper layers that cannot be monitored by satellites, Professor Belcher said.

“It looks like the Earth is continuing to accumulate energy but it looks like it is being re-arranged and hidden from view,” he said.

This energy is hiding in the ocean. Maybe Atlantis is tapping into it as a thermal energy source.

However, measurements from hundreds of ocean floats released over the last decade, which descend and drift to depths of up to 2,000 metres, show that huge amounts of heat from the sea surface is now being transferred to the deep ocean, with unknown consequences for the environment, the scientists said.

“In summary, observations of ocean heat content and of sea-level rise suggest that the Earth system has continued to absorb heat energy over the past 15 years, and that this additional heat has been absorbed in the ocean,” says the Met Office report.

Will this heat sink end? Of course it will end. As surely as global warming is true, this heat sink phenomenon will reverse. Then we’ll see that global warming is still a threat to the world.

The pause, however, is unlikely to change the predictions over the future course of global warming. Temperature increases expected by 2015 will only be delayed by a further five or ten years, the scientists said. Average surface temperatures are still on course to increase by 2C this century, with further rises expected by the end of the century if nothing is done to curb carbon dioxide emissions, they said.

They will get back to us on this. Real Soon Now.

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