CLibertyC

No One Saw This Coming…

"Last fall, I sat in a cozy living room on the outskirts of Tallinn, Estonia, drinking coffee, eating freshly baked pastries and listening to a former parliament member for the Soviet Union tell me about a phone call he had recently received from inside Russia’s central bank. The bank officials wanted input on how to build a reserve currency, one backed by the plentitude of hard assets Russia owns. What he told me – easily the most-stunning bit of information I gathered on that research trip – has stuck with me. 'Russia,' he announced, 'is using oil, gas and minerals as the new tools of war instead of military tools. This will be the beginning of a currency cold war.'" Continue reading →

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Jeffrey Tucker: Thank You, Russia?

"I’m as glad as the next guy that 'we' won the Cold War. But sometimes you just have to wonder: What was the point of those 45 years of nuclear stalemate? All that time, we were told that this was a mighty struggle between individualism and collectivism, between freedom and tyranny, between capitalism and communism. But at the end of the day, once everything has shaken itself out, it is Russia that is providing sanctuary to our best citizens. Is this some sort of strange dystopian novel? Well, yes, and it has a name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell." Continue reading →

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Copper And Gold Flowing From Turquoise Hill – Part I With Harris Kupperman

"The whole country is basically a boomtown. It’s one of these funny places where you really need to be on the ground to understand it. So you have a country that five, ten years ago didn’t have that much in the way of wealth, and the average citizen wasn’t making that much money. And suddenly they’ve gotten really high paying jobs in the mining sector, and they’re making a few thousand U.S. dollars a month. Prior to this mining project, some of them weren’t making that much in a whole year. All of this newfound wealth is entering the economy. It’s creating a middle class. It’s creating a booming economy." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingCopper And Gold Flowing From Turquoise Hill – Part I With Harris Kupperman

Escape From the Grasp of Congress

"With 11.5 million illegal aliens in the country, it’s hard to understand how a relatively small number of departing U.S. emigrants is threatening to U.S. lawmakers. Maybe it’s because those numbers are rising and the federal government fears an increasing number of U.S. citizens moving beyond its control. The only other national regimes to have adopted similar punitive tax laws were Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin and apartheid South Africa. I admit expatriation is certainly a drastic plan. However, as we see in the statistics, more and more U.S. citizens are choosing that option as the America we knew and loved fades farther from memory." Continue reading →

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Zimmerman prosecution staffer files whistleblower suit over testimony on unreleased evidence

"A former employee of Florida State Attorney Angela Corey’s office is suing the prosecutor, claiming he was illegally fired after he testified on behalf of George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the death of black teenager Trayvon Martin. Kruidbos was fired after testifying at a pre-trial hearing on June 6 that he believed prosecutors had failed to turn over to the defense, as required by evidence-sharing laws, potentially embarrassing evidence extracted from Martin’s cell phone." Continue reading →

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Texas jailer must face trial after video caught him raping 15-year-old

"A federal judge ruled this week that a trial against a Texas jailer can go forward after video caught him allegedly raping a 15-year-old female inmate. In a suit filed late last year, Michelle and Danny Hall accused former Harris County correctional officer Robert Robinson of raping their daughter, M.S.H., during her two month stay at Houston’s Harris County Juvenile Justice Center. The suit accuses Robinson of 'grooming' the girl with food and candy, before the encounters 'quickly escalated with quid pro quo requests that exchanged gifts for genital fondling and touching.'" Continue reading →

Continue ReadingTexas jailer must face trial after video caught him raping 15-year-old

60 U.S. military members fired in Pentagon sexual assault review

"Sixty people have been removed from jobs as military recruiters, drill instructors and victims counselors as a result of screenings ordered following a jump in the number of sexual assault in the U.S. armed forces, officials said on Friday. The Army said 55 people had been suspended from their positions since screenings ordered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel began last month. The Navy said it had screened more than 10,000 recruiters, drill instructors and personnel responsible for assisting sexual assault victims and had removed five people from their positions." Continue reading →

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Russian ‘mobile malware’ industry could spread to other countries

"Businesses referred to as ‘Malware HQs’ accounted for more than half the overall mobile malware detections by Lookout during the first six months of this year. Malware HQs openly recruit ‘affiliates’ that could be anyone and provide simple do-it-yourself tools to distribute viruses with tactics such as booby-trapped websites or Twitter posts. Once on smartphones, viruses fire off premium text messages behind the scenes, with HQs getting the money and sharing it with affiliates who hooked the victims. 'We’ve seen evidence that these affiliate marketers have earned between $700 a month to $12,000 a month from these scams,' Smith said." Continue reading →

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David Galland: Answers from a Monetary Master

"Mr. Bernanke will get to visit his ideal world of 2% price inflation, but it will only be a whistle stop. The price inflation that lies ahead will be at least as bad as what happened in the 1970s episode, when the annual inflation rate approached 15%. The money that's already been printed so far may be enough to produce such a 1970s-size problem. Making matters worse is that the devices for paring down the amount of cash that you need for the sake of convenience—such as credit cards, ATMs and online banks—are now far more widely available and cheaper to use than they were in the 1970s." Continue reading →

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Hacker: Sim card flaws leave ‘hundreds of millions of phones’ vulnerable to attack

"A German cryptographer says he has discovered encryption and software flaws in hundreds of millions of phones, leaving them vulnerable to attack, startling peers who had considered sim cards to be relatively safe technology. Karsten Nohl, 31, a respected hacker and specialist on phone security, said the vulnerability allowed outsiders to obtain a sim card’s digital key, a 56-digit sequence that exposes the chip to manipulation. 'What this means is that your sim card can work against you. The hacker can redirect calls, rewrite numbers, listen in on calls.' A criminal hacker, using an ordinary computer, could also commit payment fraud remotely controlling your phone." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingHacker: Sim card flaws leave ‘hundreds of millions of phones’ vulnerable to attack