"According to one estimate, since last year the Department of Homeland Security has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9mm. DHS also purchased 2,700 Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicles (MRAP)." Continue reading →
"An Occupy Wall Street activist was acquitted Thursday after jurors were presented with video evidence that directly contradicted the NYPD’s story. Prosecutors working on behalf of the NYPD have insisted that Premo tackled an NYPD officer and broke a bone during a protest. This week, Premo’s attorney presented a video that showed officers charging into the defendant unprovoked. The video shows a NYPD officer was filming the arrest as well, but prosecutors told Premo’s attorney that no such footage existed. The Manhattan District Attorney's office had presented Premo with a deal that would have let him off the hook by pleading guilty to lesser charges." Continue reading →
"February saw a massive number of legislative attacks on American emigrants and their children by ignorant or malign (un)Representatives which are only now coming to light as the Government Printing Office finishes typesetting and publishing the hundreds of pages of proposed laws. We’ve already discussed the various recent bipartisan attempts to repeal the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, but another frequent theme is increasing the tax and compliance burdens on so-called 'Controlled Foreign Corporation owners' and 'outsourcers', including people who have lived outside the U.S. all their lives but got the inherited genetic disease of U.S. citizenship from their parents." Continue reading →
"Here is a great talk given at The 21 Convention in 2012, by Doug McGuff, MD, a prominent member of the ancestral health (paleo-primal) community: 'Fitness, Health, and Liberty.' This is an important presentation because Doug presents the historical picture on how the physician-patient relationship went from a fiduciary relationship between provider and consumer to a 3rd party morass of collectivized medicine that sacrificed individual services to the needs of the masses in general in order to conform to the rules outlined by the medical establishment-insurance industry alliance." Continue reading →
"In Congressional testimony last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke slipped something in that no one much noticed. He said that the Fed might eventually choose to exit from its current monetary expansion binge, not by selling US government securities, but by letting them mature. So what happens if the Fed holds a bond to maturity? In that case, the Fed presumably receives the principal payment from the Treasury and then sends that back to the Treasury too. In effect, the government has simply canceled its own debt. Bernanke has in effect announced an intention to cancel US bonds, and it doesn’t cause a ripple." Continue reading →
"Before you head for the bunker or put a down payment on a famous bridge, I’d like to offer some sensible alternatives to sequestration calamity. Here are three that would solve the sequestration problem with billions to spare. These are just a few alternatives to the disaster that will supposedly accompany giving the federal government a smaller raise this year. Tragically, most people would view these proposals as crazy but view borrowing money to give away to others as perfectly sane. That’s when you know the end is nigh." Continue reading →
"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has customized its Predator drones, originally built for overseas military operations, to carry out at-home surveillance tasks that have civil libertarians worried: identifying civilians carrying guns and tracking their cell phones, government documents show. The documents provide more details about the surveillance capabilities of the department's unmanned Predator B drones, which are primarily used to patrol the United States' northern and southern borders but have been pressed into service on behalf of a growing number of law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas Rangers, and local police." Continue reading →
"The combination of extreme government secrecy, a supine media (see the prior two columns), and a disgracefully subservient judiciary means that the only way we really learn about what our government does is when the Daniel Ellsbergs - and Bradley Mannings - of the world risk their own personal interest and liberty to alert us. Daniel Ellberg is now widely viewed as heroic and noble, and Bradley Manning (as Ellsberg himself has repeatedly said) merits that praise and gratitude every bit as much." Continue reading →
"In a stunning move last week, four states, Indiana, Colorado, Montana and Arizona, successfully advanced anti-NDAA legislation. The goal for each bill is to protect the people of that state from indefinite detention under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012. The 2012 NDAA applies broad detention power to U.S. soil, allowing the federal government to detain and even execute any person, including an American citizen, on U.S. soil. There has not been such backlash against a federal law since Congress attempted to enforce a mandatory national speed limit, as over 21 states have introduced legislation to counter the law." Continue reading →
"When I first read this story in the Washington Post about supposedly under-appreciated federal bureaucrats, I was tempted to focus on the sentence referring to 'the sledgehammer of budget cuts scheduled to hit today.' Instead I want to focus on the part of the story featuring self-pitying remarks of federal bureaucrats. Excuse me while I wipe away the tears and compose myself. There are so many stories of unbearable hardship. Perhaps we can create a civilian version of the Medal of Honor, given to the bureaucrat who suffers the most because of the 'sledgehammer' cuts and those mean people on 'web sites.'" Continue reading →