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World Bank Insider Blows Whistle on Corruption, Federal Reserve

michaelsuede — Sat, 25 May 2013 22:41:25 +0000

A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve. The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained. In an interview with The New American, Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success.

Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”

According to the peer-reviewed paper, which presented the first global investigation of ownership architecture in the international economy, transnational corporations form a “giant bow-tie structure.” A large portion of control, meanwhile, “flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions.” The researchers described the core as an “economic ‘super-entity’” that raises important issues for policymakers and researchers. Of course, the implications are enormous for citizens as well.

Police State: Liberty Activist Illegally Searched and Arrested

michaelsuede — Thu, 23 May 2013 05:36:16 +0000

“Your megaphone might be a weapon,” says the arresting officer to liberty activist and former Marine Kyle Prouty when he asked why he was being detained.

Five members of The Panic Hour were followed into the City Hall rail station in Center City Philadelphia after attending an arraignment hearing for Adam Kokesh and Nikki Allen Poe who were kidnapped from a peaceful marijuana rally on 5/18/13.

While quietly waiting for a train, Kyle Prouty was illegally searched and detained by SEPTA police officer Nicole Lawson at 3:20pm on 5/20/13 after refusing to show ID. You can hear Kyle screaming “I do not consent to a search” while they search him.

Kyle was charged with “disorderly conduct” “obstructing a highway and other public passage” and “resisting arrest”. Can we call it a Police State yet?

Seven High School Students Arrested For Throwing… Water Balloons

michaelsuede — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:54:43 +0000

The weather’s (mostly) hot. School’s almost out. And what better way to celebrate summer being almost here than being arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for throwing water balloons.

Hail academia, forever teaching our youth that anything and everything will be punished to the fullest extent of the law, even childhood hijinks our parents would have approved of, if only they weren’t so busy being arrested themselves.

Cell Phone Users ‘Have No Legitimate Expectation of Privacy’ – Judge

michaelsuede — Sat, 18 May 2013 19:44:04 +0000

A federal judge recently ruled that if someone has their cell phone turned on, their location data does not deserve protection under the Fourth Amendment, meaning law enforcement can track individuals without a search warrant.
New York magistrate judge Gary Brown decided in favor of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who were seeking his approval over a warrant on a doctor who they suspected was being paid for issuing thousands of prescriptions. The warrant would have compelled the physician’s phone company to provide real-time tracking data from his cell.
Brown, certainly to the delight of police, issued a 30-page brief outlining his opinion that, by carrying a cell phone, someone is essentially waiving their Fourth Amendment right to due process.
“Given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the prospective of a cellular telephone where that individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple expedient of powering it off,” Brown wrote.

Study: Why Pot Smokers Are Skinnier

michaelsuede — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:22:30 +0000

Marijuana users had smaller waists and scored higher across several measures of blood sugar regulation.

Are We On The Verge Of Witnessing The Death Of The Paper Gold Scam?

michaelsuede — Thu, 09 May 2013 23:56:54 +0000

The legal claims on physical gold far exceed the amount of physical gold that the banks actually have by a very, very wide margin. And right now the bankers are scared out of their wits because their warehouses are being drained of physical gold at a frightening rate. So what happens when their physical gold is gone but they still have lots and lots of people with legal claims to gold? When that moment arrives, it will represent the end of the paper gold scam.

As Detroit Self-Destructs, Voluntarism Emerges

michaelsuede — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:21:48 +0000

One of the surprising things about Detroit’s descent toward insolvency – so dire that a state-appointed emergency manager recently arrived to take over – is that public services haven’t collapsed as completely as some might have expected.

But that’s not because city departments are functioning as usual. They’re not. Instead, a growing collection of volunteers, some affluent, some just average guys riding their Toros, are trying to pick up some services that local government can’t provide.

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Another article talks about bus stop benches being built by volunteers, which were then removed by “officials” because the volunteers didn’t ask permission first. Not only does the state destroy civilization, it actively impedes those who wish to improve it.

Lucy is Right: Insurance Should Be a Nickel

michaelsuede — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:39:18 +0000

You see, if you were to consider Lucy’s proposal as a weekly rate (after all, the lives of children revolve more around the week than the month) and adjust for inflation back to the time of the old gold standard, the proposition that, “insurance should be a nickel,” makes perfect sense. The original 1 oz. “Double Eagle” gold coin was worth 20 dollars. Therefore, 1 dollar was approximately equal to 1/20th of an ounce of gold and a nickel’s worth would be 1/400 of an ounce of gold.

When the commercial was written, I believe the price of gold was around $1,290 per ounce. Hence, an old nickel’s worth of gold would be worth almost $3.25 at the time.

Considering Lucy’s price as a weekly rate, if we took the more precisely adjusted price of $3.25 and multiplied it by 52 weeks per year, customers would be paying around $169 per year for insurance. If you took MetLife price of $14 per month, the annual cost would be $168 per year.

While we do not know the exact price of gold when the commercial was written it would seem that Lucy’s weekly price adjusted to the old gold standard is approximately the same as MetLife’s monthly price.

btcd: A Full Alternative Bitcoin Implementation, Written In Go

michaelsuede — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:57:59 +0000

Multiple implementations is also good for standardization; in a monoculture, the dominant software becomes the standard, giving the developers of the dominant software a higher degree of control over the future development of the protocol than was originally intended. This does not even require the developers to make a conscious decision to start subverting the design process for personal gain to be harmful; even if, as is almost certainly the case today, developers are acting with the best of intentions there is a bias in software development toward increasing complexity and confusion that is mitigated if multiple implementations have to work together on every change. If there is only one implementation, errors get uncovered later rather than sooner, and the result is a sort of Talebian “stability breeding its own instability” that ultimately, as in the case of the March blockchain fork, causes disaster. Additionally, developers have no incentive to even document the protocol as long as it works internally. Currently documentation does exist on the Bitcoin wiki, but with multiple implementations we can be much more certain that the page will be updated, and even improve in quality, in the future.

Whether or not btcd will actually be used by miners is hard to say; it is entirely possible that miners will remain comfortable with the existing bitcoind, and the stability through decentralization that a healthy ecosystem of alternative implementations can bring will never come to pass. But even in such a state, this will still be a step forward for Bitcoin if only because it makes it easier for Go users to interact with the protcol. A Bitcoin implementation in Go has already been written, but it has not been updated in nearly a year, and appears to have only ever had a single developer behind it. btcd is backed by a corporation that is clearly well-versed in security and privacy, inspiring much more confidence in its reliability.

Suspected Saudi Terrorist Al-Harbi Visited White House

Wed, 08 May 2013 02:27:03 +0000

Saudi student Abdul Rahman Ali Issa Al-Salimi Al-Harbi was injured in the Boston Marathon Bombings. He was once a “person of interest” in the bombings. He was put on a terror watch list after the bombings.