". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
“The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.
Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled ‘Facts about Goldman Sachs’ – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago.” (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)
This story is interesting to me because it reflects arguments I recently heard for private property as a means of environmentalism. The argument goes that individual owners are better stewards of the environment than the government, and should be allowed to operate freely on their on property. In the event that they cause pollution, say, through contaminating ground water or polluting the air, it should be viewed as an infringement on other people’s liberties and handles as a tort.
More here: Free Market Environmentalism
“They were labelled law breakers, fined $50,000 and left emotionally and financially drained.
But seven years after the Sheahans bulldozed trees to make a fire break � an act that got them dragged before a magistrate and penalised � they feel vindicated. Their house is one of the few in Reedy Creek, Victoria, still standing.
The Sheahans’ 2004 court battle with the Mitchell Shire Council for illegally clearing trees to guard against fire, as well as their decision to stay at home and battle the weekend blaze, encapsulate two of the biggest issues arising from the bushfire tragedy.
Do Victoria’s native vegetation management policies need a major overhaul? And should families risk injury or death by staying home to fight the fire rather than fleeing?
Anger at government policies stopping residents from cutting down trees and clearing scrub to protect their properties is already apparent. ‘We’ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads won’t cut trees down,’ Warwick Spooner told Nillumbik Mayor Bo Bendtsen at a meeting on Tuesday night.” (Read more from smh.com.au)
“The administration and the banks keep talking about a credit crisis, but there isn’t one. Banks are lending. If you want a mortgage and can afford to pay it back, you can borrow at low rates today. You can finance a car at low rates for seven years. But most Americans don’t want more debt because it is a debilitating path to poverty. The average American family already pays 14 percent of annual income in interest to banks.
To fix this fake crisis, there are fake discussions about what the government must do. The endlessly recycled plan to buy ‘troubled’ assets isn’t to get banks lending again, because they haven’t stopped lending. The plan seeks for taxpayers to buy worthless assets at high prices to absorb rich investors’ losses. That’s it. It keeps coming back as a different plan, but with that same goal. There is no goal beyond that one goal: keep rich people from taking losses.
Obama and his economic gurus all chant, ‘Credit is the lifeblood of the economy,’ but they don’t mean credit. They mean debt. Imagine the president saying, ‘Debt is the lifeblood of our economy. We desperately need to get more American families deeper in debt.’ That’s what he means, and that’s what these bailouts hope to do.” (Read more from sfgate.com)
Joe Rogan is a great pro-pot advocate and a great announcer for the UFC. These commercials are yet another ridiculous waste of tax-payer money. To see the talking-dog commercial Joe Rogan references click here.
“The Joint Committee on Taxation today released Disclosure Report for Public Inspection Pursuant to Internal Revenue Code Section 6103(p)(3)(C) for Calendar Year 2008 (JCX-24-09). . . .
The report reveals that the IRS made 5.3 billion disclosures of tax return information to federal and state agencies (up from 4.5 billion in 2007). Here are the Top 5 recipients of taxpayer information:
1. States: 3,182,927,345 disclosures
2. Bureau of Census: 1,842,087,625 disclosures
3. Congressional Committees: 260,592,773 disclosures
4. Medicare Premium Subsidy Adjustment: 40,431,964 disclosures
5. Child Support Enforcement Agencies: 14,856,897 disclosures
” (Read more from taxprof.typepad.com)
From georgewashington.blogspot.com:
The following comment was posted to my blog today (I do not know who the author is — he posted semi-anonymously; so decide for yourself whether or not you believe him):
“I am an Air Force veteran. I was serving at Langley AFB, Virginia on Sept. 11. (not to be confused with CIA headquarters at Langley, VA). The “Alert Squadron” of 4 F-16 Falcons also stationed at Langley AFB was scrambled AFTER the “plane” crashed into the Pentagon. Because of my position as a ground equipment mechanic, I had access to the flightline operations that day. My friends were Crew Cheifs and Weapons Loaders, among other professions on the flightline that day. One of my [unusual] duties that day was to drive a Loader (personal friend) along with a rack of live missiles (AIM-9’s and AIM-120’s) across the active runway to the Alert Squadron and drop them off. I was towing equipment to the flightline, so when it was time to go back and pick up the Loader (and our missile trailer) I was unable to do so, but another member of my Flight (a good friend, and later roommate) did go. According to my roommate (and I later confirmed with the Loader) the Loader was completely silent most of the trip back to our side of the base, after they crossed the active, he spoke. “They shot one down.” JJ replied “WHAT?” Loader:”One of those 16’s came back with one less missile than it left with” That was all. As they pulled back in to the squadron area, The loader was whisked away by his commanders for debriefing. I didn’t see him for a few days, but when I did, he said he couldn’t talk about it, but he confirmed that what my roommate had told me was true.
The US Air Force shot down Flight 93. I haven’t told this to many people. I told my parents and other family members shortly after I left the military. They didn’t believe it. I figured no one else would either. I kept my mouth shut. Everyone was dedicated to the president and the country (not really) And anything that went against the Official, media delivered story was viewed as unpatriotic. I knew that I loved this country, so I kept my mouth shut. I just can’t do that anymore. I know that I don’t have any documents to prove it, and I have no way of knowing where the others involved are now days, so I can’t prove anything. All I have is my word. and with God as my witness that is the truth.”
A technical explanation of how taxpayers will lose when banks buy assets from themselves. The crooks are in charge.
Of all the issues I cover here on LostRepublic, voicing doubts about human-induced climate change earns me by far the most consternation from friends and readers.
From the website realclimate.org:
“RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.”
Sorry, they do not take a stand on the issue. They only critique various news stories and individual studies.
Here is a book review of three climate change books: Winds of Change, Catastrophe, and The Weather Makers.
Regarding the controversial Dr. Nils-Axel Morner.
“If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, ‘the sea is not rising,’ he says. ‘It hasn’t risen in 50 years.’ If there is any rise this century it will ‘not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm’. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on ‘going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world’.
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown. . . .
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.
When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an “expert reviewer” on the IPCC’s last two reports, he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one”. Yet the results of all this “deliberate ignorance” and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.” (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)
“FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming ‘out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,’ as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. . . .
IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that ‘all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.’ . . .
A particularly distressed member of that public was Dyson’s own wife, Imme, who, after seeing [Al Gore’s] film in a local theater with Dyson when it was released in 2006, looked at her husband out on the sidewalk and, with visions of drowning polar bears still in her eyes, reproached him: ‘Everything you told me is wrong!’ she cried.
‘The polar bears will be fine,’ he assured her.” (Read more from nytimes.com)
“When oil prices spiked last summer to $147 a barrel, the biggest corporate casualty was oil pipeline giant Semgroup Holdings, a $14 billion (sales) private firm in Tulsa, Okla. It had racked up $2.4 billion in trading losses betting that oil prices would go down, including $290 million in accounts personally managed by then chief executive Thomas Kivisto. . . .
But now some of the people involved in cleaning up the financial mess are suggesting that Semgroup’s collapse was more than just bad judgment and worse timing. There is evidence of a malevolent hand at work: oil price manipulation by traders orchestrating a short squeeze to push up the price of West Texas Intermediate crude to the point that it would generate fatal losses in Semgroup’s accounts. . . .
What’s the evidence of this? Much is circumstantial. Proving oil-trading manipulation is difficult. But numerous people familiar with the events insist that Citibank, Merrill Lynch and especially Goldman Sachs had knowledge about Semgroup’s trading positions from their vetting of an ill-fated $1.5 billion private placement deal last spring. “Nothing’s been proven, but if somebody has your book and knows every trade, it would not be difficult to bet against that book and put the company into a tremendous liquidity squeeze,” says John Tucker, who is representing Kivisto.
What’s known for sure is that Goldman Sachs, through J. Aron & Co., its commodities trading arm, was in prime position to use such data–and profited handsomely from Semgroup’s fall. J. Aron was Semgroup’s biggest counterparty, trading both physical oil flowing through pipelines and paper oil, in the form of options and futures.” (Read more from forbes.com)
“‘The president and Treasury Secretary Geithner have said they will do what it takes,’ Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said after the meeting. ‘If it is enough, that will be great. If it is not enough, they will have to do more.'”
“In the wake of the accusation by Chas Freeman that his nomination to lead the National Intelligence Council was derailed by an “Israeli lobby,” a forthcoming memoir by another distinguished ambassador adds stunning new charges to the debate. The ambassador, John Gunther Dean, writes that over the years he not only came under pressure from pro-Israeli groups and officials in Washington but also was the target of an Israeli-inspired assassination attempt in 1980 in Lebanon, where he had opened links to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Dean’s suspicions that Israeli agents may have also been involved in the mysterious plane crash in 1988 that killed Pakistan’s president, General Mohammed Zia ul Haq, led finally to a decision in Washington to declare him mentally unfit, which forced his resignation from the foreign service after a thirty-year career. After he left public service, he was rehabilitated by the State Department, given a distinguished service medal and eventually encouraged to write his memoirs. Now 82, Dean sees the subsequent positive attention he has received as proof that the insanity charge (he calls it Stalinist) was phony, a supposition later confirmed by a former head of the department’s medical service.
Dean, whose memoir is titled Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests, was American ambassador in Lebanon in August 1980 when a three-car convoy carrying him and his family was attacked near Beirut.” (Read more from the nation.com)