15 Jul 2014

Middle Class is No Bingo? - Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert with Roger Ver

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the danger of betting on the middle class in a mass consumption society like America. In the second half, Max interviews Roger Ver, an angel investor in bitcoin companies like Blockchain.info, Bitpay and Kraken, about his decision to renounce his American citizenship.

US CISA: Dianne Feinstein’s Latest Attack On Privacy, Civil Liberties And The Internet

By Michael Krieger: There’s not much good you can count on the US Congress to accomplish, but when it comes to introducing and passing oligarch protecting, civil liberties destroying legislation, US “representatives” are absolutely relentless in their determination. Unsurprisingly, the only “distinctly native American criminal class,” as Mark Twain described Congress, is at it again when it comes to institutionalizing spying and attempting a legal run around the Bill of Rights.
One thing that has become crystal clear since the Edward Snowden revelations, is that much of Congress has no problem at all with unconstitutional spying. Rather, they are primarily upset it was exposed and are dead set on making sure no other whistleblower can ever do the same. Enter CISA, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.

I’ve spent much of today reading about the bill, and have compiled what I think are the most astute observations. First, from the ACLU:

A new cybersecurity bill poses serious threats to our privacy, gives the government extraordinary powers to silence potential whistleblowers, and exempts these dangerous new powers from transparency laws.

"Marriage is Prostitution!" - The C.O.C.K. Fairy

Feminism LOL: "For the law doth not intend that the man is advanced by marriage; and therefore such a promise of marriage to him is of no consideration in law, and by consequence, no action can be founded thereon. But it is otherwise where a man promiseth to marry a woman, because in the eye of the law marriage is an advancement to the woman."
Yo, men! You're just a cash cow and have been for hundreds of years. Don't go back to traditionalism, move forward into a world where you qualify as something more than a provider for others. Demand it!

Dark Wallet's Developer Envisions 'Startup Governments' Run On Bitcoin

By Joseph Cox: Amir Taaki is a busy guy. Between working on new Bitcoin technologies, the British-Iranian software developer finds time to churn out projects that could impact trade, communication, national security, transparency, and pretty much everything else, not to mention stir controversy.
Taaki doesn't see these as isolated projects, but as part of something bigger. “With the future we're heading towards, we need to have these tools that we can use to live,” he told me.
PayPub is a Bitcoin-powered app that financially incentivises people to leak documents, be they classified government secrets or corporate documents. DarkMarket is a prototype of an online marketplace similar to Silk Road that can't be shut down owing to its decentralised model. The layer underneath this, and the piece of technology that could have the most impact, is Dark Wallet, a browser plug-in that aims to make anonymous, secure Bitcoin transactions easy for anyone to carry out.
At the moment, Taaki and the Dark Wallet teamwhich also includes 3D-printed gun enthusiast turned Bitcoin evangelist Cody Wilsonare attempting to develop a ground layer to allow anyone in the world to use Bitcoin. But his hope ultimately is that people will be able to use the technology to form self-governing communities.

'Sinister' Power Grab By UK Taxman!!!

By : Millions of people face seeing money disappear from their bank accounts without being told after a "sinister" power grab by the taxman, experts have warned.
HM Revenue and Customs wants to delay telling employees about changes in their tax-codes for up to a month, which could see people paying more tax than they owe.
Tax experts say that the delay would mean people only find out when it is too late to correct the mistake and the money has already been deducted from their monthly salary.
Last year HMRC took the wrong amount of tax from 5.5 million workers through the Pay As You Earn system, despite a new £300 million computer system designed to calculate payments more accurately.
An estimated 2 million people paid too much tax last year because of errors in the PAYE system, while 3.5 million paid too little and had to make repayments to HMRC. 
The number of errors has risen from 5.2 million in the previous year, despite a new £300 million computer system which is designed to calculate payments more accurately.

The First Koalemos Awards

Is Canada Next? (In One Very Ugly Chart)

By : While the US and friends have been struggling for five years with a recovery that has been so crummy that “recovery” often shows up in quotation marks, Canada has been rolling in good times. Its economy has been powered by a housing bubble beyond even US imagination.

I wrote about that phenomenon in April:
The gap between Canadian and US home prices is at an all-time record, with the average price in Canada now 66% higher than the mean price in the US. Even when prices are adjusted for fluctuations in the exchange rate … Canadian homes are still 50% more expensive than the already expensive US homes. What gives?
I included an eye-popping chart, going back to 1999, that compares US home prices, which have been soaring recently, to the totally out of whack prices in Canada. For more, read….  Canadian home prices make the torrid excesses of the US housing bubble look banal.
But housing bubbles – or rather construction bubbles that accompany them – are dreadfully serious business. As construction activity grows, jobs shift into the sector. Secondary industries start expanding to benefit from the construction boom, and jobs shift into them as well. A lot of jobs have shifted into these sectors for years. But now dark clouds are appearing over the construction sites.

Woven Digital Media Weaving Lies - AVfM Intelligence Report

Paul Elam: Perhaps the most humorous event in recent history was in watching members of the mainstream media short circuit their tiny little brains as they attempted to gather in and process the collective lifetimes of thoughtful counter-theory on gender and power at the First International Conference on Men's Issues.

WWII-Inspired Rad-Fems Favor Internment of Innocent College Men

It, therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today…. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken. - Final recommendation of the commanding general, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, submitted to the Secretary of War, 1942
By : One of the most shameful failures of American justice was the war-hysteria-inspired internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II. Evidence from the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Office of Naval Intelligence that these American citizens were of little concern was suppressed, and the lives of these Americans were disrupted forever not because they were saboteurs but rather because they had committed no sabotage at all.
Using similar reasoning, the rape-farming feminists are at it again—using low-rape-reporting and no-rape-reporting colleges as evidence of … lots and lots of RAPE.
The mania of modern-day feminists regarding allegations of campus rape is reaching levels of paranoia and general insanity that has few parallels in history

The MHRM: Who Rules Over Us?

"Free will, ...do we have it?"
Paul Elam: The Godfather of the Online Men's Movement, Angry Harry, continues his online podcast series.

They Learned Nothing: The Banksters Of England Are Already Pushing For More Bankstering Deregulation

By : Even though the Basel banking-regulations are adhered to by all European banks, England’s largest banks have special permissions to use custom “bespoke” models when calculating their loan-loss reserve requirements rather than the standard Basel risk-weights that smaller banks are forced to use.
What does this mean?  It means large UK banks have an enormous advantage over smaller banks as they don’t need to carry nearly the amount of reserves that responsible smaller banks must carry.
Now the Bank of England has piped up in defense of England’s smaller banks.  The BoE has announced it’s “concern” that larger banks just might have a (shock) unfair advantage over smaller banks due to the differing reserve-requirements.
So you might think the Bank of England recommended that England’s larger banks also begin adhering to the standard Basel protocols to which smaller banks are bound.  Not a chance.  The Bank of England is now pressing to allow smaller banks to be equally irresponsible  by easing some of their requirements.
ie:  Less regulation.


How bad can a little 
de-regulation be?
FT Reports:

The Bank of England has been lobbying for an easing of global capital requirements for small banks, amid concerns that the rules make it harder for them to compete with larger rivals when they offer mortgages and small business loans.

Bubbles Everywhere: Krugman Wrong Again; Austrians And The BIS Are Correct