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The presidential primaries are running about as expected. There is only one candidate who represents sanity and he is running fourth in the GOP and fifth overall. There are four people ahead of him in the primaries, representing four different sets of ethics problems.
The most relevant expression that I know of for the current positions is the one that has been attributed to such thinkers as P.T.Barnum and H.L.Mencken. It is “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the public taste.”
Consider policies on the Mideast. For decades the Israeli tail has been wagging the American dog. The Europeans cannot understand this at all. At the present time Netanyahu is beating the drums for an attack on Iran to prevent the development of nuclear weapons. There are several reasons why this is nonsense. One is that the Israelis themselves have nuclear weapons. Another is that Iranian agents were reported to have been actively buying weapons during the collapse of the former Soviet Union. I can’t find any current reports about this, but published estimates at the time said that several nuclear weapons disappeared and some of them went to Iran. Another is that nobody took any similar steps when other countries developed such weapons. Current reports say that US and Israeli intelligence and military reports state that the Iranis have stopped such developments several years ago. The estimates are that if such an attack is successfully made the Irani nuclear weapon development will be delayed by about a year if there is such a program, and that one will be started if there is not one in existence. On the downside, Russia, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have stated that they will enter the war immediately on the Iranian side. Three of these are nuclear powers. The Chinese have said explicitly that they will defend Iran with all measures up to and including World War III. A one year delay in an existing nuclear program, or starting one if there is not one, is a really really poor exchange for starting World War III. Any individual who takes chances with high risks and low potential payoffs will go broke in no time.
We keep hearing that the Iranis have threatened to wipe out Israel. The translation of this remark given by Al-Jazeera is that the current Israeli regime must be changed to one that allows the Palestinians to return. On the other hand the Israelis want to eliminate Lebanon as a country. Who is the aggressor here? It is possible that Netanyahu simply wants to draw attention away from the disgraceful way that his government is mistreating the Palestinians.
On the issue of government spending all candidates except Ron Paul are in favor of continuing the wild deficit spending that has been characteristic of US governments for the last 32 years. The deficits are getting larger every year, both in nominal terms and as a percentage of the economy. Until recently this was financed by selling bonds to the Chinese government but the Chinese have stopped increasing their holdings of US bonds. If the US supports an Israeli attack on Iran it is quite likely that the Chinese will dump their remaining US treasury bonds and make it almost impossible to finance more deficits. If we use 2009 figures from the IRS, there were 81,890,189 individual taxpayers in the US. If we divide the stated annual deficit of 1.5 trillion among this many the average is 18,420. If I eliminated those with taxable incomes below this level the remaining figures would look much worse. This leaves out the estimated 3.5 trillion in increased Social Security and Medicare obligations that the government has taken on, as well as the obligations of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and many other similar programs. Whether these obligations amount to 40,000 per taxpayer or 140,000 does not really matter because neither figure can be paid. Ron Paul is the only candidate who is at all concerned about these figures and that is one reason that he is running fifth. These budget problems will damage the US economy beyond repair unless action is taken soon to decrease the damage but it looks like this will have to wait another four years. By then the burden will be much worse than it is now.
There are a few things abut the US public that distinguishes them from the citizens of other countries. One is that US citizens believe what their politicians and media tell them. This does not occur anywhere else that I have heard of. It is hard to see why it happens, since US politicians are at least as corrupt as those of any other developed country. There is one large continuum of interests between the government, their Wall Street supporters, the military-industrial complex, and the media. The voters do not seem to understand this. They appear to believe that the media represent the public and not their allies in the financial and military complexes.
When this case first began to draw publicity it reminded me of several different things. One is the murder mysteries that I read when I was about 12 years old. The main groups that I remember involved heroes Ellery Queen and Perry Mason. Each of these stories contained one common element. The detective assigned to the case began an investigation and soon decided which of the potential suspects was his prime suspect. From that point forward the investigation consisted only of checking into leads that could strengthen the case against the prime suspect and ignoring any evidence that led to other suspects. Any line of investigation that might yield information about the crime was followed only if it appeared that it could lead to more evidence against the prime suspect. Other lines of investigation that appeared logical were ignored completely. When the case was near or at the trial phase Ellery or Perry would announce all of the information that indicated that another person was responsible for the crime. This always amounted to an airtight case against someone else. The guilty party confessed and the case was closed.
I met a retired lawyer who told me that he had been assigned to defend a woman who had been charged with Murder 1. He took the logical step of looking for witnesses to the scene in which the accused had slashed a man with a knife. He found a witness without having to look very hard. The witness told the court that the deceased had lunged at the defendant with a knife and said that he was going to kill her. She sidestepped and slashed his arm. He began to bleed profusely. Instead of ripping off his shirt and using it as a bandage while going to the nearest hospital he went home, had a few more drinks, and passed out. He bled to death while he was passed out. The judge considered the evidence and declared the defendant not guilty without sending it to the jury. This would have happened in the 1950s or 60s in Texas. The critical factor is that the police had not bothered to look for a witness, since they already had a suspect.
After the first day of publicity about the Martin case it became clear that it would be impossible to have a fair trial for Zimmerman if he was to be charged. If the official investigation determines that he was not guilty he will probably have to leave the US permanently because of the publicity about this case.
The media had lots of air time and column space to fill so they went all out on the story. The information published the first day indicated that the deceased had been totally blameless in the encounter. The information published a couple of days later contradicted this. The state had already ordered a complete investigation. At the time of writing, the cell phone message appeared to be a main piece of evidence. Since essentially all land-line phone conversations in the US are recorded by both the US and Israeli governments, and cell phone companies are legally required to keep records of all cell phone conversations it is quite likely that a recording of this conversation will be produced at this hearing. I predict that it will change the picture one way or the other.
In conclusion, this case was a real tragedy before the media got involved. Once they got involved it became a media circus. I cannot see any way that this media circus can lead to justice for anybody. This should not be a surprise to anybody since the purpose of the media attention is to draw eyeballs to a particular channel or newsroom.
Unfortunately, since the media tried to make it into a racial prejudice case, there is a strong possibility that an acquittal for the defendant will lead to destructive riots all across the US and that these riots will set race relations back by 10 years. That is a very high price to pay for the extra advertising revenue that the case brought into CNN.
I have written a couple of times about the financial problems that the state of California is suffering from. They keep ignoring their serious problems, but keep diverting attention away from them by starting meaningless initiatives in other directions. They have hit a new low this week. They arrested a 65-year-old man, tortured him in jail for a week, and they set his bail at a cool million. This compares to 100k for a person accused of raping children.
The 65-year-old’s alleged crime is selling unpasteurized milk, which he cleverly disguised as unpasteurized milk. The big dairies want to discourage the use of unpasteurized milk because it makes it easier for farmers to sell their milk directly to users at market price, instead of selling it to the big dairies at a much lower price. Their allies in the state legislature are, as usual, voting for their campaign contributors.
See the details in Carpe diem, at http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/03/california-declares-war-on-raw-dairy.html#links
Previously I wrote that I had found out how to sneak plastic explosives past full-body scanners by the simple expedient of looking it up online. You do not need to be a technical genius to make that kind of search. Even the most spaced-out religious fanatic can do that. Today I found out another way of getting past the scanners. It is quite well researched. The person doing the research stated that the Israelis would not use the scanners because they knew that it was possible to get past them. One of the Israelis stated that he could carry enough explosives past the scanner to bring down a 747. He did not explain how he would do this. Goldberg was intrigued by this and decided to figure out how it could be done. He actually took a metal box through the scanners at two different airports to confirm that his method worked. He states that he could have put anything he wanted inside the metal box and it would not have shown up on the scanners. Simple physics tells me that this is correct. The box was not large enough to hold a full-size pistol like a .45 automatic but he points out that he was trying to prove that the concept worked, not trying to see how large an object he could carry past the scanners.
He does not recommend that you try this because he says that one of the buttons on your shirt, or even sweat on your armpit, might cause a false positive and this would cause a full search, which would turn up the box and get you some really serious trouble. You might be able to use it to smuggle gold coins past the scanner but please don’t say that I told you.
He points out that the scanners are a total fraud upon the taxpaying, and traveling public. It would be very difficult to disagree with this viewpoint.
To see the video where he describes the method, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/jeffrey-goldberg/
Please take a minute and read the TSA comments on the article.
I had no idea that a magazine like the Atlantic carried political items like this. Please remember that magazines like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair are publishing political stories that the regular media will not touch. The most likely explanation for this is that the regular media are a part of the Wall Street-Washington power grid and only publish things that shows their partners on Wall Street and in Washington in a favorable light.
Recently I discovered that manufacturing is beginning to increase rapidly in the US for the first time in years. Big companies like Caterpillar and Eaton are planning to produce more of their products in the US. Rentals of industrial space are increasing rapidly. There are several reasons for this. One is increasing wage rates in China. In 2005 US wage rates were 22 times Chinese rates. Now they are less than 10 times and it looks like it will be less than 5 times by 2015. Another problem is that with the recent increases in the cost of oil, the cost of shipment has gone up.
Two more factors are water and natural gas. Many industrial processes use large quantities of water. I was a little surprised when I discovered that outdoor production of grains, fruits, and vegetables requires on the order of 100 kilos of water to produce 1 kilo of product. Most of this is given off by the leaves in the process that takes in CO2 and produces oxygen. Please don’t tell Al Bore or he might have a fit when you tell him that we can reduce the CO2 concentration in the air by growing more plants and less humans. This is one reason for the proliferation of hydroponic agriculture for crops other than marijuana, since hydroponics allows for the recapture of much of this water. For the last 50 years or so industries that use water for cooling have designed all new factories so that any water that is taken in to the plant is recycled. Before that it was possible to run cooling water through the factory then discharge it back into the river, but then as standards changed it became necessary to clean the water first. This led to the reuse of water wherever possible.
For more details see http://dailyreckoning.com/the-great-comeback-no-one-will-believe/
Several years ago I read that a chemical engineer had said that it was a sin to burn natural gas as a fuel because it is so useful as a chemical feedstock. Several large companies are building factories to produce such things as ethylene near the areas where natural gas is being produced now. This is an additional benefit of horizontal drilling and fracking.
One unexpected problem is that there is a shortage of workers skilled in such trades as machinist and millwright. The companies are having to train people for these jobs. These new factories are largely operated by large companies. They have money saved up and want to make the best use of it. They also have the specialized staff necessary to fend off the nutty restrictions that big government tries to force onto them.
If you are thinking that you would like to get a job in one of these factories there are some problems. One is that the new factories will be highly automated. Low-skilled jobs have been automated out of existence. In Mexico, where wage rates are much lower than in the US, the big shopping centers used to have parking attendants. These jobs no longer exist. Shoppers push a button to get a ticket, then pay for parking in a machine vaguely similar to an ATM machine and get a mark on their ticket, then they use it to exit the parking facility. Back in the 1980s I made a few visits to pulp and paper mills. in Canada. Unless you went into the control room there was no one there. If you were thinking of looking for a job in one of the service companies that will be set up around these new centers there is another problem for you. Your potential employer is facing a very serious problem.
This problem, as you should know by now, comes from Washington. It has two aspects. One is the proliferation of new regulations in the last 3 years. A small business cannot keep up. The other aspect centers on the National Labor Relations Board. I have noted in earlier posts, such as What Were These Idiots Thinking,? and Is This Weird or What?, that they have gone out of their way to try to close down open-shop companies, especially those that were formerly unionized but are not now. They have famously tried to close down a Boeing factory in an open-shop state. They are now suing four states to try to force them to stop allowing secret ballots in union elections. They are also trying to shorten the time between when a union declares a union vote and the date of the vote, from an average of 38 days to 10 days. This will allow the union brass to get their propaganda campaign going and ambush the management propaganda campaign before it can get going. The NLRB chairman was recently quoted as saying “We keep our eye on the prize.” He promised to force employers to provide confidential employee information to union organizers so that they can harass and intimidate employees more easily and so coerce them into signing union cards.
It is no accident that Obama declared the Senate to be in recess, while the Senators thought that they were in session, so that he could appoint a man who the Senate would never have approved to the NLRB. According to Phil Karpen, the man who was illegally appointed in this manner “has a history of intimidating and silencing rank-and-file union workers to advance the interests of union bosses.” The president has a history of favoring his campaign donors. Witness his granting about 80% of the green energy grants to his campaign contributors. This appears to be Chicago corruption at its worst.
You can read more of Phil Karpen’s work at http://www.theprojecttorestoreamerica.com/ on the March 3 edition. He is the author of Democracy Denied, which was published last year. I am not suggesting that you should necessarily agree with everything that he has to say but I hope that you will consider it carefully.
The NLRB in its current form reminds me of a corrupt union boss in BC, Canada. A reporter told him that more than a third of the companies that his union organized went out of business almost immediately. They went on a strike for a first contract, their customers found new suppliers, their banker called in their loan and it went downhill from there. He replied that the workers would be better off on welfare than working at an open-shop company. He was so concerned with his own narrow interests that he did not know or care that every time his union closed a company it made it more difficult for new companies to get financing, and discouraged other would-be entrepreneurs from starting businesses, so they were closing down a few existing jobs and a whole lot of potential jobs all at the same time. If you had told him that he would probably have said that many of the potential jobs would have been open-shop so they did not really count.
Historically the strongest motive for joining a union was a management that was seen to be unfair to workers. Most such companies were unionized decades ago. Now the strongest motive is coercion from the NLRB. Is that what you want your tax money to be used for?
It is amazing how much spam is on the internet now. Today I received 2 or 3 copies of the Nigerian swindle, as usual. I have heard that they get as high as 10% responses to these messages. Other internet marketers try to get 2%. The only one I know who actually admitted to responding to a Nigerian swindle sent in some info and they asked him for money for legal fees. He told them to take it out of the settlement. He never heard from them again.
Yesterday I received an official-looking notice from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) telling me that they were looking into copyright violations from my address and asking me to open the attachment to get the details. The attachment was a zip file. I hit it to see what the complaint was about. I immediately saw that this was an exe file, not any kind of document file. The exe files show up as a square with a blue border, and usually either the top of the bottom will have a wider border. An exe file can do anything that a doc file can do, and anything else that your computer can do. Think steal passwords, send email to all of your correspondents, clean out your stock trading account, your bank account, or simply get ready to send out emails when the owner of the program wants to send out email from your address, not his. Later in the day I got about 60 more of these notices.
I have no idea if the others also contain this exe file but I expect that they do.
Last fall I got a few hundred comments that consisted of repeating a comment that someone else had sent in and adding a url address to it. These seemed to be legitimate addresses so I sent back and told them that they could not advertise here for free. A few days later these suddenly stopped. Someone had told his students that they could get free advertising by posting comments on blogs. When they did not get the expected response they simply sent out more of them.
For the last couple of months I have been getting dozens of spam messages every day. These are sent out by robots. They are easy to recognize because they have html scattered throughout the message. I have no idea if anyone anywhere actually lets these get published but I doubt it. Again the poor slobs who have been told that this is a legitimate way to do business get no response so they send out more of them.
I get lots from what appears to be New York City about traffic or parking offenses. Since I have never driven there I know that they are spam but they also ask the recipient to open an attachment. I do not know if the attachment is an exe file or not.
My final advice is NEVER OPEN AN ATTACHMENT TO A MESSAGE THAT MIGHT BE SPAM.
I just found out about the real reasons why the minimum wage laws first came into being. An article in a Princeton University publication tells us that the purpose was to force the uneducated, shiftless, or otherwise useless portion of the population into poverty so that they could starve, on the theory that by so doing they would be less likely to produce another generation of unemployable useless people. This is a fantastic statement, but the man writing it produces actual quotes from the people who began pushing this idea more than a century ago. I will give you the reference below. I checked that the reference works.
Basically the people who formed what they called the Progressive Movement were behind such things as the Federal Reserve, the income tax, greatly expanded government powers, and the minimum wage. This group was very influential in the US from about 1890 to about 1930. They believed that because they were so smart they could run the economy better than anyone else. As George Soros pointed out in one of his publications, people who have studied economics in the modern age make worse economic decisions than they did before they started these studies. We all know that the worst depression in the last century occurred when their baby the Federal Reserve first began to flex its muscles.
Once the minimum wage had been set up, the trade union movement got behind it. They still say lots of things about the poor fellow who is working for minimum wage and trying to support a wife and six children, and how much he needs a raise. What the poor fellow should have done was get some job skills to get out of the entry-level job before becoming a father of six. The trade unions would like to have the minimum wage raised to about 75 % of union scale to prevent poor people from taking jobs away from the knights of labor.
At present there is very high youth unemployment in most developed countries. One reason for this is that the minimum wage is so high that it does not pay to open up entry-level jobs for the 16-24 age group. These entry-level jobs teach the young people some of the things that they should have learned in school. The proponents of raising the minimum wage have no problem with the interns who work for essentially nothing to gain work experience, but they don’t want to see those without college work for low wages. Essentially what they say is that removing the bottom rung from the economic ladder hurts young people. It also hurts someone who has been a homemaker for several years and now needs to go back to work.
I found this to be a fascinating piece. The url is http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf
For more details see http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/the-banishment-of-the-marginal-worker/
As I wrote above I had never heard this original reason given before but once you have heard it you are likely to change your mind forever on this issue
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Several readers have asked me to install a Donate Button so that they can contribute toward my research. I finally had time to study html and the connection between Word Press and html so here is the donate button. I wanted to tell you that I have learned how to set it up correctly. There is no obligation on your part to donate but you can if you like.
Reports that Mexican drug lords are living in the US with apparent immunity from US law enforcement agencies have been circulating in Mexico for a long time. Several years ago I read that one was living about 20 miles north of the border and commuting across the border as necessary to run his organization. This required crossing the frontier on every trip but apparently his connections made it easy for him.
I recently read an article in an English-language newspaper called the Guadalajara Reporter about a man named Jesus Vicente Zambala Niebla (in some reports he is called Vicente Jesus Zambala Niebla) who is currently on trial in Chicago for drug smuggling.
In http://newschicago.net/tag/jesus-vicente-zambada-niebla/ dated April 27 we read that the accused has stated that he was a US government informant for many years, and that he operated under an agreement between the Sinaloa cartel and the US government. This gave the cartel immunity from DEA interference in their business.
In http://waronyou.com/topics/cia-wants-court-to-invoke-classified-information-procedures-act-cipa-in-case-involving-jesus-vicente-zambada-niebla/ dated Sept 13 , it is stated that the CIA tried to avoid publication of evidence that would expose their activities by invoking national security. One comment was “That is a very reasonable conclusion [that the CIA is likely involved in this case in some way],” says a former federal agent familiar with national security procedures. “Seeking CIPA protection, yup, there is hot stuff to hide.” Here CIPA stands for Classified Information Procedures Act.
In http://cnsnews.com/news/article/fast-and-furious-linked-immunity-deal-between-us-and-sinaloa-cartel-trafficking dated December 29 we see that the defendant has claimed that the Sinaloa cartel had been given permission by the US government to move drugs into the US. He claims that information on Fast and Furious, the program under which the US government sold arms to Mexican drug gangs, would help in his defense by showing that his cartel was working closely with the US government.
At http://conservativewatchnews.com/2012/01/17/the-smoking-gun-attorney-general-eric-holder-gave-drug-cartels-immunity/#more-10632 we read that the corruption involved goes at least as far up the chain as Attorney General Holder and probably all of the way to the top. Holder is described as another crooked Chicago politician, with the implication that so is his boss. An attempt is being made to impeach him before the November election.
In http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/world/americas/us-drug-agents-launder-profits-of-mexican-cartels.html?pagewanted=all it is stated that the DEA laundered millions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels. They give the feeble excuse that they were trying to find out how money is laundered. It apparently took them a long time to find out. The money laundering by the DEA has been traced back as far as 2007,when they were helping the Beltran Leyva cartel.
All of these actions show hypocrisy of the highest level. We have to hope that the impeachment action against Holder proceeds because there is no other way of finding out the sordid details of this case.
Early last year I published a post called The War on Drugs is a Failure. The situation is even worse than I wrote then. It has become abundantly clear that the ATF, DEA, and Customs and Immigration are all involved. We know that in the 60s and 70s the CIA imported heroin from Southeast Asia and cocaine from South America. Now that we know that several different branches of the US government are involved in importing supposedly illegal drugs and laundering the profits it is time to end the whole charade. This requires legalizing and taxing all the drugs that are currently illegal. This will make all of the government employees who are involved in both sides of the drug trade surplus. This will also make a big decrease in the prison population and the number of young people who are caught up in the drug trade. As stated previously, once they have been in jail once or twice it becomes almost impossible for them to get legal jobs, so that they are forced to stay in the rackets all of their lives, at enormous expense to the public purse. While they are in and out of jail their children grow up in single-parent households, which makes them much more likely to have behavior problems or become criminals themselves. To make use of the empty prisons, consider that in the small-scale Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s thousands of people went to jail. At last count the enormous set of frauds involved in the recent mortgage swindles resulted in two indictments. If the Attorney General was replaced by someone who was prepared to do his job this number could be increased easily.
I was not surprised a few years ago when I read that the union of California prison guards was the biggest lobbying group in the campaign against easing drug laws. They spent even more money in the 2010 election than the much-larger teachers’ union. When I was researching California finances last year I discovered that Arnold had tried to talk to state legislators about reducing the budget but could not reach them because they were in Hawaii courtesy of the same union. If you have read my posts about how governments work and Parkinson’s law, you will understand that the big bureaucracies like the DEA have to keep expanding all the time. To do this they have to demonize drugs, and this seems to be the only reason. The public are spending billions of dollars to provide steady employment for the DEA and allied government branches so that they can produce a new generation of criminals.
