Penny Pincher Personal Finance

ACTA: Obama's end run around SOPA/PIPA Resistance

2012-01-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

Obama just signed a treaty called ACTA into law. (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). This treaty allows any other country to request that ISP's remove people's web content based on claims of "copyright infringement", without first filing a lawsuit or anything to prove their claims.

Essentially this means now Big Brother everywhere can censor the internet by using other countries as proxies. And we can soon say goodbye to torrents, songs and snippets of movies on YouTube, embedded news clips on blogs, etc. I can't say how many bands I have become aware of and familiar with their material by looking them up on YouTube. From Kid Ory (jazz trombone) to Lady Gaga (yes, I know, there's apparently something wrong with her left eye and she's named herself after some alternate-history occult version of the planet Pluto) to Gogol Bordello (gypsy punk). We are heading toward a cultural vacuum. Hear that sucking sound? Oh wait, that's the dollar. My bad.

Well, maybe we'll all be playing in jug bands for fun, because the internet will be all Corporatocracy all the time, and we'll have to get unplugged from the Matrix to feel human anymore. Up the skiffle!

Also in the works is a program that would require everyone to use an identity card to sign onto the internet, essentially making anonymous communication much more difficult. More censorship. Actually that boils down to wiretapping everybody all the time, in my book. Perhaps hackers will find a way around it. Hacking someone else's Wifi might be a way, but then that person might get in trouble for things you do on their connection. (Those Kryptes better get good wifi encryption at home, I think)

There's a 50-cent vocabulary word of the day for you. Kryptes. Look it up. I think it's a fitting term for what's happening to our government. Roaming the cybersphere, they want to turn us laconic. They want to kill Americans on executive order, or send us to Helot Hotel, of FEMA fame. May they get wee partans in their choady beards.

Funny how international treaties trump our sovereignty, so that the people don't have a voice. Unless we stand up and say no en masse, and make our elected officials withdraw from the UN. Will that happen?

Not to alarm anyone but there is also a UN Small Arms Treaty he could sign that would make owning firearms illegal. That'll go over like a lead balloon. Or a lead something anyway. The threepers are getting rather shrill these days, and well they should.

Band-aid Cure for RFID Cards

2012-01-26T07:24:00.000-08:00

If you are concerned about your ID and credit cards having RFID chips in them, they sell wallets that purportedly attenuate (block) RFID signals. Some are made of aluminum and some of stainless steel.

There is no reason to spend a bunch of money on one of these fancy wallets.

I have discovered that a small Band-Aid tin is the perfect size to hold these kind of cards. Since it's just regular steel, and I don't know how well regular steel attenuates RFID, I would recommend also getting some aluminum furnace/duct tape and taping up the inside or outside of the can with a couple layers, or just lining it with a couple layers of aluminum foil. An Altoids tin would also work for this, but with the Band-Aid tin, for the ladies, it opens at the top so you can just pop the top and grab your card out without taking the whole tin out of your purse.

Aluminum by itself doesn't block RFID very well. Stainless steel does a much better job (also nickel). I was just thinking maybe a combination of metals would help.

The kind of RFID chips they put in pets are of a lower frequency than the ID and credit card kind, and those lower frequencies are harder to block. They go through metal. So don't bother to put tin foil on your cat.

I want YOU for the Tin Foil Brigade!

Cheap Wound Suction

2012-01-26T06:08:00.000-08:00

An MIT grad student has developed a cheap hand-pumped wound bandage with suction. Maintaining negative pressure on a wound helps it heal faster. The bandage can be left on for three days.

Field dressings, y'all!
http://cryptogon.com/?p=27228

Have I Been Duped by a Soros-funded Psyops?

2012-01-24T21:29:00.000-08:00

My last post about Newt Gingrich linked to a site called www.dcbureau.org. Someone I know told me he thought that site might be funded in some way by George Soros, who also has his fingers in the Occupy movement and also in a lot of media.

Well, I don't like to think I got fooled, but if I did, I'll come clean.

Today I tried to research the matter and didn't get real far. They have an email you can write to to get their donors. I might resort to that. I didn't want to bother them but I'm not getting much through other channels. The weird thing, though, is I could have sworn that earlier today their major donors were listed on their About page, and now they're not. Or I might be wrong.

Neat gadget from Global Guerillas

2012-01-24T12:22:00.000-08:00

I found this on Global Guerillas website - it's called the Arduino.
It's open source electronic hardware - I guess you could make your own Furby-like toy or something with it, although I'm probably not thinking big enough.
http://arduino.cc/en/

Newt Gingrich's Arms Dealer Bribe Scandal

2012-01-23T05:18:00.000-08:00

This is a serious matter. Better read this article on Mr. Gingrich and his second wife, Maryanne, and the FBI investigation into them soliciting a bribe from an arms dealer.
http://www.dcbureau.org/201112136815/national-security-news-service/newt-gingrich-marianne-and-the-arms-dealera-buried-fbi-investigation.html
This is NOT the man we need for president. He's got too many skeletons in the closet. He might be blackmailable. Just sayin'.

It might be divorce sour grapes, but in this article it says Maryanne characterizes Newt as being hopeless with money. Do we need someone who is hopeless with money in his own private life to be running the country when we are in such a financial pickle?

Girls with Mysterious Tourettes Symptoms Blown Off By Docs As "Mass Hysteria"

2012-01-22T06:46:00.000-08:00

This is unbelievable.

http://www.thebigwobble.com/2012/01/12-girls-with-tourettes-like-illness.html
The doctors (who were brought in by the feds) are saying the girls in the New York high school who were having symptoms resembling Tourettes Syndrome are suffering from "Conversion Disorder", which is a fancy word for mass hysteria.

One of the girls said she woke up from a nap and then had the symptoms. That does not sound like mass hysteria to me. How could they all come down with these symptoms independently of each other, for example after an event as untraumatic and peaceful as a nap at home?

Whatever the cause, I do have some suggestions how they might find relief without drugs. Apparently the girls were all cheerleaders. I have a relative who developed Tourettes like symptoms. She found relief in dancing. When she danced, the tic did not happen. The girls, who are already accustomed to moving in tandem with each other as a cheer team, could resume their cheering activities, or form a dance troupe, and not only find relief from their tics for a few hours a day, but also lessen whatever social isolation they might be having due to being pulled out of school. Not only that, but they could take classes together as a group and get back to school or be tutored together. Their newfound fame might get them a spot on a TV dance contest, and they could raise money for college for themselves and even for scholarships for other students. Or, if they got to a good enough level as a dance troupe, that could be their career, and they could perform to raise big money for their own charity that they could form, and pay themselves a salary from some of it. Just a thought.

NPR is Controlled Media, Parrots Corporate Lies

2012-01-22T06:25:00.000-08:00

I used to think NPR reported the news in a fair way, for intellectual people. That is the image they like to project. But in the last couple years I have caught them doing all kinds of dirty tricks in their news shows. One slick trick is to completely ignore Ron Paul even when he wins a poll, and pretend some other guy won. The entire mainstream media is doing that too, but it was especially blatant right after the Iowa poll. The BBC is also very bad about this.

Another dirty trick is to mention something unpleasant in the same breath as someone they want to make look bad. This involves running two stories back to back, the first one being the person they want to make look bad and the second one being the unpleasant story; and they don't even pause for breath so if you're not paying close attention you think it's the same story; or unconsciously you associate the guy with the unpleasant thing. With this trick, they have complete plausible deniability, but to me it's classic NLP jedi mind tricks. I have caught them at it a couple times. (I wish I could remember the specific instances).

Monsanto was funding NPR for a while around 2010 and NPR Marketplace was parroting Monsanto’s agenda by having a guy named Pedro Sanchez from Columbia University on their show who was pushing big agra ideas of increased use of pesticides and fertilizer being the solution to world hunger. This was a violation of FCC regulations. http://www.naturalnews.com/032868_NPR_Monsanto.html

DHS is sponsoring programs at NPR now, and announcing it with little public service announcements for E-Verify. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2008/12/why_is_the_department_of_homel.shtml

I would like to end this article with a parody of the usual NPR identification that you can say whenever you hear them say it:
THIS.....Is Not The Truth!

Vaccine Boobs Say to Delay Breastfeeding

2012-01-20T19:45:00.000-08:00

Not to insult actual boobs, but the vaccine pushers are telling women to delay breastfeeding so that their infant's vaccines can be of stronger effect.

I dunno about you, but I have always been under the impression that mother's milk itself imparted immunities to babies. Might have had something to do with reading Dr. Spock books when I was a kid. So if you breast feed, what do you need with all those vaccines in the first place? Oh, but no, don't breast feed, so Junior'll not only "need" all those shots, but they'll be more powerful. And then your milk will dry up and you'll have to feed Junior some expensive formula, made with - you guessed it - Fluoridated water! and Mad Cow Nilbog Milk!

What part of Junior's jabs will be more powerful? The extra viruses they slip in on the side? The mercury? No thanks. This is just more stupid poppycock by the big pharma drug pushers to try and force people to buy their crap. And I suspect, they've abandoned "Prima Non Nocere" a long time ago in the name of profits.

By the way, in the last couple years, the church I go to has gotten itself a resident nurse. This woman sits in her very own office every Sunday and makes flu shots available to all and sundry. The stupid thing is, this is a rather affluent church. It's not like the congregation is the huddled masses, yearning to be jabbed. You'd think they'd have their own physicians, so why is this woman there? She asked me a few weeks ago, in a rather concerned and solicitous way, if I had gotten my flu shot this year. I sort of blew it off, told her I had to hurry off somewhere, and have just avoided her since.

The one and only flu shot I ever got was from her two years ago - it was just a seasonal flu shot. At the time I wasn't all that "awake", I thought I was being really organized, and that I'd done well to actually get one. But last year I came down with the flu for the first time ever. I have a suspicion that the shot made me weak for the next year. It kicked my butt for about 2 weeks. Every time I tried to go back to work it came back.

This year, I'm staying the hell away from the needle and instead I've stocked up on elderberry syrup. It's some "organic" knockoff of Sambucol. All it is is elderberries, and no echinacea or any extra stuff. I figure, if I don't get the flu, I can use it to flavor fancy cocktails (in small amounts).

If you get seasonal flu, elderberry syrup will make you get better about twice as fast. It boosts your immune system. I have also stocked up on garlic pills. I think I mentioned this before, but in case I didn't, here is a recap: elderberries are good for seasonal flu, but garlic is better for the more virulent pandemic kinds of flu that make cytokine storms. Garlic will dampen a cytokine storm (immune overreaction) which might lessen any damage to your internal organs it might cause. Why not just eat enough garlic to do the same? Because it's a truckload. The pills are de-stinkified, so they have the dosage without the bad breath one would get from eating ungodly amounts of garlic. I still enjoy eating garlic - just not ungodly amounts.

Debasing of Coins? Use the Not-Money Magnet!

2012-01-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

The U.K. has debased its 5 and 10 pence coins and now they won't work in parking meters. The new coins are steel. At least that makes them easy to sort out. Just use a not-money magnet! Whatever sticks to the magnet ain't real money. They're also thicker, but why waste time feeling them when a magnet will work faster?

I wonder what a bunch of magnetized coins would do to a vending machine? I wonder if they've thought of this? Hmm...

The US is to debase nickels any time this year. I am watching for this and haven't seen any announcement yet, but they're supposed to do it sometime in 2012. If we start having big inflation, pre-2012 nickels will disappear. But you don't have to sort them like you do pennies - yet. You want some cheap copper? Get rolls of nickels here and there, and sit on them for a few years. Once they truck out the debased nickels, the value of your real copper nickels will be closer to the commodity value (which is higher than the face value). Just think about the 90% silver coins. A dime is going for around $2.40 or something like that.

On the other hand, you might want extra food around first, if you haven't started prepping yet. Once you're pretty much ready though, save your nickels.

Maybe I should acknowledge inflation and start calling myself Nickel Pincher.

Magic of the Future!

2012-01-18T22:25:00.000-08:00

I just re-found a website I found before and had forgotten about. This guy Karl Hans Wels claims he was the first inventor of "orgonite", a substance that stores orgone (Wilhelm Reich's word for life energy), and he has a magic course of study that leaves out the religious and mystical mumbo-jumbo.
Here it is: http://www.magicofthefuture.com/
I like it because it explains, bare-bones, how magick is supposed to work, kind of from a scientific point of view.

The only thing is, the colors on that site are a bit eye-popping. If this bothers you, you could copy and paste the text into a word processing program and then it would be easier to read. I wish people would stop making bright red or purple websites. Ow.

Mineral Content of Bottled Waters

2012-01-18T11:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.mineralwaters.org/index.php?func=country&parval=112
This website has a list of bottled waters (I linked to the US page) and what minerals they have, plus taste reviews. You can sometimes tell what fluoride content a particular brand of water has.
For example, Kroger Spring Water, .06 mg/liter

$1.5 Million Dollar Cave House For Sale

2012-01-17T06:08:00.000-08:00

This isn't really for penny pinchers, but some lady is putting up for sale the desert cave house her late husband built. It also has a bunch of natural pools (and a disguised hot tub) up on a hill, a game room, and a safe room. It was blasted out of the living rock. The price is down to $1.5 million from $3 million. It would make a nice survival retreat, except being in the desert might have agricultural disadvantages.

http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/inside-a-15-million-cave-house.html

I have a question. Why do they call it "living rock" when someone carves their own cave? That's kind of funny. It makes me think the rock says "Ow! Stop it!" when you're carving.

Vladimir Gavreau's Jericho Trumpet

2012-01-17T05:19:00.000-08:00


Gavreau and his invention

During the 1950's, a French scientist named Vladimir Gavreau was doing robotics research. He discovered a ventilation shaft in the building where he was working was making the people who worked there sick by way of very low frequency vibrations of a fan in the shaft. The shaft was the perfect dimensions to amplify the vibrations of the fan. When he figured this out, Gavreau turned his research instead to sonic weapons. He developed what I can only call a "Jericho trumpet": a giant subsonic whistle that could knock down buildings.

They tested this whistle, which was blown by an air pump, on a special concrete housing they built for it at Versailles. It almost knocked down part of Versailles and it destroyed its own concrete housing. Another whistle almost killed the researchers; one of them ignored the pain enough to be able to shut off the device, and they were all sick for days after.

It does not take very much energy (aka volume) for infrasound to do great damage. Such a device could be put into a remote controlled tank, or a flying drone, and inflict great harm on the battlefield. You can't direct or detect the direction infrasound goes in - it goes in all directions and permeates everything, so it would have to be remote controlled.

At certain frequencies infrasound doesn't knock things down or damage internal organs, but instead it makes people feel uneasy or depressed. The mistral wind, which is a seasonal coastal wind in the Mediterranean, does this naturally by way of infrasound. Other natural infrasound phenomena include the Aurora Borealis, winds in the desert, earthquakes, tides, and air pressure changes from solar flares. That uneasy feeling people get before a hurricane is from infrasound.

Sonic weapons exist today. There is the crowd-controlling sound cannon, there is also a thing that looks like a wand that you can make it shriek at whoever you point at. It uses a row of piezoelectric speakers. They were thinking of carrying the wand things on airplanes as a way of attacking hijackers. Do they have infrasonic weapons? Who knows? I wouldn't rule it out though.

Even a rock band has experimented with sound weapons: the band Throbbing Gristle used piezoelectric speakers tuned very close in pitch to drive away their annoying next door neighbors. The difference between the two very high pitches was low level infrasound. The band The Flaming Lips has used very low frequency in their recording "Zaireeka", although you would need a speaker system with a subwoofer for the full effect.

Here is the most detailed article I have found on Dr. Gavreau's work and on the phenomenon of infrasound in general: http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/history/gavreau.htm

Here is a pretty comprehensive article on the biological effects of sound
http://sites.google.com/site/appliedbiophysicsresearch/sound/infrasound/acoustic-trauma-bioeffects-of-sound

Solar Flare Cycle Normal So Far

2012-01-15T20:13:00.000-08:00

STEREO sunspot cam

I got myself the January issue of "Popular Communications" and looked at the solar flare chart from the NOAA on p. 56. The solar cycle seems to be progressing normally, but the article about it speculated that the peak of the cycle would be not in 2012/2013 but rather in 2014. (The cycle peaks on average every 11 years, so it's not like clockwork.) However, a panel of experts led by NOAA has predicted May 2013 as the peak.

You can get current solar flare data here http://www.n3kl.org/sun/noaa.html
Or here http://www.sunspotwatch.com
Or here http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/beacon/beacon_secchi.shtml

One cool thing about the solar cycle being on the rise, is that shortwave radio propagation is higher. Meaning that if you get into HAM radio, you will be able to get signals from farther away. And your signal will be able to be received farther away. Same with CB radio.

If we end up with a censored internet, or if we lose a big part of the grid so internet's spotty, HAM radio may be a nice alternative for keeping in touch. Yes, it requires a license, but if they completely outlawed HAM down the road you'd still have the equipment. At that point, just go mobile and sporadic. It's still worth getting the license, because you have to learn about radio and pass a test. Jumping through the hoop is worth it for the self-education, plus we're not yet at the point where they would feel compelled to outlaw lots of forms of communications.

Pushback on SOPA and PIPA Internet Censorship Bills

2012-01-15T05:54:00.000-08:00

Public outcry is working to make members of Congress consider altering the SOPA bill to be less draconian.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/under-voter-pressure-members-of-congress-backpedal-on-sopa.ars
and also read here about SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112455783/resistance-to-anti-piracy-bill-sopa-keeps-growing/

Pres. Obama said he would veto SOPA. But that's what he said about the Indefinite Detention bill, and then he went and signed that. HE LIED TO US AND TO CONGRESS. So why should we trust him?

Here is where to click to write to your representatives against SOPA and PIPA. We have until January 24 to get this message out, then they vote on it that day. They're in recess now. You could even go see your reps in person.
http://americancensorship.org/

Here's a video.

Chemtrails - A cloud cover to enable electromagnetic weapons?

2012-01-14T19:29:00.000-08:00

If you cross two beams of ultrasound that are close to each other in frequency, you can get audible sound. This is how the Audio Spotlight works It was invented by a kid from MIT and they use it at Disney now.

Likewise, if you cross two microwave beams you can cook someone. Other frequencies, you can electrocute them from a distance. Maybe with a satellite. Imagine you've pissed someone off, he presses a button and hey! Ow! holy Zeus! You can zap someone's electronic equipment and fry it. You can cloak the atmosphere so that missiles get confused. You can mess with the weather. You can even make earthquakes.

Maybe they want to be Tim the Enchanter...

I wondered why the spraying planes seemed to be military - i.e. even if they're not military looking planes, they have no flight plans posted. Well, according to Dutchsinse, it's all some kind of star wars tech they're testing. This cloud on our horizon is some kind of electronic air-soup that enables the zapping. The collateral (or not so collateral) damage is that the aluminum and barium are precipitating into the ground and killing the plants. But what a coincidence! Monsanto is developing an aluminum resistant bunch of seeds. How did they know? And remember, Monsanto now owns ACADEMI, aka Blackwater aka Xe. He who controls food controls the world, and this is their perfect opportunity to - um - make a killing.

I feel like a bug at someone's suburban backyard picnic. Spray and zap. Spray and zap. What, those silly humans aren't dead yet? Darn mosquitoes! Spray, zap, spray, zap. Bet they're wishing Zyklon-B was still on the market. Wouldn't it make their job so much faster and easier? Spray, zap, spray, zap. Oy vey!

According to Dutchsinse, the only ways to avoid these weapons are to go deep underground inside a cave lined with lead and ceramics, or to rise above the field of battle. That's assuming they don't fry the controls in your plane. Perhaps a hot air balloon? Would that get high enough? Probably not.

We might find some relief with the orgone-wielding Etheric Warriors. They think they can disperse chemtrails with homemade cloudbusters, or as they call them, chembusters. I really don't know about that, but I suppose it's worth a try. My question is, however, if the cloudbuster works to put a hole in the cloud, where does the particulate matter end up? Probably still on the ground somewhere.

But it would be funny if a collection of $150 devices consisting of nothing fancier than copper pipes in a bucket of resin and metal shavings could defeat a multi-billion-dollar star wars project.

Barring that, I think we just need the Ghost Riders. Mad cows in the sky...

3 Emerging Diseases, 12 Patients Each Time

2012-01-14T17:54:00.000-08:00

12 high school girls in the same school district in LeRoy, New York have all gotten Tourette's like symptoms, and due to HIPPA laws, the docs aren't saying what it is. Anti-vaccine activists have speculated it might be due to Gardasil vaccines. The NYS health dept. said the girls have been diagnosed and treated, but a MSNBC article said one of the girls called and told the reporter they haven't in fact diagnosed it yet. One doctor has said it could be "conversion syndrome" (i.e. blackouts from stress). Yeah, right. And I've got a bridge for sale.

12 patents in India have come down with a completely drug resistant strain of tuberculosis. It is so far 100% fatal. The strain, called TDR for totally drug resistant, actually showed up first in 2003 in Italy. Two women died of it there. One patient in India was a man in his 50's who has wandered off; nobody knows where he went. Which means he might be out there spreading it somewhere.

12 people mostly in the Midwest have come down with a new variant of the swine flu. This one is not that contagious, it looks like it's mostly hitting people who have close contact with farm animals, like at a 4-H club or similar. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/01/11/12-infected-with-new-swine-flu-strain

FrAAnce's Triskaidekaphobia

2012-01-13T21:04:00.000-08:00

Jacques de Meow's Revenge

Getting Foreclosed? Stay In Your House 3 More Years For Free

2012-01-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

If you want to make it as painful and slow as possible for your lender to repossess your home, here's how:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/28/real_estate/foreclosure/index.htm
Do not move out.
Fight back in court.
File an answer to the plaintiff's complaint. If you don't reply they will get a default judgment.
Wait till the last minute to file any replies in court, which makes as much delay as possible
Use the robo-signing argument if it applies, to say your foreclosure is invalid
Demand the plaintiff produce the original promissory note
Never sign a deed in lieu of foreclosure
File bankruptcy

This will ruin your credit, but if you're late on your mortgage anyway, it's already shot.

Radioactive Tissue Holders

2012-01-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

There were these metal tissue holders that got pulled from Bed Bath and Beyond, because they were radioactive. They had Cobalt-60 in them. The holders came from China and India - maybe they got some scrap metal that was radioactive and melted it down.
http://sincedutch.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/1132012-highly-radioactive-tissue-holders-bed-bath-and-beyond-but-from-where-nusteel-corp-tatara-group-china-and-india/

This does happen from time to time. I remember back in the 90's hearing about a whole family that got cancerous lesions behind their knees. Eventually they figured out there was this metal chair in their kitchen that had a radioactive bar in it, right where their knees would dangle over.

Everyone should have a Geiger counter. Next time you want to buy another TV, get a Geiger counter instead. Then you can test everything in your house, or you'd have one handy if there were ever a nuclear accident or war and you needed to tell if the fallout had decayed enough to go outside yet. You could, if you are tight enough with the neighbors, share one among several households, or you could get one for your extended family in the area. An old Civil Defense one that works should cost only about $200 or $250, and last time I checked the price that was right after Fukushima, so it might be less now.

Another Firefox Plug-In to Defeat SOPA

2012-01-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

Here's another one, this one is called SOAPY. Which is what I would have called it! that sounds a lot catchier than DeSopa.

http://slashdot.org/submission/1907648/random-guy-defeats-sopa-from-his-bedroom

UN Soldiers Brought Super Cholera to Haiti

2012-01-12T09:48:00.000-08:00

According to this article:
http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-un-soldiers-brought-deadly-superbug-americas-194141189--abc-news.html
UN troops from Nepal brought a super virulent variant of cholera to Haiti after the earthquake. Supposedly this was a strain they already suffered from or were carriers of, and the lack of sanitation in their camp caused it to spread. At least that's the official story. The strain of cholera has shown up in Boston, Miami and New York already - not a pandemic, just a few cases here and there.

If you ever get cholera and you can't get to a doctor, your risk of death comes from dehydration. Therefore stock up on Gatorade (or stuff to make your own), Immodium, and anything that will keep you from throwing up so much (Ginger, and if you consume cannabis, you know that helps with nausea, but I won't tell you to use it because that would be promoting illegal activity).

How To Contact Space People

2012-01-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

Where's that confounded bridge?!

Here is a bit of fun: A rare book by Ted Owens called "How to Contact Space People", reproduced online for your reading pleasure.
http://www.thejinn.net/ted_owens.htm
The attendant warning given is that it may warp your brain. According to Owens, not a lot of people can withstand the mental strain of talking to space people...

(No, that's not why I'm warped! With me it's natural!)

This website I got it from http://www.thejinn.net puts forth the idea that space aliens are really just the latest disguises for Djinn. Djinn are like spirits, or fairies, or maybe even demons, that can shape shift. Think genie in a bottle, but where that came from was some stuff about spirits in the Koran, and Mohammed had to get it from somewhere. (Ancient folk knowledge, voices in a cave, maybe both, whatever.)

Most cultures have legends about spirits or extradimensional people. The Djinn range from playful pranksters to helpful "ascended masters" or "space brothers" to malevolent beings with a sinister agenda that like to eat fear. They're like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

So... I'm hoping that this 2012 stuff is just a big prank by the Djinn. Maybe they're doing it for the lulz.

China Wants to Detain People in Secret Locations; also Bad Cyber Laws

2012-01-12T05:19:00.000-08:00

Seems like other countries are jumping on the NDAA and SOPA bandwagon:

China is seeking to alter its criminal code to detain people for up to 6 months in secret locations. This has human rights activists worried. (they should also worry about Americans now too)
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/28/world/la-fg-china-detain-20110828

Several countries are considering draconian cyber-crime laws: China wants to increase the penalty from 3 years to 7 years in jail, and Australia is considering putting in a Chinese-style firewall.
http://blog.sherweb.com/controversial-cyber-laws-around-the-world/

The problem with this firewall is it would really not block child porn, as it is touted to, because that sort of thing is mostly exchanged on chats and in peer to peer networks, which the firewall would not block. Instead, it would make browsing slow and could be used to smother political discourse. Which is probably its real intent.

Note: chats and peer to peer networks not blocked by firewall. May be a way around censorship elsewhere too.

ACADEMI (Formerly known as Xe) Owned by Monsanto

2012-01-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Check this out - Monsanto bought Blackwater/Xe in 2010.
http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/monsanto-now-owns-blackwater-xe/

Blackwater changed its name to Xe in 2009. But recently they changed it again to ACADEMI.
Here's my old article about their recent name change.
http://pennypincherpersonalfinance.blogspot.com/2011/12/blackwater-changes-name-again.html

They are trying again to get a contract in Iraq. Except we supposedly withdrew from Iraq. Except for the 70,000 contractors (read: Mercenaries) still there. Well, they're contractors.

WHY is Monsanto seeking a mercenary contract in Iraq? Three guesses. They probably want to force their crappy poison GMO seeds on them, by force of arms. Or maybe they want to expand their chemtrail spraying, or steal land from farmers that their pollen blows onto.

BTW, a lot of heirloom seed varieties are DISAPPEARING from Iraq due to the war. Introducing big-agra on top of this is a recipe for disaster and food slavery.

One of the things good people could do to help is arrange to smuggle heirloom seeds into Iraq. Or help them to save seeds. Or preserve and grow Iraqi heirloom seeds for restoring them later. This may be fairly easy: one seed catalog I got has these really cool looking Iraqi eggplants, they're wide rather than long.

Fight death with the propagation of life.

Permaculture/Sustainable Resources

2012-01-11T08:28:00.000-08:00

Permaculture is like passive solar and wood powered utilities, food preservation, straw bale houses, rocket stoves and the like. Basically being off the grid, with a bit of an on-the-farm focus. Or sustainability if you will.

This is the good side of sustainable. I just don't like anyone using the word "sustainability" to justify promoting the murder or sterilization of 80% of the humans on this planet, a la Agenda 21, the Georgia Guidestones, or any of that kind of "save the planet, kill yourself" rubbish. I think "genocide" is more the word for that, and it's completely unnecessary. They've hijacked the word "sustainable" and turned it into a code word for "your stuff is now mine and you're gonna die now". Kinda like the Nazis hijacked the swastika. F**k the Nazis for ruining a perfectly good symbol for life.

So,
I think I stole this one off of Root Simple:
http://www.geopathfinder.com/4436.html
There's also this one
http://www.permies.com/

The Dogs of War

2012-01-10T18:47:00.000-08:00

Now I know why the cats are learning Dog. The dogs are arming themselves. Even the little dogs! This one has a TANK.
See here. Again, I can't embed the vid so just click on it.
http://www.vidaddict.com/little-dogs-tank-costume/

You know how people say Hollywood movies soften up the population for events that a secret cabal wants to spring on us? What was "Cats and Dogs"????? Hmmmmm!

Fight SOPA Censorship with Firefox add-on DeSopa

2012-01-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

First off, SOPA is a bill that would pretty much turn the Internet into what China has for an internet. The feds would be able to block DNS (i.e. domain name service that points a .com name to an IP address) for websites they didn't like based on "intellectual property" issues. i.e. the huge sins of embedding YouTube videos in blog posts, or linking to someone else's article. It would pretty much squash the independent press that has popped up online. (Yes, I have a horse in the game).

A lot of copyright lawyers oppose SOPA. See here for a long list of them
http://www.prisonplanet.com/copyright-lawyers-oppose-sopa-%e2%80%a6-and-say-it-won%e2%80%99t-even-work.html

There is also someone who has written a Firefox add-on that will unblock the websites. Without it, you would have to look up the IP addresses of your favorite websites and save them somewhere, maybe written down. Which I still recommend you do.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/desopa/

North Carolina to Compensate Sterilization Eugenics Victims

2012-01-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

http://news.yahoo.com/n-c-compensate-victims-sterilization-20th-century-eugenics-141035445--abc-news.html
From 1929 to 1974, the state of North Carolina (among many other states) made it a practice to secretly sterilize poor, unwed mothers that came in to the hospital to give birth.

Now they are going to compensate those victims.

It's about damn time.

I once had a friend who narrowly escaped this fate in the 1980's in a different state, while having an abortion. The person with her noticed what was about to happen, raised holy hell, and got her out of there. She went on to raise two fine children later in life. Anyone who judges someone else because they're poor or are having misfortune, is just wrong. Poverty is not a crime. However, it may be the result of another crime, namely institutionalized oppression and "legal" theft.

Eugenics is not a thing of the past, unfortunately. It continues, under the radar, in the form of secret sterilization or murder, mostly via fake or contaminated vaccines, and possibly through GMO foods or even the water supply. Not just in the third world either, but here. Women on birth control pee estrogen, and this is making it back into the tap water. Same with psych meds. The cleaning process for tap water does not get these drugs out.

And chemtrails. I saw some really spectacular ones the other day. It started with a plane going by, and I watched the contrail. It expanded to 50 times its original width, and then wisps started precipitating out of it sideways. Within half an hour, it had unpacked to form a big, opaque cloud at least 100 times the original width of it. I'd like to know how such a big opaque cloud can fit into a little skinny contrail. (hack, cough)

Place Yourself on the Socioeconomic Scale

2012-01-10T08:48:00.000-08:00

This is an interactive Excel file where you can fill in stuff about your income, neighborhood and type of house you live in, and figure out what "socioeconomic class" you are in.
http://boombustblog.com/images/stories/blog/models/boombustblog.com_socioeconomic_class_model_version_7.3_boombustblog.xls

Of course lots of people have been sliding downward. I don't think this little exercise matters much if the dollar is going to crash. Also, my own "class" doesn't matter that much to me, survival, justice and human rights are more important. What good does it do to gain the world if you lose your soul?

That being said, if you want to improve your "class", then self-education is key. Having a sheepskin (diploma) is also good, but try to get one without getting ripped off.

Cat Learning Foreign Language

2012-01-09T17:54:00.000-08:00

About a week ago I asserted that my cat was a furry little terrorist.
And I have since found MORE evidence that OTHER cats are also up to something...
This cat is learning to speak Dog, but when he was caught he resumed meowing.
http://www.vidaddict.com/cat-gets-caught-barking-then-resumes-meowing/
(sorry, can't embed video, so click on it)

Offshore Tech City Blueseed To Circumvent Work Visas

2012-01-07T05:21:00.000-08:00

http://cryptogon.com/?p=26847
Every once in a while someone gets tired of their government and decides to form their own offshore sovereign nation. This is a little different: the guy who founded Paypal is planning an offshore city, 12 miles from San Francisco, in international waters, called Blueseed. Those who work there could live in San Francisco and commute, and because it's in international waters they don't need work visas.

Move over, Hagbard Celine...

This is giving me ideas, although it's most probably out of my budget.

Encrypt Your Hard Drives

2012-01-06T06:49:00.000-08:00

Here's an article from the EFF about encrypting your hard drive
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/newyears-resolution-full-disk-encryption-every-computer-you-own

Here's their white paper about border-crossing with (or without) your data
https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/EFF-border-search_0.pdf

Space Nazis Want To Fry The Government

2012-01-05T14:17:00.000-08:00

Ohh-Kayyyy. This one's kind of weird.
This conspiracy website here www.enterprisemission.com is concerned with uncovering outer-space cover-ups, like UFO's and the like.

From what I can tell so far, here's their theory:
There are these dudes living in outer space. Based on the moon (or in the moon), and maybe also on or in Mars, or a moon of Mars.

The governments of the world know about it and are covering it up. The dudes might be human. Maybe they are Nazis with ties to Islamic extremists and to Japanese mafia. (which would tie in with Benjamin Fulford's claims of some kind of Asian mafia challenging the Illuminati). Maybe there are more than one faction of them, at war with each other. And maybe they have ties to a "black space program" here on Earth, outside of official government control, that got a bit out of hand.

(Other conspiracy theorists have drawn connections between radical Islam and Nazis. They say a bunch of Nazis went down to the Middle East at the end of WW2 and re-named themselves Arabic names, and ended up mostly helping with intelligence ops in various Arab countries. For what that's worth. But I haven't seen any explanation why they think the Japanese have anything to do with it, unless it's something left over from WW2)

Anyway, these dudes in outer space may have thrown down a gauntlet, in the form of scalar weapon (like their own version of HAARP) demonstrations and the presence of hovering tetrahedronal spaceships which were photographed over Moscow and China. It's possible they also destroyed the WTC, from space. (There is also a woman who is a structural engineer who claims the WTC was destroyed by a ray from outer space, and her proof is all about the math.)

So, the theory continues, we're at war with Space Nazis, and we used the War on Terror as a cover for the War on Space Nazis. There's something in Iraq and Afghanistan that has to do with the Space Nazis, which the author of the website says he "hints at" in a book he's selling. (of course!)

I can't go into what the Enterprise website shows as proof, because they take their time and I'm just not going to do it justice; so you should just go there and read it. One design flaw with their site however, is they use white text on a black image as a background, and their pages are longer than the image, so when the black ends you will have to read the rest of the page by clicking and dragging the mouse over it.

One other thing they claim is that one of the moons of Mars, Phobus, is actually a defunct wreck of a spaceship. It is off-gassing, it has right-angle criss-cross lines on it, it's hollow and seems to have rooms in it, and it's shaped roughly like a squashed diamond. But it also kind of looks like a pockmarked rock. Who knows.

And here's my answer: Whitey on the Moon.

Occupy the Death Star! LOL

2012-01-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

Vote Early and Often?

2012-01-04T18:45:00.000-08:00

With upcoming opportunities to vote, and the election probably a pretty hot one, I thought I would assemble some links on voter fraud. And it seems other writers out there in the blogosphere have been thinking along the same lines.

So, here we go:
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2012/01/the-history-of-massive-vote-fraud-in-the-united-states.html
This guy thinks vote fraud is rampant in the US, and has been for some time. If this is the case, then for how many years have we not been really getting who we really want? And is American democracy an oxymoron?

http://spaces.icgpartners.com/index2.asp?NGuid=C5BD2CC7645340BEB1210650699F1F4F
This one suggests having a public black-hat hacker conference to discuss the vulnerabilities of voting machines. That way we could fix all the bugs before the election. Apparently Russia did this recently. Is Russia more free and transparent than the US now?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Electoral_fraud
This is the Wikipedia article on it. Notice the graphic in the upper right hand corner that seems to represent that the English speaking countries have less political corruption. Ha! what if that graph was just propaganda? How can we be certain?

http://www.clearvoting.com/intro_software_en.php
Here is some voting software that is supposed to prevent fraud. It's open-source!

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8997
this guy points out a University of Iowa professor Dr. Douglas Jones who has written about another voting hack in D.C. where some Univ. of Michigan hackers made the computer play the Wolverine fight song every time someone voted, and they discovered Russian and Chinese hackers were also already inside the same computer when they got there. It doesn't say which election or where the computer was. But the attack was an SQL injection. SQL is a database language used a lot in websites, e-commerce, bookkeeping applications, contact managers, you name it. It's everywhere.

And last but not least there was Anonymous' threat to mess up the Iowa caucus.

Pizza Gun Idea

2012-01-04T13:26:00.000-08:00

I saw this this afternoon:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/pizza-pistol-prompts-punishment-for-public-school-pupil.html

Some 10-year-old kid was pretending a half eaten piece of pizza was a gun, at his school lunch, and they punished him because they have zero-tolerance rules about pretend guns. Actually one of his "punishments" is a gun safety lesson, but I somehow doubt they're giving him a useful one like he could get at a range. (but that would be REALLY COOL!) I think any kid mature enough to understand responsibility should be allowed to learn how to shoot a gun, because then they'll respect and understand them, and they won't try to sneak into Dad's gun chest or Mom's nightstand and play with them and accidentally shoot someone.

But before I read the article, the image I had in my mind was more like a potato cannon that shot pizza bites. Maybe one could be made where you only have to whack the back of it and the air pushes the pizza bite out. Or one with a spring, like a Nerf dart gun. Now THAT would be cool. FOOOOOD FIIIIIIGHT!

An idea I have on EMF harassment

2012-01-04T10:04:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about people who believe they're being targeted for EMF harassment. Is it possible we all get the same broadcasts, but these folks are just a lot more sensitive to EMF than the rest of us? And what would cause this sensitivity? Sheer bad luck? Maybe implants, or maybe some kind of special ray that changed their brain?

If I were an evil dude who wanted to torture someone with EMF, it would be a lot easier to get at them once and make them sensitive to EMF, than to keep sending people there in person to blast them over and over again with high levels of EMF, and risk injuring or outing my own men. Then they could suffer just from living life with this disability, and nobody would understand it because they can't see anything happening. Occasional gaslighting would be like icing on the evil cake, but not necessary. Even if I still had to blast them from a satellite or radio tower, I wouldn't want the rest of the population to be able to sense it, and although it might be possible to track someone down to the square foot or so and then hone a beam in on them, you wouldn't have to waste the bandwidth if they had what was essentially a receiver and antenna in them. Then you could simply broadcast to their general area.

That all being said, if people are being harassed in this manner (I wouldn't doubt it actually), someone could also make equipment to find (and/or fry) any "bugs" these victims may have been given. The problem might then occur that the bugs are impossible to remove or neutralize, i.e. microscopic and too numerous, latched onto or embedded in some critical and delicate organ, or booby trapped.

Until the broadcasting can be stopped, perhaps a special house or tent could be built for EMF-sensitive people, something that was essentially a big Faraday cage. Such a structure could also be built like a private little TEMPEST zone - i.e. no electronic or acoustic spying would be possible from the outside. Then at least they'd be able to get some respite and some privacy.

People shouldn't have to go to such lengths to be left in peace. But then, people shouldn't be getting cancer left and right either.

Scientists Grow Sperm In Laboratory Dish

2012-01-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8988011/Scientists-grow-sperm-in-laboratory-dish.html

These scientists grew mouse sperm from "germ cells" (that's a sperm generating cell in the testes) in a lab dish filled with agar jelly. They published their results in the Asian Journal of Andrology.

They are touting it as a way for infertile men to still be able to father children.

I wonder then, if the next step could be to make your own germ cells, then someone's father could really "be a real nobody". Or they could grow a clone army.

I want my own clone army of mini me's. We could sing and we would blend real good.

The Disease Mongering Engine

2012-01-02T21:04:00.001-08:00

http://www.naturalnews.com/Disease-Mongering-Engine.asp
Click here for some fun inventing new non-existent diseases and learning how to get filthy rich off them!

Swedish Chef Works For the Government

2012-01-01T05:58:00.000-08:00

In the previous post I suggested one could circumvent the Men in Black at the restaurant supply store by speaking like the Swedish Chef. I have been contacted by confidential sources and advised that the Swedish Chef is actually working for the government. He recently had a run-in with Las Zetas lobsters. Here is the security tape... He was about to waterboard one of them, when the rest burst in, and...

In case you wonder if I've come unglued, the answer is Yes. But that happened a long time ago. :-)

This whole trend toward a police state has me so worried that right now I can only react to it with the absurd. But perhaps if we laugh at it, it will lose its power, like the evil carnival in "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

My Cat is a Furry Little Terrorist

2011-12-31T23:42:00.000-08:00

Overseeing DWMD (dandelion wine of mass destruction) creation

I have discovered that my cat is a domestic terrorist! And she is targeting my crops! This morning she somehow knocked over the window box in the kitchen that contains the culinary herbs. Dirt went everywhere, engulfing the seed-saving project. Of course now some of the seeds are embedded in the dirt. I will have mystery crops in my window. So my cat turns out to be in the Catz Force but she is of course blaming the attack on Mousessad. And how did I know? she doesn't look like a Persian cat.... LOL

More seriously, this week I laid in some rice from Restaurant Depot and I went to pay for it and they had to get a manager ID to override some limit on quantity. This was on just two bags of rice. I imagine that Chinese restaurants probably go through 200 lbs. of rice a day, but about 3 or 4 weeks ago I got 250 lbs. for a friend, and I got it in 25 lb. bags cause I can’t lift 100 lbs. – and maybe the Rice Nazi decided that was too much? How come the Chinese get away with it and not me??? Now actually I am not sure whether this limit thingie was imposed on everybody or just on me because I got the small bags. Or maybe someone else bought all they had one day? Or is DHS watching Restaurant Depot for preppers?

I can just see it, the Men in Black, with black chef's hats, lurking in the restaurant supply stores. I'll foil them by speaking in fake Swedish. Wiretap this! Hoor de voor dee mm bork bork bork! They'll think it's my secret recipe for rond du jambe et arabesque flambe' avec foie gras quand on a besoin de lezarder a la Cote d'Azure pour Carnevale, but now that's French isn't it? Zut alors!

Okay, maybe too much champagne at the party where I just was. By the way, just to show my exposure to Swedish isn't limited to a culinary muppet, for your New Years pleasure there is a great Swedish band out there called Hedningarna. They're kind of trance-tribal electronic folk. Here is them jamming with a Finnish joiker named Wimme. Joiking is a kind of singing that's kind of like Native American chanting, only it's Sami. It's improvised and usually pentatonic.

Anonymous (or whoever it is) Says They Will Publish Stratfor Emails

2011-12-28T22:02:00.000-08:00

Via Daily Mail: (click on link for the whole story)

The hacker group Anonymous, or should I say, the hackers who hacked Stratfor and then claimed to be part of Anonymous, have said that they will publish the Stratfor emails they stole a few days ago and that the emails "provide a smoking gun for a number crimes". They've already now posted the credit card numbers and used them to "donate to charity" on behalf of the clients on the client list they hacked.

Unfortunately, the credit card fraud they did will probably have a net effect of costing the charities a bunch of chargeback fees. I hope the credit card companies will be nice and waive these fees, as the charities had nothing to do with this. It's just a big headache for them, even just having to account for the in and out of the bogus transactions; but a pile of chargeback fees on top of it at $35 a pop would just suck for them.

In a world of rampant government surveillance, it is only natural that there would spring up groups that used similar techniques to expose corporate and government corruption. Who will watch the watchers who watch the watchers who watch the watchers who... aw hell. Just set up an infinite mirror. Here's looking at you kid.

Some new links/resources

2011-12-28T20:59:00.000-08:00

I'd like to introduce a couple new resources I just added to this blog, that someone turned me onto.
One is http://www.newsfollowup.com/. This is a gov't/business transparency watchdog site. It didn't have a blog so I put it as a whistleblower source on the news page.
Another is http://www.fulldisclosure.net/. This looks to be mostly about judicial corruption, from what I can tell. It's based in California so a lot of their news is about goings-on there. I put their blog on the blog roll.
And one more: www.corpwatch.org. They have a blog too, but I thought they should go on the news page with the other business watchdog site. This one is a watchdog site about corporations.

Our Military Bases Overseas are Staffed by Coolie Labor

2011-12-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675
The contractors who provide services to our troops overseas have in turn subcontractors, most from other countries, that recruit and hire foreign workers, mostly Asian, to build and staff our military bases. Their working conditions are deplorable: most are making $1.50 an hour or so, they are not provided safety gear, they are made to wait in line in the desert heat to be fed slop, and they are worked 16 hour days, 7 days a week. The contractors confiscate the workers' passports so they cannot leave. Sometimes the subcontractors' recruiters use bait and switch tactics to get people to work for them.

Even if half the world lives on less than $2.00 a day, and the poor workers think it's a decent wage where they come from, this is unconscionable to treat these guys this way and have them working alongside men who get a lot more money, better food, and safety gear for the same work. They all should be paid according to the work they do, not according to where they are from, allowed to keep their passports, and everybody needs safety gear.

The tiered system of contractors also shields the top tier of contractors from liability. So basically they are winking the other way at abuse, because they can make money that way.

So, is this the best we can do while "Defending the Free World"? While the very workers supporting the troops are not free and are treated so poorly?

Well, first of all, why are we even over there in the first place? 9-11 was a false flag. WMD's were a lie. The Arab Spring was engineered. We shouldn't be over there at all.

The whole idea of the so called "Free World" is BS propaganda to make us go to sleep while corporations rape the third world. We the People are not free. We are subject to covert surveillance all the time. If you get to be too much of a pain in the butt, you get suicided, or your career ruined, your academic credentials erased, your kids taken on false charges, etc.

Even if you didn't care about other people in other countries, we are not even reaping much of a benefit from these companies using our military to pillage. Maybe we get some cheap consumer electronics that are designed to break anyway, ten cents off at the pump, or some pesticide-laden, gas-ripened tomatoes or strawberries in January. Is that all we get for all that bloodshed and our boys coming home with PTSD? An Ipod that breaks on purpose after 6 months?

What to do, besides complain online? Break away from the system as much as you can. Arrange your life so you don't need the trinkets, or at least you need less of them. Avoid taxes of all kinds legally as much as you can by arranging your affairs accordingly. Boycott the big corporations to the extent that you can. Try not to use as much gas. In addition to starving the system, you will save money.

Stratfor Gets Hacked by Anonymous - PWNED!

2011-12-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

The hacker group Anonymous has hacked www.stratfor.com and stolen its 4,000 member database. This list of clients included MF Global and the Rockefeller Foundation. They also stole 200 GB of emails.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/stratfor-hacked-200gb-emails-credit-cards-stolen-client-list-released-includes-mf-global-rockef

I have a link to Stratfor in the news section. Usually you can go there and even without joining get a little bit of foreign strategy/policy news. It's down for "maintenance" right now though.

edit for clarification: Stratfor is kind of neo-con, or maybe more accurately, pro American intervention. This would be the opposite view from Ron Paul who is anti-interventionalist.

I wonder what kind of leaks Anonymous will make in a bit?

News update: Anonymous says they didn't do it. Basically the problem with being Anonymous is anyone can do something and claim to be Anonymous. Although NPR was speculating they did it and then pretended they didn't because they just didn't realize who they were dealing with. (whatever). Also one of the charities that the hackers were suggesting using the credit cards to make donations to, asked for them not to do so, because they'd have to return the money and pay a $35 fee on top of it for a chargeback on each transaction. this is what I heard on NPR this afternoon. Sounds like NPR is annoyed that another news outlet got hacked and they're sticking with their industry.

Anyway here's a link to another blog that has the real Anonymous' press release saying they didn't do it. Ah, what a tangled web we weave... http://www.talkleft.com/story/2011/12/25/124727/35

My revised opinion of #Occupy

2011-12-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

When the Occupy movement first came out, I thought it looked like a bunch of unwashed idealistic hippies, an inarticulate mass of young people who were just looking for an excuse to protest because they wanted to defy their parents (or a generic substitute in the establishment) - a natural impulse of many adolescents, but perhaps just a flash in the pan.

I was also concerned that the protests were costing municipalities money they couldn't afford to spare, as they had to police those areas more and provide enhanced sanitation services, etc., and that local businesses might suffer.

Further concern was due to a few well publicized sexual assaults at the sites of the protests and some hoo-ha about the chronically homeless taking an opportunity to "mooch" off the protesters, and how it posed a PC crisis of ethics or something like that.

Lastly, I feared that cynical globalists/socialists including the President himself had been attempting to co-opt the movement and steer it towards being (or seeming to be in the mainstream news) a sort of Greek chorus for their own platforms.

This all may have been at least partly true, but I think that with the passing of a few months, the Occupy activists that have hung on have become a bit more articulate. It has matured past being a street protest and has soaked back into activism carried out in the daily lives of its adherents. A couple of conversations with friends who are involved with Occupy has convinced me that the Occupy folks are pushing for a lot of the same things the Ron Paul supporters want. Mainly an end to the Federal Reserve Bank and a switch away from fiat currency to something backed by commodities, chiefly gold.

If Occupy and the Ron Paul supporters could find a way to get together, there would probably be enough critical mass there to try and rout out some of the corruption that has infected our system and that threatens to kill its host. I still think street protests accomplish nothing in and of themselves, but at least they got people talking.

US Military Designates US Citizens as Enemy During Collapse

2011-12-23T07:51:00.000-08:00

We have met the enemy, and he is us?!?!?!?
WTF!

This disappeared off the Federal Business Opportunities (fbo.gov) website on December 21, an hour after Infowars linked to it. And then they posted a warning against putting "classified" information on their website. However, the info was not actually classified.

Someone has archived these documents on Flickr. Please save them and further spread them. This goes beyond partisan politics, politically active people on both the left and right need to worry about this. Heck, we ALL need to worry.

People need to know what is happening. They are getting ready for a collapse and they intend to lock up/rendition/torture ordinary Americans with no due process. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is for real.

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8, Page 9, Page 10, Page 11

Avian Flu Goes Airborne

2011-12-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

Some Dutch scientists have mutated the H5N1 avian flu virus to be transmittable airborne from human to human. In case you didn't know, avian flu is 50% fatal. Before, you had to be in close contact with someone or something that was infected.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/alarm-as-dutch-lab-creates-highly-contagious-killer-flu-6279474.html

The lab is in a university and only has minimal security. i.e. a locked door, and no armed guards. The main scientist who did this incredibly stupid thing, a Dr. Ron Fouchier, has come out and said he did this, which could make himself and his colleagues unsafe (let's hope they stay safe). Microbiologists have been dying young under weird circumstances for several years now, much more than is statistically possible as a fluke. Chances are they're being assassinated.

The US government is trying to talk Dr. Fouchier out of publishing his results, or at least the whole DNA sequence. If he publishes how he did this thing, then anyone could do it. Even so, the virus could mutate in the wild and produce the same result on its own.

The flu outbreak of 1977 was due to a virus that was in a university lab getting out. If there is ever an outbreak, maybe up to 30% of the population would get sick. So at a 50% fatality rate, 15% of the population could die. Avian flu tends to affect the young more, although I wouldn't feel safe just from being old.

So what can you do to stay safe?

First, get yourself an ordinary painter's dust mask, or even better, a box of them, at any hardware store. You want either an N95 or a N100 mask. (the numbers are printed on the mask). They make them with a breathe-out valve, or not. If you start to hear of people dying of this thing, or anything else, you can whip out your handy dandy mask and start wearing it. Having several of these would be useful. In a contagion, if you are healthy then the outside of your mask should be considered to be infected. So don't touch it unless you wash your hands afterwards, and don't touch the inside after the outside or you should throw it away and put on a new mask. If you fall sick, wear a mask to avoid infecting others. In this case, don't wear the one with the valve, it won't filter your exhale.

These masks are also good for if you are exposed to dust or fumes (to a certain extent) for any reason: construction, explosion, tanker spill, etc. They're good to keep in your car, for example, and they are small so why not.

Second, go to www.alpharubicon.com and read up on all their links having to do with avian flu, setting up a safe room, etc. These guys don't fool around. They test everything they put on there.

Third, try to get an antiviral medicine (like Tamiflu or Relenza) that you can keep around just in case. They won't be able to develop a vaccine fast enough for an outbreak. You could also get/make colloidal silver, zappers, etc. but I'd do that in addition to an antiviral. It's your life after all.

Fourth, if you haven't put any food by, do it now. At least get a month's worth, and I'd get something you don't have to put a lot of energy into preparing, in case you get sick. There would probably be disruption of services and store shelves would get empty if nobody was working.

Last, if anyone in your house gets sick, you will want to keep them in a room by themselves. It would be best if this room had its own bathroom, if you had a choice. It is also better if it's not someone's regular bedroom, but one more sparsely furnished, because that's less decontamination afterwards.

Rocket Stove From Cans

2011-12-21T20:09:00.000-08:00

A challenge in any situation where fuel is scarce, is how to heat your food up. You might not want to fire up a big wood burning stove just to cook a meal. Or even if you have a camp stove, you might eventually run out of propane. In a small rocket stove, a handful of twigs is enough, twigs are almost everywhere, you don't need special tools to cut them to size, and you can also burn cardboard in a pinch. So I just tonight made a rocket stove for cooking with some empty food cans and a wire clothes hanger.

First I took a big can that used to have beef stew in it, and a 15 ounce vegetable can. I took the bottom off the small can with tin snips. I had to drive a nail hole in it to get the tin snips in. I cut a hole in the side of the big can that the small can could fit into. I put the small can in. I had some aluminum tape so I sealed it up around the small can. We'll see how this tape holds up under heat. Also it's not totally necessary, and if you don't seal it, you could remove the small can in order to pack the ensemble down smaller for transport. The small can sticks into the big can by maybe 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch.

I put some more nail holes in the big can near the top and stuck a piece of a coat hanger in there. This will act both as a rack for whatever I cook and as a handle. Inside the small can I put a folded up part of a third can to act as a platform for the wood. You're supposed to put the twigs in there, on top of that shelf, and that way air can still get into your stove.

You can see I also found a bathroom tile to put it on, if I ever had to cook on a surface that was flammable. It fits just right on the tile.

Here is another view, of the coat hanger in the top. I bent the ends down to make it stay in there. I wonder if I will have to put another piece in, to make it a triangle, or if this will do? (By the way, that's a rust stain on my kitchen table that won't come out. I might try lemon juice on it some time. Bleach didn't work. If I wanted to be really hoity-toity I'd put a table cloth on it anyway).

I found another can just a little bit skinnier than the big can, that could be used as a cooking container. I am concerned that it might be too wide and therefore snuff out the fire, and that it seems to have a BPA liner, so this might not be it; instead I could take the bottom out and use it as extra insulating walls around some other can, or I think this stove might be the right size to heat one of those metal Army cups. But here's the can. It sits on the wires just right:

I'll test drive this rocket stove another day soon (because it's dark out and I want to test it outside when I can take pictures). To Be Continued!

Santa's List Gets Leaked (LOL)

2011-12-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

News flash: THE list, that is Santa's Naughty/Nice list, has been hacked!
Oh the humanity! The elvendom! HO HO HO!

Replacing a Smart Meter With a Safe Analog Meter - Vid

2011-12-20T04:44:00.000-08:00

Anonymous Declares War on US Gov for Indefinite Detention Bill

2011-12-19T23:26:00.000-08:00

There has been so much saber rattling about this bill. It's rather shrill out there, and with good reason. The bill is, quite simply, unconstitutional. And scary as hell. I have a bad feeling that things are about to go completely berserk, and soon. It's like a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy,

I will repeat my usual advice, although I have no idea who is actually listening: if you are being encouraged by anyone to do anything that would cost people's lives, chances are they're agents and you're being set up. Don't be a patsy. Walk away from it. If you are agents who are trying to make some guy do something, then shame on you, you're just as guilty if not more, and you can also walk away.

And my solution for both the government and the people they're scared of, is just plant gardens. None of this camp stuff is necessary if people can eat well. Any kind of self-sufficiency needs to be encouraged.
/rant

I got this story originally from Western Rifle Shooters, but the links go back about 5 generations to this Pastebin link:
http://pastebin.com/BLjKcuYW

Here is a reprint.

We are anonymous

We ask that you post the following in public places

Whereas, on the 14th of December, 2011, the House of Representatives of these United States

voted in favor of indefinite military detention, without charges, of any American, anywhere,

anytime, without due process of law, at the discretion of the government alone;

Whereas, on the 15th of December, 2011, the Senate of these United States voted in favor of

the same bill;

Whereas, the proscription against the use of military force to police the populous has been

an essential feature of American civic life and civic liberty since the arrival of our

civilization upon this continent;

Whereas, the wanton violation of this proscription was one of the chief causes of the

separation of the American peoples from their government in Great Britain;

Whereas, the Constitution so chartering the government of these United States does not grant

this power;

Whereas, the Constitution forbids the addition of any power not enumerated to the general

government;

Whereas, the use of such draconian measures has been an essential feature of the enforcement

of tyranny by totalitarian governments of the 20th century, including, but not limited to,

the Nationalist-Socialist government of Germany, the fascist government of Italy, the

government of the United Soviet Socialist Republics, and the government of Vietnam;

Whereas, the use of such draconian measures is carefully calculated to quash all political

dissent amongst a captive people;

Whereas, the codification of such draconian measures effectively nullifies all civil

liberties the people may hope to hold;

Whereas, the codification of such draconian measures are the last act in the quest to hold a

people captive to the rapacious will of their government without recourse;

And whereas, the codification of such draconian measures is an act of war against the

populous at large;

Therefore, be it declared that a STATE OF WAR formally exists between the Government of

these United States and the People of these United States.

We, the People of these United States, declare any and all attempts to enforce the

provisions of HR 1540 to be unlawful, void, and of no force.

We, declare ALL WHO voted in favor of HR 1540, and ALL WHO attempt to enforce HR 1540 to be

traitors to these United States, punishable under law.

We, SHALL DISOBEY, APPREHEND, OR RESIST WITH DEADLY FORCE, in our discretion, any person who

attempts to enforce the provisions of HR 1540.

We, SHALL NOT aggress against any employee of any American government who shall not attempt

to enforce or aid and abet the enforcement of HR 1540, they being as trapped as the rest of

the populous.

Such STATE OF WAR shall continue until HR 1540 is stricken from the code of law, and all who

had hand in HR 1540 are brought to justice under due process of law.

Signed and witnessed by we, the individual citizens of these United States, below:

Small Town in England Grows Food for the Taking

2011-12-19T22:21:00.000-08:00

Now this is very cool: The town of Todmorden in England is aiming for town-wide food self-sufficiency. The cops have a vegetable garden that anyone is allowed to pick from, and there are other public pick-your-own garden food plots all over town. Since starting this, vandalism is way down and kids are eating fennel instead of candy on the way to school. There's also a vegetable cart where the proceeds go to the high school. I am glad that people are catching onto this guerrilla gardening thing, and making it mainstream, and making their towns nice places to live. http://wakeup-world.com/2011/12/14/a-deliciously-resourceful-town-aims-for-total-food-self-sufficiency-within-7-years/

GMO crop risk database! Squee!

2011-12-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

Via FarmWars:

Testbiotech e.V. has published an online database of genetically modified crop plants and the risks they pose.- This is really cool, because this data wasn't really available in one easy to research spot before.

Munich, 15.12. 2011 Testbiotech is today publishing a database designed to give an overview of the risks associated with genetically engineered plants allowed for marketing in the European Union, or being about to be authorised soon. The current version of the database, called PlantGeneRisk, gives an overview of thirteen genetically engineered crops, four soy plants and nine maize plants. Ten of these plants already have EU authorisation for use, import and usage in food and feed, one of them is also allowed for cultivation. The plants produce insecticides or are tolerant to herbicides, and many also have a combination of both. So far, thirty eight genetically engineered crops have been authorised within the EU for use in food and feed, but no public database is available giving an overview of their risks. In the existing databases provided by state authorities or by institutions which have a close affiliation with industry, the actual risks are mostly marginalized.
“Genetically engineered plants raise similar problems to the finance sector: Everybody is concerned by the problems, but hardly anybody has an overview of the actual risks,” says Christoph Then from Testbiotech. “So far, most information comes from industry. By establishing this new database we are offering some much needed counter-expertise.”
Looking at the existing data it is evident that there are major gaps in current risk assessment:

Interaction between genetically engineered plants and the environment are only poorly investigated. Due to the invasive methods used for genetic engineering, genetically engineered plants very often show different reactions to environmental stress when compared to plants derived from conventional breeding. This can also cause unexpected changes in their compositions and risks to the consumers.

The mode of action of the insecticides produced by the plants is not known in complete detail. This leaves major uncertainties about risks for humans and the environment. All together, the plants already authorised in the EU produce ten different insecticidal toxins. These toxins can also be found in food and feed products in varying concentrations, and also can show unexpected combinatorial effects. A lack of sufficiently standardised methods means that the insecticide content in the plants cannot be reliably determined.

Despite the fact that most genetically engineered plants are tolerant to herbicides, there are hardly any data available on the actual amounts of herbicide residues that they contain after spraying with herbicides such as Roundup.

Feeding trials with plants to examine effects on health are not mandatory and there is an almost complete lack of long-term investigations.

Possible accumulated effects emerging from cultivation of different genetically engineered plants or from mixing them in food and feed are not investigated despite this being required by EU regulations.

The post marketing monitoring of potential effects on health as foreseen by EU regulations is not implemented.
This pilot version of the database was initiated with funds from the Gregor Louisoder Environmental Foundation and Hermsen Foundation. In 2012, further initiatives will be started such as workshops with scientists to further develop the content and structure of the database.
Contact: Christoph Then, Tel: +4915154638040, info@testbiotech.org
Link to the database of Testbiotech: http://www.testbiotech.de/en/database

The Dragon Family's Trillion Dollar Lawsuit

2011-12-13T22:30:00.000-08:00

OK, this one is weird, and it could be good news if it's true. According to this website
http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/995-lawsuit-end-tyranny
there is this group in Asia called the Dragon Family which apparently is the old ruling party of China (or their heirs) from before Communism. This party entrusted an American expat fellow named Keenan with transporting somewhere around a trillion bucks worth of government bonds earmarked for humanitarian purposes, which were then stolen in Italy when they were confiscated from two Japanese guys who were involved somehow with Keenan, and called fakes. Berlusconi reportedly subsequently tried to cash them but was unsuccessful. Keenan has now sued Italy and the UN for stealing the bonds.

The real shocker is that this Dragon Family is supposed to have gold worth many thousands of trillions of dollars. A thousand trillion is a quadrillion, folks. I can't even wrap my head around it, except to think they could probably buy everything in the world all at once, if it were for sale. This is like 10 times the entire amount of gold that conventional wisdom says was ever mined in the history of mankind.

And again, the interesting character Benjamin Fulford is in the news. This is the Canadian guy who used to write for Forbes and who now says he's with a band of ninjas that want to take out the Illuminati. He has covered this trillion dollars in bonds story for a while. He has now been taken in by some intelligence types, and the author of the article doesn't know where they are holding him.

The author also prints an interview with Fulford where Fulford claims that WW2 on the Japanese front was really started over the gold in Asia.

I hope this story is real and not some ludibrium of the author's. If you don't know the word ludibrium, google it. It's my 50 cent word of the day.

Martial Law?

2011-12-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

Is the Fear of Unrest/Martial Law a Self Fulfilling Prophecy?

Martial law is usually declared in a region during a disaster, not in the whole US. The last time martial law was declared was in New Orleans during Katrina. However some things I can think of that would prompt someone to declare nationwide martial law would be:

Widespread riots and bank runs due to a dollar collapse – This might only cause martial law to be declared in cities rather than everywhere, unless it got really crazy. It all depends on how badly or quickly the dollar crashes.

A famine – This is actually quite possible, the US strategic reserve of grain is only enough to make half a loaf for each American, and riots have occurred all over the Middle East mainly due to the rising cost of food. When you are talking food for survival, it’s really staple foods with carbohydrates that count the most. There have been problems with wheat (rust) and potatoes (fungus) in the last few years. But if the dollar crashes hard, and we get hyperinflation, this will drive the cost of food through the roof regardless of availability.

A pandemic - If there is a pandemic going around, a quarantine might be attempted in parts of the country that are affected. This might require martial law. As far as threats go, a pandemic is the most likely avenue of attack from a hostile party. It's the most bang for the buck. And our government preparation for pandemic is woefully inadequate.

Civil war/revolution/“homegrown terrorists” – There has certainly been enough thinly veiled saber rattling among various right wing/conspiracy malcontents lately (especially after SB 1867 was passed by the Senate); however, most of the organized militia groups are probably heavily infiltrated by counterintelligence agents. Most “terrorist attacks” in the last few years have been false-flag or provocateured affairs. I suppose on one hand that it could be argued that this practice weeds out the malcontents who actually have the will to carry out an attack before it becomes serious; however, it also gives the appearance of there being a conspiracy to create a false enemy. Or maybe there is such a conspiracy.

One also wonders how much of the saber rattling is really being done by "sock puppets". Sometimes radio personalities are really in the pay of intelligence (i.e. Sean Casey), also according to Wikipedia "In the 1990s it came to light that soldiers from the 4th Psychological Operations Group had been interning at the American news networks Cable News Network (CNN) and National Public Radio (NPR)." - ostensibly for training purposes, and when they were discovered they supposedly discontinued the program; also there have recently been government sock puppets on Facebook, leaving comments under websites, etc. Some psyops might be pro-government and some might be seemingly against, perhaps to get others to speak out and so be identified, or if you're more conspiracy minded, perhaps to create a situation that would seem to require more surveillance/martial law.

Whether this is all a 100-year-old conspiracy to use fiat currency to ruin the US as a nation-state, provoke both fake and real unrest, and then make martial law the new normal so someone can steal our natural resources; or whether it’s just the unfortunate result of greed gone wild, with scavengers like George Soros with his farmland-buying spree picking off the remains for cheap, is almost irrelevant. The result is about the same.

Either way, the best outcome when the dollar finally crashes would be if nobody rioted, and instead of making a big angry fuss we got down now to becoming more self-sufficient and cooperating with each other so that we didn't need currency or government aid so much. If we want to resist anything, it would be best done through noncompliance and/or litigation, rather than violence. I'm not holding out hope that my best outcome will happen though. Unfortunately the government's fear of riots and the people's fear of martial law may together become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Some statistics for your consideration:

Number of persons in the US military – around 2.5 million. Most are overseas at the moment.

Number of persons in the US – getting near 300 million

Number of guns among civilians in the US – Somewhere around 250 million

Around 40% to 50% of households possess at least one gun.
The Revolutionary War was fought and won by 3% of the population. But we were fighting at home and the British were fighting across the pond. So I don't think this factoid has much meaning in today's situation.

If asked to round up and intern large sections of the population for pretty much no good reason, it's quite possible that our own military would turn and refuse to do so. Some conspiracy theorists have claimed that for this reason there are UN soldiers who have been "imported" here and who are laying low working menial jobs until called up - I don't know about that, but if you can prove it then please comment. It seems to me that it would require an awful lot of them. Also, it would be easier for the government to just ask for UN troops if it became necessary - I don't see any advantage in keeping them here under wraps. And the rest of the world is having problems too - the UN doesn't have infinite resources any more than we do, so why waste the availability of troops in that manner?

Given these statistics, it would behoove the government to try and keep the majority of people supportive. It would also behoove the folks who are trying to prep, be self-sufficient etc. to be a little more civic minded and perhaps try to start community gardens, resilient communities, or whatnot. Not necessarily with the blessing of government, since that would require spending tax dollars to do something you can do yourself. Just do it. The neighborhood you save might be your own.

Paraguay Not So Hot After All

2011-12-12T17:41:00.000-08:00

I had thought once upon a time that Paraguay would be a good place to go to get away from the coming implosion of America, because it's fairly inexpensive to establish residency there; but on Alex Jones today I heard the government there is persecuting the Mennonites there who are the farmers who feed most of the country with new onerous farming regulations that disfavor the Mennonites and favor big agra. These Mennonites have settled mostly west of the river that runs through Paraguay and divides it into east and west sides. The west side is actually more arid, and less desirable as farmland, but they make it work somehow, they've turned their part green and fertile over the years, and this is the thanks they get. The Bush family and Sung Myung Moon have bought large tracts of land in Paraguay in recent years.

I'm guessing it'll be all right for elites who are connected, and crappy for the average Joe who wants to move there and maybe farm. For one thing, you'd be an outsider and equated in the minds of the locals with those other Americans who are destroying their way of life; for another thing, even if you are American, as a small farmer you'd still fall under the hammer of the big agra machine, so you'd get it from both sides. And even if you don't farm, you will eventually have to put up with crappy, tasteless produce that is void of nutrition, GMO, and full of poisonous chemicals, and the other onerous laws that will undoubtedly get passed in order to keep people from resisting slow death by bad food. Add to that the dollar probably becoming worthless, and you better not be depending on income from investments back in America. You better either find a way to bring assets over and convert them to something local, or start a business there. Good luck with the assets after 1/1/13.

On the other hand, perhaps one could go unnoticed more easily in a country with less infrastructure. For a time.

Blackwater Changes Name Again

2011-12-12T17:32:00.000-08:00

Blackwater was that contractor in Iraq that was kicked out for driveby-shooting unarmed civilians in a town square. They changed their name after that to Xe. Now they are changing their name again to ACADEMI and are seeking again to get a contract in Iraq. (See here for Activist Post article)

Whatever the nom de guerre du jour, I guess it's all academic where they are now, they'll probably be beating our heads in soon enough too. Is there nowhere to go to escape the madness?

Mental Toughness Exam

2011-12-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

This online quiz is mostly for soldiers or cops, I think. But you can take it too. If you don't "go on missions", then substitute other situations, like sparring if you take martial arts, doing an eviction, leading people on a work crew, administering first aid, camping in bad weather, or having to confront someone who is being disruptive and angry and make them leave. I've had to do all of these at various times, with varying degrees of self-control. So I just substituted, and came up "passed muster". http://oripomerantz.com/toughness.html

This test was linked to here: http://www.warriorsciencegroup.com/warrior-mindset/

I've been poking around paramilitary/security professionals' training websites lately out of curiosity because of something I read the other day in a reply to one of my comments on the Survivalist Blog. Now, I might be wrong but it seems to me they've sprung up a bunch lately. Maybe it's only that I have just become aware of them, so I'm noticing them, kind of like those missing hubcaps I keep noticing.

Anyway, some of them have open enrollment and might be good places to learn how to shoot, but there are other organizations like Appleseed as well, that would probably be more economical. Learning how to drive defensively might save you from a carjacking. You can read about it in a book and then try bits of it yourself, just do so in a safe manner and use your brain. Martial arts training is always good, you really can't go wrong with that. I think it's the martial arts training that gives me any mental toughness that I might have. Marching band was also kind of good for that; when I was a teen we had to march for miles in the snow and all kinds of weather. Somehow the music made the foot-numbing slog go by without too much suffering.

Dilbert's Rebel Army LOL

2011-12-09T07:42:00.000-08:00

Be careful out there.

Microsoft can Kill Apps Remotely

2011-12-09T05:19:00.000-08:00

Microsoft just admitted that they can kill Microsoft apps that you bought, remotely.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=26401

This is a very good reason to switch to Linux, and back your data up early and often. Even if you prefer Windows, you might like to take your old machine next time you upgrade and convert it to Linux. The good news is Linux is usually free. There are a lot of distros of Linux out there, one popular one is Ubuntu, another is Red Hat, but there are just tons of them out there. People like to complain that Linux is for geeks, but the GUI (Graphical user interface) has made it easy in the last few years so you don't need to be a geek to use Linux.

I have both Windows and Linux machines. In case you're wondering, and yes I'm a bit of a geek, but never mind that.

Besides, there's nothing wrong with learning a skill that will free you from yet another form of surveillance and control, now is there?

FEMA camp KBR leaked document seeks suppliers

2011-12-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

Someone leaked this document to Infowars.com today. It basically says KBR (the subsidiary of Halliburton that got the contract in 06 for the FEMA camps) is going to divide the US up into 5 areas and they are looking for suppliers for all the FEMA camps for tents, catering, barbed wire, etc.
http://static.infowars.com/2011/12/i/general/kbr-doc.pdf

Think they're a hoax now? This made my innards go to liquid. I feel sick.

Was Gingrich Involved in Freddie Mac's Fundraising Scandal?

2011-12-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

Please see this article. It wonders aloud if there is a connection between Newt Gingrich getting a consultant job at Freddie Mac to the tune of $30K a month from 1999 to 2002, and Freddie Mac starting to make illegal campaign contributions to Republicans during the same time period, for which it was ultimately fined.

Hmm. Could it be... Satan?

Poetry Break

2011-12-05T05:06:00.000-08:00

To Those Born After (Bertold Brecht)

English translation was found on www.poemhunter.com

To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

II.

You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realized
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.

And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.

Emergency light w/power from your phone jack

2011-12-04T21:17:00.000-08:00

This is cool

The Fed Loaned $16 Trillion to International Banks

2011-12-02T07:03:00.000-08:00

via the Economic Collapse Blog: Read this

This is huge - it's more than the Federal deficit (which is $15 trillion). Between 2007 and 2010 the Federal Reserve Bank (which as you probably know is not part of the Federal government) for a bailout, secretly loaned $16 TRILLION to international banks, at less than market rates, and they made $13 billion in profit off the arbitrage.

How does the Federal Reserve Bank get its money?
It creates it out of thin air. (it used to have to print it, but it mostly makes it electronically now). When it does this, it dilutes the value of the dollar (causing inflation).

Inflation is mostly a tax on the poor and middle class. It's a tax on everyone, but we all buy a certain amount of stuff to live, so it falls harder on us regular Joes because we spend more percent of our income to get the stuff to live.

So, if you thought that TARP was bad with its 700 billion, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

This is a crime scene. You have been robbed. How do you feel?

How to Survive A Comet Smackdown, for Cheap

2011-12-01T17:31:00.000-08:00

Several months ago I had an article on how to survive ginormous solar flares. Mostly just keep your electronics that count in a Faraday cage (metal container), and have some batteries around for them. Solar flares aren't a big deal for people, only for electronics, but you might want to get some lightweight long sleeve shirts and a big hat if you are worried about sunburn.

In the event that there is a comet smackdown, though, the strategy would be different. There have been several comet smackdowns in the past, for example some people think the Dark Ages were caused by one or more comets slamming into the Earth. Here's a woodcut showing comets, lightning, and people running around while buildings burned from the 4th century. Courtesy of www.sott.net

There are also accounts of the whole sky being on fire, and that sort of thing, from late antiquity Rome etc.

The comforting thought is that humanity has managed to bounce back from the comets in the past, because we're still here. But comets have spelled the end of several major civilizations, along with a major culling of the population each time. It seems comets do this about every 3600 years or so, and we're about due for another smackdown, in 2012 or soon thereafter.

The reason why a comet bombardment is so devastating isn't so much the destruction to property by falling debris as it is the large amount of dust and smoke that ends up in the air for several years on end, which stunts plant growth and causes famine and disease. The evidence is borne out in tree rings as well as history. Sometimes comets only affect one part of the world and then there's contemporary writings about "bread failures" and such.

I am wondering if the people who are making chemtrails might be better employed figuring out how to precipitate the dust from comet smackdowns out of the air faster. They might be able to save more of humanity. Of course, from what various elites have said on the record, I think they would rather have most of us die. Maybe they think they'll survive in those giant bunkers they've built everywhere, then come out when the dust settles and be in a position to rule the rest of us, probably with less politeness than before. With the stories that come out of alien or military type abductions that all seem to involve medical experiments or genetics, and the various attempts at population reduction through GMO food, sneaky sterilization or infection with disease by fake vaccines in the third world, etc., it's possible they also think they will replace us with something else "new and improved".

With this in mind, if you don't have some big underground bunker of your own, here's my thoughts how to survive the comet smackdown that is probably coming soon:

1. If you are just out and about and stuff starts falling from the sky, get as far underground as you can - like if you are in a city and there's a subway, go there, or go into the basement of whatever building you are in or near. Think about places to go take shelter in that are near where you frequently go. Practice going to them, so that you don't have to think hard when the time comes. Train your spouse and kids to do the same. Carry on or near you, a dust mask or an equivalent (bandannas etc.). Perhaps there is a chance of weird electromagnetic things happening too - lightning, etc. so being underground in that event would be good. Carry a little flashlight. If you're in a basement and the lights go out, you'll be glad you had one.

2. If you have the luxury of moving now, seek the high ground. I am guessing that the chance of actually being hit by a falling rock from the sky would be small, but that the resulting fires, shock waves from the impacts, tsunamis, etc. would be significantly more of a risk. If a tsunami were big enough, it would throw water further inland than a regular storm, so you would want high ground. I would also add, if you can be both on the high ground and near a drinkable source of water like a mountain stream or spring, so much the better. You can be both on the high ground and underground at the same time, if you can dig. I would also choose to be near a small town that is within 10 or 20 miles of a hospital over a city or a really remote place.

3. Food and water. Starting now, carry food you don't have to cook for 2 or 3 days and maybe a half gallon of water on you (minimum). But water is heavy, so carry some and have more around where you will usually be. Put bottled water in your car and stash some at work. You can do the same with the food, but at home, stockpile a lot of canned and dry food and water, because not only will there be a great disruption of the supply chain, but there will be problems with crops for several years after. You might want to hide a lot of this food so that looters won't get it all, and just have some out. Don't brag to your neighbors about your food!

Not only get regular shelf-stable food, but if you can't afford freeze-dried food, which is 3 times the cost of regular food, consider dehydrating regular food yourself and storing it with oxygen absorbers and with as little oxygen as possible. You can make your own oxygen absorbers by putting steel wool and salt in a little cloth pouch (just use a piece of cloth and put a twist tie on it). Store your food in 5-gallon buckets from the hardware store (with lids), unless you can get free buckets - and perhaps also in mylar pouches, if you can afford them. You can get oxygen out of your food containers by putting dry ice on top, waiting a little while and then closing the lid. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air so it'll fill the top of the bucket. You can make a solar/air dehydrating shack, about the size of a doghouse or an outhouse, and not need power to run it. This will dry a lot of produce at once. You could make it out of pallets and an old window for almost free. If you can't make a big thing like that, you can make a small dehydrator out of a small lamp with an old-style light bulb poking into a cardboard box with a lid, and some old screening for shelves. Get one (or more) gravity water filter, and learn how to make one out of sand, clay, charcoal etc. so that when your filter runs out you can make another one. Also, get a water barrel or some kiddie pools so that you can collect water to drink, irrigate, etc. Or dig a well, or at least learn how to dig a well. A well with a hand water pump would be a great thing to have.

If you can afford it, you're of a fertile age, and you want to stay fertile, store home grown food that you know isn't GMO or treated with pesticides. If you know nothing else, then know this: Just avoiding all prepackaged food as much as you can is a big step. Cook from scratch and don't eat corn or soy unless you know for certain it's not a GMO variety. However, if you are curious, there's a couple links to GMO news on the news page. They keep coming out with more GMO stuff, like salmon for example. For now, wild-caught salmon is still safe.

4. Seeds. Store some heirloom seeds. You might not be able to grow crops effectively for a few years after a comet smackdown. You could try, but the reduced sunlight and/or weather disruptions might make it a non-starter. If you were fabulously wealthy or a government you could get some kind of small nuclear reactor and power grow lights in your bunker underground, but since we're just average Joes and Janes here, you want to store seeds in a way that they will keep for 5 or 10 years. Freezing them is good, but we can't be assured of having power. The best we can probably do is keep them in a cool, dark place and keep them dry. You can freeze them for now, and maybe your area won't be affected by power outages. Maybe we can be reassured that Bill Gates and Monsanto have built a big seed bank in Norway, but somehow I don't think that's for us. There are other seed banks, too. Also consider learning about edible weeds, because those plants might be better able to survive without irrigation, lots of sun, etc.

5. Security. If you want to stay in your home, which might be easier than running off to somewhere else, you will want to make bars for the windows, for across the door, etc. You can pre-fab these in sets now and just keep them around, then install them when you think you need them. Re-bar is okay, but if you don't have the tools to cut re-bar then try conduit. It's better than nothing, and they make clamps etc. for conduit so you can fasten it to wood.

I suggest you also arm yourself and learn how to use your weapons; and hide a few of them so that if the one you carry is stolen you can re-arm yourself later. You may need to defend yourself from looters. Guns aren't the only weapons in the world. Practically anything can be used as a weapon. But do consider getting a conceal carry license - follow the law. No need to get jailed for something stupid while society still works. And of course, use discretion.

I also suggest that you stockpile dog food. Even if you don't want to have a dog now, you can always acquire one (or more) later as a guard dog, and you will be able to feed it then. There will probably be a lot of stray dogs running around after a disaster. The strays will get feral after a short while, so it might be better to adopt a stray dog sooner than later after a disaster. Also, people might start to eat the stray dogs and cats if they get hungry enough, so eventually there might be no dogs around. If you have land, consider things like trip wire alarms, booby traps, etc. for when things get rough. It will be hard for someone to live alone and survive. You will have to learn how to work in a group, if only for the reason that you have to sleep sometime.

6. Utilities. Store propane, lamp oil, wood, candles, and get a wood burning stove. If you can't afford a wood burning stove, you can build a rocket stove from clay you get from the ground, rubble, a metal barrel, and furnace parts. Get a battery powered carbon monoxide alarm if you are going to experiment with that. You can make a primitive fridge from two large clay pots, one inside the other, with a lid and wet sand between them. When choosing a place to live, if you are going to build something, keep in mind that a small place is easier to heat, and that underground it stays around 50 degrees F year round.

7. If the comet disaster leaves your area sort of "walking wounded" and then it looks like you will face a lot of social chaos, troops, etc., the best bet for survival is to hide, blend in, try to stay calm, avoid armed conflict if you can, pretend to acquiesce to authority, but then do your own thing when they're gone. If it gets too nazi-esque, then slip away, hide, lie, whatever you need to do. Nobody has the right to be a nazi to anyone else. Everybody has the right to live and be free.

8. Once things settle down, you will need a profession that actually produces something or is useful in the smackdown world. If you don't know how to do something useful, learn now.

Habeas what corpus?

2011-11-30T12:30:00.000-08:00

Let them enter the hall of shame.
These senators today voted to indefinitely suspend habeas corpus, as part of an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act. Not only that, but this bill, the way they passed it, would allow them to send Americans to Gitmo indefinitely with no trial.

At first blush it would seem the opposite. There is a provision in the bill saying it doesn't apply to Americans Here is the text of that part.

SEC. 1032. REQUIREMENT FOR MILITARY CUSTODY.

(a) Custody Pending Disposition Under Law of War-

(1) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in paragraph (4), the Armed Forces of the United States shall hold a person described in paragraph (2) who is captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) in military custody pending disposition under the law of war.

(2) COVERED PERSONS- The requirement in paragraph (1) shall apply to any person whose detention is authorized under section 1031 who is determined--

(A) to be a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force that acts in coordination with or pursuant to the direction of al-Qaeda; and

(B) to have participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.

(3) DISPOSITION UNDER LAW OF WAR- For purposes of this subsection, the disposition of a person under the law of war has the meaning given in section 1031(c), except that no transfer otherwise described in paragraph (4) of that section shall be made unless consistent with the requirements of section 1033.

(4) WAIVER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY- The Secretary of Defense may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security interests of the United States.

(b) Applicability to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens-

UNITED STATES CITIZENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.

(2) LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to a lawful resident alien of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.

However, the sponsors of the bill say it DOES apply to Americans on American soil ANYWAY, because of the Supreme Court case of Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld. See here http://www.congress.org/soapbox/alert/57387501.
There has also been a lot of hand-wringing about this by the ACLU, they released a statement supporting an amendment that wasn't made part of the bill, on November 23. But the bill passed as-is, unfortunately.

Here are the Senators who voted for this, for the hall of shame:

Ayotte (R-NH)

Barrasso (R-WY)

Blunt (R-MO)

Boozman (R-AR)

Brown (R-MA)

Burr (R-NC)

Casey (D-PA)

Chambliss (R-GA)

Coats (R-IN)

Coburn (R-OK)

Cochran (R-MS)

Collins (R-ME)

Conrad (D-ND)

Corker (R-TN)

Cornyn (R-TX)

Crapo (R-ID)

DeMint (R-SC)

Enzi (R-WY)

Graham (R-SC)

Grassley (R-IA)

Hagan (D-NC)

Hatch (R-UT)

Heller (R-NV)

Hoeven (R-ND)

Hutchison (R-TX)

Inhofe (R-OK)

Inouye (D-HI)

Isakson (R-GA)

Johanns (R-NE)

Johnson (R-WI)

Kohl (D-WI)

Kyl (R-AZ)

Landrieu (D-LA)

Lee (R-UT)

Levin (D-MI)

Lieberman (ID-CT)

Lugar (R-IN)

Manchin (D-WV)

McCain (R-AZ)

McCaskill (D-MO)

McConnell (R-KY)

Menendez (D-NJ)

Moran (R-KS)

Nelson (D-NE)

Portman (R-OH)

Pryor (D-AR)

Reed (D-RI)

Risch (R-ID)

Roberts (R-KS)

Rubio (R-FL)

Sessions (R-AL)

Shaheen (D-NH)

Shelby (R-AL)

Snowe (R-ME)

Stabenow (D-MI)

Thune (R-SD)

Toomey (R-PA)

Vitter (R-LA)

Whitehouse (D-RI)

Wicker (R-MS)

Here is the text of the Senate bill http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1867:

Smart Meters Not So Smart

2011-11-27T06:41:00.000-08:00

There is a push on to get residential consumers of electricity (that's you) to switch over to "smart meters". This is supposed to "save money". But it's not you who will save money.

Currently, the "old" meters don't measure peaks, like if you need more power for a second to start up a motor, for example. Also they are only read once a month, so if you have a party one weekend and you're out of town the next weekend, it evens out.

The new meters measure peaks and they are also read more like weekly. If you used more power one week, the power company would bill you on a higher usage tier, and possibly apply it to the entire month. This means an increase in your electric bill of 5 to 30 percent.

Smart meters are designed to be read from afar, in other words they broadcast their readings. They can turn off your power remotely as well, not having to send a guy out. Because they broadcast all the time, the meters emit electromagnetic radiation, which can make you sick if you get too much of it. Think about the poor guy living in the apartment of a complex where all the meters for the whole complex are just outside his bedroom wall. Some people are very sensitive to EMF and are bothered more by it than others, but all people get sick eventually from it - cancer, etc. It can also cause mental disturbances. The toll to public health (and the cost thereof) could exceed any "savings" to energy use caused by the changes in the consumer's behavior when they start getting those big electric bills. It can also make your pets and children sick.

Large war-technology manufacturers such as Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, SAIC, Raytheon, and BAE are trying to get big government bids to make and install smart meters in homes all over the US. There is a lot of pork for this. The feds approved some of these bids before the safety studies were done. Not only the meters themselves, but the cybersecurity for the meters is a cash cow for these guys.

I might also point out that the smart meters also make it so that the federal government, or their privatized defense contractors, will have jurisdiction over how much electricity you are allowed to have, and they could also attempt to harass you by turning off your electricity from afar.

You can refuse a smart meter, but you might not even notice they've put one in. They might just do it and not ask. If you discover you have one and you don't want it, you can ask that they put the old one back in, but there is usually a fee involved of a few hundred dollars.

So the smart meters are basically a way to keep the war manufacturers working, while passing the cost on to consumers, and they also give out more granular information about how you use the energy in your home. Plus, they're a lot more hackable than the old meters, despite all the cybersecurity they'll be getting. Some hacker could much more easily knock out parts of the grid under the new smart meters.

Sources
http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/smart-grid/
http://morphcity.com/home/105-national-energy-policy-the-cheney-law-massacre

Fake Software Updates Could Be Spyware

2011-11-26T08:08:00.000-08:00

From the Wall Street Journal

A surveillance company, Gamma International UK, LTD has bragged that they can infect a target's computer with their spyware called FinFisher that acts just like an iTunes update or other software updates. They say they can make a website claim that the target's computer doesn't have the right version of whatever software (like Flash or whatever) and then the target will download their fake update and infect their own computer.

They are selling this software to law enforcement.

I would just assume you're being spied on, and keep your private communication as unelectronic as possible. i.e. take the battery out of your cell phone, or leave it behind, etc. and just have an in-person conversation far from street lamps, cars, buildings, etc. Then all you have to worry about is if the person you are speaking to is wired, or if there's someone else or some battery powered surveillance equipment hiding in the bushes nearby.

For when you can't avoid the electronics, you can encrypt stuff, but if there's a key logger on your computer, encryption won't do you much good. In one of your unelectronic moments you could agree on a few code words with your friends. Or you could switch to Linux on a different computer for all your private stuff, and you might get around a lot of that spyware crap. Especially if you are running your OS from a CD-Rom instead of the hard drive. That way every time you boot up, you've got the original OS with no updates or other moss it might have gathered. I recommend SLAX. It's small enough to fit on a CD-Rom.

If you don't want hackers to get your private files, keep them on a computer that is never on the Internet. You can certainly walk or mail a hard copy of your bookkeeping program backup to your accountant's place a couple times a year. There is no good reason to have your financial information on anything that can go online. Same with your secret plans for world domination. Of course your accountant might be online.

The One-Eyed Jacks are Wild

2011-11-25T22:20:00.000-08:00

The other day I was doing a review of the online movie "Thrive" and commented on the poster for it which features a young lady with one eye hidden by a blindfold. I pointed out that some people think this is an Illuminati symbol. So I thought I'd dig up as many one-eyed gods as I could, just for the sake of curiosity. Some of them are naturally one-eyed and some of them lost an eye.

The first one that springs to mind is Odin. The Norse All-Father gave his eye in order to gain the wisdom of the ages by drinking the water at Mimir's well. (which eye is not specified) Mimir's well is at the foot of the Yggdrasil, or the World Tree. Mimir kept Odin's eye there at the bottom of the well, for safekeeping I guess.

Then there's the Cyclops. These Greek god-beings made the thunder and lightning for Zeus. They had one eye in the middle of their foreheads.

Of course there's Horus. The Egyptian god Horus was the son of Isis and Osiris. Isis and Osiris were married and they were also twin brother and sister. They had a brother Set who was married to his twin sister Nepthys. Set and Osiris had a famous family feud. Set killed and dismembered Osiris and strewed his body parts all over. Isis found all the body parts except for his penis, which had been eaten by a catfish in the Nile. So she made a gold penis for Osiris, put him back together with magic, got pregnant with Horus, and then hid with Horus so Set wouldn't get him too. Horus was a sky god, the sun was his right eye and the moon was his left eye. So he was considered to have a weak left eye because the moon isn't as strong as the sun. During the new moon, he was supposed to be blind. Later Horus and Set got into it with each other, and Horus castrated Set. Sometimes Set was depicted with fins, so the catfish that ate Osiris' willy might have also been Set.

As a little side thing about Set, he was sometimes worshipped along with Osiris and sometimes they were a conglomerated god; but eventually Set was demonized.

Balor of the Evil Eye, the Celtic god, had one eye in the middle of his forehead and one in the back of his head, so people couldn't sneak up on him.

And there's the One Eyed Jack Jolly Roger flag, or even Captain Hook.

Avast!

I am also reminded of a deck of playing cards, where suicide kings and one-eyed jacks are wild.

Bugged Bugs at the University of Michigan

2011-11-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

I saw this on Rense.com:
Scientists at the University of Michigan have made insects into hybrid bug-robots. They say they could send these bugs out into natural disasters to monitor them before they send rescue teams.

That is just an excuse. Now we've gotta worry about being BUGGED by bugs.

I wanna be a fly on the wall!

New Food Bill in New Zealand

2011-11-25T07:06:00.000-08:00

http://investmentwatchblog.com/new-food-bill-in-new-zealand-takes-away-human-right-to-grow-food/
According to this article there is a new food bill in New Zealand that calls growing food a privilege instead of a right. I will try to find the actual bill. New Zealand, being part of the WTO, is trying to "harmonize" with Codex Alimentarius.

The danger, even if this bill turns out to be not as horrible as the food-rights crowd thinks, is that any legal language at all that limits the rights of the people to grow their own food will at some point be used to starve people. It's setting the ground for totalitarian rule and the use of food as a weapon to control people. The nature of power-hungry people and just Murphy's Law make it a big possibility.

Imagine a world where raising food is a crime like if you were growing marijuana or running a meth lab. You would have to buy completely irradiated, sterilized and not-very-nutritious Soylent Green or something like that from big agra companies like Monsanto. You wouldn't be able to get vitamins and if they caught you eating anything else you'd get in trouble. People who seemed too well-fed would get busted and then either killed or singled out for "re-education", your jealous neighbors would turn you in for growing your own food, "real food" would be either a huge bribe item or a liability, there'd be secret grow rooms with lights, etc. but then they'd be looking at people's electric bills to find the grow rooms, and grow bulbs would become a controlled item. The powerful and connected, of course, would be able to get "real food" and would eat it behind their gated complexes, but they wouldn't care a whit about the masses and what they eat. The smell of cooking would have to be contained so as not to alert the neighbors.

Now, that seems like a dystopian fantasy, but what circumstances would cause people to actually clamor for that kind of control? Maybe one where E. Coli keeps cropping up (hmm), or one where massive crop failure or a nuclear or bioweapon creates allegedly unsafe soil (like if earthquakes ruin enough nuclear plants, which are all built on faults), and then it's Science to the Rescue and food nazis everywhere. All the farmland would become wilderness where nobody was allowed to go, if the soil was made "unsafe", but it might all really be bullcrap designed to kill people off and turn the world into a giant game preserve for the rich. Then all our food would be hydroponically grown under lab conditions and people would be herded into small areas for their own "safety". Kinda like that Agenda 21 map that shows people only living in a couple cities on the east coast. Theoretically they'd have to have outposts to catch people trying to sneak into the rest of the country, but maybe they'd have robots and drones for that, controlled by geeks in a basement somewhere.

I for one plan to defy this possible future. I'll be one of the people with a guerrilla garden. I'll be one of the ones who sneak out into the wilderness, braving the robots. I'd rather live like that than be trapped like a duck in a pen by the Soup Nazi.

The Thrive Movie - A review

2011-11-23T16:47:00.000-08:00

The other day I sat through the Thrive movie on YouTube. This 2-hour movie was created by Foster Gamble, an heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune. Supposedly he spent 8 years producing this thing. Here's my take on it:

This slickly produced movie starts out by suggesting that free energy is possible. It makes repeated use of a cartoon electric purple donut, or torus, shape, and claims that this shape has to do with how free energy would work. Various people sit around a coffee table and talk while they pretend to hold the electric purple donut. Then the movie moves on from the donut and starts to point out various conspiracies and ways that we are not free.

Near the end of the movie, it starts to promote a website where people can go to find solutions to all the problems it presents. The narrator suggests that a solution can be found by networking together all the nonprofits and NGO's that "work for justice" worldwide, using the Internet.

I went to this website today, and it doesn't seem to actually have any answers, just a number of links to sign up for updates. I was - how do you say it - underwhelmed. I also saw the ad for the movie, finally. It features a young lady removing a blindfold from her face. One of her eyes is still covered. She also is holding her hands like she is saying "OK" with her hand as she removes the blindfold.

There is a kind of magickal semaphore in many cultures' systems. The general consensus among people who pay attention to this stuff as it relates to Western mysticism is if you see a one-eyed person in a picture, or someone covering one eye, it's supposed to be a sign the Illuminati use for the All-Seeing Eye (i.e. like on the dollar bill). I don't know if Mr. Gamble meant it that way, but it does make me raise an eyebrow. The "OK" hand looks like the number 6, so maybe the model is also saying "666" - or maybe she is just trying to get her kicks on Route 66.

In addition, the film came out on 11/11/11. The number 11 was very important to the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. He thought it was a very magickal number. Maybe his amp went up to 11. Or maybe it was just the odd number between 10 and 12, which are both nice round numbers - we count in base 10 and clocks go to 12, so 11 would just be an uncomfortable way to go, or it's kind of between two worlds of counting. 1 and 1 add up to 2, and there's 3 11's, so you have both 2 and 3 there, which leads me to "23 skidoo".

Just a little side story: One time in college this guy I knew who claimed to be a medium pointedly asked me what I thought the difference was between 2 and 3. I have been pondering this little koan of his for years on end now. Maybe I'll get into it in another post. I have known some very odd people. It makes life interesting.

As to who Foster Gamble is allied to, or what his political leanings are, not all kids agree with their parents or their heritage. I might not put too much stock in his heritage, but obviously he has decided to get on the proverbial soap box. It would be interesting to see who or what he has supported in the past, as that would give a clue as to if he is squeaky clean or if he is trying to work people into a lather for some other purpose.

In the meantime, perhaps this movie is a useful tool to get people talking about the issues it brings up, but I don't think the call to action should be to visit some website that doesn't seem to have anything going, nor should it be to waste one's time networking with nonprofitry and global NGO's. So many NGO's and nonprofits are really either get-rich or avoid-taxes schemes for the wealthy, or they are front organizations for people with very different agendas than the organization seems to be about. Such organizations tend to waste a large percentage of the monies they receive on overhead and fat salaries for their directors. If you want to bring on justice, if you want to dispense mercy, you'll have to do it yourself if you want it done right.

On the other hand, free energy is where it's at. I wish I understood physics and electricity better.

Occupy Your House

2011-11-23T15:44:00.000-08:00

Now THIS is the #occupy I like!

If you were foreclosed on illegally, don't move out.
They might even send goons, but don't let them scare you away.
Just sue the bastards back. It's still your house.
See this website, and I'm adding it to my blog roll.
http://www.foreclosurehamlet.org

Less Lethal, My A$$

2011-11-23T15:36:00.000-08:00

Via Anita Sands:

Today, activists in Tahrir square picked up tear gas cannisters lying next to suffocated bodies, and read the label and reported it to Amy Goodman's nightly hour news show, which read it out over the air. PENNSYLVANIA corp supplies this killer gas to the entire planet. They have a dozen american supply depots. See http://www.less-lethal.com/

Their tear gas cartridges suffocated 3 of the Tahrir square dead activists today, two dozen had bullets, 3 died of suffocation from this lethal tear gas. 846 known dead since late Jan, 2011, 6,000 wounded.

many blinded.

What can we do for this "LESS LETHAL" company of Jamestown PENNSylVANIA?

Hmmm ? Got any P.R. ideas? And what mesg. can we leave them on their multiple email addies, Amberlyn, Bobby Jo, Dennis, Paul and Kristal, (surf there, see the 5 secretaries who handle the 13 divisions of the USA..take note of their multiple offices, which supply Law Enforcement ALL OVER AMERICA and internationally. WHO ARE NOT ENFORCING LAWs as we're not BREaKING any in protesting the banks taking everything, famine, no healthcare, mortgages not being refinanced...WE have a right to protest, so do the Egyptians.

This corp should name itself LETHAL and get over the shame of making money, hand over foot, helping governments everywhere to kill protestors and help govs deny starving people jobs, food, constitutional rights.

Sample: Dear Lethal, get over your shame. You kill people. Pure and simple. Well... not PURE exactly. You made that Faustian bargain. You decided that money was better than loving life, other people, principles of conscience and morality. Today, you provided death by suffocation for

3 Egyptians. Bullets did the other two dozen. Their deaths weren't as easy to track and attribute as your tear gas cylinders with your name and address on them. We, the activists of America who care about people everywhere are going to make your quirky name famous, signed " etc etc Design it yourself, but do send it.

http://www.less-lethal.com/

13 email addies. 5 secretaries.

diff parts of country

PASS THIS ON, please, let's close them down or make them infamous.

PS: Here's a random page of Anita's http://www.luckinlove.com/enronwebpage.htm

Insider Trading of Public Opinion - OWS

2011-11-23T09:18:00.000-08:00

I've been critical of OWS. Yes, I am fed up with corporate and gov't corruption and greed. But this "We're the 99%" movement is getting hijacked by Marxists and globalists who are really part of the 1%. Most of the regular people in OWS aren't that articulate about what they want exactly. But the leaders of OWS could use the force of the crowd, without the crowd realizing it, to push bigger government and - well, Communism.

We all know how Communism worked out for North Korea, the USSR, the Ukraine, etc. The people in North Korea are starving under Communism. In order to survive, people have to go out at 4 a.m. and pick edible weeds before their neighbor gets to them. That ought to tell you a lot right there. The USSR faked their economic numbers, claiming 92% harvests, until the lack of bread became so obvious nobody could ignore it. We used to send them wheat. The Communists starved the Ukraine en masse on purpose, creating something called the Holodomor. (translates to death by starvation)

FerFAL said it much more eloquently than me. Please read his excellent article on Why OWS Does Not Represent You.

With all this hoo-ha about insider trading in Congress, I might also point out that these Communists who are hijacking OWS are sort of like insider traders of public opinion. They know that most of the people in this movement are new to politics and philosophy and don't know their history either. They are counting on this inchoate mass of fed-ups to follow them blindly to oblivion. It's a big pump and dump scheme, just like all the other "people's movements" that ever pushed for collectivism.

Let me say it very plainly and slowly. NO COMMIE GOVERNMENT IS EVER GOING TO TAKE CARE OF YOU. Once they are done taking power, the first thing they will do is kill the political activists that helped them take power, because those people are the most likely to realize they've been had and fight them.

Insider Trading

2011-11-23T05:14:00.000-08:00

Recently 60 Minutes did an expose of Congressional inside trading. Apparently members of Congress must be immune to the insider trading laws...
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2011/11/60-minutes-blows-the-lid-off-congressional-insider-trading-2.html

Market Skeptics claims that Congressional insider trading allowed them to profit off of the demise of Bear Stearns. http://www.marketskeptics.com/2011/11/why-mainstream-media-wants-the-congressional-insider-trading-story-to-die-2.html

OK, we've covered the corrupt insider trading. Martha move over. But you too can benefit a bit from your own insider trading. See, Congress knew Bear Stearns was about to take a dive. And you, if you've been paying attention, know the American economy, its currency, and our way of life is also about to take a dive. Heck, it's already been showing signs all over the place. So, since you are awake, buy things that will be valuable after the crash. Food. Seeds. Ammo. I just read yesterday that a case of 50 rounds of .22LR (these are cheap bullets comparative to other kinds of bullets, too) in the Depression would buy you groceries. (I think I read this in a comment on the Survivalist Blog's recent article on barter). Coleman fuel. Toilet paper Etc.

Use YOUR insider knowledge.

Chemtrails in my Travels, Morgellon's

2011-11-22T15:49:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I went on a trip to another city in the Midwest. To get there I had to go through two other cities. On my way there at first I saw a blue sky with a few little contrails near the horizon. Didn't think much of them because they were skinny. But as my trip progressed through the first city (maybe 50-60 miles from home), they got fatter and also more numerous - there were some on the left as well. (couldn't see other directions so well as I was driving). Anyway, the whole sky became hazier and hazier until by the second city (about 200 miles from home) it was totally gray. But if you looked up you could tell that it was just kind of a criss-cross mist hiding an otherwise blue sky. By the time I reached my destination, not only was the gray mist very thick above but I could also see the city pollution as that city stretched before me. For the rest of the weekend, the sky was gray, and eventually on the way home it rained a bit.

These little "contrails" I had seen were really chemtrails, obviously. And they were sprayed right over a major interstate corridor where there were three major cities, fouling the air for millions. I kept my car air on "recirculate", in the hopes that it would not affect me as much if I was constantly filtering the air over and over again. Maybe people with filtered indoor air aren't affected as much as people who have to be outside all day, but y'know, you're supposed to go OUTSIDE for fresh air and sunlight, and this is just ridiculous. I imagine that this might be partly responsible for the rampant Vitamin D deficiencies people have.

How little time we spend watching the sky. Most people are oblivious to this. I remember when the sky was different. I watched the sky a lot when I was a kid. The skies get cloudy more now, and it's because of these criss-cross chemtrails. But the clouds are false clouds.

Some people have linked chemtrails to Morgellon's Disease. This is a blood infection, possibly caused by either a bacteria, or maybe nanomachines that got loose. People with advanced Morgellon's get a very itchy rash with these little multicolored fibers coming out of their skin. A chemist has analyzed blood of some people with the disease and figured out that one of the things it does is to turn the ferrous oxide in your blood into ferric oxide, which limits your blood's ability to process oxygen. People with it also get tired a lot. Doctors turn them away, saying it's all in their head, that they have imaginary parasites. The mainstream press ignores it.

It has been asserted that many more people have Morgellon's than know it, because some don't have symptoms like the rash yet. I did post one supposed cure involving dumping alfalfa in a bath, but if it's really a blood infection, all that would do is to draw out the fibers from the rash, but not cure the blood part.

I wonder if this Morgellon's is some kind of backhanded attempt at transhumanism. Perhaps, though, this particular form of it is designed to bring people down, rather than make them "better than human". Or maybe it's just another way to depopulate the world in a sneaky fashion. If someone is doing this on purpose, then
A SHAME UPON THEIR BEARDS and A POX UPON THEIR BUTTS.

Here's some links on Morgellon's Disease.
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/if-chemtrails-and-haarp-didnt-disturb.html
http://www.rense.com/Datapages/morgdat1.htm an index of various articles
http://www.carnicominstitute.org/articles/bio2011-6.htm this is the guy with the iron in blood study

Guest post on The Survivalist Blog

2011-11-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

I left a comment one day on the Survivalist Blog and it didn't show up but a smaller comment did. Later I discovered it was made into a guest post article! WOO HOO! Thank you, MD Creekmore! Everyone go to his blog, it's really good.

Here it is - it's about gardening experiences, including using taters, seeds or other things that can sprout from the supermarket. I think I'm in Zone 6 if that's a help. Maybe if you are north of Zone 6 you won't want to try and overwinter basil seeds, for example
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/garden-tips/#comment-72639

Also, the other day I learned from a Smithsonian magazine that the fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine is back (it never really went away), and that nothing the commercial potato growers use is killing it. It destroyed the taters and maters on the east coast of the US in 2009. Potatoes and tomatoes are in the nightshade family.

The way to fix this organically, according to my gardening maven friend, is to amend the soil with molasses, milk, cornmeal, and mushroom spoor. This encourages bacteria and other kinds of fungus, which compete with the potato fungus and keep it down to a dull roar. You also want to rotate where you plant your taters and maters, so that they only hit the same spot every 3 years. I'm thinking next year I might do porch tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets, so no worries about where they've been before. I'll have a few in the ground, in case the buckets don't work.

Pregare per la Patria: the Corralito is here

2011-11-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

In Argentina when their currency crashed, their government made a new law that you couldn't get more than about $200 a day out of the bank. People's money was stuck in the bank while it diminished in value, until it was essentially worthless. They weren't able to remove it and buy things to preserve its value. This law was intended to prevent a "run on the bank". It was intended to protect the banks, not the people.

This is called a CORRALITO. Your money, like a horse, ends up stuck in the corral.

Citibank just imposed a 7-day waiting period for people to get all their money out if they want to close out their account. See here:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/if-there-is-a-run-on-the-banks-know-who-to-blame.html

When a country expects its currency to crash, it starts trying to keep people from removing their wealth from that country. Obama's jobs bill has a clause that makes it almost impossible to remove any significant amount of money from the US starting on 1/1/13. You also can't leave the country now with more than $5,000 in cash. All Americans' foreign bank accounts are now subject to the bank telling the Feds how much you have in there. It's getting so Americans can't get a foreign bank account - they won't open one for you because they don't want to deal with the Feds. For this reason it would be good to have dual citizenship, if you want to put money in the bank elsewhere.

The only way left to get a lot of money out of the US and not have it monitored by the Feds is to buy a piece of foreign real estate. We'll see how long that one lasts. Incidentally, Jenna Bush bought 100,000 acres of Paraguayan farmland a few years back. The price of this farmland probably exceeds by 100% what the Bush net worth officially was when Dubya was in office (unless she got a total steal). I wonder where they got the money?

I'm not even sure it's safe to stockpile gold and silver. In 1933 Roosevelt made people turn in their gold for Federal Reserve Notes and made it illegal to have gold coins or bullion. Right after he was done with that the price of gold doubled.

Maybe if the gold is jewelry you'll get to keep it. But you can't even count on that: Italy during WW2 made all the women turn in their wedding bands for the gold and in their place issued these dross-metal replacement wedding bands that were inscribed with the phrase "Pregare per la Patria" (Pray for the Fatherland). You were supposed to be able to cash in the fake band for your gold back later, but there's still some of these fake bands out there owned by families that fled.

Witch's Brews

2011-11-18T06:57:00.000-08:00

When in college, for a class on women and religion in late antiquity, I wrote a paper comparing witchcraft from late antiquity to the middle ages to modern times. For the older source material I enjoyed Apuleius' "The Golden Ass", which is a late antiquity novel about a guy who gets turned into an ass by a witch, and his adventures trying to get back to human form. Apuleius was also at one point himself accused of witchcraft, and represented himself pro se in court. He was acquitted. His speech that he gave in court was preserved for posterity, and is very funny. I also read translations of items found in archaeological digs that were related to magic spells cast by ordinary ancient Greeks and Romans who had resorted to magic. For more modern times I just used popular culture as it relates to the typical Halloween witch; also some Shakespeare. I wasn't trying to drag the Wiccans into it.

I found that certain things have remained the same about the popular (i.e. literary) idea of witches dating back to before Christianity appeared on the scene: Shapeshifting or causing others to turn into animals, the use of other people's hair in spells, sexual shenanigans, prayers to whoever was the current god of the underworld, and the preparation of brews using yucky ingredients.

In other words, Christians didn't invent witches, the whole idea of witches, including all the usual details, is very old. Similarly, when ordinary people attempted to cast magic spells, back then just as now, it was done largely by people who were otherwise frustrated by their attempts to get things done in the "real world", and it was done furtively and with reference to gods one wasn't supposed to be praying to. In most cases, those gods were older than the current ones and had fallen out of favor. For example, Hecate in the earliest writings about her was beautiful and had a "shimmering veil", but later she became a hag. I guess she grew old.

Now in modern days, it seems the archetypical kind of witches have taken over the food industry: We face a lot of brews made with yucky ingredients. They're everywhere. For example:

Reconstituted "meat" and bread with dangerous ingredients like in the McRib Sandwich
Really bad-for-you stuff in supermarket bread.
Rampant counterfeiting of meat
Diet pop (aspartame and Splenda were originally invented as a bug poison)
GMO food
Fluoride in the water, and now proposed lithium as well

So yucky brews aren't just for witches anymore; they're being forced on everyone. Have we become a Halloween Witch-ocracy?

Deus Ex Machina vs. the Borg: Mind Fu in the Witchy Wars

2011-11-16T23:35:00.000-08:00

I've been a busy beaver.

First I have been reading an e-book entitled "Monkeys of Eden" by Andrew Hennessey. It's a far-out, very woo-woo conspiracy book by a self-described ufologist and Celtic fiddler. (right up my alley). Available on Scribd. It's written with a wry sense of humor, but a couple parts of it repeat, as if he had an accident with the cut and paste function and didn't catch it while proofreading. Still, it's an entertaining read.

here's a link to other of his books, off his website, also for free http://www.monkeysofeden.i8.com/

The author asserts, among other things, that the Lizard People are more or less telepathic, that it's not so much a conspiracy by various groups of elites, as it is a conspiracy of people with a secret ability. It would explain the ability of the Lizard People to keep so many details of their existence secret, if they don't have to actually talk about things with each other since they're just thinking back and forth at each other. There may also be some element of hive-mind to it.

Anyway, if true, the answer to dealing with them would first be to try and become telepathic so that at least you're on the same playing field. However if you do so and can't control it well, they might still be able to out-mind-fu you. It's possible that the people who get gang-stalked are targeted for being slightly telepathic, or sensitive. Indeed, I've encountered psychic but insane people. Once in Germany in a train station, I was walking along thinking about my great-grandfather coming from Germany and this crazy guy started walking behind me saying "ur ur ur ur ur Grossvater" (great great great great great grandfather). It's possible that I broadcast slightly, to those who can pick it up. Maybe we all do, but it's the reception that is the trick? Perhaps this disheveled guy walking behind me couldn't shut out the thoughts of others. Or it could have been a coincidence, but it was an odd one.

The whole broadcasting/reception thing is interesting, too, if you consider a performing artist's rapport with the audience. In order to convincingly perform, I think your imagination has to get carried away a little in the material you are performing. However, strong emotions can make the throat tighten, which is not what you want when you are singing. So you have to, while you are using the imagination, also remain slightly detached so that emotion does not overcome you so much that it messes with your throat, and so that you remember when to come in, what the next words are, etc. It's a balance between left and right brain. The pineal gland, however, which is the "psychic" part of the brain, is center brain. Perhaps this is activated more when both hemispheres are going at once.

There are also delta brain waves that are supposed to trigger telepathy. These mostly happen when you're asleep, but you can train yourself to make these waves while awake. In order to do so, use the binaural beats I linked to a few posts back.

There is supposed to be a way to enhance one's telepathy, with monoatomic gold, but I have also read many health warnings about consuming gold. Interestingly, the Philosopher's Stone is mixed with gold at the very end of the process. I've got a recipe for the Philosopher's Stone on the Forbidden Knowledge page.

The new-age 2012 thing has it that we will all become psychic. (alternately that we will enter the 4th dimension). If we were for some reason to all become telepathic that would indeed level the playing field. If we were to partially hive-mind, it would be like the biggest botnet ever. Imagine the telepathic elites, small percentage of the world that they are, confronted with 7 billion suddenly telepathic, angry and indignant minds at once. I think if I saw that coming I'd try to hide in a bunker too. #OCCUPY YOUR MIND!

I also looked further into the Singularity. This is actually more of a Borg kind of thing where man merges with machine, becoming "transhuman". Machine becomes sentient, chip implants become more sophisticated, and lo, we've got rich people becoming immortal by transplanting their personalities into a mainframe, or clone babies, or some such. Why stop at one clone? Why not become an army of Mr. Smiths, a la the Matrix? Well, I have enough trouble keeping after one of me. I can't imagine trying to keep track of an army of Mini-me. Combine that with a sort of Lawnmower Man scenario, and you've got the Central Scrutinizer running the Borg Army. Be all that you can be. yeah.

One wonders, is this just the techno version of a Witchy War? On one hand you've got the new-age hippies hoping for a Deus Ex Machina, either becoming psychic off the fumes from the solar flares or the pole shift magnetism; or for the Zeta UFO Air Force to come save us from the Lizards. On the other hand you've got these intellectual elites trying to convince us to let the Borg assimilate us.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who used to make fun of the territorial pissing and pagan witchy wars that would sometimes crop up among our friends. He would stand there, and pronounce, "I CURSE YOU!" and point at an imaginary point in front of him. Then he would go over to where the point he'd cursed was, stand there, and point at the first location, and bellow, "NO, I CURSE YOU!" then return to the first location, and say "NO, I CURSE YOU!" and lather-rinse-repeat until someone told him to shut up already.

Not Censored After All - Phew.

2011-11-13T06:07:00.000-08:00

The other day I complained that my transfer of blog posts to Wordpress got hung up for "content" right at the point where it would have downloaded a post critical of the Fed. But I got this message from Wordpress:

Our apologies. The system should not have done that.
We have removed the warning in your dashboard and sincerely
apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.

Well, I'm glad it wasn't censorship. It was just a weird place for the transfer to get hung up.
The new "mirror" blog is at www.pennypincherpersonalfinance.wordpress.com
I plan to keep it as a mirror site for a while, until I decide what I want to do. Posts will go here first though.

Marching to Electronic Bastille Day

2011-11-13T05:53:00.000-08:00

Hackers have found a vulnerability in computerized prison security systems that could let all the prisoners be let out of their cells at once remotely.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/11/vulnerabilities-give-hackers-ability-to-open-prison-cells-from-afar.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

On a bit of research, my analogy to Bastille Day really isn't that great of an analogy after all. I thought the deal was a bunch of prisoners were released - it was only 7 prisoners.

On July 14, 1789, just under 1,000 rioters/revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, which was a Medieval fort being used as a prison for aristocrats that held only 7 elderly prisoners at the time. What they wanted wasn't the prisoners, but the arms and armaments that were stored there. Interestingly, the Marquis de Sade had been held at the Bastille but had been released 10 days prior to the riot. Also the French king had just decided to close the Bastille a few days earlier because it was cost-ineffective to keep this big drafty old fort open to just hold 7 prisoners and some arms.

Fannie Mae Asks For Another Bailout

2011-11-13T05:30:00.000-08:00

http://news.yahoo.com/fannie-mae-loss-widens-asks-taxpayers-7-8b-221752510.html
Fannie Mae, in case you didn't know, buys mortgages and then repackages them in tranches as bonds that large investors like the Chinese government, life insurance companies, and pension plans buy. It was formed in 1938 as part of the New Deal. Fannie and Freddie are GSE's (Government Sponsored Enterprises). In order to hedge their bets on mortgages, they also deal in derivatives, including the now infamous credit default swaps.

Without someone selling mortgages on the secondary market, it is argued that mortgages would be a lot harder to get and would be more expensive. For this reason Fannie and Freddy are considered "too big to fail".

Due to careless subprime lending, the mortgage industry and real estate prices started to cave in on their own weight in 2006. Both Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac had epic fails in 2008 and had to be bailed out. On July 11, 2008 they went into conservatorship (i.e. the feds took them over). In September 2008 Fannie Mae received the biggest single bailout in the entire history of the US. In 2010 they were delisted from the NYSE. The Obama administration revealed a plan to slowly dissolve them earlier in 2011.

See here for a more complete history (Wikipedia).

Now Fannie Mae has their hand out again for 7.8 billion more of the taxpayers' money. They face losses because more people are in foreclosure. The alternative is for mortgages to become almost impossible to get. But the fat cats at the top of these companies are still getting big fat bonuses. Are we surprised? Also bailouts privatize profit and socialize risk. In other words, the fat cats gamble, and when they lose, they dip into our wallets, but still receive bonuses.

Without Fannie Mae et al, someone would have to fill the need for mortgages. Without another centralized alternative, there would be more owner financing; but there's a relatively new law saying nobody can draw up a mortgage unless a licensed mortgage broker is involved. This was on the surface supposed to protect people from unscrupulous real estate investors, but I think the real reason was to protect the mortgage industry.

Some Alternative Campers

2011-11-13T04:23:00.000-08:00

Duct Tape Camper (Yet another use for Duct Tape! Wheeee!)

The Tiny Transformer House Camper
Don't fold it back in while someone's in bed upstairs!

Have I Been Censored for Federal Reserve Criticism?

2011-11-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of exporting this blog to Wordpress. The reason is so that I have two blogs that are the same, because two is one and one is none. I'll probably keep this one but start posting in the other one, or something like that, eventually. I'll let you know. Wordpress is supposed to be more versatile, etc.

The new address there is www.pennypincherpersonalfinance.wordpress.com.

While exporting, it got hung up almost to the end. It had gotten up to October 7, 2011's post and then I got an error message saying they had a problem with my content. So I sent them an "error report" and asked why.

While waiting to hear from them as to why, I went and looked at my October content, and sure enough, on October 8, the very next post after the last one that got through was a history of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Well, I don't know for sure yet. Let's hope that Wordpress isn't engaging in that sort of censorship. Let's hope that the First Amendment is still working. And for the record, if the Fed is trying to shut down/shut up people who tell the truth about it, they can kiss my petunias and I will just shout all the louder. END THE FED.

Anonymous Does Something Worthwhile - Demolishes Kiddy Porn Ring

2011-11-10T23:03:00.000-08:00

Now this is cool. Finally the hackers at Anonymous found an opponent to hack that nobody's going to begrudge them.
They exposed a child porn ring called Lolita City. This ring was hiding on a darknet that was built using TOR.
Read here and here.

Now the fact that pedophilia is evil doesn't make TOR evil, just like it doesn't make the whole internet evil. TOR is a good tool for dissidents and political activists in repressive regimes too. But keep in mind if Anonymous could find these guys, then if you formed a darknet on TOR for whatever purpose and some hacker wanted to find it, they might be able to. It all depends on how bad they want to find it.

More Homemade Toiletries

2011-11-09T20:48:00.000-08:00

Homemade pore strip:
You need unflavored gelatin powder and milk. Mix a little gelatin and enough milk to make it about peanut butter consistency. Microwave it for 10 seconds (or heat it gently otherwise) until it's the consistency of white glue. Spread it on your face where you want to treat your pores. Wait till it dries, and peel it off.

Homemade pore strip #2:
2 egg whites and a tablespoon of honey. Whip them up. Spread it on your face where you want to treat your pores. Take tissues and place them on top of the stuff. Let it dry, peel it off, and wash your face.

Several hand cream recipes can be found at http://naturalnailcarerecipes.homestead.com/handcream.html
They all seem to involve mixing various oils and water at 90 degrees in a blender with sometimes 1/4 tsp of borax for 2 cups of lotion. The borax helps make the emulsion, and I imagine it also would act as a preservative. Olive oil is good, but you can also use almond or coconut oil. You can also substitute aloe vera gel for some of the water, or rose water. To make rose water you boil rose petals in distilled water and then discard the petals. (distilled water is sold at the grocery with the bottled water) The trick to getting the water and oil to not separate is to have them at exactly the same temperature.

If you end up having to make your own nut oil, like if you're living off the land, the way to do it is to grind nuts and boil them, then skim off the oil. You can make sunflower oil that way, so probably other oils as well. Olive oil is cold pressed for the most part.

Moldy Trailer, Bogus Loan

2011-11-09T06:23:00.000-08:00

I wrote a comment below an article at www.4closurefraud.org back in June. It was advice to a person who had a moldy trailer on land and a predatory loan. They couldn't stand to live in their own home for the mold and it was ruining their health. So I wrote this advice. I still think this is good advice.

To the guy with the moldy trailer: Mold is no laughing matter. Get out of there before the mold kills you. Walk away from the crappy trailer and declare bankruptcy. Do not pay the bank another penny. They don’t deserve your money – they may or may not have been complicit in the loan fraud your loan officer perpetrated, but aside from that, they’re a crappy bloodsucking vampire just from being a bank in the first place. Report your loan officer to Rachel Dollar, she is at http://www.mortgagefraudblog.com.

You can file your own bankruptcy, which just costs the filing fees; if you want a lawyer it will cost around $1500. You seem like you’re smart enough to educate yourself in the right way to file your own bankruptcy since you’ve been fighting with your bank. If you get a lawyer, you can tell any collection agents who call that they must stop calling you and instead call your lawyer. Or you can just get a prepaid cell phone anonymously, and give that number to family and friends, and get rid of the phone the agents keep calling.

Find a piece of “junk land” somewhere rural for $2000 or so, consider for anonymity’s sake forming a land trust to buy it in, using documents from http://www.totalrealestatesolutions.com or if they don’t have a land trust form then maybe some other legal forms website will have a form for sale, or look on Ebay for a used real estate investor course that might have that form, and make some friend or relative your trustee so that you aren’t the owner of record (so the foreclosing bank won’t try to attach your new property, although the bankruptcy will make it so they can’t do that anyway).

Clear off a spot (hire a guy with a bush hog or let someone cut down a few trees and keep the wood in barter), buy a used RV or travel trailer, because this piece of land probably won’t have any utilities, get M.D. Creekmore’s book on how he did this and got off the grid, and don’t take out any more loans. Creekmore’s website is http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/

You can also just buy a used RV or retrofit a van, not bother with the land, get a mail drop and change your residency to Nevada, and become snowbirds. (this requires one trip to Nevada to get a new drivers’ license and the mail drop). Look in Craig’s List for the RV and pay cash, you might be able to get one for around $2500 or even less. Check out http://www.cheaprvliving.com for ideas. I say Nevada because they don’t have a state income tax, they’re snowbird friendly, and you can pretty much just walk in and get a new drivers license without having to prove you have an apartment in Nevada. The mail drop is enough.

If you can’t afford any of this, is there somewhere you can couch-surf for several months in order to save up the money? You’ll need to get out of there anyway to avoid the mold. Also keep in mind that your mortgage payment, if you’re keeping it, you can save that up towards your new life.

Good luck. If you take nothing else from this, take this: Refuse to play their game. You owe nothing to that bank. You are not messing your honor up by refusing to pay on that crappy trailer. It is possible to have decent housing for under $5,000. And I would sue that loan officer personally for fraud, just to make a point. You might be able to get Legal Aid to help you with that.

PS: My blog is http://www.pennypincherpersonalfinance.blogspot.com. I have been a loan officer, legal secretary, real estate investor, and title examiner. I’ve seen a lot of crap and weirdness having to do with real estate.

How to Detect and Prove Mortgage Assignment Fraud

2011-11-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

I was trying to get to my blog this morning and accidentally typed the URL into a search engine box. At the top of the results was a link to this particular gem of a document at Scribd. I made a comment at 4closurefraud.org once upon a time, under this. Anyway, this document is a GREAT guide on how you can prove it if your mortgage was assigned from your lender to a loan servicer by the servicer itself instead of by your lender. Many of these documents were prepared by foreclosure mills and then signed off by "vice presidents" of the lender when those people are really employees of the servicer. Which is blatant fraud, and if you can prove it you can probably get your foreclosure set aside. It's probable that MILLIONS of these bogus utterances were prepared in the foreclosure "boom".

Here's the link at 4closurefraud.org
http://4closurefraud.org/2009/10/18/foreclosure-fraud-guide-to-looking-up-public-records-for-fraud/

Here's the link at Scribd
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24348139/Foreclosure-Fraud-%E2%80%93-Guide-to-Looking-Up-Public-Records-for-Fraud

I will publish my comment in the next post. It was advice to a man who had a moldy trailer and a bogus loan.

GPS Car Trackers

2011-11-09T05:30:00.000-08:00

Via Cryptogon and Wired:

This guy in San Jose found TWO GPS trackers on his car (one after he found and took pictures of the other one) and a strange man was seen poking around his girlfriend's car, which makes them think they were retrieving one off her car before she could find it. Also the police showed up while he was talking to Wired.

I thought I'd put some pictures from it so you can know what to look for. He found the second one when he saw "what looked like a cell phone antenna inside a hole on his back bumper".

Here's the first one he found. It was stuck under his car near his spare tire with a magnet.

Not too long ago, a Moslem student found this one on his car. When he posted this, the FBI came knocking to get it back from him.

All of these trackers have transmitters in them, so they're larger. But there are GPS devices that fit in the palm of your hand and that look like other things like Ipods or USB sticks. These are designed for people who want to spy on their spouse or something and who have access to the vehicle to retrieve the device from time to time. Therefore, you should consider not only looking under your car or in the trunk or spare tire, but also looking around in your car for these kind of items and leave them behind if you don't want to be tracked.

Incidentally you can also get someone's general location from their cell phone, and many cell phones also have GPS, and some of them will broadcast even when turned off, and even when the battery is out, because they have other batteries as well. So keep that in mind too.

If that's not enough, there are RFID's in tires that can be tracked by boxes on some roadside lamp poles. I'm assuming that's only in or near large cities or interstates, at least for now. And if you decide to walk and leave all electronics behind, now they're coming out with secret-camera light poles.

Maybe we should all take to wearing a large brimmed hat and a domino? Then they'd have a hard time telling any of us apart on the street. Or burkas for everyone even the men.

Some Inconvenient Quotes by Gandhi

2011-11-08T06:57:00.000-08:00

These are quotes where Gandhi advocates the use of violence in self-defense. He was not the total pushover he is sometimes made out to be.

“I WOULD risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of a whole race.”

“I have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honour by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live for ever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully”

“Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right”