Infinite Unknown

The Internet Is The Last Stronghold Of Freedom And It Is Under Siege.

Call your representatives and defend your freedom against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The elite hates the Internet and constantly makes plans to ‘take over’ – not only the Internet – in case of a ‘disaster’.

See also: G. W. Bush and Adolf Hitler signed a Directive 51

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

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Tags: Barack Obama, Civil liberties, Civil rights, Global News, Government, Internet, Law, New World Order, Obama administration, Politics, Rockefeller, U.S.

A job seeker looks over an employment bulletin board in Brooklyn

The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.

“If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did “do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee,” the policy-setting body of the central bank.

Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department’s monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent.

Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression.

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Tags: Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Labor Department, U.S., Unemployment

Rather than summarize, let me just highlight some of his best one-liners:

On retail:

• “The retail business is terrible… It’s almost all negative.”
• “We’re going to close hundreds of thousands of stores.”

On the consumer:

• “They’re still over leveraged, they’re losing jobs, their credit has been cut back.”

On America:

• “We are in the tank forever. As a country we are out of control, we’re in a death spiral.”

On the stock market:

• “We’re in terrible shape. That’s what the fundamentals tell me. I can’t explain the stock market.”

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Tags: Barack Obama, Consumers, Debt, Economy, Obama administration, Politics, Retailers, U.S.

Related information:
- Geithner: Auditing the Federal Reserve is a ‘line that we don’t want to cross’
- Judge: Federal Reserve Must Release Reports on Emergency Bank Loans
- Ben Bernanke warns on auditing the Federal Reserve
- Federal Reserve Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion

These days the TRUTH ‘could’ cause a systemic collapse!

And so the guns come out blazing. The Clearing House Association, another name for all the banks that were bailed out over the past year with the generous contributions from all of you, dear taxpayers, are now threatening with another instance of complete systemic collapse if Bloomberg’s lawsuit is allowed to proceed unchallenged, let alone if any of the “Audit The Fed” measures are actually implemented.

As a reminder, The Clearing House Association consists of ABN Amro, Bank Of America, The Bank Of New York, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, US Bank and Wells Fargo.

In a declaration filed in the Bloomberg Case (08-CV-9595, Southern District of New York), the banks demonstrate no shame in attempting to perpetuate the status quo with regard to the Federal Reserve and demand that the wool over the eyes of the general population remain firmly planted in perpetuity.

The Clearing House submits this declaration because the Court’s Order threatens to impair the ability of our members to access emergency funds through the New York Fed’s Discount Window without suffering the severe competitive harm that public disclosure of their identity will cause.

Our members have accessed the New York Fed’s Discount Window with the understanding that the Fed will not publicly disclose information about their borrowing, especially their identity. Industry experience, including very recent and searing experience, has shown that negative rumors about a bank’s financial condition – even completely unfounded rumors – have caused competitive harm, including bank runs and failures.

Surely transparency would facilitate rumor-mongering to an unprecedented degree. After all rumors spread much easier when everyone knows the true financial condition of banks.

And here, in plain written Times New Roman, you see what racketeering by a major bank consortium looks like:

If the names of our member banks who borrow emergency funds are publicly disclosed, the likelihood that a borrowing bank’s customers, counterparties and other market participants will draw a negative inference is great. Public speculation that a financial institution is experiencing liquidity shortfalls – which would be a natural inference from having tapped emergency funds – has caused bank customers to withdraw deposits, counterparties to make collateral calls and lenders to accelerate loan repayment or refuse to make new loans. When an institution’s customers flee and its credit dries up the institution may suffer severe capital and liquidity strains leaving it in a weakened competitive position.

Pardon me if I am a broken record here, but would rumors not spread much less if there was more transparency, if investors and other financial intermediaries were fully aware of the conditions of their counterparties, if banks did not have to cover their billions in reserve losses by pretending they are viable and essentially being constant wards of the state?

The Banks’ racketeering has gone on for far too long.

And yet, it does not stop: the conclusion from the banks’ letter: Continue reading »

Tags: Bailout, Bank of America, Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, JPMorgan, Taxpayers, U.S., Wells Fargo & Co.

- Green Sharts On The NYSE!:

These four stocks represented thirty seven percent of all shares traded today.

Today 3,162 different stocks traded on the NYSE.  These four represent 0.13% of the total, yet they comprised 37% of the volume.  That’s an over-representation of nearly 300 times the average.

Now folks, let’s be straight here.  Do you believe for one second that this is “great liquidity” added by the “high-frequency trading” computers that are almost certainly behind the vast majority of this volume?

This isn’t the first day with this sort of abnormal trading and volume pattern either.  In fact it has been going on for the last week, with AIG making a frequent appearance on the list as well.

If there was ever an argument to be made for the NYSE having turned into a gigantic “hot potato” parlor game, this is it – in your face in an impossible-to-explain-away fashion.

- Stocks led by four wounded horsemen (of  the coming apocalypse):

In fact, these four wounded horsemen of the financial sector comprised 40% of the overall trading volume on the NYSE on Tuesday. These stocks haven’t just been active, they’ve been surging.

This is kind of scary. It suggests that the late-summer portion of the almost six-month long market rally is being fueled more by speculation and momentum, not real optimism about a potential recovery in the financial sector and the overall economy.

- The Great Economic Recovery of 2009 Is a Fraud:

If the economy were truly in “recovery” mode, and if consumer demand were truly picking up, the Baltic Dry Index should be moving consistently higher.

It’s not. And that fact should be a major warning sign for anyone buying stocks and betting the economy’s current blip higher is sustainable.

- PE Ratio Shows That Today’s Stock Market Is Very Expensive:

From 1936 into the late 1980s, the PE ratio tended to peak in the low 20s (red line) and trough somewhere around seven (green line). The price investors were willing to pay for a dollar of earnings increased during the dot-com boom (late 1990s) and the dot-com bust (early 2000s). As a result of the recent plunge in earnings and recent stock market rally, the PE ratio spiked and just peaked at 144 – a record high. Currently, with 97% of US corporations having reported for Q2 2009, the PE ratio now stands at a lofty 129.

- RBS chief credit strategist issues red alert on global stock markets:

Three-month slide could hit record lows, Royal Bank of Scotland chief credit strategist Bob Janjuah predicts.
He expects the S&P 500 index of US equities to reach the “mid 500s”.

Tags: AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, Economy, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Stock Market, Wall Street

- Meredith Whitney: There Will Be More Than 300 Bank Failures

The US banking system will lose some 1,000 institutions over the next two years, said John Kanas, whose private equity firm bought BankUnited of Florida in May.

“We’ve already lost 81 this year,” Kanas told CNBC. “The numbers are climbing every day. Many of these institutions nobody’s ever heard of. They’re smaller companies.” (See the accompanying video for the complete interview.)

Failed banks tend to be smaller and private, which exacerbates the problem for small business borrowers, said Kanas, who became CEO of BankUnited when his firm bought the bank and is the former chairman and CEO of North Fork bank.

“Government money has propped up the very large institutions as a result of the stimulus package,” he said. “There’s really very little lifeline available for the small institutions that are suffering.”

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Tags: Bailout, Banking, Economy, FDIC, Obama administration, Politics, Real Estate, U.S., Wall Street

Nearly 4,000 US prisoners were sent $250 (£154) economic stimulus cheques by the government to encourage them to go shopping. Officials revealed yesterday that 2,200 convicts were entitled to the money because they had been free when eligibility was determined, although 1,700 prisoners got $425,000 of taxpayers’ money in error.

As a leading Republican in Congress, Eric Cantor, branded the payments “unacceptable”, the US social security administration said many cheques were returned by jails, and that the mistake was a tiny part of Barack Obama’s $787bn stimulus effort.

Andrew Clark in New York
Thursday 27 August 2009 00.39 BST

Source: Guardian

Tags: Economy, Government, Obama administration, Politics, U.S.

After all, the 1918 flu virus was dead and buried – until, that is, scientists unearthed a lead coffin to obtain a biopsy of the corpse it contained. Later, researchers similarly disturbed an Inuit woman buried under permafrost.³

The US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with a scientist from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, then began to reconstruct the 1918 Spanish flu. Had Iran or North Korea engaged in Frankenstein experiments (complete with ransacking graves) to reverse engineer the 1918 virus the US and the UK would have gone ballistic at the UN Security Council.

Interestingly, numerous doctors and scientists suspect that the swine flu virus was cultured in a laboratory. A mainstream Australian virologist, Adrian Gibbs – who was one of the first to analyze the genetic properties of the 2009 swine flu – believes that scientists accidentally created the H1N1 virus while producing vaccines. And Dr. John Carlo, Dallas Co. Medical Director, “This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified.”⁴ Because of this, the 2009 swine flu virus – which has yet to be detected in any animals – has a rather suspicious pedigree.”

By Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.

The alarm has been sounded. Politicians, pharmaceutical executives and media conglomerates would have us believe that a 1918-style pandemic is a real threat. The 1918 pandemic, however, evolved out of conditions unique to World War I, for four specific reasons.

Why 2009 Is Not 1918

First, World War I was characterized by millions of troops living in waterlogged trenches along the Western Front. This war zone became fertile ground for an opportunistic virus, as medical literature reveals:

“…a landscape that was contaminated with respiratory irritants such as chlorine and phosgene, and characterized by stress and overcrowding, the partial starvation in civilians, and the opportunity for rapid ‘passage’ of influenza in young soldiers would have provided the opportunity for multiple but small mutational charges throughout the viral genome.”¹

Second, the war witnessed the growth of industrial-scale military camps and embarkation ports, such as Etaples in France, enabling the flu virus to enter into another phase of accelerated mutation. On any given day, Etaples was a makeshift city of 100,000 troops from around the British Empire and its former dominions. These soldiers concentrated into unsanitary barracks, tents and mess halls.

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Tags: Flu, Health, Immune System, Influenza, Medicine, Pandemic, Science, Virus, WW I

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- Sold as non-lethal, Tasers killed 400 in US, Canada since 2001
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Taser applications:
- Police State: Cops pepperspray, taser mentally challenged, deaf man, while using the toilet
- Police State: Cops Taser Child 19 Times Leaving Him in a Coma
- Police State: Cop Tasers Mom In Front of Her Children
- Unedited Dash Cam Footage of Grandmother Being Tased
- Taser use to obtain DNA not unconstitutional: NIAGARA COURTS RULING
- Prison officer zaps children with 50,000-volt stun gun ‘to show them what a day at work is like’
- Top cop fired for allegedly using Taser on wife
- Ex-NFL Player Tasered For Pointing At Cop

THE manufacturer of the Taser stun gun is sparking new controversy with the commercial launch of a long-range version that can be fired from a 12-bore shotgun.

Government-funded tests on initial versions of the new Extended Range Electronic Projectile (XREP) have revealed possible health risks to people on the receiving end, New Scientist has learned. The manufacturer, Taser International of Scottsdale, Arizona, says the issue has been addressed in redesigned devices, but these have yet to be independently tested.

Unlike the current Taser X26, which fires darts attached to short wires, the XREP is wire-free. Its projectile, the size of a shotgun cartridge, is designed to pierce the target’s skin and contains battery-powered circuits that deliver a debilitating shock. It has a range of 20 metres or more, compared with 5 metres for previous Tasers.

A team led by Cynthia Bir, a trauma injury specialist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, found that some of the 275 XREP cartridges that Taser supplied for testing last year were capable of delivering an electric shock for more than 5 minutes, rather than the 20 seconds of shocking current they are supposed to generate. Previous Taser stun guns shock for only 5 seconds per discharge, though that can be repeated.

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Tags: Taser, Technology, Weapons

Related articles:
- Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Finally Testifies Under Oath
- Sibel Edmonds ‘Bombshell’: Osama Bin Laden Worked for US Until 9/11

Over 24 hours have passed since the video and full transcript of Sibel Edmond’s deposition have been made public, giving even the most stupid and lazy journalist the time to either watch the video or read the transcript. This morning, I decided to check what Google News would find for me. I simply typed “Sibel Edmonds” and hit enter. Here are the results:

Now, I cannot say that I was expecting a tsunami of reports, but still, nothing. Almost nothing at all! Take a look for yourself (click on the pic for a higher resolution). What do you see?

The Brad Blog. Well, yes, since Brad Friedman has been following this story from the very beginning and since his blog is, along with Lukery’s “Let Sibel Speak“, the unofficial “Sibel news” blog.

What else?

Znet, Georgetown News Democrat, kypost, and Antiwar.com.

That’s it. Absolutely nothing from the corporate press. Not a single word, not even on page 23…

Think of some of the possible news headlines which could have legitimately been made with Sibel’s testimony:

FBI WHISTLEBLOWER ACCUSES NUMBER TWO AT STATE OF SELLING NUCLEAR SECRETS

or

BISEXUAL CONGRESSWOMAN BLACKMAILED BY NATO ALLY

Surely, if the corporate media is in the business of selling stuff, then such catchy headlines are just any editor’s wet dream, no?

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Tags: Corporate Media, FBI, Global News, Sibel Edmonds