CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-19 17:32:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

A crime is only a 'scandal' if your political opponents disapprove  Most of Obama's crimes are not 'scandals' because the Republicans approved of them.  

2013-05-19 16:47:36 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

One survey found that 75% of IRS respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie to Congress.

2013-05-19 15:44:12 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

"If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law."

-- Edward Abbey

2013-05-19 15:43:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

“What is really, really disturbing to me is how some companies treat the city of Detroit as a dumping ground,”  LOL  LOL  ROFL

2013-05-19 15:19:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-19 15:23:03 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

To find how much Google has screwed things up in the past week, it is only necessary to find a Chromebook that has had the old versions of G+ and Play sleeping for the past several days.  If you can avoid anything that causes it to reload you find yourself saying, "My, that was a pretty clean interface they used to have."

2013-05-19 07:07:10 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race.  — Thomas Sowell

2013-05-19 06:48:14 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

"Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed". And there are millions of long-term unemployed. Who will never have a real job.

2013-05-19 06:24:26 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

What does it mean to be retired in the United States? The age of disappearing pensions, dependence on Social Security, and stock market speculation.  http://goo.gl/xCfkc

2013-05-19 05:01:04 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

WASHINGTON—While stressing that he has no plans to mount such an insurrection, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey told reporters Friday that if he really wanted to, he could probably carry out a sweeping military junta that would oust President Obama from power. “I’m just saying, there are seven joint chiefs, we all have extensive military training, and we spend a lot of time behind closed doors with the president,” said Gen. Dempsey, adding that the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that, if he had a mind to do such a thing, installing a military dictatorship “wouldn’t be all that difficult.” “There really are no insurmountable barriers to eliminating him, declaring martial law, and having tanks on the White House lawn by the end of the day. I can’t say that I’m interested in making myself the ruler of a 300-million-person police state, but it certainly would beeasier to do than a... more »

2013-05-19 04:18:32 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

At the time of these raids, we heard not a single protest from the “Tea Party” groups that are now loudly protesting their own victimization at the hands of the government: the leftists targeted by the FBI were just another group of “terrorists,” left to fight against their targeting and prosecution largely alone. Now that conservatives have been put in the crosshairs in a similar manner, however – singled out by a government agency for “special treatment” on account of their politics – their sympathizers in Congress are making a big stink about it and the headlines are alight with their outrage.

The Tea Partiers’ problem is that their protests come far too late – because the legal and political precedents targeting dissident groups were established long ago, with the full complicity and even enthusiastic support of most of those who call themselves “conservatives” thesedays. The “Patriot” Act... more »

2013-05-19 04:00:44 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported,... more »

2013-05-19 03:41:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

...Michelle Obama on Friday said the reason more African-American children don't go to college is because they're lazy:

“Instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper."

2013-05-19 03:33:33 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"How I Found Freedom in and Unfree World"

2013-05-18 18:25:47 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Many view the government switching to a chained-CPI to calculate price inflation as something that will impact Social Security recipient payments, but it is worse than that, it also straight out increases taxes.

2013-05-18 18:17:12 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Russia Providing Syria with Advanced Cruise Missiles, a Big Middle Finger to the United States

2013-05-18 18:08:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Almost two years ago, I reported that there are no more churches in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. State Department. Now, Andrew Doran at AmCon Mag tells the story of how the Iraq War became a war on Christians. Hopefully, the U.S. will not repeat the mistake for a third time in Syria.

Personally, I don't believe it's been a "mistake."  I think it's been deliberate.

2013-05-18 17:37:45 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-05-18 17:16:56 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Eff the prison industrial complex and it's goon squads!

2013-05-18 16:57:29 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”
...
In a set of 22 industrialised countries containerisation explains a 320% rise in bilateral trade over the first five years after adoption and 790% over 20 years. By comparison, a bilateral free-trade agreement raises trade by 45% over 20 years and GATT membership adds 285%.

2013-05-18 02:46:18 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

The AP reviewed 990 tax returns for nonprofit groups that were made publicly available and posted on both the Guidestar and the Foundation Center websites, searching between 2009 and 2011 under the terms "tea party," "patriot" and other terms frequently used by tea party groups. Several tea party groups also made their tax returns available to the AP. The returns detailed revenues and expenses for the groups, as well as other details. Donors' identifies, however, are shielded from disclosure under federal tax code provisions.

Only 21 of the 93 groups reported annual gross receipts higher than $25,000 between 2009 and 2011, according to the AP review. The $25,000 figure is a threshold for the IRS because an organization's financial strength and revenue sources are important factors in determining its tax-exempt status. Nonprofit groups reporting less than $25,000 a year... more »

2013-05-17 21:55:08 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

Obama's use of the IRS to silence critics just proves that government must regulate who is allowed to criticize it.  

2013-05-17 21:12:00 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Imitation  Modification  Improvement

2013-05-17 20:15:27 (0 comments, 5 reshares, 5 +1s)

For the past twelve years, the US military has been given free rein in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing, raping, pillaging, and otherwise doing the Devil’s work. Why is anybody surprised that, when they come home, they keep doing what they've been doing all along?

2013-05-17 20:11:30 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17429786

2013-05-17 17:18:14 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

Go Obama!  Wag that dog!

2013-05-17 17:15:55 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

What is creepier:  Flesh-eating jihadis, or that the UN backs them?

2013-05-17 14:23:42 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

This is how thugs in government think. Its ok for them to bomb the fuck out of people but heaven forbid attempting to defend yourself from them. 

2013-05-17 13:41:15 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

This is your government pissing on you, and daring you to do something about it.

2013-05-16 19:56:31 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

"As the river reversed direction, it formed a 150 foot waterfall, the highest ever in Louisiana" 

An oil company mistakenly drains a lake into a salt mine.

2013-05-16 19:20:59 (14 comments, 3 reshares, 9 +1s)

Is Rand Paul trying to be so odious that his father will seem like such an improvement and we will ignore all his problems when he runs in 2016?

2013-05-16 18:44:57 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Did somebody remind them that all the Watergate Burglars went to prison?

2013-05-16 17:42:18 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

it's hard to have a clue what's going on if you're always fundraising and golfing right? 

2013-05-16 17:14:58 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Big surprise: governments start using porn filters to block other sites they don't approve of.

2013-05-16 17:10:21 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Thinking that an option to display more text by default in postings and comments would be very useful.  I'm now having to manually expand pretty much everything. Some of us are more text than photo oriented, as it turns out!

2013-05-16 10:16:04 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 8 +1s)

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ's attack on AP's news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in tones of recent epiphany, made me laugh audibly:

"President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises.

"The Justice Department's collection of journalists' phone records and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama's credibility as a champion of civil liberties - and as ap... more »

2013-05-16 04:02:40 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: they privately assured the South Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a better deal than would a Democratic one. In this way, they undercut both the talks themselves and the electoral strategy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The tactic “worked,” in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the peace initiative on which the Democrats had based their campaign.

The recently released Johnson  tapes confirm that not only is Nixon partially responsible for the tens of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese who needlessly died after the talks fell apart, but Johnson was aware of the “treason.”

2013-05-16 03:55:33 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 9 +1s)

2013-05-16 02:50:29 (4 comments, 3 reshares, 14 +1s)

2013-05-15 20:32:27 (5 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Police will never stop doing this.  Taxpayers will never stop funding this.  The only way to make it stop is to bury the taxpayers in so many lawsuits so that they will not be able to afford to keep paying for this.  

2013-05-15 19:37:30 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 13 +1s)

2013-05-15 03:19:29 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Crowdsourced campaign to stop celebrity Kickstarter projects

2013-05-15 02:25:57 (14 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

These aren't general economic concepts.  They are anti-interventionist arguments for a statist society.  They assume collectivist intervention and that every step towards freedom must be justified.  A free society would be puzzled by most of these, and economics would not be about evaluating the effects of coercion.  

via +Brad Dillon 

2013-05-14 20:30:12 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

"We are all Tea Partiers now"

2013-05-14 19:04:14 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

Watergate II?
It does not seem to matter how many foreigners you kill or how many American dissidents you abuse.  What matters is whether you insult the self esteem of the well connected.  This was Nixon's mistake, and it may now be Obama's.  

A good investigation will provide a much needed distraction for the wars we are losing, and the collapse of the dollar, and the ongoing collapse of the economy, and the damage caused by Obamacare and the Internet Sales Tax.  Is it feeling like 1973 to anybody else?  

2013-05-14 05:38:03 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

http://www.waronwhistleblowers.com/

2013-05-14 05:27:57 (4 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

But the Republicans in Congress also want to shift the blame. They supported the Obama Administration’s policy of bombing Libya and overthrowing its government. They also repeated the same manufactured claims that Gaddafi was “killing his own people” and was about to commit mass genocide if he were not stopped. Republicans want to draw attention to the President’s editing talking points in hopes no one will notice that if the attack on Libya they supported had not taken place, Ambassador Stevens would be alive today.

2013-05-14 04:35:14 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

To maintain the accusation of fraud in the presence of informed consent, some Rothbardian economists expand the definition of ‘fraud’ itself. As a counter to Bryan Caplan’s arguments in defense of fractional reserve, for example, Walter Block responded, “But, lying is only sufficient for fraud, not necessary. There are other ways to commit fraud besides an outright lie. For example, it is fraudulent for a bank or anyone else to try to sell you a square circle, even if they do not lie about it. Why? Because there is no such thing as a square circle, and, in order for a contract to be a valid one, not only must both parties agree to it (neither lies to the other), but, also, the contract must be in accordance with LOGIC.”

This is a strange requirement. It means a 3rd party would be able to invalidate a contract in which there is full disclosure and with which the contracting parties aresatisfied... more »

2013-05-14 03:04:32 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

2013-05-14 00:00:32 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 1 +1s)

The sale was a naked short. The seller had no gold to sell. COMEX reported having gold only equal to about half of the short sale in its vaults, and not all of that was available for delivery. No one but the Federal Reserve could have placed such an order, and the order came from one of the Fed’s bullion banks, one of the entities “too big to fail.”