from The Liberty Hound:
SGT
If You Can’t Change Your Mind, Change the Subject
by Andrew P. Napolitano, Lew Rockwell:
On the heels of his worst week in office, during which his crude comments about race were widely perceived as defending racism and hatred — comments that sent some of his natural domestic allies fleeing — President Donald Trump could not bring himself to articulate a mea culpa.
Instead, he purported to defend as “some very fine people” the monsters who shouted “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil” (a virulent Nazi slogan calling for lands where only Aryans may live) as they clashed with those who rejected their messages in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Police failure and general government indifference about the freedom of speech permitted one of the racists to kill one of those who had come to reject the hate.
After the deceased was identified, one of the neo-Nazis there said she deserved to die because she was “fat.” It is difficult for me to accept that I am writing about neo-Nazis calling for racial purity and rejoicing in the death of an innocent — in America in 2017. But here we are. They are among us, and these subjects must be addressed.
At first, the president made a rambling statement about bad people on “both sides”; then he read a nicely worded attack on racists; and then he held a disastrous impromptu news conference in which he was so morally ambivalent that he seemed to reject his duty as president.
Rejecting, as well, the pleas of those around him to renounce his own failure to renounce his moral ambivalence — which won him a public accolade from the most notorious Ku Klux Klan fanatic in the country — Trump decided to change the subject.
Like former President Bill Clinton after his disastrous public appearance before a federal grand jury that was investigating him, Trump decided to fight a war. But the war he announced we will “fight to win” earlier this week is the longest, most misguided, costliest and least understood war in our history, and we are fighting for people who hate us.
If these phrases and ideas sound familiar, they should. They are not my words — though I agree with them — but those of candidate Trump. He articulated them forcefully to the American electorate during last year’s presidential election campaign. He actually began attacking the war in Afghanistan long before he announced his presidential candidacy.
If he has been consistent on any public issue, it has been his opposition to this useless, lawless, costly war — until he needed to change the subject.
Read More @ LewRockwell.com
Urban Survivors: A Post-SHTF Water Supply
by Jeremiah Johnson, Ready Nutrition:
ReadyNutrition Guys and Gals, we’re going to cover some quick, down-and-dirty techniques for throwing a water supply together before the SHTF for our urban-dwelling readers. Too often urbanites are ignored, and there are surely many more of you as readers than the comments reveal.
Many of you may be wondering about this, as I’ve written extensively about a rain-catchment system for your home, underground cisterns, methods of water storage in the home, and the like. I have also written on how to locate water from “unlikely” sources. So why this?
Because we’re a hair’s breadth away from a war and/or an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) Strike against the U.S., and many have not initiated any of these plans for water storage.
On another note, naysayers and trolls have been posting without hiatus. Their methods are simple: Deny, Discredit, and Denounce. Do not pay any attention to these “nonproductive” comments, in which everything written is attacked without any viable solution being proposed. The information presented here is not as “perfect” as the credentials of the trolls, however, if you take the initiative…research it yourself and then act upon it…the information gives you both options and ideas to enable you to succeed.
If you’re in an urban environment, especially living in an apartment or condo, your options regarding water storage are going to be severely limited. Tell you what. If you’re not thinking outside of the box, nobody will do so for you when the time is needed. My advice is if you have a storage unit in the building or complex? See if you can rent an extra one. If not, then allocate the one that you have for storing emergency supplies, one of them being water.
You can store 5-gallon containers with water in that storage unit. A good idea for you would be two 5-gallon containers for each member of the family. That would give you a minimum of a five-day supply per family member, as each person needs about 2 gallons per day. Cases of bottled water would be your next option, followed by the 2-liter bottle storage method. Ensure that if you’re in an apartment, that you have at least 1 of those 5-gallon containers per person. I’m trying to suggest it so that you don’t have too much “water weight” in one given area…although 1 container per person is certainly on the “conservative” side. Use your best judgment.
In an apartment: allocate water for use for the toilet. You want a couple of 5-gallon containers for the toilet. When the emergency either occurs or looms “danger close,” you need to fill up the bathtub and all the sinks in the house completely. Fill up every large container that can’t be easily knocked over, and preferably those with lids. Fill up containers with lids, lining and stacking them up all over the house, if need be.
You may plan on bugging out, but you may be trapped there for a while, and it’s better safe than sorry: load up now and store it to see you through until you can leave.
Here’s an idea for you that may work should your city or town be suffering from the effects of an EMP but not a nuke or nuclear radiation. Tap into the downspout nearest to your unit. With the aid of a square and a sturdy but flexible sheet of plastic (such as a disposable plastic baking sheet, for instance), make a “funnel” and run the end of this into a length of 1” or comparable PVC pipe, securing your funnel with strong duct tape. You’ll then need to “punch” into the downspout, and then position your funnel to catch the water and run it into your PVC pipe, then to a container that you preposition.
To answer your question: if you just place a container at the bottom of the downspout and there’s a water shortage, how long will it be until a “Planet of the Apes” scenario unfolds, and another 100 people want the water that’s in that container?
Not to mention that you’ll have to expose yourself to the outside. High rise apartment-dwellers will have a hard time with this one, and if you don’t have a balcony facing the downspout, you’ll have to figure an alternative method to pipe it in or collect it. For apartment dwellers with balconies, you can stretch sheets of plastic in an “open” funnel, and channel the water into collecting containers. Preposition open containers all over your balcony.
Here’s a good idea for you. Pick up a large metal or plastic outdoor garbage can. Line the inside of it with two layers of thick contractor strength trash bags. Leave that out on your balcony or on your porch. Be smart: after the SHTF, place a bunch of trash around the base of it, maybe kick a dent or two into it, and go at it with a can of spray paint all over. Make it appear to be a trash can.
But it’ll be your “urban cistern,” hidden from the IHM (Incredible Human Mob).
You can fill that with water you collect, from the rain-gutter tap I just mentioned, to the smaller containers and plastic sheets you use to gather rainwater. With the plastic bag overlapped it will look just as an ordinary trash can.
Make sure you also have plenty of water purification gear: filters, chemical additives such as bleach, iodine, or HTH (calcium hypochlorite) to treat the water you collect, and pitchers with filtration systems, such as Brita’s, etc. You also need to find a building or storage facility that is not going to hold anything particularly useful. Use the spouts from this location to collect rainwater. Just remember, chances are unless you visit it or watch over it, the water you collect will be taken.
Now, about others in your building: if you’re fortunate enough to have a laundry room in your building, you can organize a “building water supply” with the washing machines. Run the machines to fill and use them as a storage reservoir. You can (after it has hit) disconnect the hoses and see if you might be able to take some water from them. Don’t forget that utility sink: stopper it up, plug it up, or whatever. But fill that bad boy up, and keep it topped off.
Read More @ ReadyNutrition.com
Why Am I Doing This?
by Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg:
Those of you who’ve read me for many years will have undoubtedly noticed a major transformation in the tone and content of my writing over the course of 2017. This shift has been the result of much personal introspection regarding how I had been doing things in the past and whether I was pleased with the outcome.
In the June post, People Are Devolving Into Degeneracy and Violence – Don’t Join the Club, I noted:
When times get tough people can unite and fight back against a common enemy, or they can be manipulated into fighting each other. Unfortunately, the latter has become increasingly popular amongst all sides in what has become an increasingly deranged, adolescent and counterproductive political environment.
Meanwhile, the people who are truly powerful, the oligarchs of industry and their bought and paid for political minions are the ones who really benefit. The primary purpose of this website from the very beginning has been to highlight how power actually functions in imperial America with the hope that people across the political spectrum could unite and push back against the unaccountable rent-seeking practices of a common enemy. It seems I was extraordinarily naive.
When a writer and thinker such as myself is forced to admit failure, it’s a very tough pill to swallow. Writing this blog is in many ways a thankless task. I’m essentially doing volunteer work day in and day out because I passionately believe in the ideas I put forth, and to see them have little to no effect on the public debate can be very depressing. Rather than seeing human beings unite to throw off the predatory shackles that bind them as I had hoped, I see people who should be coming together punching and yelling at each other in the streets — and that’s on a good day. On bad days, people are getting shot or run over, from Virginia to London. Watching all this madness unfold while the truly powerful sit back and grin, more secure in their positions as ever before thanks to rabble fighting each other, sometimes makes me want to just stop doing this writing thing. After all, what’s the point?
Upon deeper reflection, I’ve come away with several unpleasant self-critiques about how I had been engaging with readers over the past five years. For one thing, I realized that most of my posts revolved around expressing outrage about how poorly other people were acting and how dangerous these actions were to society at large.
While understanding how the system works and identifying some particularly bad actors is very important, it’s not nearly enough. By spending so much thought and energy on the transgressions of others, I realized that I had done my part to contribute to the “outrage culture” which currently infects our political dialogue. Pointing fingers at others incessantly is what unconscious people do, which more conscious people inspire others to live up to their best nature. For years, I had been doing too much of the former, and not enough of the latter. That’s not to say there’s no value in calling out bad actors, I think there is. The point is that my content had become defined by a dangerous imbalance, and it was bad for me and bad for you.
To see what I mean, let’s take a step back in time. Upon seeing the government response to the financial crisis nearly a decade ago, I immediately knew that the country was headed for a very dangerous and tumultuous time. This realization left me with a sense of a mission to get out there and warn people about what was happening and the destructive implications that would inevitably follow. You simply cannot have elitist theft and corruption at the scale we witnessed in the post financial crisis era without major blowback. I figured that the most important thing I could do was explain how the entire economy and political paradigm had become a parasitic, criminal, systemic cancer. I figured if people “woke up” to reality and got upset about it, we could unify the public against oligarchy and implement true governance by the people, for the people. I was completely wrong.
People certainly got angry, but much of this anger was channeled toward the election of a narcissistic con man, who immediately handed his administration over to Wall Street, just as all his predecessors had before him. Even worse, the election of Trump has made it even easier to divide the public against one another, rather than against true power. The road we’re headed on right now doesn’t end well, and I’ve recognized the error of my ways.
As I noted in yesterday’s post, operating from a state of anger (or fear) will only result in very bad responses to our real problems. Calling reality as I see it is as important as ever, but merely trying to get people outraged will never get us to where we need to — as individuals or a nation.
Part of the reason I felt like a failure when reflecting upon how things turned out since the financial crisis was due to my unrealistic expectations. I assumed a largely unconscious population could overcome and transcend our corrupt, neo-feudal society simply by becoming outraged. This was an extremely stupid and lazy assumption, and I now recognize that. I’ve since come to understand that a culture does indeed reflect the individuals who reside in it — an discomforting, yet fundamental truth.
Read More @ LibertyBlitzkrieg.com
U.S. Senate Wants To Label WikiLeaks A “Non-State Hostile Intelligence Service”
by Aaron Kesel, Activist Post:
The U.S. Senate is considering a bill that would classify WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” bundled as part of the 2018 Intelligence Authorization Act. Presumably, that classification would authorize the use of force against WikiLeaks.
“It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States,” a section of the Act reads.
The Act almost unanimously passed a Senate panel last month 14-1, rejected by only one man, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who staunchly opposed the measure due to the provision that was snuck in about WikiLeaks.
“The language in the bill suggesting that the U.S. government has some unstated course of action against ‘non-state hostile intelligence services’ is equally troubling,” Wyden said in a press release. “The damage done by WikiLeaks to the United States is clear. But with any new challenge to our country, Congress ought not react in a manner that could have negative consequences, unforeseen or not, for our constitutional principles. The introduction of vague, undefined new categories of enemies constitutes such an ill-considered reaction.”
“The use of the novel phrase ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets,” said Senator Wyden.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions previously said in April that the arrest of WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange was a “priority” for the DOJ.
“We are going to step up our effort and already are stepping up our efforts on all leaks,” he said. “This is a matter that’s gone beyond anything I’m aware of. We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious. So yes, it is a priority. We’ve already begun to step up our efforts and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail,” Sessions said.
Meanwhile, CIA Director Mike Pompeo has regularly labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” the same term used in the Senate bill.
WikiLeaks, an international non-profit whistleblowing organization, has leaked at least 10 million classified documents to date from various governments including the United States. In 2016, the group published a number of documents and emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta that suggested the DNC deliberately tried to discredit presidential candidate Bernie Sanders over then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Read More @ ActivistPost.com
U.S. Banks Precious Metals Derivative Exposure Surged In The Beginning Of 2017
by Steve St. Angelo, SRSrocco:
According to the most recent report on the U.S. Financial Institutions Derivatives trading activity, the U.S. banks held a record amount of precious metals contracts in the first quarter of 2017. Not only did the U.S. banks report a record amount of precious metals contracts, but they also held an unprecedented quantity in notional value of commodity and equity derivative contracts.
There just seems to be a lot of paper floating around in our highly inflated stock, bond, and Forex markets. And… there needs to be. Without an ever increasing amount of leverage via their derivative bets and hedging, these markets would be in serious trouble. Furthermore, the practice of using contracts to hedge bets upon on other derivative bets has put the financial market in a highly fragile state.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) put out its First Quarter 2017 Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivative Activities. In that report, they published the following chart on the U.S. Banks’ notional value in precious metals contracts:
As we can see in the chart, the overall trend has continued higher since 2000. What is interesting is that the notional value of precious metals contracts held by the U.S. banks was even greater in the first quarter of 2017 versus Q4 2012 when the prices of the precious metals were much higher.
In looking at previous data, some quarters reported a larger amount of precious metals contracts, which was due to the banks adding short contracts as the price of precious metals increased. However, Q1 2017 of $43.6 billion was up considerably versus the $28.3 billion in Q1 2016.
For example, in Q3 2016, U.S. banks also held $43.6 billion in precious metals contracts. Again, this was due to a lot of short contracts held by the U.S. banks when the gold price surged to a high of $1,366 in the third quarter of 2016. As the gold price sold off over the next several months, the precious metals contracts declined in the fourth quarter of 2016:
We can see this in the last bar on the chart on the right. But what is interesting is the significant increase in U.S. banks’ precious metals exposure in the first quarter of 2017, shown in the first chart above, when the number of short gold contracts the large U.S. banks held declined significantly in the graph below:
Now, this is only showing the U.S. banks’ gold contracts. These contracts do not include other precious metals, such as silver, platinum, and palladium. However, gold is by far the largest market. If we include the FX contracts (forward exchange contracts), the total notional amount is enormous:
The total notional amount of U.S. banks’ FX & Gold Contracts was a stunning $34.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2017, up from $30.7 trillion at the end of 2016. Here is the definition of a Forward Exchange Contract by Investopedia:
Forward Exchange Contract: A forward exchange contract is a special type of foreign currency transaction. Forward contracts are agreements between two parties.
Forward contracts are not traded on exchanges, and standard amounts of currency are not traded in these agreements. They cannot be canceled except by the mutual agreement of both parties involved. The parties involved in the contract are generally interested in hedging a foreign exchange position or taking a speculative position.
The nature of forward exchange contracts protects both parties from unexpected or adverse movements in the currencies’ future spot rates.
So, these FX Contracts are hedges on the movements of different fiat currencies spot prices. We don’t know the percentage breakdown of the Gold or FX contracts. However, I would imagine the majority being in the FX Contracts that are hedging the different fiat currencies.
Read More @ SRSrocco.com
WHAT TBP MEANS TO ME
by Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform:
With all the turmoil in the last few weeks over websites, censorship, free speech, and leftist tech corporations banning sites they don’t like, I thought it would be a good time to clarify my vision and purpose for The Burning Platform. First, TBP is not an alt-right, white supremacist or pro-nazi website. I also don’t consider it a pro-Republican website. It’s been built by being anti lots of stuff. I don’t want to be part of any group that would have me as a member.
My philosophy is practical libertarian. I want to be left alone to live my life as I choose. I don’t care how others live their lives. The less government, the better. The purpose of our military is to protect our country from invasion, not policing the world. The Austrian School of economics makes the most sense to me. Keynesian economists are either liars or brain damaged. I’m a strict Constitutionalist. I despise Wall Street bankers, the Federal Reserve, liberal politicians, GOP establishment politicians, neo-cons, fake news corporate media, the military industrial complex, government apparatchiks, the surveillance state, and the Deep State oligarchs.
The site’s patron saints are Ron Paul and David Walker. The mistreatment of Ron Paul by the corporate media and the GOP establishment during his 2008 and 2012 campaigns for president was the motivation for me to begin writing. The name of the website is taken from a quote by David Walker which I believe sums up the dilemma facing our country. Our fiscal situation is now far worse than it was when he made this statement in 2007. But still, the ignorant masses continue to mindlessly sleepwalk through life staring at their iGadgets as the American Empire accelerates towards bankruptcy and a great fall.
“The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon.
There are striking similarities between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. The fiscal imbalance meant the US was on a path toward an explosion of debt.
With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiraling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks. Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an unsustainable path. Our very prosperity is placing greater demands on our physical infrastructure. Billions of dollars will be needed to modernize everything from highways and airports to water and sewage systems.”
– David Walker – 2007
The original intent of creating this website was to have a place where I could post my articles without being censored. Seeking Alpha began changing my articles and eventually banning me. Financial Sense black balled me. They both sold out to Wall Street. After having a falling out with my original web master and then running the site on the cheap by myself for a few years, a massive denial of service attack in 2014 looked like it would be the end of TBP. That is when fellow blogger Mike Krieger and TMWNN came to my rescue. TMWNN fought off the denial of service attack and has protected TBP ever since.
TBP went from a half assed shoestring operation to a more professional website. My generous readers stepped up with a significant level of donations and the big boob ads get plenty of clicks from my dirty old man demographic, generating decent ad revenue. The site has changed dramatically over the last few years as my annual visitor totals have doubled from 4.4 million to 8.8 million. Not bad for some guy doing this in his spare time.
As the TBP community has grown I had to make a choice. I could just write an article or two per week and leave the site dormant for most of the week. I have very limited time, especially during the workweek. It became clear to me the community wanted to interact on a daily basis, so I decided to turn TBP into a mini Zero Hedge with 15 to 20 posts per day from various writers. I’ve been thrilled to have multiple TBPers become great contributors to the site with an outstanding array of articles and viewpoints. I’ve become more of a publisher/editor and less of a writer. I prefer writing, but keeping this community entertained and involved on a daily basis is more important.
The entire point of this website is to piss people off, wake them up to the evils being done by their government, uncover the fake data pumped out on a daily basis by the government and media, reveal the propaganda techniques used by the Deep State to keep the sheep sedated, and warn them of the financial peril that unequivocally will destroy our country. I view everything through the lens of the Fourth Turning. Strauss & Howe’s generational theory makes total sense to me. There is nothing that has happened since I read that book in 2007 to make me question it’s hypothesis. We are in the middle of a Fourth Turning and I’m trying to help people navigate through it.
Read More @ TheBurningPlatform.com
