Times Online: Back in January last year, David Bond packed a rucksack, kissed his pregnant wife Katie and toddler Ivy, climbed into his Toyota Prius and drove away from home. Nobody knew where he was going – he didn’t even know himself. One thing he was sure about was this: “I’m going to leave my life behind and disappear,” he said.
A 38-year-old Oxford graduate with a solid if unspectacular career in media, Bond wasn’t your typical runaway. But then, you might have said the same about Will Smith in Enemy of the State, or Robert Donat in The 39 Steps – two of Bond’s favourite films. For Katie, left alone with a toddler, his disappearance could not have come at a worse time. “I had to juggle the childcare and work,” she says, “and I was seven and a half months pregnant.”
Bond might never have thought of running away if he’d not received a letter, some months earlier, informing him that his daughter was among 25 million Britons whose records had been lost by the Child Benefit Office, along with bank details and other private information.
He “became obsessed”, Katie remembers, about the amount of information on him and his family that was already out there. As he looked into it, he found that the UK, once a bastion of freedom and civil liberties, is now one of the most advanced surveillance societies in the world, ranked third after Russia and China. The average UK adult is now registered on more than 700 databases and is caught many times each day by nearly five million CCTV cameras. Increasingly monitored, citizens are being turned into suspects. Within 100 yards of Bond’s home, he discovered, there were no fewer than 200 cameras. Read it...
The job before Congress is to bring the fear of God back to Wall Street!
"Not to stifle enterprise but quite the opposite: to restore real capitalism. By all means, let the bankers savor the sweets of their success. But let them, and their stockholders, pay dearly for their failures. Fair's fair."
More from James Grant: The trouble with Wall Street isn't that too many bankers get rich in the booms. The trouble, rather, is that too few get poor -- really, suitably poor -- in the busts. To the titans of finance go the upside. To we, the people, nowadays, goes the downside. How much better it would be if the bankers took the losses just as they do the profits.
What these people do they do in our name. We are responsible. Are you a citizen or a subject? Think about it.-flynn
Having watched the video of the death of the 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen in that July 2007 video, his father said: "At last the truth has been revealed, and I'm satisfied God revealed the truth... If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?"
Radio host and author Charles Goyette has no doubt about the future of the U.S. dollar. The question isn’t whether the U.S. currency will become virtually worthless but when it will happen. Goyette wrote The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil and Other Unconventional Investments for the express purpose of giving people an opportunity to protect themselves and their families in the face of what he contends is an inevitable collapse of the U.S. dollar, owing to the federal government’s outrageous inflationary spending.
There are numerous other books out there offering financial advice, proclaiming to help the reader get rich quick. Unlike those, this book instead attempts to help the readers preserve whatever they can of their existing savings in the face of the ongoing destruction of the U.S. fiat currency by the “wizards in Washington.”
... Through anecdotal examples and witty analysis, Dollar Meltdown is a much more readable book than others on a similar subject. It is informative but also keeps the reader engrossed enough to keep turning the pages. There are many amusing quotes and a few of his most memorable ones will stick with you after you’re done.
That is not to say the book is light-hearted. If anything, it’s a massive downer, as it takes a sober look at what lies ahead. America is on a collision course with bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve Notes we currently exchange as money are IOUs that our national leaders have overextended beyond the point of no return. “America’s national government has moved way beyond a political spoils system…. It has become a piñata: everybody gets a crack at it…. But the piñata does not survive the party. It is bashed to bits.”
It’s war you can watch on video, much like a movie, except the victims really die and the killers really murder. If you watch and listen to the entire recording of the July 12, 2007 helicopter attack on a group of Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters employees, you will hear the repeated use of military call signs, but towards the end, you hear an exasperated voice sharing an aside with "Kyle." It’s Grand Theft Auto meets Reno 911 – except it isn’t. One is entertained by GTA and the antics of incompetent policepeople. One is simply floored by what our soldiers are doing, and how they are doing it. In their defense, they say, "This is war."
Except, of course, it isn’t war at all. It’s an occupation, and a partial occupation at that. In July 2007, the Iraq mission had been accomplished for over four years. We are allies with Eurasia; we have always been at war with Eastasia. How could you have possibly missed it? Read the rest... Karen Kwiatkowski at LRC
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
~ A. J. Liebling
"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."
~ A. J. Liebling
Liebling had it right. He died in 1963. He would have enjoyed what has taken place in journalism since the advent of the World Wide Web's Navigator browser in late 1994. The Web began to take off in 1995. I started my first site in 1996.
Anyone with a Web connection can set up a blog for free on Blogger or WordPress. He can then move on to a separately controlled, hosted Web site for a few dollars a month.
If he is really lucky, he can get a President impeached. Matt Drudge did... Read the rest... Gary North
