The Western world is rapidly devolving into an electronic police state.  There was a time when it was commonly accepted that people had a right to privacy and a right to their property.  Today, laws routinely allow the surveillance state to violate your rights, sold to an uninformed public under the guise of "security." 

From cameras watching you walk down the street to global tracking of your finances to eavesdropping on your calls, illegal wiretapping, tracking and surveillance have become commonplace.  No longer are you presumed innocent until proven guilty - in practice you are assumed guilty and monitored to determine how guilty you may be. 

In a software-based communications infrastructure, tracking you no longer requires the phone company to physically place a bug on your phone line.  There is no need for Big Brother to view you from the television.  Almost all of your transactions, your money, and your communications are electronic and leverage the same fundamental IP-based infrastructure. 

The most valuable business commodity today is personal data.  Your daily electronic communications are under attack from a variety of sources ranging from governments to businesses to malicious hackers.  How in the world can you protect yourself against this onslaught?

Many government officials like to pretend that the effects of tax rates on the willingness of people to purchase goods or services, or work, save and invest are far less than the empirical and historical evidence shows. The Obama administration is now engaging in this type of misrepresentation and forecast fraud, which will result in much higher deficits and lower levels of economic growth and job creation than it claims.

To understand how serious this type of fraud is, think about how government officials would react if a company forecast a huge increase in revenues - and sent press releases of the forecast to the investment community, but failed to reveal that this forecast was based on the intention to double the prices for the company's products while assuming it will not reduce demand.

Such actions by company officials would be considered irresponsible misrepresentation, for which they could be held legally liable.  Shouldn't government officials be held liable for their fraud and misrepresentation?

We begin this week with a letter of profound gratitude.

Dear TTP Family,

My Marines and I cannot thank you enough for the dozens of care packages you have sent us here in Afghanistan.  At least 50 have come in so far and more arrive almost every day.  They have been an immense morale boost, and we are able to use, eat, and drink everything.  Everything you sent is so appreciated.

Just as appreciated are your prayers and spiritual support.  We are a long ways from home, and to know that people back home are praying for us every day means so much to us all.

Be assured that the Marines are proud and strong.  We have the best training in the world and it is paying off here.  We are fighting every day, getting grenades thrown at us, RPGs shot at us, and engaging in intense firefights.  Despite all of this, the Taliban are running scared.

Simultaneously, we are able to protect the local population who hate and fear the Taliban.  We are engaging and employing villagers here who often live just a couple of hundred meters away from Taliban positions.  Know that every day, the US Marines are making progress on moving forward a culture that has neither running water nor electricity, that hasn't progressed in 2,000 years.

I wish I could be with you at the TTP Rendezvous this November in Washington.  But I will still be here with my Marines.  Thank you all so very much once again.

Ethos anthropos daemon

1^st Lt. Brandon H. Wheeler
United States Marine Corps
Afghanistan

Which was the only country in the 27-nation European Union to register economic growth without going through a recession last year? The surprising answer is Poland.

Over the past couple of weeks, Greece has been grabbing the headlines as a poster child for bad fiscal management. The Greek tragedy is threatening to undo the Eurozone and cause a pan-European financial crisis.

There is no mystery as to why Greece is in the financial soup - its politicians have continued to spend far more than the government receives in taxes. The more interesting question is: What did Poland do right - and will Poland be better off or worse off if it joins the Eurozone?

Of all the headlines in all the news publications on the planet this week, there's one that struck me as the strangest.  In today's (8/13) British newspaper The Independent, the headline blares out at you:  Why Is The World Unmoved By The Plight Of Pakistan?

Just to make totally sure you get the guilt-trip, right at the top of the article is a close-up picture of an old woman's tear-filled eye.

The story is strange for two reasons.  First, "The World" in the headline clearly means "The West."  Why are we the world?  Did all the oil-rich Moslem countries like Saudi Arabia (which spends billions on turning Pakistani boys into terrorists in their Wahhabi medressahs or Moslem indoctrination schools) just fall off the edge of the earth?

Here's the second reason.  Instead of this guilt-trip headline, why isn't there a headline in any major news publication asking:  Why Is Obama Unmoved By The Plight Of The Unemployed?

Far - far - more heartbreaking for Americans than Paks up to their butts in mud is the sight of their fellow Americans hungry, broke, and desperate for a job they can't find.

Yet Zero doesn't care - he really actually couldn't care less.  He'd rather be playing golf.   He has no intention whatever of  increasing employment other than put more people on government handouts (or government jobs which is the same thing).  Most folks intuit this to be true but don't understand the actual mechanism engineered to make it true. 

Most economists, including yours truly, have been saying that the huge budget deficits the country is running will result in inflation. So, where's the inflation?

Inflation normally lags changes in the growth of the money supply by one to two years. The big monetary expansion took place in the last half of 2008. So if the economy follows past trends, one would expect to see growing inflation by the latter part of this year.

There are several reasons why inflation does not occur simultaneously with a sudden growth in the money supply. (Remember, inflation is caused by the money supply growing faster than the supply of goods and services.)

A particularly disturbing aspect of the accelerating rush to a very possible near-future fiscal collapse of government at all levels - bankruptcy, default, the destruction of the dollar as a currency, the increasing dysfunction of  markets under increasing  loads  of regulations and taxes - is that none of  the potential  Republican  candidates for President in 2012  have provided  a vision that impacts the emotions of this destructive scenario.

People see what things look  like now  -- not so bad, even for the worst off if nobody in the U.S. is  starving to death, people still get  their Social  Security checks, etc. -- but they are not being warned of what their lives will be like under rapidly approaching desperate conditions that will be very different from now. 

All Republicans give you is numbers, like the x fund (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) will run out of money in y years, the amount of the GDP going to pay just the interest on the national debt will be x in only y years.  People are unlikely to be frightened by dry numbers because they can't imagine what the end results will look  like, so there's no emotional impact. 

Unless the emotional brain is involved, nobody is going to care enough to seriously consider what needs to be done to avoid disaster.   What is needed for any possibility of change or at least to help people prepare for the (coming soon) unimaginably bad years is for the general public to have a vision that impacts the emotions of what the world of Americans is going to look like in a collapsed America. 

Relax.  Close your eyes, take a deep breath, then another, think of a beautiful sunset and the smell of an ocean breeze.  If it's not too early - the sun is over the yard-arm somewhere - pour yourself three fingers of your favorite adult libation.  It's going to be okay.

True enough, parts of the world around you went even more nuts this week.  A left-wing looney with contempt for the Constitution became a Supreme Court Justice.  A left-wing limp-wrist judge with contempt for the very basis of what makes us human and for millions of his state's voters forces his homosexuality upon us all.

Yet there's also good news, good judicial news.  While Judge "Swish" Walker was emasculating Prop 8, the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 209 - 6 to 1! - this week (8/02) which bans "affirmative action," i.e., preferential treatment of women and minorities in public school admissions, government hiring and contracting.

The Left took a real hit on this one.  Yet that wasn't the only one, for on that same day (8/02) the Left suffered a double-whammy when US District Judge Henry Hudson refused to dismiss the State of Virginia's suit against ObamaCare on the grounds of unconstitutionality.

This, potentially, is a much bigger deal than banning affirmative action.  Here's why...

Over the last two weeks, the rule of law has been strengthened in a couple of major cases, one in the United States and one in Switzerland, but has been undermined in an action - surprise, surprise - by the IRS.

On Jan. 22, a Swiss court upheld the rule of law by saying that an agreement between the U.S. and Swiss governments to turn over UBS files on private bank clients to U.S. authorities violated Swiss law.

Switzerland has different laws than the United States regarding financial privacy and what parts of the tax law are felonies and which are not. Just because the Swiss law is different does not make it inferior to U.S. law. (In fact, Switzerland has direct democracy and a very long tradition of upholding human rights.) The United States considers it a felony not to file a W-9 tax form, while the Swiss do not consider the failure to file the appropriate form a felony.

An IRS official said, "We expect the Swiss government to continue to honor the terms of the agreement" - despite the agreement having been deemed unlawful. Of course, the IRS has a long tradition of ignoring the law and the Constitution when it suits its purposes.