http://www.infowars.com/senate-moves-to-allow-military-to-intern-americans-without-trial/


Senate Moves To Allow Military To Intern Americans Without Trial

NDAA detention provision would turn America into a “battlefield”


Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, November 28, 2011

The Senate is set to vote on a bill today that would define the whole of the United States as a “battlefield” and allow the U.S. Military to arrest American citizens in their own back yard without charge or trial.

“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office

Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor this week, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.

The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.

“I would also point out that these provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech last week. One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with these provisions that must be resolved.”

This means Americans could be declared domestic terrorists and thrown in a military brig with no recourse whatsoever. Given that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized behavior such as buying gold, owning guns, using a watch or binoculars, donating to charity, using the telephone or email to find information, using cash, and all manner of mundane behaviors as potential indicators of domestic terrorism, such a provision would be wide open to abuse.

“American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?” asks Anders.

The ACLU is urging citizens to call their Senator and demand that the Udall Amendment be added to the bill, [Ed: but pass the bill!] a change that would at least act as a check to prevent Americans being snatched off the streets without some form of Congressional oversight.

We have been warning for over a decade that Americans would become the target of laws supposedly aimed at terrorists and enemy combatants. Alex Jones personally documented how U.S. troops were being trained to arrest U.S. citizens in the event of martial law during urban warfare training drills back in the 90′s.  Under the National Defense Authorization Act bill, no declaration of martial law is necessary since Americans would now be subject to the same treatment as suspected insurgents in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

If you thought that the executive assassination of American citizens abroad was bad enough, now similar powers will be extended to the “homeland,” in other words, your town, your community, your back yard.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

The shit is hitting the fan

http://www.unelected.org/audit-of-the-federal-reserve-reveals-16-trillion-in-secret-bailouts

The first ever GAO(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke(pictured to the left), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning:  http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3

What was revealed in the audit was startling: $16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious — the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is “only” $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing banks and companies. That was a blatant lie considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.

“This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.” – Bernie Sanders(I-VT)
 
When you have conservative Republican stalwarts like Jim DeMint(R-SC) and Ron Paul(R-TX) as well as self identified Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders all fighting against the Federal Reserve, you know that it is no longer an issue of Right versus Left. When you have every single member of the Republican Party in Congress and progressive Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, you realize that the Federal Reserve is an entity onto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability.

Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy.

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows..

Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places

View the 266-page GAO audit of the Federal Reserve(July 21st, 2011): http://www.scribd.com/doc/60553686/GAO-Fed-Investigation

Source: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-696
FULL PDF on GAO server: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf
Senator Sander’s Article: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
             

I wish I had never left my money on mybitcoin... Used the same password as my mtgox... Stupid? Yes, very stupid.

I won't divulge the exact amount, but it was pretty substantial as I am one (was one?) of the early adopters. Happened at 10AM this morning, coins went to this address: 1MAazCWMydsQB5ynYXqSGQDjNQMN3HFmEu



Anyone else in the same boat? Just looking for some people to commiserate with...

I just PMed jamesnintendonerd (the "Angry Video Game Nerd" if you've heard of him) about bitcoin:

----------
subject: donations

Hi James,

(stuff about how much I love his videos...)

 In any event, do you accept donations via Bitcoin? It would be a great way to monetize your videos, just slap a donation address on each one. If you did this I would be the first to donate!

 Cheers,
(my youtube account name)
---------

The reason I post this here is simply in case other people have favorite YouTube celebrities, you should PM them with a similar message. I myself have gotten some donations from YouTube fans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jptmJO674fY) so I know this really works! So please help spread the word on what I believe is probably one of the best and most immediate applications of Bitcoin!

Just ordered this from makestickers.com, can't wait to put it on my car!

For the second time I'm selling a copy of Win7 ultimate. 64-bit only, full retail edition. Check out the "list of honest traders" thread and you will find me there.

http://www.biddingpond.com/item.php?id=401&mode=1

(Rationale: finally switching fully to Debian, so I'm done with windows now for good.)

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-based-dns-to-counter-us-domain-seizures-101130/

BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures

The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.

In a direct response to the domain seizures by US authorities during the last few days, a group of established enthusiasts have started working on a DNS system that can’t be touched by any governmental institution. [ed. sounds similar to Bitcoin]

Ironically, considering the seizure of the Torrent-Finder meta-search engine domain, the new DNS system will be partly powered by BitTorrent.

In recent months, global anti-piracy efforts have increasingly focused on seizing domains of allegedly infringing sites. In the United States the proposed COICA bill is explicitly aimed at increasing the government’s censorship powers, but seizing a domain name is already quite easy, as illustrated by ICE and Department of Justice actions last weekend and earlier this year.

For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains, not least because several top level domains are managed by US-based corporations such as VeriSign, who work closely together with the US Department of Commerce. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.

To limit the power governments have over domain names, a group of enthusiasts has started working on a revolutionary system that can not be influenced by a government institution, or taken down by pulling the plug on a central server. Instead, it is distributed by the people, with help from a BitTorrent-based application that people install on their computer.

According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”

The Dot-P2P project was literally started a few days ago, but already the developers are making great progress. It is expected that a beta version of the client can be released relatively shortly, a team member assured TorrentFreak.

The project has been embraced by many familiar names in the P2P-community. Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is among them, and the people from EZTV have been promoting it as well.
“For me it’s mostly to scare back. To show that if they try anything, we have weapons of making it harder for them to abuse it. If they then back down, we win,” Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.

Although the initiators of the project are still debating on various technical issues on how the system should function, it seems that the administrative part has been thought out. The .p2p domain registration will be handled by OpenNIC, an alternative community based DNS network. OpenNIC also maintains the .geek, .free, .null and several other top level domains.

On the other hand, there are also voices that are for distributed domain registration, which would keep the system entirely decentralized.

The domain registrations will be totally free, but registrants will have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension first, to prevent scammers from taking over a brand.
The new P2P-based DNS system will require users to run an application on their own computer before they can access the domains, but there are also plans to create a separate root-server (like OpenNIC) as a complimentary service. It’s worth noting that the DNS changes will only affect the new .p2p domains, it will not interfere with access to any other domains.

It will be interesting to see in what direction this project goes and how widely it will be adopted. There are already talks of getting Internet Service Providers to accept the .p2p extension as well, but even if this doesn’t happen the system can always be accessed through the BitTorrent-powered application and supporting DNS servers.

If anything, this shows that no matter what legislation or legal actions are taken, technology stays always one step ahead. The more aggressive law enforcement gets, the more creative and motivated adopters of the Open Internet will respond.
 

Some people like red snakes, some people like blue snakes. Some people want a snake with more venom, some prefer a different rattle. No matter the form, it still hurts when the snake bites you. So you go out to convince people to vote for a different snake, you try to explain that smaller snakes are less painful. But this will never work: people are too diverse in their opinions, and the one thing most of them have in common is that they support the snake. So voting doesn't work, convincing doesn't work, and fighting the snake doesn't work because it's too dangerous (and if you resort to violence you're no different than the snake, potentially you could even become the snake), so what does work? Only one thing will work, and only one thing is moral: defense. Armor plated boots so the snake cannot bite. Grab your pair now -- use Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency, www.bitcoin.org.

In case you don’t know who John Carmack is, he’s the famous 3D game programmer that gave us Doom and Quake.

Seems like he might be a bit of a libertarian too.

from http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/misc/government.htm

John Carmack on 10-28-2010

Almost everything that I write publicly is about technical details in software or aerospace, and the points are usually not very contentious.  I’m going to go out on a limb today and talk about a much more banal topic -– government.  This is sort of an open letter to my mother and stepfather, who are intelligent people, but we don’t see eye to eye on political issues.  A couple brief conversations a year during visits doesn’t really establish much, and I have wanted to make a more carefully considered set of points.

I had nearly disqualified myself from discuss politics by not bothering to cast a vote for almost 20 years after I was legally able to.  I was busy.  I paid millions of dollars of taxes without any dodges, and just focused on my work.  Listening to political speeches full of carefully calculated rhetoric is almost physically painful to me, and I diligently avoided it.

A couple things slowly brought me around to paying more attention.  A computer game company doesn’t need to have much to do with the government, but a company that flies rocket ships is a different matter.  Due to Armadillo Aerospace, in the last decade I have observed and interacted with a lot of different agencies, civil servants, and congressmen, and I have collected enough data points to form some opinions.  The second thing that has changed for me is becoming a father; with two young sons, I think more about how the world might look in twenty or thirty years when they are adults.

I am an optimist on almost all fronts.  Throughout history, there have always been those that argue that the world is going to hell, yet here we are, better off than any previous generation.  Not only are things pretty damn good, but there is a lot of positive inertia that makes it likely that things will continue to  improve for quite some time.  We aren’t balanced at a precipice, where the result of any given election can pitch us into darkness.

However, trends do matter.  Small, nearly painless losses accumulate over the years, and the world can slowly change into something you don’t want while you weren’t paying attention.  It doesn’t take a cataclysmic crash, just a slow accretion of over regulation, taxation, and dependency that chokes the vibrant processes that produce wealth and growth.  Without growth, you get a zero sum game of fighting over the pie that breeds all sorts of problems in government and society.

My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious.  This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services, but that the cost of having the government provide them is much higher than you would tolerate from a company or individual you chose to do business with.  For almost every task, it is a poor tool.

So much of the government just grinds up money, like shoveling cash into a wood chipper.  It is ghastly to watch.  Billions and billions of dollars.  Imagine every stupid dot-com company that you ever heard of that suckered in millions of dollars of investor money before leaving a smoking crater in the ground with nothing to show for it.  Add up all that waste, all that stupidity.  All together, it is a rounding error versus the analogous program results in the government.  Private enterprises can’t go on squandering resources like that for long, but it is standard operating procedure for the government.

Well, can’t we make the government more efficient, so they can accomplish its tasks for less, or do more good work?  Sure, there is room for improvement everywhere, but there are important fundamental limits.  It is entertaining to imagine a corporate turnaround expert being told to get the federal house in shape, but it can’t happen.  The modern civil service employment arrangement is probably superior to the historic jobs-as-political-spoils approach, but it insulates the workforce from the forces that improve commercial enterprises, and the voting influence of each worker is completely uncorrelated with their value.  Without the goal and scorecard of profit, it is hard to even make value judgments between people and programs, so there are few checks against mounting inefficiency and abject failure, let alone evolution towards improvement.

Even if you could snap your fingers and get it, do you really want a razor sharp federal apparatus ready to efficiently carry out the mandates of whoever is the supreme central planner at the moment?  The US government was explicitly designed to make that difficult, and I think that was wise. 

So, the federal government is essentially doomed to inefficiency, no matter who is in charge or what policies they want it to implement.  I probably haven’t lost too many people at this point – almost nobody thinks that the federal government is a paragon of efficiency, and it doesn’t take too much of an open mind to entertain the possibility that it might be much worse than you thought (it is).

Given the inefficiency, why is the federal government called upon to do so many things?  A large part is naked self interest, which is never going to go away -- lots of people play the game to their best advantage, and even take pride in their ability to get more than they give.

However, a lot is done in the name of misplaced idealism.  It isn’t hard to look around the world and find something that you feel needs fixing.  The world gets to be a better place by people taking action to improve things, but it is easy for the thought to occur that if the government can be made to address your issue, it could give results far greater than what you would be able to accomplish with direct action.  Even if you knew that it wasn’t going to be managed especially well, it would make up for it in volume.  This has an obvious appeal.

Every idealistic cry for the government to “Do Something” means raising revenue, which means taking money from people to spend in the name of the new cause instead of letting it be used for whatever purpose the earner would have preferred.

It is unfortunate that income taxes get deducted automatically from most people’s paychecks, before they ever see the money they earned.  A large chunk of the population thinks that tax day is when you get a nice little refund check.  Good trick, that.  If everyone was required to pay taxes like they pay their utilities, attitudes would probably change.  When you get an appallingly high utility bill, you start thinking about turning off some lights and changing the thermostat.  When your taxes are higher than all your other bills put together, what do you do?  You can make a bit of a difference by living in Texas instead of California, but you don’t have many options regarding the bulk of it.

Also, it is horribly crass to say it, but taxes are extracted by the threat of force.  I know a man (Walt Anderson), who has been in jail for a decade because the IRS disagreed with how his foundations were set up, so it isn’t an academic statement.  What things do you care strongly enough about to feel morally justified in pointing a gun at me to get me to pay for them?  A few layers of distance by proxy let most people avoid thinking about it, but that is really what it boils down to.  Feeding starving children?  The justice system?  Chemotherapy for the elderly?  Viagra for the indigent?  Corn subsidies?

Helping people directly can be a noble thing.  Forcing other people to do it with great inefficiency?  Not so much.  There isn’t a single thing that I would petition the federal government to add to its task list, and I would ask that it stop doing the majority of the things that it is currently doing.  My vote is going to the candidates that at least vector in that direction.

Who does the blog "The Monetary Future"? Anyone know? I have a question for them.

Thanks!

Some cool stats at:

http://www.sharenator.com/w/bitcoin.org

Looks like the Russians are particularly interested. I'm guessing it's because they're both highly technological and also have experienced immense monetary corruption under the government there.

PM me if interested, thanks

The recent hubbub about the Bitcoin rally actually makes me nervous. I don't want Bitcoin to be a beanie-baby style bubble. I want it to make inroads into business and liberate people from the burdens of paypal and the dangers of our instable government-run banking system.

Naturally I'm very happy that my holdings have increased in value, as I'm sure other Bitcoiners are, but I don't want the BTC community to lose focus of the long-term goals here based on the recent rally. It feels like a few months ago bitcoin was a "stable currency", and now it's an "investment". Not a good label IMO, and it worries me. I have friends now that are asking me how to get into bitcoin, not because they want to use the currency in any way, but simply because "it's going up!", and they want to flip it for a USD profit (that is, they think of it as a commodity I guess). These types of people are also going to be the ones that will also panic sell if "it goes down!". Bitcoin has become FOREX now, bah ...

Maybe I just worry for nothing

Is it just my connection or is BiddingPond down?

What's the best way to invest? Wall St won't tell you the secret, but here it is: don't. Find a good money market fund as your base, and clip coupons by building a high quality relatively short duration bond ladder. It's essentially risk free, and it has beaten the market for over a decade now. Sleep well, save well, focus on your career, and enjoy your life -- and though you may not believe me, I guarantee you'll beat 95% of all investors in the long run, and you won't have to pay any "advisors" a nickel.

I put together some of my favorite freedom quotes w/ some home-brewed music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jptmJO674fY

If you have any favorite freedom quotes, reply away! Enjoy.

(Note: for hardcore anarchist, capitalist, agorist, voluntaryist, libertarian eyes only ... )

For those that remember, I got my Bitcoin article published this month @ elliottwave.com

In any event, it has had the effect of drawing some new users to btc. I also got this email recently in response to it:

"I found the info on Bitcoin rather interesting!  Can you please give me the contact info for Satoshi Nakamoto of Bitcoin?
Thanks!
Stephen Lange Ranzini
President & CEO
University Bank*
Ann Arbor, MI USA"

2 things:

1) What is Satoshi's email? I should put the two in contact.

2) Also, who is the Bitcoin blogger? I would like to get my article re-posted there to help it circulate the net.

Bitcoin clients should have a built in simple message encryption/decryption system, perhaps based off of your actual Bitcoin addresses themselves.

This would make doing trades on sites like biddingpond much easier, since you don't need to both agree on a separate app like PGP before communicating over email.

Most of the time I bet people don't even bother to use encryption, but I think it's a good idea to use it when doing trades in Bitcoins.

Thoughts?

I've had this idea for a while, but I'm probalby too lazy to implement it anyway. So I might as well put the idea out there for others to muse over.

Derivatives trading denominated in bitcoins. Futures, options, or entirely new types of contracts.

Obviously, we're not at the point where we can buy real stocks or bonds with BTC, but I don't see any reason why we cannot trade derivatives off of these instruments.

The only problem is that the market for BTC derivatives probably won't be very liquid, at least initially.

3 days left to bid! Selling for only a *quarter* of its dollar value.

http://www.biddingpond.com/item.php?id=20