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the gold standard is the foundation of any economy desirous of being a Camelot.  In that sense, then, Gold is a plea for a return to sanity - the gold standard. The book is presented in three parts.  Part One takes a look at the history of money, what it is and how it works.  Part Two examines the history of America's money, from Colonial silver through the 1930s and into the Reagan administration and the Greenspan years.  The third part of Gold discusses recent currency crises around the world, including Japan, the Asian crisis of the 1990s, Russia, China, Mexico and Yugoslavia.

"Pieces of Eight." It is a two-volume treatise on the monetary powers of the Constitution. Now out of print, it has become a kind of cult classic, selling on the Internet for hundreds of dollars a set. It addresses questions that, with the value of the dollar having collapsed to 1,200th of an ounce of gold, are suddenly timely. What is a dollar? How did it become our money of account? What powers in respect of money were given to the federal government in 1787? What disabilities, or prohibitions, are in the Constitution? How have we managed to get so far from the law as the Founders wrote it? And what can be done to bring us back from the brink? The title of the book comes from the nickname for the coin the Founding Fathers were referring to when, in the Constitution, they twice used the word "dollars." Its definition was codified in the Coinage Act of 1792, which provided for minting gold and silver coins and defined a dollar as having "the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or four hundred and sixteen grains of standard silver." Mr. Vieira speaks for a school of thought-it goes back to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and comes together today in, among other places, the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education-that reckons such dollars, and their free-market equivalent in gold, are the only constitutional money in America. Lately he has been arguing for the establishment by the states of separate monetary systems. The authority to do so is in Article 1, Section 10, of the Constitution, which prohibits the states from making "any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts."

"Recently, Marvin Levant (Dec. 28), Steve Harris (Dec. 30), Syed Soharwardy (Jan. 2), and Riazuddin Ahmed (Jan. 5) debated Islam through the forum of the Herald's letters to the editor. The issue of wife beating and gender inequality in Islam has become convoluted and highly controversial as many Muslims try to sugar-coat the ugly truths and others try to shed some light on the issue. Soharwardy's statement that "Beating one's wife is not only wrong, it is criminal and completely un-Islamic" is incorrect. The Qur'an says that "men are in charge of women because Allah has made one of them (men) to excel the other (women), thus man's superiority over women . . . good women are the obedient ones . . . admonish the rebellious women and banish them, and scourge them (whip them severely to inflict pain) (4:34) . . . smote them (hit or strike with the hand or with a weapon causing pain, beat them . . . (4:62)". Islam does not recognize gender equality. For example, polygamy is accepted in Islam, but polyandry is not. A woman's testimony is considered half as worthy as a man's in court; a son inherits twice as much as a daughter does. Muslim men may marry Muslim, Jewish or Christian women, but Muslim women can marry only Muslim men. In short, sharia law leads to the inhuman treatment of Muslim women by their husbands and others, especially in South Asia and the Middle East. Higher education is emphasized more for sons than for daughters; in cultural honour killings, almost always women are the target for murder. Under sharia, divorced Muslim women get custody of their sons under eight years of age and daughters until puberty, and then the fathers take the children away. Sharia enabled one of the worst fundamentalists, the vile and ruthless military dictator, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, to put more than 15,000 rape victims in jail because they could not comply with the absurd Islamic condition requiring them to have numerous male witnesses of their victimization. They were char

excerpt:  Democrats, watch out. The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction - and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener's rogue body parts.  If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle - a big if - then they have the biggest opportunity to move the country rightward since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office back in 1981. The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form:  Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America's best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot.  The villains?  An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros.  (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)

OUTRAGE - Microsoft Uses Loopholes To Pay Just 7% Corporate Tax Eric Cantor Is The Hedge Funder's Best Man In Congress - Washinton Post The Road To Hell Directly Before Us - MUST READ Karl Denninger Obamacare Individual Mandate Battle Reaches Supreme Court DETAILS - Geithner To Announce Backup Plans With No Debt Deal In Place Fed Governor Speaks: More QE Won't Help Growth But Would Spur Inflation How The Two-Party Oligarchy Uses Left-Right Charade To Loot The Country Debt Ceiling Fights Going Back To Eisenhower Florida Rep. Demands Records On Ousted Foreclosure Fraud Investigators Publisher That Owns S&P Kills Ritholtz's Bailout Book Critical Of Ratings Agencies Did S&P flip flop on US debt target? - Reuters The "Solution" to America's Debt Ceiling Crisis: Looting What has Already been Looted

Excellent article written by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, authors of "Death by China: Confronting the Dragon -- A Global Call to Action". The authors explain why China MUST continue to buy US Treasuries regardless of the low rate of return and extremely high risk of default or ravage by inflation through the destruction of the dollar.  Very interesting.  But the game China is playing really looks unsustainable. The one thing the authors don't touch is the role International Banksters and their New World Corporations have played in this assault on American propserity.  I guess i have to get the book!   One last point; having worked for a Chinese Corporation desiring to enter the USA-European information technology markets, i don't doubt for a moment that Autry and Navarro have this exactly right.  We are at war, with Chicomms providing the shock troops for this latest Bankster - Bankster Corp assault on our liberty.

Cut to the chase explanation of Austrian economics:  Banksters and their IMF collection arm want to roll over the sovereign debt of EU nations (PIIGS), subsidized by tax paying citizens.  The Banksters want the Sovereign debt of a few nations "nationalized" so that the loses are shared by the entire EU - and taken off the Bankster books. The Austrian economics handbook says that these Sovereign debters should go into default immediately, and declare bankruptcy.  The Banksters should take the hit for making the bad loans in the first place.  No bailouts. 75% of German tax payers support the Austrian plan!

Summary of the Federal Reserve activities. Some highlights include the $16.1 Trillion dollar bailout of international banks and Wall Street Banksters. $3.08 Trillion went to foreign banksters. And now the Federal Reserve is queing up another massive bailout of European banksters. The debt keeps piling up, the value of the dollar continues to go down, and world's economy languishes. These guys suck. Interestingly, the recent publication of the Ron Suskind book, "Confidence Men", based on hundreds of hours of first hand interviews with Obama and members of his administration, included some eye opening exchanges revealing that Treasury Secretary Timmy Geitner defied Obama to implement Federal Reserve policies and initiatives. Incredible.

Excellent summary of Herman Cain.  Background and brief explanation of Herman's "first 90 days in the White House" plan.  Good stuff.... excerpt:  Herman Cain - or the Hermanator, as he calls himself in his new book - is so confident he'll be elected president on November 6, 2012, he's already sketched out his first 90 days in office. Among the things he says he'll do in the early days of a Cain administration: "Treat our economic system as I would a corporation on the verge of bankruptcy: Step one, make a 10 percent across-the-board cut" in all government departments. Step two, he says, would include "vertical deep dives" in which every department would be asked to justify its cost and directly answer the question, "Is it still in the best interests of the country?" Election 2012 Complete Coverage According to a new CBS News poll, Cain, 65, is now tied with Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, atop the field of Republican presidential candidates. Among GOP primary voters, support for Cain now stands at 17 percent support, compared with 5 percent two weeks ago. (Rick Perry has fallen 11 percentage points in just two weeks.) Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan has attracted voters: He'd replace the current tax code with a nine-percent flat income tax, a nine-percent corporate tax, and a nine-percent national sales tax.

Whoa!  Incredible fact filled analysis of the pre election GDP numbers released by Obama. excerpt:  Disposable personal income decreased in nominal terms q/o/q by 5.9% while in real terms (inflation adjusted) it decreased q/o/q by 7.4%!  That is an enormous swing in purchasing power and not in the right direction! Personal outlays increased $148.2 billion (5.8 percent) in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $8.2 billion (0.3 percent) in the second. Personal saving -- disposable personal income less personal outlays -- was $364.6 billion in the third quarter, compared with $533.1 billion in the second. The personal saving rate -- saving as a percentage of disposable personal income -- was 3.3 percent in the third quarter, compared with 4.9 percent in the second. So into decreasing personal income and disposable personal income people tried to spend anyway.  Best guess: most of this was "cash for clunkers", which is the worst sort of "spending" - it is the taking on of more debt by replacing a paid-off car with one that now comes with a shiny (and nasty) payment book.  The Trade: Go long auto repo outfits (aside: as far as I know there are no publicly-traded repo companies.) Nothing in here I like; to the contrary, this report sucks and on a drill-down appears to be full of outright lies.

Photoshop expert: and author of more than 17 books on computer graphics Mara Zebest: Obama's Latest Long-Form Birth Certificate Is a Fake! http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/2011/04/critics-obamas-latest-long-form-birth-certificate-is-a-fake/

Paul Craig Roberts reviews the recently published Patrick Buchanan book, "The Suicide of Liberty".

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity call on Obama to sack Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for perjured testimony to Congress and lying to the public, with a nice collection of Clapper's lies. And Sen. Diane Feinstein gets a share of their wrath.  In my book both Clapper and Gen. Keith Alexander must be fired in disgrace else the message to the intelligence community is that there is no penalty for lying to Congress and the People, which can only encourage further lies.  Moreover, it send a message to the People that the President is more loyal to his henchmen than he is to the public's interest.

While some governments -- my own included -- attempt to impose an Orwellian Dark State of ubiquitous secret surveillance, secret wars, the rule of oligarchs, and public ignorance, the Edward Snowden leaks fanned the flames of the countering War on Ignorance that had been kept alive by civil libertarians. Only days after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in a case where a reporter had been ordered to reveal his source of information for a book on the Dark State under the penalties for contempt of court (a long stretch in jail), a new web site is launched for communications between sources and journalists where the source's names never need to be revealed. This article is part of the publicity for that new weapon fielded by the civil libertarian side in the War Against Ignorance.  Hurrah!

Of course, President Obama has told us that all nations do this so it must be okay, right?

I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha

This rule change has been in the works during the last year.  "The change is designed specifically to help federal investigators carry out surveillance on computers that have been "anonymized" - that is, their location has been hidden using tools such as Tor."  Are we dizzy yet? The State Department is pushing the use of TOR by dissidents in nations whose governments State and the CIA intends to overthrow. Meanwhile, Feed Bag, Inc. wants use of TOR to be sufficient grounds for installing malware on anyone using it to make their systems and all their systems can see or hear be an open book. Let's see. There's the First Amendment right to anonymous speech just to begin with. McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, 514 US 334 (1995). ("Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation-and their ideas from suppression-at the hand of an intolerant society. The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct. But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse.") (Internal citation omitted.) And of course there's the Natural Law liberty to whisper, to utter words in a way that none but the intended recipient can hear. So throw on the violation of the Fifth Amendment's Liberty clause. Then there's the plain language of the Fourth Amendment warrant clause, "particularly describing the *place* to be searched." Not to mention the major reason for the Fourth Amendment, to abolish the "general warrant" that had enabled the Crown to search wherever the warrant's executor's little heart desired.  And th

Hard to fight a War on Drugs when drugs are a major off-books revenue source for the CIA.