Tag: Americana

Ron Paul warns Americans of the consequences of submitting to the Federal molesters at the TSA:

“If we tolerate this,” Paul said, “there’s something wrong with us.” He added that the American people deserve to be humiliated and demeaned by the government if they refuse to stand up and resist. Paul predicted Americans will eventually boycott the airlines to put an end to the intrusive searches and the unconscionable use of dangerous backscatter radiation naked body scanners. “Maybe the Congress will get off their duffs and do something in January,” he said, “and insist we reign in the TSA.”

I certainly hope he’s right, but I have to confess, I tend to think there is something wrong with us and most people will adapt to gate rape as the new status quo sooner rather than later. I don’t see that taken as a whole, Americans value freedom very much anymore. The Tea Party talks a good game, but they appear to have swallowed the “security” argument as readily as the good little liberal fascists.

Regardless, I’m not flying and won’t fly until our 4th Amendment rights are respected at the airport again. Because if Americans accept the scanners, they’re soon going to see them everywhere from buses to shopping malls.

Napolitano said her agency is now looking into ways to make other popular means of travel safer for passengers and commuters. Napolitano isn’t the only one who’s suggested that advanced scanning machines could be used in places beyond airports. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, introduced legislation this past September that would authorize testing of body scanners at some federal buildings.

No nation that is willing to collectively submit to this behavior is one that deserves to survive. Only a nation of fat and worthless sheep who have wholly abandoned their inheritance of liberty would prefer to have its children strip-searched than give up air travel. On a potentially related note, not that you had any doubt, but the big banks are definitely going to need the expected TARP II soon. It turns out that many of the so-called mortgage-backed securities didn’t have any mortgages backing them.

Countrywide Routinely Failed to Send Key Docs to MBS Trustees, B of A Employee Says, by Kate Berry, American Banker: Countrywide, the mortgage giant that’s now part of Bank of America Corp., routinely didn’t bother to transfer essential documents for loans sold to investors, an employee testified…. it was customary for Countrywide to maintain possession of the original note and related loan documents.

Denninger explains the significance at the Market Ticker.

Refreshing the Tree of Liberty demonstrates that the naked scanners provide much more detailed image information than the picture that the media has been using indicates at first glance.

To the right is the image that everyone has seen in the various news articles about the TSA’s non-invasive x-ray scanners.  It looks rather like an x-ray, so no big deal, right?

 
Except that to the left is the exact same image which is simply inverted with the brightness increased a little.  No fancy software or Photoshop skills required.  It provides enough detail to show how a woman trims the topiary.  So, unless you are the sort of individual who delights in putting naked photos of yourself up on Facebook, you might want to think twice before deciding to fly and face the decision of distributing naked images of your family or subjecting everyone to a gate rape.

It appears the above images may not actually be generated by the TSA scanners but are merely a simulation. So, it looks as if we’ll have to wait until a few of them leak onto the Internet to see exactly how much detail is revealed by the inverted images.   As usual, Ron Paul is the only Republican who appears to care about these little assaults on American liberties enough to do anything about it.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, introduced the Air Traveler Dignity Act to protect Americans from physical and emotional abuse by federal Transportation Security Administration employees conducting screenings at the nation’s airports.

“Something has to be done,” Paul said. “Everybody’s fed up. The people are fed up. The pilots are fed up. I’m fed up. We have seen the videos of terrified children being grabbed and probed by airport screeners. We have read the stories of Americans being subjected to humiliating body imaging machines and/or forced to have the most intimate parts of their bodies poked and fondled.  This TSA version of our rights looks more like the ‘rights’ granted in the old Soviet Constitutions, where freedoms were granted to Soviet citizens – right up to the moment the state decided to remove those freedoms.”

Neither Spacebunny nor I have any intention of flying while the TSA is permitted to force travelers to choose between being scanned naked or sexually molested.  This is an absolute travesty and if Americans do not resist it now, they will have no cause to complain when they start facing the same choice every time they leave the house and travel in a car, a bus, or a train, all of which are presently under the abusive authority of the Transportation Security Administration.  As I wrote in my column on Monday, I recommend that Americans not settle for merely opting out of the scanners and submitting to the grope testgate rape, but rather stay home, save money, and see how long it will take before the airlines stop meekly accepting every Federal dictate handed down from on bureaucratic high in the interest of their own survival.  See We Won’t Fly for more details.

Needless to say, every pervert and pedophile has probably submitted their application to the TSA upon hearing that hot down-the-pants action was now part of the job description; SB sent me this little bit of unsurprising news about a police search for one of the TSA’s finest.

Winthrop Police were searching this week for 45-year old Sean Shanahan, most recently of 26 Shirley Street apartment #3 on five charges including two counts of statutory rape, two counts of enticing a child and one count of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14, after the alleged victim’s parents reported finding disturbing and explicit text messages on the child’s cell phone.  “This individual (Shanahan) is someone who was familiar with the child,” explained Police Chief Terrence Delehanty. “It appears that this case began with a series of text messages and then progressed to other activities that included the statutory rape charges.”

Shanahan, a Transportation Security Administration employee at Logan Airport, has not appeared at his job in several days and has also not been back to his apartment on Shirley Street, following an initial search of his residence by police, which resulted in the confiscation of a computer and cell phone from his home.

Clearly this is all just a terrible misunderstanding, as Shanahan is obviously nothing more than a deeply committed employee who is so devoted to transportation security that he took his work home with him.  The TSA will probably promote him. And for those who think the scanners are a reasonable option, note that, statistically speaking, they are as about as dangerous to your health as those dangerous airborne terrorists.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find this combination of events to be particularly lifting of the animal spirits.

Acquaman notwithstanding, it seems unlikely that it was just a jet contrail… rising from the ocean. I have the impression that the Official Story tellers in Washington are having a rough time coming up with their usual fiction. I tend to think their best bet is to blame the private space consortium with which Richard Garriott is involved, give them a chewing-out for failing to properly alert the appropriate authorities, then quietly pay them to publicly support the story.

Stratfor concludes that “everything points to a missile launched by the United States”, but they find it inexplicable that no reason for launching the missile has been given yet.

We saw a young viszla running through the woods yesterday. It was so familiar, like a fleeting glance through a temporal window back to a time when it was Mithra who was dashing gleefully, back and forth amongst the trees. It was simultaneously heartwarming and sad. Most of all, it was a reminder of how much I miss my dog.

American symbols are now out of bounds in what is still, for the time being, technically America. Did you really think that importing tens millions of Mexicans was going to change the Mexicans? The Melting Pot is a myth popularized by a Jewish immigrant to England who never lived in the United States, supported pacifism, feminism, and was a fervent Zionist. If the pro-immigration politicians and their supporters want to live in a third-world socialist hellhole so badly, why don’t we simply send them all there rather than permitting them to import millions of their precious immigrants here?

And, I wonder, how long will it be before the North Mexico Yankee Corps follows suit and bans the American flag?

The truly shocking news here is that a bank actually dared to foreclose on a property. These days, they usually prefer to pretend that the loan is still performing.

The foreclosure crisis in Philadelphia is now becoming a matter of life and death. Eyewitness News has learned that in the past month, two homeowners took their own lives before sheriff’s deputies arrived to tell them that they were being evicted. On March 5, deputies arriving to post an eviction notice on Lynda Clark’s South Philadelphia home found she had hanged herself…. Less than three weeks later, owner Gregory Bellows shot and killed himself shortly before deputies arrived to evict him from his Roxborough home.

It seems unlikely that this violent despair is going to remain self-directed for long. A lot of people still believe the news; I have people tell me every day that they see this sign or that sign that the economy is recovering. The economists, meanwhile, cite the GDP and unemployment numbers. But the statistical mirage is entirely transparent to those who understand how the statistics are constructed and how they have been manipulated by the $2 trillion increase in debt-funded government spending over the last 18 months. Extend-and-pretend was a gambit, an entirely rational gamble for those who subscribe to Neo-Keynesian economic theory and thought that recovery was predicated on resparking the all-important animal spirits. Unfortunately, because it was based on a false premise, it failed.

I was interviewed on a radio station last night and the hosts seemed a little surprised when I told them in no uncertain terms that there is nothing to be done. But it’s not that hard to understand; what would you tell someone who makes $15k a year, spends $25k per year, and is $75k in debt? That’s only part of the problem, as you also have to keep in mind that 42% of reported bank assets are literally worthless.

Who will ever be able to forget Corey Haim’s portrayal of Edgar Frog? A true classic of 80s Americana. R.I.P.