“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their peoples in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was their object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”–Abraham Lincoln
I recently did a series of interviews for an international venture investing newsletter called Capitalist Exploits. Here's a question I got that I thought we be of interest to GG readers. I've extended the answer a bit from the original in the interview.
Mark: Switching gears just a bit… We've watched the SOPA/PIPA controversy, now its CISPA; the “Stellar Wind” project was featured in Wired last month, and recently an NSA whistleblower, former Director William Binney, came out and said flat out that the government is lying, they intercept and store everything we do, Constitution be damned. It seems the government won't stop until it completely controls the flow of information on the Internet and has the ability to monitor and record everything we say and do online. You're a counter-terrorism expert, how much of this is hype and how much of it is really necessary to safeguard national security, in your opinion. And what about our civil liberties and right to privacy?
John: It’s a mixed bag. There’s certainly lots of concern in regards to how the NSA gathers data on US citizens. Added to what the private sector is gathering, its safe to conclude that we don’t have any privacy.
For example, nearly every new phone sold today has a GPS chip in it. It’s constantly gathering data on where that phone is and sending it to the phone company. All of that phone company data, from all of the phone companies across the world, is aggregated and provided to select governments for use in counter-terrorism. In short, the three billion people that are using cell phones are being tracked in order to help find and kill a couple hundred terrorists (its contribution is probably limited to being the primary source for neutralizing a couple of terrorists a year).
When reaching out to Alberta oil sands companies before a trip to Canada last month, I thought all of them mined oil the same way — they don't.The open mining most people think of when they picture the oil sands is just one way of extracting crude from the ground, but it is without a doubt the most dramatic. And we had to see it.
After being refused a mine tour and any type of access to a mining site or equipment, Business Insider rented a plane that I used to see everything I could of the mines on my own.
Restricted to flying no lower than 1,000 feet above the ground, I spent nearly two hours leaning out the window of a small Cessna 172 with a long lens, snapping pictures and trying to keep warm.
The oil sands hold up to two trillion barrels of oil spread over more than 54,000 square miles, making it the second largest oil deposit in the world after Saudi Arabia.
The amount of energy spent recovering that oil and the pollution created in refining it is immense and the impact on the environment profound.
Leading academic and industry experts have validated BlackLight's new process that directly produces electric energy from the conversion of water vapor to a new, more stable form of Hydrogen. Experts agree that BlackLight's ‘Hydrino theory' represents a fundamental breakthrough in clean energy technology.
Adapted by Sterling D. Allan from a press release Pure Energy Systems News
Cranbury, NJ (May 22, 2012) — BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announced a major breakthrough in clean energy technology, which experts agree holds tremendous promise for a wide range of commercial applications. The announcement comes on the heels of BlackLight's recent completion of a $5 million round of financing to support commercial development of its new process for producing affordable, reliable energy from water vapor.
In six separate, independent studies, leading scientists from academia and industry, with PhDs from prestigious universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, confirm that BlackLight has achieved a technological breakthrough with its CIHT (Catalyst-Induced-Hydrino-Transition) clean energy generating process and cell. The Process is fueled by water vapor that is a gaseous component of air and present wherever there is any source of water. The CIHT cell harnesses this energy as electrical power output and is suitable for essentially all power applications including transportation applications and electrical power production completely autonomous of fuels and grid infrastructure at a small fraction of the current capital costs.
The national unemployment rate gets lots of attention, and lately more attention has been paid to the workforce participation rate since more Americans have given up looking for a job, but we can also see that an astounding 100 million Americans don’t have jobs.
Specifically, these are people who are part of the civilian over-16 non-institutional population who are either unemployed or not part of the workforce. According to the April jobs report, the number of jobless American stood at 100.9 million.
That’s an all-time record and it’s an increase of 26.2 million over the last 12 years. It’s as if we absorbed the entire adult population of Canada and not a single person had a job.
The numbers are staggering. The jobs-to-population ratio peaked 12 years ago. If we were to have the same ratio today, we would need 15.3 million more jobs, or 23.7 million fewer people.
(Note: The chart above is the Civilian Over-16 Non-Institutional Population minus the seasonally adjusted Civilian Workforce.)
For six weeks in early 2012 I ran for the office of President of the United States of America. I was accepted by the Reform Party (one of six accredited national parties completely shut out of the political process in the US), was listed at Politics1, participated in a WikiNews interview and got my views posted at On the Issues. I created We the People Reform Coalition, and I wrote letters to every single candidate for President including Rocky Anderson and Buddy Roemer, throwing in Dennis Kucinich for grins. This is my report — there are no winners.
Preamble
I was shocked into paying attention by Al Gore's playing dead in 2000 (despite Greg Palast outing the Bush family scheme to disenfranchise 50,000 people of color, doing so three months in advance of election day). I was radicalized by 9/11 — a clear false-flag operation in which elements of our own government were complicit — and infuriated with the ease by which this nation was taken to war on the strength of 935 now-documented lies — lies that no serving officer — including Colin Powell — was willing to confront. Then I lost everything in the 2008 economic crash described so well by Matt Taibbi in GRIFTOPIA — it took two years for my company to go out of business — and along came Occupy. Occupy failed. This is their story and mine. If this story moves you, I believe we have 90 days from today to take seven steps that can bury the two-party tyranny and install an honest coalition government.
… Are what again? As the following graphic from IBD demonstrates, for the first time in history, a majority of jobless workers over 25 have attended some college, and now outnumber those without a job who simply have a high school diploma or less. But at least those in the fomer category have tens of thousands of non-dischargeable debt to show for it.
Click on Image to Enlarge
.. Are what again? As the following graphic from IBD demonstrates, for the first time in history, a majority of jobless workers over 25 have attended some college, and now outnumber those without a job who simply have a high school diploma or less. But at least those in the fomer category have tens of thousands of non-dischargeable debt to show for it.
