Mindconnection eNL, 2008-12-07

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• Unique opportunity. If it's presented to more than one person, it's not unique. For the less English-enabled among us, "unique" means "one of a kind." It derives from the same Latin root as "unicycle." How many wheels are on a unicycle?
   
• Daylight Savings Time. With this bad public policy, most people lose an hour of daylight in the morning because they don't work 9 to 5. They start their day much earlier.
  
  Consequently, the clock change is wasting, not saving, daylight. We now have empirical evidence of this needless waste, in the form of the higher energy costs that occurred when CONgress cranked up the BS factor by calling this an "energy savings move." Predictably, the costs went up rather than down. Yet, they still call it Daylight Savings Time instead of Daylight Wasting Time. I use DWT any time I refer to this asinine system.
  
  Members of CONgress are out of step with the normal sleep patterns of most of America, just as they are clueless and out of step with everything else having to do with America. Changing the clocks in the opposite direction would actually be helpful. But because that's not a completely bassackwards approach, CONgress will never do it.
   
• Emergency bailout. The enormous pork barrel spending package that incidentally contained a financial rescue of AIG will cost Americans something like $27,000 a piece. You do have this much money just lying around, right? AIG subsequently threw a couple of lavish parties that cost a total of about 3/4 of a million dollars. When Senator Chuck Grassley (Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance) asked for a cost accounting of this largesse handed over to AIG, they refused. This wasn't an emergency bailout. It was a scam.
   
• Election. When the best you can come up with out of 300 million people are two folks who promise to increase federal spending while the nation is staggering under an $11 trillion debt that is almost the size of its entire economy, that's not an election. That's ballot control, and it's designed to give people the illusion of choice instead of actually providing choice.
  
  Before anyone gets all rattled, does it matter which gasoline truck arrives at a house fire? Calling for even more spending when you are already in a hole that is 11 million million dollars deep is exactly what the two Demopublican candidates did. Because the Demopublicans always get one of their two candidates into the office of the POTUS, this "election" was between the Crips and Bloods, metaphorically speaking--you are going to get robbed, and you get to "choose" which one robs you. The truth is that when you limit your "choices" to either Robber A or Robber B, you lose no matter who wins.
   
• Stimulus package. When you have an $11 trillion debt, the only thing you "stimulate" by transferring another $500 billion to special interests is deeper debt. Bush gave us an economy-draining "stimulus package" and now Obama, who promised "change" is now saying he'll do the same thing.
  
  It's not a stimulus package.
  
  FDR did the same kind of nonsense, and now economists agree his draining of capital from the capitalist economy prolonged the Great Depression. This is the kind of "stimulus" we don't need.
  
  A real stimulus package would be the passing of the Fair Tax (it would save us billions annually in compliance costs alone) and a paring down of the $541 billion Defense budget so it's only as large as the military budgets of the next five nations combined instead of the next nine. But then, they wouldn't have a false name for it because an actual stimulus package would be a sensible action and not need reverse spin like everything else they do.

From the above examples, you can see that language manipulation overcomes common sense quite readily. However, simply applying brainpower to the underlying facts and/or the results of whatever is being discussed is how you overcome language manipulation.

Here are some examples of ideas called by their correct names, if you look at what implementing these ideas actually produces for results. I'm not passing judgment here, so don't get upset if you personal view is challenged. These are all either existing public policy or ideas pushed by political activists:

• Save the Criminals
• Pro-coathanger
• Hijacker Safety Program
• Job Exportation Program

I won't go into detail about the above four items, because too many people have a strong emotional attachment to the opposite things these denote. All I ask you to do is decide to overcome the language manipulation and look at the actual results of what these things do. Two things to keep in mind:

1. You do not stop a behavior by banning it. You just drive it underground and/or force people to adopt even worse alternatives.
2. Whatever you subsidize, you get more of. That's why a bailout is a bad idea. Give in to an extortionist once, and you will have to again.

This tip is for American citizens, but our other readers can find a few nuggets in it also.

In the 1500s, Spain and Portugal extracted tremendous wealth from Central America and South America (respectively). This was in the form of gold, silver, various spices, and other natural resources. At the time, Europe was an economic backwater. The Muslim empire to the south and east of Europe was the height of civilization, science, and economic power.

So, what did Spain and Portugal do? They used every bit of this wealth to finance military campaigns throughout the "civilized" world. None of it went into productive use. None of it went into building infrastructure, either. These two countries just kept piling up debt until they collapsed.

Can you name a country today that is doing the same idiotic thing? It's called the USA. The USA spends more on its military than the next nine nations combined. And that's outside the costs of actually fighting wars. Those costs are extra.

Here we are today with an $11 trillion national debt that is nearly the size of our 2007 GDP ($13 trillion). Do you see the problem, here?

Regardless of how anyone feels about the purported consequences of pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq, the consequences of staying there spell certain doom. We simply cannot afford it.

Meanwhile, we pay the highest taxes in the world but have crumbling bridges and roads. We have a federal agency that is supposed to collect our federal income tax (based on a 65,000 document that defies logic) but the GAO reports that its employees spend half their day surfing p*rn and gambling sites. Further, this same agency has many other issues (such as spending several times what it can possibly collect in going after the victims of the Hoyt fraud its own employees colluded in) that result in its costing more in govt revenue than it produces. The compliance costs alone exceed the revenue collected, which means enacting sensible taxation program would result in the same revenue at half the rate of taxation!

Your misrepresentatives in CONgress are wildly spending your country (and your financial future) into oblivion, and using uncivilized and costly methods (such as the aforementioned agency) to raise the money needed for this stupidity.

Just to drive home how serious it is that you do something about this, consider the $11 trillion debt. It can't be paid off from a $13 trillion economy. So, it has to be mortgaged. Especially since we have current costs to pay along the way. A typical home mortgage costs 3 X the principal. It will take at least two lifetimes to pay off $11 trillion. So, you can call this a $66 trillion burden. Scientists have concluded that money does not grow on trees, therefore every penny mis-spent by CONgress is a penny taxed. Divide the $66 trillion tax by some 66 million workers, keeping in mind that a trillion is a million million. Your tax is an astounding 1 million dollars. You are paying a million dollar mortgage, my friend, and getting zero in return for it.

What can you do about this impending destruction of your financial future?

Obviously, one step is to tell your misrepresentative in the House, "No new spending. Please. Make spending cuts wherever you can." Get this same message to each of your senators. Do this once a month. When voting, remember who got us into this mess. It was the Democrats and the Republicans. Regardless of any other red herring they pretend is an issue, the simple fact is the one thing that govt can get right if it chooses to is to stop stealing your money. You personally are on the hook for a million dollars.

Voting for a Democrat or a Republican simply gives a rubber stamp of approval to continue the same thieving. If you are going to vote that way, please send me all of your money and personal possessions plus the deed to your house and the title to your car because you are stating you don't need any money or possessions. Well, I happen to like those things. If you don't mind having them stolen, why not just send them to me? I'll pay the shipping.

If you do value the sweat of your brow and you do make your employer pay you, then vote Libertarian so you send a clear message of NO to the theives who think you don't deserve to be paid for the work you do.

You can't absolutely prevent identity theft, just as you can't absolutely protect your home from a break-in. You can put the best locks on all of your doors and do everything else right, but then still find yourself looking down the sights of your home protection tool because someone defeated your perimeter defenses and broke in anyhow.

Of course, your being able to get to that tool in a timely manner depends on your being alerted to the intrusion. So it is with identity theft. You have to know when security is breached, so that you can take defensive actions right away.

Here are some signs your identity theft measures have been breached or compromised:

• Bank charges. You should check your bank acct daily or almost daily. Look for charges that you don't recognize. And just because it's a small charge doesn't mean it's an authorized one. If you were a crook sitting on stolen access to 100 checking accounts, $49.95 a month from each one can add up to a nice income. Staying under the radar this way emulates the highly effective way CONgress steals from you and other thieves are catching on.
   
• Credit card charges. If you use your card anywhere other than online, you are at high risk of identity theft. It's easy to stand behind you in a checkout line and snap pictures of both sides of your card. Shop online to reduce the risk. Also, have one card for shopping and a different card (and account number) for regularly charged bill payments. View your c/c statements online once or twice a week and look for charges you don't recognize.
   
• Electronic bill payments. These seldom present any problems. But, an "inside job" thief can cause problems. Review all statements.
   
• Paper bill notices. Paper is not only the bane of productivity, but it presents huge security holes. However, many companies continue to send out paper bills, paper statements, paper invoices, etc. If you eliminate these wherever possible, then a paper bill notice for something you did not order will be easy to spot.
   
• Followups on purchases. You may get a phone call, e-mail, or paper followup to a purchase you didn't make. For example, a sales person may contact you regarding a satisfaction survey, technical assistance followup, or extended warranty option. Rather than just dismiss this as an error on their part, get information about the underlying purchase. Find out the date of purchase, what was purchased, the amount of the purchase, the payment method used, and--if possible--the shipping address. Do not give out your credit card number. A crook can call knowing you didn't make any such purchase and then pretend to help you track down the problem by "verifying" your credit card number. Collect information, don't give it out. Then, contact your credit card company or any other possible payment method providers to report the incident.
   
• Rejection on an application for credit. This can be a sign of identity theft, because the thief may have left a wake of unpaid bills in your name. It can also be a sign that some IRS employee has made false reports about you, made hostile inquiries about you, sold your information to an accomplice, or taken collection actions without notifying you. Such behavior was inflicted on many of the 4300 victims of the Hoyt Fiasco, a scam in which IRS employees made $103 million disappear and then falsified information so that the IRS machinery was unleashed against the victims of the fraud.
  
  In the case of IRS malfeasance, there is nothing you can do because these people are above the law and they know it. In other cases, you can contact one of the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) and ask for a free credit report. You can use that information to start the long, hard slog to correcting your credit record.

As we noted in our last issue, no thievery compares to the degree to which you are robbed by your own government. This isn't an anti-tax rant. Taxes are required for proper functioning of government. But excess taxes used for dysfunctioning of government and used purely for wealth transfer purposes should get our attention.

You can keep writing to your misrepresentatives to stop grossly over-spending and maybe they will slow it down a bit. But a huge cost you bear is that of complying with the federal tax regulations. It's not just cost that's the issue. You are forced to provide very sensitive information to an agency whose employees steal several thousand computers from their own offices each year. Do you see the obvious problem, here? There is a solution: the Fair Tax. The only viable way to ensure your personal security is to help get the Fair Tax www.fairtax.org passed.

Note: Contrary to anti-citizen propaganda, the Fair Tax is not a flat tax. Nor does it punish the poor nearly as much as the federal income tax currently does. The "progressive" part of the federal income tax is the part of the iceberg that is above the waterline. Below the surface is a monumental burden of billions of dollars of compliance costs that show up in every product and service you buy.

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While you're at supplecity, go to the home page after you read that article and you'll find more great stuff to motivate and assist you in having a lean, attractive, and healthy body.

1. In terms of landmass, Florida is larger than England. However, it has a population of 18 million vs. England's population of 60 million. Another important way in which they differ is England has a Save the Criminals program and consequently very high rates (% of population) of violent crime. Florida was the first state to enact Right To Carry and in the first year of enactment saw murder rates plunge by 90%. They have stayed low ever since.
    

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