lumberjack in a desert

Let’s stop and hypothesize for a minute.  Let’s say your MasterCard is maxed out.  So is your Visa.  Same with the Discover Card.  You have a car payment you can’t afford.  Your mortgage is well beyond your means.  You’re barely making the payments.  If you continue to make the minimum payment it will take decades to pay off with the vast majority going to interest.  There is no end in sight.  So what do you do?

Well if you’re Dave Obey, you don’t worry about small technicalities like losing your home or filing for bankruptcy.  You simply ask for a higher credit limit.  Looks like crazy Dave is at it again.  From the Examiner:

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The International Business Times has just reported that House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, says Congress may need to raise theU.S. federal debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion.

“It is December,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey said, “we don’t really have a choice. The bill’s already been run up; the credit card has already been used. When you get the bill in the mail you need to pay it,” he added.

By “pay it”, Obey means borrow for it.

Obey’s words perfectly encapsulate what has become the government’s chief fiscal operating principle: spend first, figure out where the money is going to come from later.

But while the American government may be in the habit of kicking into the future the question of how it can pay its bills, other nations are beginning to ask America this very question.

Last month President Obama visited China and found Chinese officials taking a keen interest in his healthcare reform plans. The Chinese’s interest in healthcare did not centre around the usual questions that have been preoccupying Americans. Instead, one participant in the talks recalled, “They wanted to know, in painstaking detail, how the health care plan would affect the deficit…”

It is not surprising that China should take more of an interest than most Americans in this crucial question. After all, the United States already owes China two Trillion dollars and could be forced to beg for at least half that much again if Obama’s health care promises are realized. “Like any banker,” the NYT reported, “they wanted evidence that the United States had a plan to pay them back.”

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Obey and Obama have hit the accelerator on this big debt train and seem bound and determined to charge ahead full speed whether there is track laid ahead or not. Ever wonder where the government gets money after it has already taken ours?  Well of course, it borrows.  How much does it borrow?  How much do we owe?

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Spending as if there is no tomorrow

Obama’s curious method for correcting his predecessors’ mistakes has been to perpetuate their disastrous policies to an unprecedented extreme. In an attempt to stimulate the economy out of the recession (a recession caused, principally, by so much unpayble debt), Obama borrowed more federal funds than any President in the nation’s history. Hardly had he settled into the White House when he signed two new bills, the $787B stimulus and the $410B omnibus, which together equal the $1.2T deficit he “inherited.” Consequently, when the 2009 fiscal year finally ended this October, America had run up an all time record deficit of $1.58 trillion – 3.4 times the $459B deficit of 2008, and 10 times the $160B deficit of 2007.

The impulse behind Obama’s borrowing spree is an economic theory known as Keynesianism. John Maynard Keynes (1883 –1946) argued that a failing economy could be revived by governments injecting money into it. As the new money began circulating, Keynes theorized, it would reach people who would spend it, creating economic growth and more revenue for the state coffers.

Selling ourselves into slavery

Keynesianism has an air of plausibility about it until we stop to ask where the money actually comes from that government so generously pumps into the economy. The answer, of course, is that it can only come from debt. However, given the inflationary implications of debt (see section below on how the Government gets money), even this indirectly comes out of the pockets of citizens in the form of currency devaluation.

If the amount of money that the government desires exceeds the amount that American banks are willing to loan, then the government will go, hat in hand, to foreign banks. This is exactly what the Obama and Bush administrations have done, with the result thatChina and other foreign holders of America’s national debt are owed a combined total of about $3.3 trillion. Just to put this problem in perspective, America’s national debt is larger than the total economies of China, the United Kingdom, and Australiacombined and is quickly approaching or exceeding the USA’s 14 trillion GDP. (It appears less than that in charts, because the government has been cooking the books since the Clinton Administration. They are not counting Social Security and Medicare obligations as part of the debt.) If the pattern continues over the next decade, the government will borrow approximately $1.72 million every minute.

The result is essentially that the American government has sold its people into slavery. Those who will be hit the hardest with this debt servitude are those future generations of Americans who will be crippled by their obligation to service the interest on such an extortionate debt. But it is not just the burden to pay the debt that will cripple successive generations. They will also face the much more terrifying prospect of holding a devalued currency, since devaluation is always the result of pumping so much debt-money into the economy over long periods of time.

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The article is a great read, even if it is a bit long.  Read the whole thing and educate yourself.  Politicians hate educated voters. 

Remember when I said the mainstream media doesn’t want you to learn about climategate?  Well they’re not alone.  Apparently Google, a company known for its liberal agenda, censorship of conservatives, and blatant bias and favoritism doesn’t want you to know about it either.

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From Talking About The Weather

Among the points of interest in the unfolding climate scandal is the fact that the term “climategate” rapidly eclipsed global warming in the number of links produced by a simple Google search.

As is standard, Google’s auto-suggest function facilitated this, several days into the story’s evolution. Anyone typing in the letters c-l-i would see the suggested time-saving choice of climategate. Within a day or two of the auto-suggest function being added for “climategate” it had become the top item in the list.

Suddenly, though, on Monday December 1, Google stopped offering “climategate” as a choice to those who typed c-l-i and even to those who typed c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t. Strange.

Intrigued, I sent a few questions to Google’s Global Communications Department and a polite gentleman by the name of Jake Hubert responded right away.

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To make a long story short, he goes all the way up the chain until he gets to the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.

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I decided then to try another e-mail to Eric Schmidt (Sorry about that, Jake!). In the meantime, I’d seen that Google searching “climategate” (if one was willing to type in the whole phrase) now produced 22 million links.

Dear Mr. Schmidt,

Thank you for following up with Jake Hubert, who has reached out to me by telephone.

Unfortunately, the explanation makes no more sense by phone than it did by e-mail.

Climategate generates 22 million links on the main Google search engine. Global warming, by comparison, generates fewer than 11 million.

The idea that a numbers-driven algorithm stopped Google Suggest from filling in Climategate is absurd on its face. (Google Suggest, as it should, continues to in-fill global warming when a user begins typing it.)

These are my questions for you and your staff:

1. Was Google contacted by Al Gore or any one of his business associates regarding climategate searches on Google? If so, when did the approach take place?

2. What was the process that led to the decision to remove Climategate from the Google Suggest function?

3. Will Climategate be added to the list of Google Suggest items again?

4. Does Google feel that it acted according to its own highest ethical principles in this matter?

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely yours,

Harold Ambler

I pushed send, got my daughter into her gymnastics gear, and rushed out the door. When I returned a little less than two hours later, I put my sleeping daughter on the couch and rushed upstairs to check my e-mail. Nada. Then I did a Google search, typing c-l-i-m … and there it was – offered by the gloriously user-friendly Google Suggest function – “climategate.”

Coincidence?

You never know.

Was Google briefly complicit in the largest scientific scandal in at least a generation, attempting to minimize it behind the scenes? Like I said, you never, ever, ever, ever know. Ever.

P.S. Four hours after the function returned, Google Suggest on “climategate” was altered again. Instead of the single word “climategate,” which yields 27 million links per search, Google now offers “climate gate scandal,” which yields 6 million. Only by hand-typing the complete word “climategate,” to the last letter, can users view an additional 21 million links. The evident message from on high? “Tamp it down.” The apparent success of the strategy: close to non-existent.

P.P.S. As of six days after this post (today is Tuesday December 8), Google Suggest no longer offers any choices for C-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t-e, no matter how many letters one types. The total number of links appears to be stable around 30 million. The first reader who finds any Google search with 30 million or more links that Google Suggest doesn’t assist with wins the prize.

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Read the whole thing. As of this writing, climategate is not auto suggested at all. In fact, when I get to “climategat” the only two auto suggests are “climate guatemala” and “climate guatemala city.” I tried it as two separate words, and even after typing the whole thing out (”climate gate”) I’m only being suggested “climate gates.”

I’ve been keeping an eye on this throught the climategate scandal. For a couple days it was autosuggested but has since disappeared despite the 24,600,000 search results. Just for giggles, I typed in my own name (JR Salzman) just to see what would happen. I got to “JR Sal” before my name or “JR Salzman logrolling” was suggested. Which is funny considering a search brings up only 1,250,000 results (most of them irrelevant).

Now I realize that my name and climategate are completely unrelated, but it got me thinking. I am a peon in terms of searches. I have never had an entire year of searches on my name that add up to one day of the climategate scandal’s. Google trends will prove that because my results are so low I’m not even listed. So why auto suggest me and not climategate?

So then I thought, what if climategate is not showing up because there are more relevant autosuggested words in front of it? If that is the case then it should show up at “climatega-.” Every autosuggest after that starts with “climate gu-”

There is no logical reason why a word – with far more search results than many autocomplete words out there, a much more recent spike in searches, and a word that was autocompleted mere days ago – like climategate would suddenly disappear. Someone is fiddling. Its one thing if it had never autocompleted. Its another if it suddenly disappears.

As the old adage goes, follow the money. Google wouldn’t have anything to gain from the bogus science of global warming, would they?

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Google Invests Millions in Green Energy

Google will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to jumpstart alternative energy technology, cofounder Larry Page announced Tuesday. Google will focus efforts on solar thermal power, wind power, and enhanced geothermal systems, the company said in a statement.
Google plans to spend tens of millions of dollars in 2008, as the project hires engineers and energy experts. Capital expenditures on renewable energy projects will reach hundreds of millions of dollars, the company said.
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OK, big deal.  Whats wrong with being “green?”

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Google Invests in Silver Spring; Expect More – “The search giant, which has been investing in startups through its philanthropy arm, has created a standard fund that will spend $100 million in 12 months.”

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Wait a minute.  Silver Spring? Why does that sound familiar?  Oh yeah, its the same company Al Gore has heavily invested in and “advises.”

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From Gore’s Dual Role: Advocate and Investor

The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr. Gore’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital providers, looking for $75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.

Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr, another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate advisers.

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I know what you’re saying.  Mere coincidence.  But the article continues:

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As a private citizen, Mr. Gore does not have to disclose his income or assets, as he did in his years in Congress and the White House. When he left government in early 2001, he listed assets of less than $2 million, including homes in suburban Washington and in Tennessee.

Since then, his net worth has skyrocketed, helped by timely investments in Apple and Google, profits from books and his movie, and scores of speeches for which he can be paid more than $100,000, although he often speaks at no charge.

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Still not enough?

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Gore Can ‘Buy’ 2008 Election

Al Gore has such a fortune in Google stock that he could easily fund his own campaign for the White House, Democratic insiders say.

Gore became a senior adviser to the Internet search engine back in February 2001, and is a close friend of CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt. Google shares went public in 2004, and the stock has soared from $85 a share to more than $400. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth an estimated $11 billion each.

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But of course, it doesn’t stop there.  You just knew there was an Obama connection, didn’t you.  I’m shamelessly ripping this off from Wikipedia so I dont have to link all the sources myself.   (All citations are linked on Wikipedia)

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Schmidt was an informal advisor to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate ^[22]. He had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the new Chief Technology Officer position which Obama created in his administration. ^[23]. In announcing his endorsement for Obama, Schmidt jokingly said that with his $1.00 salary, he would be getting a tax cut ^[24]. After Obama won, Schmidt was a member of President Obama’s transition advisory board. He proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the United States’ problems at once, at least in domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

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Looks like a whole lot of inconvienant truths.  Time to look for an alternative to Google.