Current rankings at Amazon:

* #12 in All Books
* #2 in Nonfiction
* #1 in Economics, and
* #1 in Government!

This is interesting to me because it reflects an argument I’m learning that private property is a much better steward of land than government. More on that argument here.

Federal authorities failed to follow through on plans earlier this year to burn away highly flammable brush in a forest on the edge of Los Angeles to avoid the very kind of wildfire now raging there, The Associated Press has learned.

Months before the huge blaze erupted, the U.S. Forest Service obtained permits to burn away the undergrowth and brush on more than 1,700 acres of the Angeles National Forest. But just 193 acres had been cleared by the time the fire broke out, Forest Service resource officer Steve Bear said. (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

(Read more from news.yahoo.com)

This is complete bullshit. We have borrowed this recovery, or pause, from the future. Things will get much, much worse. We’ll have all the old problems, plus a whole lot of debt on top of them.

Here is Ron Paul, who has been right over, and over, and over…

Mises does a great profile of Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), president of the Second Bank of the United States – the central bank that preceded the Federal Reserve, and provides some useful analogues to not just the current Chairman of the Fed, but to all Fed-friendly crony insitutions that are doing all in the power to perpetuate the hegemony of Wall Street.

Like Ben Bernanke today, Nicholas Biddle cultivated the veneer of a benign civil servant calculating serenely far above the political fray. In reality he, like Bernanke, was up to his neck in the backroom game of power.

When Biddle’s bureaucratic cradle was rocked, he quickly morphed into a Machiavellian monster. Keep that in mind as Ben Bernanke gets progressively cornered by Ron Paul and the bourgeoning anti-Fed movement. (Already the Fed is less popular than the IRS.)

When you hear about the Federal Reserve Transparency Act getting stalled in committee, think of Daniel Webster, bought and paid for with central bank money. When you read Fed apologia in the New York Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal denouncing the “reckless populism” of the Act, think of the newspaper editors in Biddle’s pocket.

The full must read article can be found here. (From zerohedge.com)

Over at The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy website, Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes about the so-called Presidential Surveillance Program, the “still-shadowy set of programs that spy on Americans in America without any probable cause or warrant.” The EFF, as regular BB readers know, has fought this program for several years now — in 2006, it filed suit against AT&T for providing the NSA with direct access to its database of communications records. Snip from Cohn’s essay:

While the details are unknown, credible evidence indicates that billions of everyday communications of ordinary Americans are swept up by government computers and run through a process that includes both data-mining and review of content, to try to figure out whether any of us were involved in illegal or terrorist-related activity. That means that even the most personal and private of our electronic communications – between doctors and patients, between husbands and wives, or between children and parents – are subject to review by computer algorithms programmed by government bureaucrats or by the bureaucrats themselves. (Read more from boingboing.net)

See Also:

• The federal government has lost count of the number of federal crimes. It is a crime to be in possession of a certain type of lobster.
• Speaking to the police cannot help you. What you say can, famously, “be used against you,” but IT CANNOT BE USED TO HELP YOU. If something you tell police is demonstrative of your innocence, it is legally hearsay.
• No rush to plead guilty.
• 25% of convicts exonerated by DNA evidence had made incriminating statements to police.
• Even perfectly innocent people can make small missteps when under interrogation.
• Even if you only tell truthful and innocent information, it can still be used against you.
• Ohio v. Reiner. “Truthful responses of an innocent witness . . . may provide the government with incriminating evidence.”
• Police might misremember something you said during a several-hour interrogation.

By Joby Warrick, Peter Finn and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers

As the session begins, the detainee stands naked, except for a hood covering his head. Guards shackle his arms and legs, then slip a small collar around his neck. The collar will be used later; according to CIA guidelines for interrogations, it will serve as a handle for slamming the detainee’s head against a wall.

After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face — to get the detainee’s attention — followed by other slaps, the guidelines state. Next comes the head-slamming, or “walling,” which can be tried once “to make a point,” or repeated again and again.

“Twenty or thirty times consecutively” is permissible, the guidelines say, “if the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question.” And if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried.

Five years after the CIA’s secret detention program came to light, much is known about the spy agency’s decision to use harsh techniques, including waterboarding, to pry information from alleged al-Qaeda leaders. Now, with the release late Monday of guidelines for interrogating high-value detainees, the agency has provided — in its own words — the first detailed description of the step-by-step procedures used to systematically crush a detainee’s will to resist by eliciting stress, exhaustion and fear.

The guidelines, along with thousands of pages from other newly released documents, also show how the CIA gradually imposed limits on the program and eliminated some of the most controversial practices after the agency’s medical advisers protested.

Still, by Dec. 30, 2004, the date of the CIA memo that outlines the guidelines to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, agency interrogators had grown adept at using sleep deprivation, stress positions and sometimes multiple methods to create a “state of learned helplessness and dependence.”

“Certain interrogation techniques place the detainee in more physical and psychological stress and, therefore, are considered more effective tools,” according to the memo, released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Amnesty International USA and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The CIA on Tuesday declined to comment on the memo, which was written by an agency lawyer whose name was redacted from the document. But agency spokesman George Little noted that the interrogation program operated under guidelines approved by top legal officials of the Bush administration’s Justice Department. (Read more from informationclearinghouse.info)

I will avoid a crowd estimate but a friend of mine who was there today described it as enormous.

Here’s my take on the tea party movement so far. It’s been a successful coalition of conservatives and libertarians so far united by opposition to Obama and all his works. The sentiment in the nation right now is clearly anti-Obama.

The key point is, what is the tea party movement for? On that, there is no agreement and probably won’t be. If conservatives will repudiate eight years of Bushian big government, the coalition might persist. If not, the libertarians should very quickly go their own way lest they unwittingly lend their support to a restoration. (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city’s surveillance network has claimed.

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.

In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers.

David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.”

He added: “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness.

“It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.” (Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)

Government Reaction: Obviously, we need more cameras.

If Larry Frankel, past executive director and longtime lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, were to have played a character in a biblical pageant he would have been the burning bush, Andrew Chirls, his former longtime partner once told him. . . . .

On Friday, Frankel, who took a position last year as state legislative counsel for the ACLU’s Washington office, was found dead in the stream that gives Washington’s Rock Creek Park its name.

Police released little about the circumstances of Frankel’s death and as of yesterday had declined to officially identify the man found floating in water shortly before noon on Friday in the federally administered large park that cuts through Northwest Washington. (Read more from philly.com)

ABCNNBBCBS: You will mourn who we tell you to mourn, and forget who we tell you to forget!

Progressive forces in the Philippines have urged Manila to scrap a military deal with the US after former officials testified that US soldiers have been fighting in Mindanao in violation of the country’s constitution.

Under a Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), hundreds of elite US troops have been deployed in half a dozen locations in the southern Philippines since 2002, ostensibly to train and advise Filipino troops fighting Islamist militants and the Maoist New People’s Army.

On Thursday retired Philippine navy lieutenant Nancy Gadian testified at a congressional hearing that US troops based on Mindanao were embedded with Filipino units in combat situations.

The Philippine constitution bars foreign troops from fighting in the country, which was a US colony until 1946. (Read more from morningstaronline.co.uk)

We cannot afford all this war, neither morally nor economically nor politically.

An acerbic attack on Charlie Sheen for the crime of questioning the official story behind 9/11, a sentiment shared by the majority of Americans and indeed the majority of the 9/11 Commission itself, appearing in U.S. News and World Report this morning relies upon cliched and completely unfounded terms of reference in a poor effort to smear Sheen as part of a “conspiracy fringe”.

In his hit piece, author Peter Roff labels 9/11 truth as an “extremist theory” and compares its adherents with those who believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy.

So that’ll be over two thirds of the entire population of the U.S. then, Mr. Roff! In what possible way can this be described as “fringe” thinking?

An ABC News poll conducted on the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination found that 7 in 10 Americans believe that the murder of Kennedy was the result of a wider plot, not the lone actions of Oswald.

The establishment media are still operating under a deluded and contrived perception of public opinion that has no correlation whatsoever to reality itself.

Roff goes on to reference Van Jones and dismiss 9/11 truthers as a “fringe element” but concedes that they are politically influential and that establishment Democrats and Republicans “need to deal with them”.

Just by coincidence, while arguing that 9/11 truthers represent a “fringe element,” Roff fails to mention that the majority of American citizens doubt the official government version of events.

He also fails to acknowledge the fact, as strongly emphasized in Charlie Sheen’s letter to the President, that the majority of the 9/11 Commission members publicly denounced the official story and stated that the government agreed not to tell the truth. (Read more from prisonplanet.com)

President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.

The request was made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday morning. Sources said Bush initiated the conversation.

He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry that some lawmakers have proposed, the sources said [CNN 1/29/2002] (Archived at whatreallyhappened.com)