03/24/16

The Spectre of the Cashless Society

I have just been reading a rather well written article by Tyler Lonergan about the virtues of a cashless society. He is quite in favour of it and points out many of the genuine benefits that would derive from such a society. You can read his article HERE, and perhaps join this important debate yourself.

Above: The Bank of England – The Central Bank of the United Kingdom

In this article I will argue that a cashless society would be a very dangerous development. I will do so be referring to two issues. The first is that it would lead to officially legalised theft. The second is that it would lead to tyranny. I will then make some conclusions on the basis of these issues. But to start off, I will set the scene by doing something unexpected and discussing the virtues of optimism and pessimism. This is an important part of the discussion as you will come to see.

Continue reading →

07/19/15

Obama’s Diversity Police State and Government Mandated Racism

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Getty Images

Obama has brought racism to a whole new level in our government. It’s breathtaking in scope and breadth. He is solidifying his legacy before leaving office with the unprecedented gathering of information on all of us and how we live to be used in racial databases. Not only does the government already have such databases on police departments, they have created monster ones for almost every area of our lives to be used to forward “racial and economic justice” as we have never seen before as a nation. Enforced diversity is racism. Obama is already using the databases against institutions to penalize them and it will get much worse.

In fact, I wouldn’t put it past Obama to have other databases floating around out there having to do with demographics on gun ownership, religion and political affiliations. But what has just come to light as fact is that he’s got people tallying everything to do with race and mining data on American’s health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods and how children are disciplined in public schools. All of this is to show how ‘hateful’ and ‘racist’ we are as a nation. It creates racism out of thin air and shows it where it never existed. It takes all responsibility from those of color and places it on institutions. It blames repression on an evil white national structure. It’s meant to show how discriminated against minorities are in comparison to whites in every sector of American society.

Not only will this discriminate against whites, it will be a bonanza for attorneys who will make billions off of petty law suits using these skewed statistics as testimony against individuals and businesses in court. As the New York Post points out, these databases will be weaponized against banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

The data collected will be posted online or hidden away as ammo against those perceived to be in violation of the rules and definitions of The Ministry of Truth. The information and data will never stop being collected. It will be passed onto fellow travelers and will become its own division of the federal government. It will even be used for intelligence purposes against the American people by a brand-spanking new form of the Stasi. “Racial disparities” and “segregation” will be seen everywhere and those who run afoul of the new guidelines will be punished legally and financially.

The magic of these databases is in the skewing of the “analysis” of the data, combined with a shiny new concept, that if you can plausibly “discover” a “pattern” in the data, you can “plausibly” assert that there must exist the intention to create that pattern. And, of course, you can assign any motive you want to that, and the preferred motive du jour is racism. Doesn’t matter whether that’s true, only matters that dot-gov can allege it is. The real cause is, of course, irrelevant. Have a ghetto full of thugs, resulting from bureaucratic meddling and condition-free handouts? Find that a high percentage of the free-ride yo-yos do a lot of misbehaving and wind up in jail? No problem: just “discover a pattern” of disproportionately high incarceration of the thug demographic, assert RACISM! and punish the non-thug population.

Housing Database

One of the most ridiculously titled databases I have ever heard of is the prized invention of HUD – the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database which was debuted this month with the intent of racially balancing the nation (I kid you not) by zip code. Every neighborhood from coast to coast will be mapped according to four racial groups: white, Asian, black and Hispanic. The “geospatial data” will be published pinpointing racial imbalances. Data is subjective by the way… it is malleable and can pretty much mean whatever you want it to for whatever purpose you intend it for. And guess what? If you live in an area that is more than half white, you are going to get classified and ordered to rectify it or have your funding pulled. That’s called racial extortion.

Cities and towns who take money from the government are about to be told whether they are overly segregated or not. If the government decides they are, then they will be strong armed into constructing more subsidized housing in the midst of established neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that people chose to live in for varying reasons. They hold mortgages there and as the government drives property values down, these people will find themselves trapped and unable to sell their homes. Crime will rise exponentially and as Obama strips more and more Americans of their guns, the murder and death rates will rocket as well. Poverty and chaos will start to be the norm and America will begin devolving into a third world nation. This directly violates freedom of assembly by the way, which by definition is the right to hold public meetings and form associations without interference by the government. The association of those you choose to be your neighbors will be forever constrained by what Obama is doing. Inner-city minorities will be moved into predominantly white areas courtesy of HUD’s maps. The only places exempt from this demographic reconfiguration will be places like, oh… Galt’s Gulch.

All aspects of towns and cities will come under review by HUD using these databases. Transportation sites, schools, parks and even supermarkets will be dictated to on the basis of proximity to minorities. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination. These same towns and cities will now allow civil rights activists to have access to these databases and maps and they will be part of city planning to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

By now it has probably not escaped your notice that this demographic manipulation will have the same electoral impact as gerrymandering, but using the clever device of salting regions with enough demographic mass to tip the scales instead of redrawing the voting district lines. The eventual objective is that it won’t matter where you live, your vote will have been severely diluted. And to see how that’s mechanically implemented, let’s have a look at mortgages.

Mortgage Database

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is headed by Mel Watt, who has had solid Socialist/Progressive/Marxist ties throughout his political career. Watt was the Congressional Black Caucus leader as well. So, I’m not surprised at all that he’s heading the construction of a database for racially balancing home loans. The National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race and will be organized with everything from individual credit scores to employment records.

In this data dump, all lines of credit will be included for an individual. Student loans, credit cards, loans, mortgages… anything reported to a credit bureau will find its way into the database. When this is done, it will make the IRS databanks look amateurish in scope. The database will include other items of personal interest such as what assets you hold, what debts you have paid and haven’t and that payment history, whether you have ever had a bankruptcy or default, your interest rates and even how big your home is. This info will be shared with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They are notorious for going after lenders who are not seen as lending easily enough to minorities. No real justification is given for all of this other than it is for research purposes and policy making. CFPB Director Richard Cordray explained in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.” In America these days, everyone and everything is racist and open to attack by the Marxists.

Credit Database

Next comes a database that will track credit card transactions. Up to 900 million accounts will be snagged, designated and sorted by race. That’s about 85% of the credit card market and is intended to show discrimination on interest rates, charge-offs and collections. I bet it will also track and eventually determine who gets what credit lines, etc. Preferential treatment will be given to minorities almost certainly.

You might find yourself applying for a loan, a card, or some other line of credit, and be turned down for being too white.

Employment Database

A rule was also just issued that now requires all regulated banks to report on the hiring of minorities to the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. That name just makes me cringe. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another attempt to scream racism and ensure preference towards minorities.

School Database

This one just burns me. The mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project is dictating that the Education Department gather information on student suspensions and expulsions by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform. In other words, if they don’t conform, their funding and licensing will be yanked. Punishment for not obeying will become the norm especially in the schools. It’s already occurring in the schools with disastrous and violent results. As I have said many, many times… get your kids out of the public school system no matter what it takes and do it now.

The edu-Nazis are demanding to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes. Because, you know, it just isn’t fair. If these classes are shown to not have enough blacks and Latinos, they will be investigated and perhaps sued by the government. The only people doing well off all this nonsense are the lawyers who will sue from both sides of the fence and collect money all around. Racism is profitable after all. And racism will be claimed and proven regardless of whether it exists or not. Numbers are funny like that, they can say whatever you need them to.

Social Security

Stay with me here, it looks like I’m mixing topics, but I’m really not. Social Security is a huge database. One that touches every person in the US. Obama is now instituting a new gun ban that will affect everyone connected to Social Security. This is obscene, unethical and unconstitutional in the extreme. This is definitely one of the most evil and despicable moves I have seen to date. Basically, it comes down to this, either you can have your Social Security, which you have paid into your whole life, or you can have your guns. The day after a massacre in Chattanooga, Tennessee is committed by a radical Islamist, where four Marines and a Navy officer are gunned down, Obama made this move. The timing is not a coincidence. This will effect 4.2 million Americans. If they deem you of “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease,” they will come after your weapons. And this is an issue that the NRA bought into years ago and I warned about. Allowing a carve out for mental illness has allowed the eradication of our Constitutional rights. Those are very, very vague definitions and will be used as fodder against us, trust me. The ban also covers anyone who has their finances handled by other members of their family if they are on Social Security. Have you had enough yet? Because, I know I have.

Obama is going after the largest segment of the population – retiring baby boomers. He’s using a tactic that was used by Hitler in Nazi Germany and by communists in the Soviet Union. It’s the use of psychiatry as a soft enforcement arm of the federal government. The Nazis began a huge propaganda campaign against mentally and physically disabled Germans. They did not fit into the Nazi stereotype of the pure Aryan, that is physically fit with an obedient mind to serve the Reich. In addition, they were viewed as a burden on society, as they were unable to work and drained resources from the state. Sound familiar? Now, Obama is making similar moves against the retired and elderly. You can either starve or be a casualty of crime in Obama’s new and improved regime. Either way, the feds win. Either you die off saving them money and resources or you are disarmed and stand a good chance of being eliminated by criminals sanctioned by the State. This is massive extortion against Americans, attempting to force them into relinquishing their Second Amendment rights and into giving up their guns. To this I say,“Aw, nuts!” Social Security is being used as one more database to ensure that everyone is equally helpless and the funds therein, that you and I have paid for, will be meted out depending on compliance and perceived need.

Never in the history of the United States have these types of intrusive databases existed. I would not be surprised if these are being housed in those NSA facilities in Utah. This much data is just staggering. Obama has instituted a diversity police state, complete with race cops and a legion of civil rights lawyers. He has mandated racism from the White House. Anything touched by federal funding will come under the sway of what amounts to a race mafia. The data will be used to justify reparations and wealth redistribution as we have never seen before. It will also be used to keep Marxists in office indefinitely. These databases will be used to crush our Constitutional rights in every way imaginable. Data is power – the power to rule ruthlessly.

“America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”

– Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution

07/18/15

James O’Keefe Goes Undercover in Greece During Financial Crisis

Project Veritas

As you can see in today’s news, the Greek parliament just effectively disenfranchised the voters who recently enacted opposing austerity reforms in their country. Last night, the Greek politicians voted to accept bailout terms from their European creditors while protestors and police lobbed Molotov cocktails and tear gas at each other in the streets.

In our latest undercover video, we predicted this outcome.

“It looks like a deal will be made,” said James O’Keefe in the video narration which was produced before the parliamentary vote was cast. “Greece will get a bailout. It will be business as usual… until the next time Greece can’t pay its bills. Not everyone is happy. And many feel betrayed by their Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.”

With banks closed and riots in the street, what’s truly scary is what’s happening in Greece could happen anywhere — even here in the United States. For example, the U.S. territory Puerto Rico just defaulted on a major debt payment.

“We are the first… you are the next,” said a Greek nationalist protestor. “You should think about that.”‘

So while you are thinking about what it will be like in the United States when we are finally forced to pay the bills we are racking up with one unbalanced budget after another, consider what the mainstream media refuses to show you, presumably for fear for their lives.

As we show in the video, the Greek communists, anarchists and even the far right wing neo Nazi party are all opposed to the referendum and many of their demonstrations get out of hand. One journalist explained to us on film that when the anarchists come, they put their cameras down so they don’t get beaten up.

“Whenever they come, don’t shoot ,” said one of the journalists. “And you never get close to them.”

“One day we burn, not only parliament, parliament, police stations,” said one of the anarchists we caught on hidden camera. “We attack the police stations, we burn them, so the building… maybe one day also the parliament will be all black.”

While it’s a bleak vision of America’s possible future, it’s important that people watch our video to see what could happen here when we become unable to pay our nation’s bills.

Also, we promised we’d show you what happened when James O’Keefe tried to vote in the Greek elections. As you’ll recall, James would have been allowed to vote in 19 out of 20 attempts in last year’s North Carolina election, we showed that dead people could vote in New Hampshire — and one of our reporters could have gotten away with voting in the name of former US Attorney General Eric Holder. If you’re even remotely curious about how tough or easy it is to cast a fraudulent vote in Greece, check out our latest video here.

05/28/15

The Ironic Tie Between Elizabeth Warren’s Hypocritical Home Flipping and Mitt Romney

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

Massachusetts political roots aside, you might think that the comparison of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former governor and failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is absurd.

Warren, the progressive populist who in both rhetoric and regulation has sought to shackle “predatory” financial institutions as a means of supposedly protecting “the little guy,” and Romney, the patrician and wealthy denizen of the financial establishment of 47 percent infamy, would appear to be polar opposites.

Elizabeth Warren delivers her famous “You didn’t build that” speech.
(Image Source: YouTube screengrab)

But alas, as is so often is the case in politics, Warren’s public face is contradicted by her private actions – actions that we will soon see are similar in nature to those that made Romney a millionaire.

Warren, like Romney, profited by buying assets at low prices and through either improving said assets or waiting for the market to strengthen, selling them at higher prices.

As Jillian Kay Melchior and Eliana Johnson lay out in a recent National Review exposé, Warren “bought and sold at least five [residential] properties for profit,” generating at least $240,500 before accounting for remodeling costs.

Several of the homes Warren purchased and then flipped had been foreclosed upon.

The focus of the piece is the rank hypocrisy that Warren would execute such profit-seeking transactions, given that she has called the idea of buying and selling properties quickly for profit a “myth” that contributed to our economic woes, and decried the banks that foreclosed on the homes of working class Americans.

Rightfully, the column closes with the following flourish:

In her 2014 autobiography, Warren wrote of the events that precipitated the financial crisis that “everyone seemed to have a story about someone they knew who was getting rich by flipping houses.”

She omitted a crucial one.

But it ought to be pointed out that not only were Warren’s actions counter to her stated principles – they mimicked those of the private equity companies and other financial institutions that she has spent her entire public life railing against.

What private equity professionals like Mitt Romney, and investors in general seek to do is “buy low and sell high.”

Firms like Romney’s Bain Capital scour the market for businesses they believe are undervalued and/or have significant growth potential. They seek to buy these businesses at a low price, and grow them while making them more profitable and efficient by cutting costs, closing non-core operations while strengthening core ones and implementing new and improved strategies and practices to better their business models.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

By improving the companies in which they invest, the end goal is to sell them for many times the price at which they were bought.

What Romney did at the macro level in investing in businesses worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, Warren did at the micro level in investing in homes worth thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The difference however is that Romney’s investing in many cases led to the creation of ever-better goods and services at ever-lower prices, with the benefits accruing to not only Romney, Bain’s investors, and the employees of the strengthened companies, but all consumers – that is, you and me.

Certainly Warren’s investments in home remodeling may have created work for construction companies and home suppliers, but those benefits pale in size and scope to the benefits to the public of successful private equity investments.

Too, many progressives are queasy about the idea of gentrification, which they argue prices poorer people out of their neighborhoods, replacing them with the more “privileged,” all supposedly to the detriment of the character of said communities. Warren supported this process by improving several of the homes she purchased that had been in disrepair, and selling them at a significant premium.

No one should begrudge Elizabeth Warren for her apparent investing acumen.

And one suspects that no one on the left will begrudge her for her home-flipping hypocrisy, given that the truly ill-gotten riches of the Clintons who partnered with all manner of tinpot dictators and civil rights squelchers do not seem to offend the left’s sensibilities.

But all should recognize that the very business for which Romney was castigated by large swaths of the public is in essence the same business in which Warren was an active participant, only at a smaller scale and with far more modest benefits.

This is not an indictment, but a compliment, even if Warren herself would not like to hear it.

More broadly, we should be celebrating those who create wealth, and crucifying those who destroy it — namely government bureaucrats whose resources only exist because they bilk the individuals and businesses that did build that.

04/17/15

IRS Takes Farmer’s Funds Under Laundering Law

03/12/15

Central Banks Buying 100% of Sovereign Debt

Hat Tip: BB

02/28/15

Mark Levin: We’re not a Constitutional Republic anymore…

02/3/15

The Other Cause of Terrorism

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

I never fail to be astonished by the amount of corruption there is in the world. It is a very human trait whether it was royalty asserting that they ruled by God’s choice until their subjects rose up against them or modern day despots encountering the same fate.

Sarah Chayes has authored “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security” ($26.95, W.W. Norton) and it is quite timely when you consider that corruption ignited the “Arab Spring”, first in Tunisia when a peddler grew so tired of the police asking for bribes that he set himself afire in protest. Its dictator’s wife openly displayed the nation’s stolen wealth for which they were driven from power. In Egypt there was a similar response when the public tired of the looting of the state treasury by Mubarak’s son. Revolts from Libya to Syria have been generated by the same cause.

Corruption in the Middle East has a long history, but it is worldwide and, depending on the nation, is either tolerated as part of the way the culture does business or resisted by governments who understand that it undermines their legitimacy. Throw a dart at the map of the world and you are likely to hit a nation where corruption is influencing current events. As Chayes notes, “Time and again U.S. officials are blindsided by major developments in countries where they work. Too often they are insensible to the perspectives and aspirations of population.”

A classic example is Afghanistan where both the Soviet Union and the U.S. ran into such ingrained corruption that it undermined their objectives, the former to turn it into a satellite and the latter to turn it into a modern, democratic government. Chayes cites Afghanistan as a classic example of why the Taliban emerged as a jihadist movement. Corruption in the form of bribes, kick-backs, cronyism, is so deeply engrained in Afghanistan that it generated a movement to replace it with sharia law by Islamists.

“If the very Afghan officials by whose sides they planned to combat extremists were generating those extremists themselves—by having men shake down travelers and taking a cut, or leaving bills unpaid, or by providing judiciously selected ‘intelligence’ to engineer a night-raid against a rival trafficking network—it was too big a paradox to take in. NATO officers,” said Chayes, “did not want to know.”

“The corruption networks” in Afghanistan, writes Chayes, “were just too vertically integrated: any move against any official, no matter how lowly, would reverberate all the way up the chain to Karzai.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan had been a constitutional monarchy with a national assembly and local elders affording a check on executive power. “Citizens expected a decent education from their government, health care, even employment in state-owned industries.” That changed when Hamid Karzai took over. At that point government became a criminal enterprise.

The 9/11 attack prompted the U.S. to invade to drive out al Qaeda, but it also led to its staying on to fight the perceived enemies of Afghanistan. They—otherwise known as the Taliban—were being generated in part by the desire to drive out the corrupt Karzai administration.

What we tend to forget about the “Arab Spring” was that “millions of Arabs chose a constructive way to force change. They chose political revolution—a peaceful, civic, inclusive, and responsible form of revolt—directed square at their own leaderships, not at Western countries, not even those seen as regime allies.”

This is not to suggest that Islamism hasn’t degraded from its opposition to widespread corruption into organizations seeking to take control over the nations where it has spread. It has and this is most evidence in the incredibly corrupt nation of Nigeria where since 2009 Boko Haram has developed terrorism to new heights of barbarity—if that is possible.

An oil-rich nation, the billions that it generates have gone missing thanks to the administration of Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan. The police in Nigeria are hated as much as Boko Haram and, as we have seen, have not demonstrated any ability to eliminate the terrorist organization.

Why would any police officer or member of the armed forces want to die for a corrupt, kleptocratic administration? This was true back in the days when the U.S. was fighting in Vietnam, true when the Iraqi armed forces fled from those of the Islamic State, and it explains why even the active participation of U.S. forces does not result in victory against the terrorist organizations.

Why then should we be surprised that many throughout the Middle East have turned to Islam to address the problems they encounter from the corruption of their governments? “Lured by militant advocates of a religious ordering of human affairs, they will seek to roll back four hundred years of political history.”

In the West, we regard those regions of the world where corruption is rampant as backward. We can be forgiven for forgetting that our ancestors in England, the Netherlands, and parts of France laid the groundwork for modern democracy by their efforts to curb the corruption of the monarchies that enjoyed the good life at the expense of their subjects.

By the time the Founders came together to create the U.S. Constitution, they had been well-schooled and experienced in what it would require to keep corruption at bay with a government whose powers were limited and divided among executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

We are their beneficiaries, but that does not mean we have defeated corruption. The vast entitlement programs are just one example of the way millions are secured illegally by deception and disbursement. Other forms of corruption are addressed in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that forbids the use of bribery by corporations doing business in foreign nations.

The U.S. is not alone, however. Just as occurred in 2008, the too close relationship of the banking community and government led to financial crises in Ireland and Iceland. The public’s rejection of corruption in Ukraine led to its current civil unrest.

The role of corruption in the nations experiencing Islamic terrorism cannot be underestimated. Its role in the conduct of the world’s affairs is huge and a constant threat whose many forms must be understood, addressed, and eliminated to the greatest degree possible.

12/10/14

The Treasury Department is Seeking Survival Kits for Bank Employees and Thousands of Cellphone Users Received a Government “Emergency Alert”

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Two items came across my desk this morning that certainly got my attention.

Let’s start with the Treasury Department seeking survival kits for every employee at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which conducts on-site reviews of banks throughout the country. Now, why would they do that? Do they expect major unrest concerning the banks? This would certainly seem to indicate such an event. Or perhaps just major unrest. The solicitation states the feds are willing to spend up to $200,000 and it was dated December 4th.

From The Washington Free Beacon:

The survival kits must come in a fanny-pack or backpack that can fit all of the items, including a 33-piece personal first aid kit with “decongestant tablets,” a variety of bandages, and medicines.

The kits must also include a “reusable solar blanket” 52 by 84 inches long, a 2,400-calorie food bar, “50 water purification tablets,” a “dust mask,” “one-size fits all poncho with hood,” a rechargeable lantern with built-in radio, and an “Air-Aid emergency mask” for protection against airborne viruses.

Survival kits will be delivered to every major bank in the United States including Bank of America, American Express Bank, BMO Financial Corp., Capitol One Financial Corporation, Citigroup, Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Company, and Wells Fargo.

Items will also be delivered to OCC offices across the country, from Champaign, Ill. to Billings, Mont. The agency also has offices in Sioux City, Iowa; Joplin, Mo.; and Fargo, N.D.

Since the mission of the OCC is to “ensure that national banks and federal savings associations operate in a safe and sound manner, provide fair access to financial services, treat customers fairly, and comply with applicable laws and regulations,” why in the world would they need to supply these people with survival fanny packs? Does their safety measures now cover the end of the world? Okay, who ordered the apocalypse and didn’t tell me? The agency has about 3,814 employees that need to be outfitted with their doomsday packs. This includes “bank examiners” who provide “sustained supervision” of major banks in the United States. Maybe they think we are returning to Prohibition times and revenuers will be shot or something like that. First they armed all these people, now they are giving them survival supplies. Doesn’t take a genius to do the math here.

Usually kits like these are ordered for the military or FBI. Guess these guys are gearing up to be part of Obama’s DHS at-home police force. Wink, wink.

Survival Kits RFP

If that’s not creepy enough for you… I have more.

Thousands of cellphone users in Kentucky received an “emergency alert” from the federal government warning them to “prepare for action.” The local authorities later blamed the message on “human error” during testing. Bull crap. This was a test, I would wager to see how people reacted. The alert went out to the Corbin and London areas of Southern Kentucky yesterday, understandably shaking people up. They came from the Emergency Operations Center in Frankfort via the Federal Communication Commission’s Wireless Emergency Alert system. How do you screw that up? I don’t think you can.

These messages are meant to alert citizens of local or national emergencies. My first exposure to such a message was right after moving to Oklahoma, when a really ugly storm hit around midnight. My phone went nuts and emitted a rousing alert that scared me more than the storm did. No sleep was had that night.

Frankfort Emergency Operations spokesman Buddy Rogers claimed that the alert was mistakenly sent out “during testing” and was the result of “a computer error, followed by a human error.” Right, because you know that sounds so very plausible. This isn’t a first ‘test’ either. Not long ago, the cellphone emergency alert system in New Jersey caused panic after Verizon customers received text messages warning them that a “civil emergency” was in progress and to “take shelter,” prompting alarmed citizens to flood 911 lines with anxious calls and in general ‘panic.’ Once again a testing error was blamed by Verizon.

Give credit where credit is due here, Info Wars has been just about the only one on this thing. Back in October, they also reported that television viewers in a number of states were interrupted by an emergency alert from the White House warning them to stand by for an emergency message and not to use their phones. Visions of the Cold War and nuclear bunkers were experienced by many. First you freeze, then you panic if you aren’t prepared and that is exactly what happened. And again it was blamed on an error – AT&T subsequently blamed a nationally syndicated radio station for triggering the alert message. Some cried bull crap, given that only the federal government has the capability of sending out EAS alerts. America is being Grubered and used as guinea pigs.

I leave it to you out there. Looks to me like the government is still rapidly gearing up for some sort of emergency and/or catastrophe. What say you?