Teeing It Up for the Censorship President

590px-IAO-logo
When I first read about the Total Information Awareness program on Wikipedia, I was shocked by the creepy logo. Wikipedia has since removed the logo, but fortunately, I had it. (Sometimes when I see such blatant symbolism like this I wonder if they’re just messing with us.)

Recently, President Obama said he wanted a truthiness test for information. (To hear it, click the link and go to chronomark 1:00:00 and listen for about four and a half minutes.) I believe he was focusing on scientific information (climate change in particular, of course), but he made an interesting analogy with the news media.

We are going to have to rebuild, within this wild, wild west of information flow, some sort of curating function…

It used to be there were three television stations, and Walter Cronkite was there…generally people trusted a basic body of information…

There has to be some sort of way we can sort through information that passes some sort of truthiness test.

This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds out of context (almost!), but I recalled his words while reading the newspaper today and it made me think Obama was revealing a broader mindset that is about to be rolled out.

The first article I read was about a recent appearance by Melania Trump during which she, no doubt sweetly and innocently (I mean that, I’m not being sarcastic),

lamented an increasingly coarse culture in which users of social media, especially children, belittle each other.

“Our culture has gotten too mean and too tough, especially to children and teenagers,” Mrs. Trump said. “We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other.”

bn-eb793_vernon_e_20140812180258I didn’t think too much about Melania’s comments and didn’t put them together with Obama’s until later, when

Heroin Rising On Cue

In my notes from February 2015, I wrote this under the heading Drug War 2.0:

If they legalize pot but still want to fund black ops they need to ramp up opium.

Then on my January 2016 show, The Year Ahead, the first prediction I made was this (starting at around 5:00 in hour 1):

I began to suspect that we might have a shift towards emphasizing heroin when I saw that George Soros was behind the legal pot movement…Obviously the establishment is sanctioning this trend in the different states for pot to be legal and that got me puzzling, because I read somewhere that 70% of the illegal drug trade is pot. (Now it’s hard to get the real stats.) And at the same time I have read plenty about how the illegal drug trade does fund black ops—CIA operations that can’t get Congressional funding–the most famous example of which is Iran-Contra…I thought the pot being legal has to be replaced by something else like heroin, which by the way has grown tremendously more now in Afghanistan since we took over from the Taliban than before…Or if the black ops money doesn’t get replaced then maybe the funding structure will be different, so the CIA will take a back seat and the NSA will do some of that stuff because the NSA gets funded directly. So I just feel like the heroin thing has a much bigger backstory than you’re gonna think, and it will be in the news more–kind of like free advertising…I think we will hear more of that [story] as the year progresses.

As I’ve noted before (see The Ferguson Effect), I’m not saying predicting an outcome is proof of causation, but it certainly supports the proposed thesis. My thesis in all these cases is the same: these are not unintended consequences, but foreseeable consequences that are either inevitable or intentional. So forgive me if I differ with Don Winslow, who, in one of this week’s WSJ Notable & Quotable, offers a “free market” explanation for the reported rise of heroin coinciding with the legalization of pot…

Notable & Quotable: How Marijuana Begat Heroin
‘Looking at the American drug market as it existed, Guzmán and his partners saw an opportunity.’

The article starts:

Okay, I’m going to say it: The heroin epidemic was caused by the legalization of marijuana.

Not too far off–I would say, “The heroin epidemic was caused by the same people who arranged for the legalization of marijuana.”

Weed was a major profit center for [the dominant cartel in Mexico, the Sinaloa], but suddenly they couldn’t compete against a superior American product that also had drastically lower transportation and security costs.

In a single year, the cartel suffered a 40 percent drop in marijuana sales, representing billions of dollars. Mexican marijuana became an almost worthless product. . . . Once-vast fields in Durango now lie fallow.

According to Winslow, in a move of “classic market economics,” Sinaloa decided to undercut pharmaceutical pricing on opiods by leveraging “some of the best poppy fields in the world.” But it was US government policy that provided the underserved market Sinaloa needed to make up lost pot revenue:

Has Your Town Adopted the International Property Maintenance Code?

Ever since Michael called into the show yesterday telling us how John’s Creek implemented this International Property Maintenance Code I’ve been getting messages from all over complaining about the same…how on earth could one-code-fit-all? Here are other model codes developed by the International Code Council International Building Code International Energy Conservation Code International Existing Building (more…)

GOP Rules & Libertarian Party in the Crosshairs…

I have believed that Donald Trump’s campaign was an inside job ever since his initial comments about Hispanic immigrants gained traction by an obviously manipulated story about a woman shot on a pier in San Francisco as well as a ridiculous story about El Chapo (likely a psyop in himself) angrily tweeting at The Donald (more…)

Ken Starr, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Ken Starr, Bill Clinton…

I wasn’t very political engaged back when the Clintons’ were in office the first time & didn’t follow the blow-by-blow of Ken Starr’s investigations into White Water, Vince Foster’s death and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, so I didn’t really form an opinion of Starr. I can’t seem to help but to form one now, however, (more…)