This is Just the Beginning

I told ya'all before.

If you read the Obamacare bill, and you pay close attention, you'll see that the new bill calls for a consolidation of personal information and documentation into a single, accessible record.

Take a look at page 161 of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

The standards and protocols for electronic enrollment in the Federal and State Programs described in sub-section (a) shall allow for the following:


(1) Electronic matching against existing Federal and State data, including vital records, employment history, enrollment systems, tax records and other date determined appropriate by the Secretary to serve as evidence of eligibility and in lieu of paper-based documentation.

Once you enroll, they will crosscheck your enrollment info with all other info the Government has on you in various computer systems.

(2) Simplification and submission of electronic documentation, digitization of documents, and systems verification of elegibility.

Once they cross check all of your enrollment info with all they data they can find in State and Federal computer systems, they'll compile it all - including digitizing documents that only exist in hard copy - and compile it all into a single record...all under the guise of "assessing eligibility."

(3) Reuse of stored eligibility information (including documentation) to assist with retention of eligible individuals.

See, that documentation - all of it that they used to cross check your enrollment info - will be available for "reuse."

(4) Capability of individuals to apply, recertify and manage their eligibility information online, including at home, at points of service, and other community based locations.

So if a person is able to access this compiled information from the internet...what do you think this will do in terms of identity theft? Or do you really TRUST the government will be able to securely keep all this compiled info private and secure?

Ah, but here's the real kicker:

(5) Ability to expand the enrollment system to integrate new programs, rule, and functionalities, to operate at increased volume, and to apply streamlined verification and eligibility processes to other Federal and State programs as appropriate.

Essentially other Federal and State programs will than be allowed to use all of that compiled private info as they "deem appropriate."

Do you think this is appropriate?  

That was 3 years ago. Now, the American Surveillance Death Star is undoubtedly complete, fully operational, and ready to process, collate and store compiled records of all the citizenry for near-instantaneous retrieval by any Government lackey and stooge with access to the network.

Orwell's total information awareness dystopia depicted in 1984 is already here.

Ellen Richardson was prevented from going on a March of Dimes organized cruise because the U.S. border agent said she was hospitalized for mental health issues in 2012 and she needed special clearance. Richardson was treated for clinical depression but she wonders how he accessed her medical records. 

This will be the first story in what will soon become the new normal for everyone living, working, vacationing and those who wish to enter, and eventually those who try to leave the good ole USA Inc.

Just what are the sheeple really signing up for over at healthcare.gov? Much has been made of how this website "doesn't work."

Don't be so sure it's "not working."

It may be doing precisely what it was designed to do. Get millions of Americans to log on from their personal computers and smartphones and create accounts. Check this out:

Mike Adams at Natural News.com posits a theory:

It is actually a government-run Trojan Horse that suckers people into creating accounts where they hand over:

• Name and address
• Email address and password
• Social security number
• Private bank account details
• Employer details and other information

During the enrollment process, your computer also hands over your IP address which is then tied to your social security number.

This IP address is then handed over to the NSA thanks to its new mega-black-hole data center in Utah, where your IP is cross-referenced with all website visits, including:

• "Anti-government" websites
• Porn sites
• Gambling sites
• File sharing sites
• "Terrorism" support sites
• Encryption service sites like Hushmail
• Chat rooms, message boards and more

Armed with this information, the NSA can then link your seemingly-anonymous online chats, comments and posts with your social security number.

Whether Adams is correct about the intentions or motivations of the Government declaring the website was ready for sign ups on October 1st despite not being "ready to handle the load," was to deliberately gather citizen data or not is debatable.

But the facts remain - when you fill out the account info on the site, unless you're using a proxy server or some other means of masking your IP address, you are giving the Government your social security number and the IP address (or even GPS coordinates if you have any GPS apps running on your device) directly linked with all the other private info you submit with your application, that they can then use to cross reference all other internet activities connected to that same IP address.

Speaking of which...

I saw very similar sign strung up on the wall of a fast food restaurant in a neighboring town the other day, here in Hawaii:

Now why would our government want to give "free" cell phones and "free" cell phone minutes to citizens who are on ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE?

Prior to seeing this PSA in real life, I had always thought the entire "Obama phone" story was just a FOXNews - right-wing-kool-aid exaggeration.

I should have known better.

With sign up for the healthcare exchange website "debacle" and "free" cell phones for welfare recipients, two goals of the omniscient and omnipresent surveillance State are accomplished.

Now the Sheeple's IP addresses on their home and work PC's can now be linked to their SSN's and all the other info they voluntarily submit when they sign up for their "affordable" health care...and they can also now sigh up for the free phone so that the physical location and recorded history of movement anywhere and everywhere they carry their Obama phones.

In 1948, this kind of scenario was considered science fiction:

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

My fellow Americans...sign up for your affordable healthcare and free cell phones, and you can rest easy knowing the Government will be watching out for you.

Here's to Thanksdrinking

 

For people concerned with the impact on health our annual, national celebration of partially hydrogenated gluttony, I bring holiday tidings of joy!

Now these joyous tidings are essentially a rerun of a topic I've covered before....namely the idea that not only is drinking alcohol NOT bad for you (the caveat of moderation certainly applies), it is actually good for you.

Well, this post is not entirely a re-run, as I came across two different articles that corroborate the somewhat controversial ideas I've previously covered.

First up, a report in the UK paper, the dailymail: Drinking Doesn't Make You Fat

Anyone who’s ever gone on a diet is told to lay off the booze because it’s high in calories.
And that, of course, must make it very fattening indeed. Go onto the NHS Direct website, and you’ll be told a glass of wine contains as many calories as a slice of cake. Or if you prefer beer, the British Nutrition Foundation reminds you two pints are roughly the equivalent in calories to a full glass of single cream. So you may be surprised to learn that there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever to support the idea that alcohol makes you put on weight.

Does that notion surprise me? Not at all. That article is rather long (read the whole thing!), but it covers several different ideas I've written about before as well...namely that the reason why so many folks consider alcohol fattening is due to it's supposed high calorie content. Problem is, not all calories are equal. And alcohol appears to be one of those substances for which the human body does not metabolize/assimilate the calories in alcohol.

But of course, as I've pointed out many times before, weight gain and weight loss are not the be all, end all of health. Fat or skinny, most people can still gain the longevity benefits of moderate alcohol consumption. Here's the case for it made in another Dailymail article, Alcohol is good for your health:

A businessman goes to his GP. ‘My hands hurt, I get a bit of a pain in my chest sometimes, and I’m beginning to forget things,’ he complains.

The doctor examines him and says: ‘You’ve got a touch of arthritis, possibly mild heart disease, and you may be in the first stages of dementia. How much are you drinking?’

‘Never touch a drop, doctor,’ says the patient proudly.

‘Ah, that explains it,’ says the GP, wagging an admonishing finger. ‘Here’s a prescription for red wine — a quarter of a litre a day.’

Ridiculous? Absurd? A story from the Bumper Book of Jokes for Alcoholics? Absolutely not.

Let me tell you this: if GPs fail to recommend alcohol to at least some of their patients, they should be had up for medical negligence.

That, at least, is the logical conclusion I’ve drawn from an in-depth study of around half-a-million scientific papers about alcohol.

To my surprise, they contained findings that would make any pharmaceutical company uncork the champagne. Except they never will, of course, because alcohol can’t be patented as a drug.

Aaah. Therein lies the rub. Remember, moderate, daily consumption of alcohol is a known factor in increased longevity.

So, in the spirit of this holiday season, I raise my glass and make a toast to you, the readers of this blog and all the other participants out here in these fringes of the anti-establishment arena on teh Interwebz!

On our traditional day of giving thanks for all that is good in our lives, let us also give thanks for our daily dose of the world's best medicine!

It's Just Good Business

So, remember the third, terrible Pirates of the Caribbean movie? The big villain is Lord Cutler Beckett, a bigwig at the fictional East India Trading Company (any similarity to the East India Company purely coincidental).

His catch phrase, which he says whenever he is screwing someone over or doing something unethical, is "It's just good business." - J. Wilkins

I finally got around to reading a book I've always intended to for years,  The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. What I find most interesting was reading his critiques of the British Empire's Mercantilist system and extrapolating it to our current global economic paradigm.

Let's entitle this exercise in abstraction:

 The Wealth of Corporations at the Expense of the Health of Nations: A Treatise on the Extrapolation of 16th century Mercantilism to 21st century Globalization.

Of course, with the current state of Idiocracy amongst the general populace in today's Brave New World Order, that title may be a bit too comprehensively challenging to the average bleating sheeple, so we can just simplify the concept here: The More Things Change, The More They Stay They Same

Consider Smith's conclusions regarding the Mercantilist system:

Though the encouragement of exportation and the discouragement of importation are the two great engines by which the mercantile system proposes to enrich every country, yet with regard to some particular commodities it seems to follow an opposite plan: to discourage exportation and to encourage importation. Its ultimate object, however, it pretends, is always the same, to enrich the country by an advantageous balance of trade.

There currently exists only one real advantageous balance of trade in the 21st century, and it serves to enrich the international Banking establishment. This is done with the collusion of multi-national corporate cartels to provide goods and services procured from the corporation's sweat shops production facilities and natural resource mining operations in third world nations, and then sold to various first world nation-states.

In nearly all cases, these purchases are made on a macro level through debt-financing of the Government spending by the globalized central banking system. On the micro level, the same is accomplished via credit cards, signature and equity loans and other means of debt financing available to the individual consumer at the company store.

In both the macro and micro perspectives, the same end goals are achieved: enslavement of the global populace via the tyranny of usury.


The following indictment by Smith of Mercantilism also applies to our current paradigm of corporate collusion to benefit the cartel's profit margins at the expense of consumer health and well being:

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

In the 21st century version of Mercantilism - Globalized Corporate Collusion -  this particular facet of Mercantilism has been taken to a whole new level. Big Government, Big Science, and Big Media promulgate lies and propaganda to brainwash the masses to the effect of making the average person believe that up is down, right is left, evil is good and good is evil. 

The mis-informed and dis-informed consumers then engages in commerce (People spending money they don't have on things they don't need, ) that essentially is harmful to their own health and well being, while the producers -- our multi-national corporate overlords and the financing Banksters 2Big2Fail -- continue to rake in the profits.

Another interesting aspect of Smith's critique of Mercantilism has been inverted to benefit the now Globally-based "producers."

In the restraints upon the importation of all foreign commodities which can come into competition with those of our own growth or manufacture, the interest of the home-consumer is evidently sacrificed to that of the producer. It is altogether for the benefit of the latter that the former is obliged to pay that enhancement of price which this monopoly almost always occasions.

Protectionism for home-grown products and services was the antiquated practice tied to patriotic notions of loyalty to your nation-state. But the multi-national corporations have no loyalty to any nation-state, only the state of their bottom line; their stock valuations and profit margins.

Now most everything consumers buy is foreign produced and the consumers of the first world nations pay a different price that is not measured in mere currency valuation....instead, the price we now pay is one of dependency and loss of self-sufficiency.

People used to know how to produce and manufacture a wide variety of goods, as well as repair and extend the useful life of various products. It was more economical to do so. People used to be able to sew, mend, and repair clothing and other textile products. Now, it's simply much easier and more economical to throw it away and go buy a new product manufactured cheaply in China or Mexico, available at your nearest Big Box Corporate Retailer.

Same goes for big ticket items like appliances and modern automotive vehicles. In many cases, parts break, and the replacement part and labor service fees may cost half or more of the price of a new product.

And even if you can't afford to just buy a new item to replace your old, broken and/or worn out product, why you can just go and get a loan from your local branch of the Usury Cartel and "buy" a new one.

As time progresses, knowledge to manufacture, maintain, repair and reuse many items of commerce becomes lost amongst the masses, increasing dependency on the Global Corporate Cartels and antiquating any formerly held notions of self-sufficiency and thrift. This is the very essence of our waste-driven, consumerist culture of materialistic consumption.

And that's exactly how our Corporate Overlords want it. In pursuit of improving their bottom line and overarching goals of global economic and political domination, it's just good business.