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Thursday, December 28, 2017

Myths Which Mislead Most Americans…Freedom Didn’t Fare Well in 2017


 
Poor Man Survival
Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…
ISSN 2161-5543
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
 

Myths Which Mislead Most Americans…Freedom Didn’t Fare Well in 2017
Plenty of useful informational nuggets in this issue to finish off your year-you simply need to pay attention!
Let's be clear, fiat currencies are one of the first machinations of the virtual economy. Once paper currencies printed from thin air by central bankers were accepted by the masses as "valuable" and worth trading labor for, the seed of financial cancer was planted. Once  currencies were decoupled completely from tangible commodities like gold, the malignant growth spread.
Today, there is one final step needed for the establishment to accomplish complete tyranny in global trade and that is to separate the masses fully from private transactions. In other words, we must be tricked into going digital, where privacy is an absurd memory.  This is one reason why there is such a push to eliminate currency…the BS excuse is for governments to prevent crime but in reality, it is to control its citizens and to extract even more cash from them.  Gullible citizens fall for the ‘crime prevention’ routine all the time.
It is even become a regular joke on the popular Simpson’s cartoon show where someone always shouts “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?!”
Virtual economics is appealing for several reasons, most of them bad. Americans and much of the west in particular are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of real production. The latest generation coming into political and social influence, the millenials, are a perfect example. Surveys show American millenials more than any other generation lack basic workplace competency skills, including scoring low on arithmetic and reading comprehension. Often portrayed as "tech savvy" in popular culture and the media, millenials are actually quite inept when it comes to core skills that fuel strong business and trade, which is part of the reason why the U.S. is falling into the shadow of foreign workforces.
Friends of mine in the Great Lakes area who own small manufacturing concerns constantly find themselves in a bind when it comes to securing quality workers.  Even our local post office was unable to find temporary help this Christmas season.  Despite offering an above average hourly wage, most workers quite after one week citing the work was too hard or boring.
Millenials in the West also exhibit abysmal tech skills in international testing and lag far behind foreign peers. This has come as a surprise to many mainstream economists and social analysts, primarily because millenials are also considered the "most educated" generation ever…I find that oddly misleading.


Here’s how things would look if you REALLY lived in a free country
(Natural News) Think you live in a free country? Think again: If you really lived in a free country, all sorts of things around you would look much different than the way they do now.
For example, if you really lived in a free country, you wouldn’t see people being arrested for selling fresh, whole milk.
People also wouldn’t be arrested for growing their own medicine in the form of cannabis.
If you really lived in a free country, you’d be able to seek out any form of medicine you wanted, including holistic medicine. And doctors would be free to practice holistic medicine without being criminalized by the state.
If you lived in a free country, you wouldn’t see people being threatened with arrest for growing food in their own front yards!
Watch the video below to learn the truth, Neo: You are a slave living in a police state
 
Does Anyone Still Trust Government?  Ever Since Bush Passed the un-Patriot Act & Obama Defied the Courts’ Repeated Demands to STOP Spying on Americans…it has been full speed ahead and the Constitution be damned.
 
“PRISM” lets the NSA access emails, video chats, instant messages, and other content sent via Facebook, Google, Apple and others. “Upstream” lets the NSA worm its way into the internet backbone—the cables and switches owned by private corporations like AT&T that make the internet into a global network—and scan traffic for the communications of tens of thousands of individuals labeled “targets.”

Just as the
USA Patriot Act was perverted from its original intent to fight terrorism abroad and was used instead to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of Americans’ emails, phone calls, text messages and other electronic communication without a warrant.

Under Section 702, the government collects and analyzes over 250 million internet communications every year. There are estimates that at least half of these contain information about U.S. residents, many of whom have done nothing wrong. This information is then shared with law enforcement and “
routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security.”
 
According to my associate John Whitehead, the need for a citizens advocate in America is growing…
 
The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and healthcare costs skyrocketed. Despite being one of the world’s richest nations, America’s poor grew to 41 million people living in poverty. That doesn’t include the number of Americans struggling to pay their bills and make ends meet. Americans currently pay $3.4 trillion a year for medical care. We spent more than $10,000 per person on health care in 2016. Those attempting to shop for health insurance coverage right now are understandably experiencing sticker shock with premiums set to rise 34% in 2018. It’s estimated that costs may rise as high as $15,000 by 2023.

We became a nation of snowflakes. We have entered a new age where there can be no freedom speech, expression or thought. We have become a nation of snowflakes, snitches and book burners: a legalistic, intolerant, elitist, squealing bystander nation eager to report fellow citizens to the police for the slightest offense. Americans allowed their fears—fear for their safety, fear of each other, fear of being labeled racist or hateful or prejudiced, etc.—to trump their freedom of speech and muzzle them far more effectively than any government edict could. Ultimately the war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is: a war being waged by Americans against other Americans—is a war that is driven by fear. That bottled up dissent bubbled over and fomented even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.
 
 
The plight of the nation’s homeless worsened. In communities across the country, legislators adopted a variety of methods (parking meters, zoning regulations, tickets, and even robots) to discourage the homeless from squatting, loitering and panhandling. One of the most common—and least discussed—practices: homeless relocation programs that bus the homeless outside city limits.
 
The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. The Department of Homeland, which has been leading the charge to create a Surveillance State, began deploying mandatory facial recognition scans at airports and improperly gathering biometric data on American travelers. Police were gifted with new surveillance gadgets that allows them to scan vehicles for valuable goods and contraband. Even churches got in on the game, installing “crime cameras” to monitor church property and churchgoers. The Corporate State tapped into our computer keyboards, cameras, cell phones and smart devices in order to better target us for advertising. Social media giants such as Facebook granted secret requests by the government and its agents for access to users’ accounts. Triggered by background noise, Google Assistant has been actively recording phone users’ conversations. And our private data—methodically collected and stored with or without our say-so—was repeatedly compromised and breached.
 
Here’s John Rutherford to explain why Congress should let Section 702 expire -- and why government spying will be a permanent fixture if it doesn’t.
 
 
 
Surveillance That Never Ends
[It should be noted the Poor Man is a long time financial contributor to Rutherford’s non-profit group]
Just in time for Christmas, the Deep State wants to give America the gift that keeps on giving: never-ending mass surveillance.
I’m not referring to the kind of surveillance carried out by that all-knowing and all-seeing Jolly Old St. Nick and his informant the Elf on the Shelf (although, to be fair, they have helped to acclimate us to a world in which we’re always being watched and judged by higher authorities).
No, this particular bit of Yuletide gift-giving comes courtesy of the Deep State (a.k.a. the Surveillance State, Police State, Shadow Government and black-ops spy agencies).
If this power-hungry cabal gets its way, the government’s power to spy on its citizens will soon be all-encompassing and permanent.
As it now stands, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the legal basis for two of the National Security Agency’s largest mass surveillance programs, “PRISM” and “Upstream”—is set to expire at the end of 2017.
“PRISM” lets the NSA access emails, video chats, instant messages, and other content sent via Facebook, Google, Apple and others. “Upstream” lets the NSA worm its way into the internet backbone—the cables and switches owned by private corporations like AT&T that make the internet into a global network—and scan traffic for the communications of tens of thousands of individuals labeled “targets.”
Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of Americans’ emails, phone calls, text messages and other electronic communication without a warrant.
Under Section 702, the government collects and analyzes over 250 million internet communications every year. There are estimates that at least half of these contain information about U.S. residents, many of whom have done nothing wrong. This information is then shared with law enforcement and “routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security.”
Mind you, Section 702 gives the government access to the very content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats), your photographs, your emails.
So beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.
For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.
This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.
The short answer: they have become one and the same entity.
The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.
This hasn’t fazed President Trump who, much like his predecessors, has thus far marched in lockstep with the dictates of the police state.
If approved, this would be yet another secret government agency carrying out secret surveillance and counterintelligence, funded by a secret black ops budget that by its very nature does away with transparency, bypasses accountability and completely eludes any form of constitutionality.


As if we weren’t being spied on enough already.
On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.
Talk about a system rife for abuse.
Ask the government why it’s carrying out this warrantless surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting out since 9/11 to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.
Yet warrantless mass surveillance by the government and its corporate cohorts hasn’t made America any safer. And it certainly isn’t helping to preserve our freedoms. Frankly, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.
Don’t believe it.
Warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens is wrong, un-American, and unconstitutional.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, whenever the rights of the American people are pitted against the interests of the military/corporate/security complex, “we the people” lose. Unless Congress develops a conscience—or suddenly remembers that they owe their allegiance to the citizenry and not the corporate state—we’re about to lose big.
Mark my words: if Congress votes to make the NSA’s vast spying powers permanent, it will be yet another brick in the wall imprisoning us within an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape.
This article originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute’s website, right here at this link.
Notes of Interest…
As detailed below, Uncle Sam's borrowing requirements are likely to hit $1.25 trillion or more than 6% of GDP in FY 2019 owing to the fact that the tax bill is so heavily front-loaded and the GOP's wild spending spree for defense, disasters and much else.
Needless to say, this impending bond market collision has not fazed the dip-buyers in the slightest. Financial markets are in the blow-off stage of the third great central bank bubble of the present era and are therefore entirely in the grip of momentum chasing robo-machines and day traders. The latter are processing price action alone----to the complete exclusion of a swelling tide of facts and threats which sharply contradict the bullish mania of the moment.
As a percentage of operating revenues, Chicago (Ba1 negative) remained at the top with unfunded pension liabilities at 703%, followed by Dallas (A1 stable) at 609%, and Houston (Aa3 stable) at 606%. All exhibit very high leverage from debt, unfunded pensions and retiree healthcare in fiscal 2016. Both Dallas and Houston recently passed significant benefit changes that will impact future pension liability measurements.
Moody's says in fiscal 2017 ANPLs will spike an additional 33% for most local governments due to lagged recognition of weak investment returns in the prior year.
The 2018 World Inequality Report, written by a team of leading international economists including Thomas Piketty of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” fame, finds that the rise of income inequality in the United States is “largely due to massive educational inequalities, combined with a tax system that grew less progressive despite a surge in top labor compensation since the 1980s, and in top capital incomes in the 2000s.”
 

 What about you? Got anything interesting to share?

Bruce, the Poor Man, free thinker, social critic & cynic
 
A Final Note…
BONUS MATERIALS

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Additional Resources
4 Ways to Cash a Check without a Bank Account
No bank account? No problem. You can still cash that check.
 
How to Waste Sudden Wealth
Don't let 'found' money slip through your fingers.
 
Be Radical, Get Rich
Want to know how to get rich? Stop being average!
 
Blemished Banking History? Try Second-Chance Checking Account
Don't let past mistakes prevent you from opening a checking account.

The Easy Budget
This trick makes budgeting so easy anyone can do it!
 
How to Survive the War on the Middle Class
14 of the best reports I’ve assembled on protecting your freedom-Download link.
 
Support our efforts by shopping my storefront…
  
You Have a 16-Cylinder Brain-Learn How to Use it & Re-Awaken the Genius Inside You!
 

I know everyone is short on time in this hectic world so I’ve kept this PDF short and to the point with links to expert how-to articles and guides including:
 
·         How to Increase Your Intelligence
·         6 Step Brain Exercise Steve Jobs Used to Boost Creativity
·         6 Simple Habits to Boost Your Intelligence
·         The Best Vitamins to Increase Brain Function
·         How a Harvard Brain Specialist Keeps Her Brain Healthy
·         A Review of the Top 10 Brain [Limitless] Pills
·         How to Protect Your Cognitive Function
 
 
Here's to a Better New Year...May Each of You Prosper!
 
 
 
A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production
 

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Finding the Free Resources & Answers You Need


Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…


ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 


Finding the Free Resources & Answers You Need

Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, I have no privacy and life couldn’t be more terrifying.

Fortunately, privacy isn’t dead. And technology is a wild beast which might prove impossible to tame completely

Despite all these known risks, though, and the constant stream of stories about hackers and government spying, few people take steps to safeguard their data.

(As an example, according to a study by Keeper Security, the most common password is 123456. Not exactly hacker-proof.)

But there are some very simple tools available that can help.

One of them is called Cryptomator, which came to my attention from a close friend of mine who works in the US Army’s cyberwarfare divison, which was established to defend government systems against foreign hackers.

Cryptomator is free, simple program which encrypts every single file you store on a cloud server.

Let’s say you use Dropbox to sync files between your laptop and the cloud.

Ordinarily, your files are stored unencrypted on your laptop, and they’re accessible by certain Dropbox staff through the cloud servers.

Cryptomator encrypts the files on BOTH ends, i.e. the file that’s stored on the Dropbox servers is encrypted, AND the file stored locally on your laptop is encrypted.

Dropbox employees who try to access your data would see nothing but gibberish.

And anyone who gains physical access to your laptop would see nothing but gibberish.

Only you have the ability to unlock the files.

Now, this sounds like a cumbersome process… having to constantly encrypt and decrypt files, enter passwords, etc.

But it’s not. Cryptomator has created a streamlined platform where you can group files together in ‘vaults’.

Then you can decrypt an entire vault, attach it to your file system, and easily re-encrypt it when you’re finished.


Try it out if you’re interested; the software is free, available on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iPhone.

Plus it’s open-source, meaning that anyone who knows the Java programming language can download the source code and verify that the software contains no backdoors or malware.

[Ed. note: This article originally appeared on the Sovereign Man blog, right here at this link.]



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Wishing a Merry Christmas

And Happy New Year to all!

 

During all the celebrating, I'd like to make a request for those who aren't able to celebrate this time of year because of poor finances, illness, loss of a loved one, or anything else that makes this time of year especially hard for them.

My request is this. If you're able, among all the gifts you give, reach out to someone who's having a hard time this holiday season. Invite them over for cake and coffee, give a gift card to your local grocery store, just sit with them while they grieve, or do whatever to encourage them and let them know they're not alone in this world.

 

Yours for smarter living,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

Additional Resources

How to Survive the War on the Middle Class

14 of the best reports I’ve assembled on protecting your freedom…Here is the download link.

http://1drv.ms/1d9kfiU

 
The Poor Man’s Essential Survival Package

--The Doctors Protocol: Secrets of Survival

--How to Survive the Coming Economic Collapse

--Guide to Self Reliant Living

--Becoming Self Sufficient for Six Months

--How I Found Freedom in an Un-free World

http://1drv.ms/1d9kfiU

 


Whether you’re unemployed or just need a bit of extra cash, finding odd jobs online is a great place to start. These 11 websites can be good places to find odd jobs that make good money. 

Food Storage Inventory Spreadsheets You Can Download For Free


 


14 Frugal Food-Rescuing Tips from Grandma
These depression-era frugal tips still work today!


Attention to details could reduce your food bill by over $500! Read more.

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A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production