Freedomshift

We should know at this point that when the government sets out to create an "ownership society" through market and monetary intervention this outcome would be no surprise........... When it comes to the US housing market there appear to be three groups of people: those who who have either unlimited cash and/or access to credit, and like the most rabid of bubble-chasing speculators, are perfectly happy to engage in a game of Flip That House for a short-term profit pending the discovery of a greater fool (often times converting the house into rental properties as numerous hedge funds have been doing on cost-free basis courtesy of the government's REO-To-Rent program) - they are the vast minority of speculators; then there are those who currently rent and are opportunistically looking at home prices, willing to dip their toe at the right price - these too are few and far between and mostly represent a function of the natural growth of the US household offset by ...

Three days ago we pointed out that while the story surrounding the alleged Boston Bombers had many gaping holes in it while it was being made up in process, following the filing of the official sworn FBI affidavit making things up out of thin air would become far more complicated. Sure enough, one specific section in the 11 page sworn testimony caught our attention: the one discussing the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev following the boat "shootout". Read more: here

A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house.  Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night. They intended to raid the home next door.  The two officers, 25-year-old Kyle Shedran and 24-year-old Greg Day, were placed on administrative leave with pay. Read more: here

As we have discussed numerous times over the past year, there is a quiet movement among the world's central banks to diversify their reserves away from the pejorative USD. Whether it is direct trade linkages, hording physical precious metals, or simply buying foreign sovereign debt, there is a trend emerging. The latest defection, as BusinessWeek reports , is Australia's plan to invest about 5% of foreign currency reserves in China . Read more: here

This is what America looks like under martial law: Read more: here

When the law gets bent out of shape for him, it’s easier to bend out of shape of the rest of us. By Emily Bazelon Posted Friday, April 19, 2013, at 11:29 PM Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not hear his Miranda rights before the FBI questions him Friday night. He will have to remember on his own that he has a right to a lawyer, and that anything he says can be used against him in court, because the government won’t tell him. This is an extension of a rule the Justice Department wrote for the FBI—without the oversight of any court—called the “public safety exception.” There is one specific circumstance in which it makes sense to hold off on Miranda. It’s exactly what the name of the exception suggests. The police can interrogate a suspect without offering him the benefit of Miranda if he could have information that’s of urgent concern for public safety. That may or may not be the case with Tsarnaev. The problem is that Attorney General Eric Holder has stre...

Kim Dotcom really is his name these days. He had it legally changed. The federal government shut down his enormously profitable file-sharing business in 2011. It won’t shut down his latest version of file-sharing.His new company, Mega, offers 100% encryption. His company can’t crack it. The U.S. government can’t crack it – not at a price it can afford, anyway. So people can post movies, songs, or anything else on his site. You get 50 megabytes of free storage to start out. His lawyers can now say this: “Our company will cooperate with the governments of the world. But, sorry, we have no idea what people are putting into their accounts.” The federal government opened a gigantic can of worms when it did Hollywood’s bidding and shut him down. It made him mad. He decided to get revenge. Read more: here

** Compare the photos of the bag remains to the contractor's bag with the white square tag ** Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com April 17, 2013 UPDATE: FBI briefing on Boston bombings postponed. The FBI said it “needs more time to prepare” before speaking to the media. Struggling to get their narrative straight in the aftermath of numerous men with backpacks being identified? Photos collated on the 4chan website show numerous images of suspicious individuals wearing large backpacks present at the scene of the Boston Marathon bombings. Three of the men appear to be Arab or Middle Eastern in appearance, whereas another two of the individuals are white. The images show the men looking away from the marathon runners, talking on cellphones and running from the scene immediately after the blast. Remains of one of the backpacks are also photographed yards from where one of the bombs exploded. The FBI states that at least one of the pressure cooker devices used in th...

The US government is already fighting wars on several fronts, including the perpetual War on Terror. "War is the health of the state," as Randolph Bourne stated, and the state has never been healthier , using this variety of opponents as excuses to increase surveillance, curtail rights and expand power. Bruce Schneier highlights a piece written by Molly Sauter for the Atlantic which poses the question, " If hackers didn't exist, would the government have to invent them? " The government certainly seems to need some sort of existential hacker threat in order to justify more broadly/badly written laws (on top of the outdated and overbroad CFAA). But the government's portrayal of hackers as "malicious, adolescent techno-wizards, willing and able to do great harm to innocent civilians and society at large," is largely false. If teen techno-wizards aren't taking down site after site, how is all this personal information ending up in hac...

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief Of Staff to Barack Obama While many people might immediately dismiss the concept, any student of true and unadulterated history has to eventually admit this fact: Governments exploit crisis. Sometimes, they merely take advantage of the ensuing chaos and aftermath of a disaster they had nothing to do with directly. Other times, they create those disasters themselves in order to engineer social and political opportunity. Read more: Here

For the fourth month in a row , NAHB's sentiment index missed expectations . With 'real' data on the housing recovery beginning to fade , we now see confidence in the sustainability of the 'recovery' starting to fade. Today's NAHB print is the lowest in six months and is the fastest 3-month drop since June 2011 . Read more: here