Year: 2016

Vinny Lingham aka ‘The Bitcoin Oracle’ Maintains a $3,000+ Price Prediction for Bitcoin in 2017

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One of the things I try to do here at Liberty Blitzkrieg is identify and comment upon major macro trends before they become apparent to the public at large. Sometimes these trends are positive, while other times they are decisively negative. Since I started writing publicly, I’d say the emergence and success of Bitcoin has been the most positive macro development I’ve observed. While I certainly wasn’t an “early adopter” of the technology, I did identify it and highlight its significance well before most people had ever heard of it.

My first post on the topic was way back in August 2012, and since most of you weren’t following me back then, here it is for your enjoyment: Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists? A few weeks later, I received my first bitcoin donations from generous readers and the rest is history. The price was $10.

A couple of years later, I came across serial entrepreneur Vinny Lingham far before he became known as the “The Bitcoin Oracle.” He really caught my attention with a 2014 post describing why the price was acting so weak following its tremendous run the prior year. I found his thought process extremely compelling and I highlighted his thesis in the post: Guest Post: Why is the Bitcoin Price So Weak? I continued to follow his Bitcoin writings and have published them consistently ever since.

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Mainstream Media is Now Whining About the “Fake News” Hysteria It Created

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After coming under attack, the alternative media successfully appropriated and reassigned the now ubiquitous term “fake news” to a variety of disingenuous mainstream media outlets. The corporate media is not too happy about this, and is doing what it does best (aside from cheerleading for war). It’s whining about it to its readers.

Nothing more perfectly highlights the mainstream media’s instinctual response to complain than an article published on Christmas Day in The New York Times, which reinvents history by claiming alternative media is to blame for turning “fake news” into an overly expansive and thus meaningless term. Here are a few excerpts:

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

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Montreal Moves to Limit New Restaurants to Protect Existing Restaurants

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Here’s your “it’s hard to believe, but true” article of the day.

Reason reports:

Lawmakers in Montreal have moved to crack down on new restaurants, in an odious attempt to protect existing ones.

“Montreal has one of the highest restaurant per-capita ratios in North America and the amount of places to eat is worrying local politicians,” reads a Canadian Press piece from earlier this week.

If that sounds awful and weird, that’s because it is. Studies of the best places to eat often conclude that the more restaurants a city has per-capita, the better its restaurant scene. It’s no surprise that the more choices a consumer has, the better off that consumer is.

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India’s Prime Minister Has Singlehandedly Crushed the Economy with His Reckless Cash Ban

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Today’s piece should be seen as a bit of a followup to yesterday’s post, India’s Demonetization Debacle Highlights the Dangers of Monetary Monopoly. While yesterday’s piece was more philosophical/strategic in nature, today’s zeroes in on some of the devastating real world impacts of Narendra Modi’s insane and inhumane cash ban. It’s hard to overstate the damage this policy has done to India’s economy. Modi is quickly solidifying his place as one of monetary history’s biggest idiots.

First, let’s take a look at the destructive impact the move has had on India’s massive small businesses community. The Washington Post reports:

NOIDA, India — Over the past two years, this suburb of New Delhi mushroomed into a flourishing enclave of small cellphone manufacturers, attracting tens of thousands of workers from the countryside. Noida, known as the “handset hub,” was touted as a showcase for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet “Make in India” initiative.

Then on Nov. 8, Modi’s government took a step that has jolted the bustling industrial quarter. It scrapped high-denomination currency, with a view, officials said, to curbing illicit wealth and the financing of terrorism. But the cash shortage triggered by the move has also curbed legitimate small enterprises. Many of Noida’s manufacturing units have slashed production by nearly half, and more than a quarter of the workers have gone back to their villages.

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India’s Demonetization Debacle Highlights the Dangers of Monetary Monopoly

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As longtime readers know, I believe we are at the beginning stages of what will be historical paradigm level change across the planet. We sit on the precipice of the self-destruction of almost all the dominant institutions we’ve been accustomed to throughout our lifetimes. To borrow a bit of played out and painfully clichéd Silicon Valley lingo, everything is on the table for “disruption.”

Naturally, this doesn’t necessarily mean the paradigm that follows the current one will be materially better, but I am personally optimistic about what will emerge following a period of considerable confusion, hardship and conflict. In order to tilt the scales toward a positive outcome, those of us who wish to usher in a world characterized  by human freedom, decentralization, self-government and kindness, need to recognize the most likely avenues we have to get there. Technology is obviously extremely important, as a recent move by Whisper Systems to thwart censorship demonstrates.

As Wired reported last week:

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Liberty Links 12/24/16

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If you appreciate our work, and want to contribute to genuine, independent media, consider visiting our Support Page. Must Reads Goldman Sachs Ties to Scandal-Plagued 1MDB Run Deep (Pure criminality, The Wall Street Journal) Yahoo Email Scan Shows U.S. Spy Push to Recast Constitutional Privacy (Very disturbing, Reuters) Egyptian Police Arrest Five People for Using Children to Stage Fake ‘Aleppo’ … Read more

This is How the U.S. Government Destroys the Lives of Patriotic Whistleblowers

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We live in a time and within a culture where the best amongst us are thrown in jail, demonized or destroyed, while the worst are celebrated, promoted and enriched. Nothing more clearly crystalizes this sad state of affairs than the U.S. government’s ruthless war on whistleblowers who expose severe constitutional violations by those in power. This war knows no political affiliation, and has been waged with equal vigor by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama.

Earlier this morning, I read one of the most enlightening articles on the subject to-date. It was published back in May, and should be read by every single American citizen. We need to admit to ourselves what we have become before we can make changes.

What follows are excerpts from the Guardian piece, How the Pentagon Punished NSA Whistleblowers, but you should really take the time to read the entire thing.

If you want to know why Snowden did it, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s surveillance program were largely ignored.

But there is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well.

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The U.S. Interfered in Foreign Presidential Elections 81 Times from 1946-2000

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Something we should all be aware of.

From the LA Times:

The CIA has accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election by hacking into Democratic and Republican computer networks and selectively releasing  emails. But critics might point out the U.S. has done similar things. 

The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it’s done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University.

That number doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring.

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Here’s a Great Way to Increase Trump’s Popularity – Harass His Children in Public

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One of the key themes I’ve been writing about since the election relates to how many of those who claim to be virulently anti-Trump, keep doing Trump favors by acting like deranged, irrational lunatics. I went into detail on the matter in last week’s post, Video of the Day – The ‘Fake Left’ Has Lost Its Mind.

Here are a few of the tweets I highlighted at the time:

Totally incapable of thoughtful dissent, many of these people continue to resort to hysterical public outbursts that, if anything, will only increase Trump’s popularity.

Here’s the latest example, courtesy of TMZ:

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Black Man Arrested in Mississippi Arson Attack on African-American Church

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One week before the U.S. Presidential election, Hopewell Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi was set ablaze and the words “Vote Trump” were spray-painted on its side. Here’s what the disturbing scene looked like.

Although nobody knew who did it or their motivations at the time, many immediately and irresponsibly categorized it as a hate crime. As CNN reported:

Investigators continue to collect evidence, and there are no suspects yet, Greenville Police Chief Delando Wilson said at the news conference. Later, Wilson told CNN that police brought in a person of interest Wednesday afternoon and “are interviewing this person to determine if they had any participation in this event or if we can clear them.” Police are investigating multiple motives, including that the fire could be a hate crime.

Mayor Errick Simmons said he spoke to some of the church’s 200 congregants who were fearful and felt intimidated. They felt the vandalism was not just an attack on the church, but on the black community, he said.

“It happened in the ’50s, it happened in the ’60s, but we’re in 2016 and that should not happen,” he said.

Fortunately, that’s not what happened. As the AP just reported:

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