Baytzim

The people of San Bernardino County should ask themselves: "Why does G-d  want to destroy our property". Us folks in Northern California know the answer.

Something I've long suspected: Forensic "science" is largely bunk!

Forensic science was not developed by scientists. It was mostly created by cops, who were guided by little more than common sense. And as hundreds of criminal cases begin to unravel, many established forensic practices are coming under fire. PM takes an in-depth look at the shaky science that has put innocent people behind bars.

Read the whole thing here

We seem to be breaking records daily here in the US... none of them good unfortunately.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/reuters/2009/08/06/2009-08-06T152646Z_01_N06328040_RTRIDST_0_FOODSTAMPS-USA.html

For the first time in US history there are over 34 million people receiving food stamps.  To put that in perspective, we have roughly a 300 million population, which equates to around 11% of US citizens (loosely defined since about 20 million are NOT citizens) are receiving government food assistance!  We have to ask ourselves, are there REALLY 11% of the population that needs govt. assistance to eat?  Does 1 in 10 people you know have a hard time feeding themselves?

It's about time! Lee, County Florida is charging these two people under a new Florida state law that criminalizes the use of electronic media to "promote gangs."

Baytzim.com was the lone voice in this matter when a person who has clear ties to gangs, judging from his gestures on his MySpace page, was caught smuggling guns onto an airplane. Nobody seemed to care about this.

But Florida, which has little regard for minor annoyances like our "Constitution" and our "First Ammendment" is bold enough to do something about this horrible electronic threat!

LEE COUNTY — Elvis Rodriguez, 30, flashed Latin Kings hand signals on his MySpace.com page and called himself “King Kamel,” according to his arrest report.

Richard Figueroa-Santiago, 22, used his MySpace page to post pictures of friends making “Eastside” hand gestures, detectives said.

Now, in the first cases of their kind in Florida and in the nation, both Lee County men face five years in state prison for the gang-related content of their Web pages.

(more....)

Good news!  More proof that those in Washington, DC who claim to be smart enough to 'fix' the economy (let's give them a hint: 'free market') were completely wrong in diagnosing how bad things really are.  While this type of metric is typically referred to as a 'lagging indicator', it goes to show that those supposedly in-the-know also have NO clue how much impact (good or bad) the various bailouts are having.  I expect within the next week we'll hear from Obama/Biden/Geithner/Bernanke/random-econ-stooge that things would be 4x worse if we didn't pass those stimulus packages!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aNivTjr852TI

Now ponder this fact:  only 6% of the bailout funds have actually been granted, transferred or spent at this point.  The real fun (inflation) starts when the other 94% finds its' way into our economy.  'Helicopter Ben' indeed...

Ah, Barney Frank... when not busy being accomplice to male-prostitution in his own house, his little idle hands just have to try to fix something, typically clearly NOT broken. Frank is now telling banks (ie...private sector) that if they don't move quickly to 'volunteer' to save more homeowners (again, private sector) from foreclosure that Congress will force them.

So let's review the timeline here; Congress used the Fed to lower interest rates and Fannie/Freddie to federally back loans (ie... our wallets), resulting in 'moral hazard' and the destruction of a reasonable risk model, which led to lowered lending standards, which led to lots of credit expansion, which led to astronomical rises in housing prices, which led to a housing/credit bubble, which led to crash.  Now that the credit-induced delirium has died off (the Fed of course is back at it with artificially low interest rates), and the credit markets are only now correcting themselves to a reasonable model; ie... people that can actually afford to own a house staying in them, our government has once again continued use of the bubble machine of regulation to ensure that broke people stay in houses they can't afford and should not have bought.  Sounds like a brilliant fix to me!