The Morning Roar: House Votes To Stop Medical Marijuana Prosecutions, Paul Volcker Calls For A New Bretton Woods System, NSA Collecting Millions Of Faces From Web Images
Welcome to your Monday edition of The Morning Roar!House Votes To Stop Medical Marijuana ProsecutionsEvery once in a while, congress votes in favor of a piece of legislation that expands individual liberty. These occasions are rare, but every incremental step towards liberty should be celebrated. Last Friday morning the House voted 219-189 to stop prosecutions of medical marijuana users in states where medical weed is legal and the user has a valid doctor’s prescription.Samuel Eaton of Benswann.com reports:
An appropriations amendment offered by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) prohibits the DEA from spending funds to arrest medical marijuana users. The amendment had bipartisan support.Rohrabacher said the amendment “should be a no-brainer.”Tom Angell, chairman of Marijuana Majority, said, “This historic vote shows just how quickly marijuana reform has become a mainstream issue.” Angell continued, “If any political observers weren’t aware that the end of the war on marijuana is nearing, they just found out.”The legislation will still need to be passed by the Senate before the President can sign it into law. At first glance, passage by the Senate seems unlikely, but because it is an election year and polls consistently show the public favors legalization or decriminalization of marijuana, there is a fair chance that this law passes.
Twenty-two states and Washington D.C. have legalized medical marijuana. If a Senator from one of those States is up for re-election I would imagine it would be in their best interest to vote in favor of this proposed legislation.Obviously, we look forward to the day when the State cedes control of drug regulation to the marketplace, but until then we’ll rejoice at the prospect of having less victimless “criminals” locked up for smoking a plant that is able to grow almost anywhere.Paul Volcker Calls For A New Bretton Woods SystemWhen the next huge financial crisis occurs you can bet that the elitist international community will ready to spring into action and “save the day” with a new international monetary system. Perhaps it will be a new Bretton Woods system.The details of the system may not be finalized, but former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker has begun the important task of convincing the sheeple that a new system will benefit the United States and the world. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Bretton Woods Committee, he discussed a plan for a new international “rules-based cooperatively managed, monetary system.”Zerohedge reports
While we have frequently shown that this assessment is flawed, the interpretation of the data is always a matter of opinion, and usually breaks down based on ideological conviction: be it Keynesian or Austrian. However, one person whose view carries significant weight among the Keynesian school of thought is none other than former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. Which is why we found it surprising that it was Volcker himself who, on May 21 at the annual meeting of the Bretton Woods Committee, said that "by now I think we can agree that the absence of an official, rules-based cooperatively managed, monetary system has not been a great success. In fact, international financial crises seem at least as frequent and more destructive in impeding economic stability and growth." We can, indeed, agree.However, we certainly disagree with Volcker's proposal for a solution to this far more brittle monetary system: a new Bretton Woods.Because if there is one place where our view radically diverges with that of the Chairman emeritus of the Group of 30 and not to mention former Fed chairman, it is in the arena of institutional oversight of finance and economics: whereas he and his ilk want more deference to an "official, rules-based managed monetary system", we believe that this merely sows the seeds of yet another system's own destruction as it hindres efficient markets, fair price discovery and by definition results in a manipulated market whose purpose is to serve a given policy objective du jour, and in doing so pushes it ever further from an equilibrium point and raises the likelihood of even greater, and more violent crashes.However, since it is the fate of the current centrally-planned regime to become even more centralized following its next inevitable crash, we can only sit back and muse at Volcker's tongue-in-cheek prediction of what will almost certainly come next.This news serves to remind us why the work we do here at Lions of Liberty and the work of so many others, inside and outside the liberty movement, to education the masses on the evils of central banking is of vital importance.
As we’ve discussed previously on this site, the dollar’s status as the reserve currency of the world is in jeopardy. When the next crash occurs in the financial markets (and it will occur eventually) the elitists and the crony capitalists will be ready to introduce a “new world order” in monetary policy that protects the interests of the elites and the crony capitalists at the expense of the rest of societyThis is why we need to be tenacious in promoting competition in money. In order for liberty to thrive the State must lose their monopoly on the creation and distribution of money.It would be insane to allow the people that were directly responsible for multiple catastrophic collapses to design a financial system that is proposed to replace the flawed model those same people have made a living defending. That would be comparable to hiring a convicted child molester to run a daycare.NSA Collecting Millions Of Faces From Web ImagesDo you ever review pictures before posting to Facebook or Instagram? Of course you do, everyone does. You want to make sure the pictures you post for the world to see show you in the best possible light. However, just because you don’t post a picture on social media, doesn’t mean that others cannot see it. And no, I’m not referring a crazed ex-lover hacking your phone and posting your most intimate pictures on a revenge porn website. Of course, I’m referring to your friends at the N.S.A. swiping your pictures from emails, texts, and many other kinds of communications.In a recent New York Times article, James Risen and Laura Poitras reported on the N.S.A.’s collecting of huge numbers of facial images pulled without your consent from all sorts of communication platforms.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
Be careful what pictures you send digitally across the interwebs, chances are the N.S.A. is adding your images to a vast facial image database.If this news had broken years ago, before the Edward Snowden leak, people would be outraged. Unfortunately, today this story will get little air time or traction as the mainstream media focuses on the five Taliban leaders released from the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in exchange for the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from Taliban captivity.Read The Morning Roar every weekday Monday-Friday!The Lions of Liberty are on Twitter, Facebook & Google+Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!
