NC Renegades

US Futures are taking the Greek Vote in Stride, off 60bp and steadily rallying back from the overnight lows as Varoufakis resigns, may signal Tsipras bringing new proposals, helping markets recover. No shock, but Europe is underperforming the USA with German markets off 1.2% led by a drop in the Fins. Peripheral Markets are faring worse, with Spain off 2% and Italy 3% as contagion fears from the overwhelming “no” vote weigh. Volumes quite benign in Europe as peeps await tomorrow’s Eurogroup and the ECB as it must decide whether to keep Greek banks alive.

While Athens remains closed, The GREK ETF is marked 10% lower and nearing June lows, while NBG is offered 20% lower. Over in Asia, Shanghai initially opened 7% higher as PBOC threw multiple headlines at the selloff (No more IPOs, Brokerages must invest in market…), but heavy selling pressed the index to “only” a 2.4% gain. This hit Hong Kong for 3%, its worst selloff in 3 years. Aussie lost 1% into the RBA decision tonight, while the Nikkei was 2% lower as haven trades pressed the Yen higher.

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What you are watching unfold in Greece right now is eventually going to come to your own neighborhood.  Someday, people living all around you will be storming the supermarkets in a desperate attempt to secure the food and supplies that they neglected to store up when they had the chance.  Of course the Greeks never thought that it would happen to them either.  Their civilization had endured for thousands of years, and they were a part of the most powerful economic alliance on the face of the planet.  Most Greeks never imagined that they would be plunged into a multi-year economic depression that would ultimately lead to “bank holidays”, long lines at ATM machines, and people diving into dumpsters in a frantic search for something to sell.  And this is just the beginning of the chaos in Greece – things are going to get much, much worse for them.  Hopefully, this will serve as a wake up call for millions upon millions of clueless Americans out there, because we are on the exact same path that Greece has gone down.  The sad truth is that no amount of “American exceptionalism” is going to prevent us from suffering the consequences of decades of very foolish decisions.  We are steamrolling toward our own version of economic collapse, and when that time arrives you don’t want to be caught totally unprepared for it.

In some cities in the United States, it only takes an inch or two of snow during the winter to set off panic hoarding at local supermarkets and hardware stores.

So what is going to happen during a real crisis?

The Greek people are just like us.  They are proud, sophisticated people that are highly educated.  But now that a full-blown collapse of their economy is imminent, they are feverishly hoarding cash and food…

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by Robert Gore

It is impossible to overstate the significance of Greece’s “Oxi,” or No vote. It puts into stark relief a simple proposition: governments propose, the citizens whose labors fund them dispose. In this case the government in question was not the Greek government, but supranational institutions: the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, known collectively as the Troika. It is symbolically fitting that in a simple exercise of direct democracy, voters in its cradle rejected the Troika’s proposal of rescue loans without debt relief, coupled with a package of reforms. Leaving aside questions of fair dealing—neither side has clean hands—the vote shows that the financial foundation of government does indeed rest on the consent of the governed. Beyond the immediate chaos and longer-term ramifications, it was this realization that prompted the hysterical panic, prior to the vote, of the powers that be, in Europe and beyond. After the vote, panic gives way to terror.

Not that they should be surprised. History is littered with regimes in which the productive people who were to support the rulers’ grand schemes, burdened with too much debt and taxes, said “Oxi”. The joke in the old USSR: they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Usually there is no vote to register the sentiment—there certainly wasn’t in the USSR—but when work is punished rather than rewarded, people stop working and governments collapse. The Greeks watched their economy shrink and unemployment climb under Troika-mandated austerity, and were facing decades of debt servitude. A default and exit from the EU will be no picnic. Alexis Tsirpas’s Syriza socialists will get acquainted with the realities of no credit (unless Russia or China comes through), reinstatement of a drachma that nobody inside or outside Greece will trust, and only what it can generate in economic activity going forward to fund their redistributive proclivities and the rest of the government, assuming Greek aversion to paying taxes can be overcome. In other words, Greeks will be starting from zero, but in their collective judgement, zero is better than negative—clawing out from a deep debt and austerity hole.

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Greece Contemplates Nuclear Options: May Print Euros, Launch Parallel Currency, Nationalize Banks

As we said earlier today, following today’s dramatic referendum result the Greeks may have burned all symbolic bridges with the Eurozone. However, there still is one key link: the insolvent Greek banks’ reliance on the ECB’s goodwill via the ELA. While we have explained countless times that even a modest ELA collateral haircut would lead to depositor bail ins, here is DB’s George Saravelos with a simplified version of the potential worst case for Greece in the coming days:

The ECB is scheduled to meet tomorrow morning to decide on ELA policy. An outright suspension would effectively put the banking system into immediate resolution and would be a step closer to Eurozone exit. All outstanding Greek bank ELA liquidity (and hence deposits) would become immediately due and payable to the Bank of Greece. The maintenance of ELA at the existing level is the most likely outcome, at least until the European political reaction has materialized. This will in any case materially increase the pressure on the economy in coming days.

All of which of course, is meant to suggest that there is no formal way to expel Greece from the Euro and only an economic and financial collapse is what the Troika and ECB have left as a negotiating card.

However, that cuts both ways, because while Greece and the ECB may be on the verge of a terminal fall out, Greece still has something of great value: a Euro printing press.

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Watch the banks closely tomorrow. There is a reason that the financial experts are calling the Greek collapse the beginning of contagion.

David DeGerolamo

by Michael Krieger

U.S. law enforcement agencies rank the threat of violence from anti-government  extremists higher than the threat from radicalized Muslims, according to a report released Thursday by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security (TCTHS).

The report, “Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremism Threat,” was based on survey research by Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Schanzer, director of TCTHS and associate professor of the practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

The survey — conducted by the center with the Police Executive Research Forum — found that 74 percent of 382 law enforcement agencies rated anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction. By comparison, 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations as a Top 3 terrorist threat.

– From Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy

Since September 11, 2001, the frightened and emotionally pliable American public has gullibly relinquished its civil liberties and free heritage in order to allow the U.S. government to wage unaccountable and unconstitutional war again Al-Qaeda and radical Islamic terrorism across the world.

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Charles Kurzman is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations.

How else would you expect the government to react that has overthrown the rule of law and the Constitution? Then consider how they react next? We can look to history to see how tyranny always reacts.

Will you resist or submit? If the government was not concerned about resistance, they would not be casting patriots as terrorists.

David DeGerolamo

1. The supremacy clause of the federal Constitution (Art. VI, clause 2) says that only the Constitution, laws made pursuant to the Constitution, and Treaties made under the authority of the United States are the supreme law of the land. Supreme Court “opinions” are NOT part of that supreme law.

2. Supreme court opinions are not “law” — they are OPINIONS on the cases [rightly or wrongly] before the Court. The ONLY ONLY ONLY federal law in this land is: The Constitution, Laws made by Congress which are permitted by the Constitution, and Treaties made by the President and the Senate which are permitted by the Constitution.

Supreme Court opinions are NOT LAW.

3. But the statists have managed to convince most Americans that the Supreme Court is THE highest law making body in the entire Country. If people would only read our federal Constitution and use their heads, they would have seen through this absurd claim 100 years ago.

Source

Emmer responds in anger (not about the murdered teen, he didn’t like being questioned) according to this news at the Examiner entitled ‘Tom Emmer’s public meltdown.’

By the way, the thin-skinned Rep. Tom Emmer is the Republican who won the seat formerly held by Rep. Michele Bachmann.  It sure looks like the 6th District of Minnesota will miss Bachmann as we learned recently that Emmer has joined forces with Rep. Keith Ellison to create a Somalia Caucus in Congress!

Here is Gary Gross writing at the Examiner.  St. Cloud residents want to know what the cost is to the local taxpayer as Lutheran Social Services and the UN/US State Department continue to send refugees to the city that has a growing ‘pocket of resistance’ to the colonization plan.

A big crowd turned out for Congressman Tom Emmer’s townhall meeting Wednesday night. It wasn’t a good night for Emmer because he let his temper get the better of him early in the event.

The chief point of contention was over the refugee resettlement program. When citizens asked for a moratorium on the program until after an economic impact statement had been done, Congressman Emmer asked why anyone would have a problem with people in the United States legally. When an unidentified member of the audience said that refugees were draining St. Cloud’s resources, Emmer responded by saying that he’d seen the city of St. Cloud’s budget and that it looked fine. At that point, several people booed.

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A few folks had questions about how tactical site exploitation (TSE; also called Sensitive Site Exploitation, or SSE) and how to do that. You can download the Army’s Site Exploitation manual here.  My experience is on the backside of that, in exploitation, and not in the actual collection, although I’ve been through the training.  I’ll leave it to those PFCs, Corporals and Sergeants who have first-hand experience.

The thing about TSE is that we need tools available to us in order to exploit any evidence.  Exploiting DNA and fingerprints, for instance, are going to be generally beyond our reach.

While we don’t have any Document and Media Exploitation (DOMEX) units available to us, we do have the potential ability to exploit receipts, files and other paper documents, cameras, phones, computers and maybe other information storage systems.  This would be the Exploit and Analyze phases of F3EAD.  These things can often lead to actionable intelligence, however, there are much better avenues available to us that don’t require the Find, Fix, Finish phases of F3EAD.

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Compliments to The Lonely Libertarian

The one about… Teaching on Civil Disobedience and Sedition from a Pope who wasn’t a Marxist, Modernist Imbecile

That would be Pope Leo XIII. Here are some choice excerpts from his Encyclical SPAIENTIAE CHRISTIANAE – On Christians as Citizens, from January ARSH 1890, which was recently brought to my attention. And boy, did it ever get my attention.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE FULL DOCUMENT, which I cannot recommend strongly enough. If you can, print it out and take a highlighter to it. You might run out of highlighter ink before you get through it. Every paragraph is a manful, crystal-clear tour de force. Read this, and then compare it to the nebulous, wishy-washy, clear-as-mud Marxist, Modernist rhetoric we get today. When you read Leo XIII you comprehend EXACTLY what he is saying immediately. Bam. Pow. Here it is. Take it or leave it. 2+2=4. Period.

I can’t resist posting these excerpts, because he is speaking directly to us. “Relevant” doesn’t begin to do it justice. All emphases are mine.

From paragraph 2, (confirming) my position that the United States no longer actually exists as a licit state:

…if, in administering public affairs, it [government] is wont to put God aside, and show no solicitude for the upholding of moral law, it deflects woefully from its right course and from the injunctions of nature; nor should it be accounted as a society or a community of men, but only as the deceitful imitation or appearance of a society.

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h/t WRSA

Right now the media is all abuzz about the threat of radical islamacists targeting Americans over the Fourth of July weekend. I am on my way to speak at Pastor Manning’s event at Gettysburg, and in the airport I just heard one “terrorism analyst” describe how easily a lone ISIS gunman, or small team of gunmen, with full auto weapons could attack crowds at gatherings, on congested bridges, subways, etc, and easily kill fifty or so Americans. He is right, but the reason it would be easy is because of the anti-gun conditioning and sheep-like mindset that causes most Americans to choose to go unarmed, and also, usually, totally untrained and unprepared to deal with any active shooter situation. They are conditioned to leave their security to the “professionals” – the police, DHS/FBI, National Guard, military, etc. that my good friend David Codrea calls the “Only Ones” – as in “the police and military are the only ones who should have guns.”

And when Americans leave their security to government sanctioned “Only Ones” they set themselves and their children up as unarmed victims – lambs for the slaughter who bleat in terror as they die, while waiting for a professional “sheep dog” to come to their rescue.
And we have seen it over and over in mass shootings – including the jihadist attack at Ft. Hood Texas, where even soldiers were mandated to go unarmed and were turned into sheep who had to be rescued by a civilian cop, or the Navy Yard shooting, where the gunman gained access because he worked there, and went on a murderous spree with a shotgun until he was finally shot down by responding officers – and at each and every school shooting – while the unarmed “sheep” wait for the sanctioned sheep dogs to arrive, they are slaughtered in such numbers as to make the attack a “success” in the eyes of the terrorists or crazy maniacs intent on going down in history with a big body count.

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h/t Jim D