Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The commercial property bubble is bursting.

Robert Murphy predicts we're heading for the worst price inflation we've ever seen in the US. I.e., we're heading into a period worse than the 70s. He says he couldn't have designed a better way to harm our economy than Bernanke and Obama are carrying out right now. He also points out that if Bernanke really wanted banks to loan money, he wouldn't pay them interest to keep their money in the Fed. Bernanke has a hidden agenda he's lying about. Knowing about Bush's support for the North American Union and replacing the dollar with the Amero, you can't help but wonder if Bernanke's actions aren't related. When you read the old predictions of the destruction of the dollar and you watch what Bernanke's doing, you can't help but fear there's a grain of truth.

Even Milton Friedman misunderstood the effects of monetary inflation, and Bernanke is following Friedman's model. I always possible that Bernanke is just that wrong, but then why interest on bank deposits with the Fed? Something else is going on.

In essay on the Fed, Ron Paul succinctly summaries the Obama administration's policies:

"The administration claims that it inherited a dire situation from the last administration, which is absolutely true. However, that hasn’t stopped them from accepting all the policies and premises that got us here, and accelerating those policies to rapidly make a bad situation much worse. The bailouts started with the last administration. They have gotten bigger with this one. The last administration gave us expanded government involvement in healthcare with a new prescription drug benefit. This administration gave us a renewal and expansion of SCHIP, and now the current healthcare takeover attempts. In reality, we can afford none of this, but shady monetary policy allows Washington to continue along its merry way, aggravating all our economic problems."

Obama was never a candidate for change. His policies are just the same failed policies of old, but bigger and worse.

Summary of Australian interview with GloomDoomBoom.com's Marc Faber:

"One stimulus will lead to the next one, and then more money printing, and then the collapse. The US government will go bust, then it will go to war. Buy a farm and a gun."

DEBT:

The CBO reports that Obama's plan to seize control of student loans would cost Americans billions.

HEALTH CARE:

The AFL-CIO threatens Democrats if they drop the public option from health care. Democrats are damned if they do and damned if they don't. That's why I think they will continue to push for severe health care oppression despite the will of the people. Might as well do as much damage as they can before they're voted out. That gives us an opportunity to kill this oppression outright.

Prisoners in the UK have a better diet than hospital patients.

WAR:

George Will calls for our exit from Afghanistan and a reduction of force to offshore forces that focus on high value targets. Good for Will. I don't see how pulling out of Afghanistan can be considered a defeat. We went into Afghanistan with the goal of denying al Qaeda a safe haven. That goal was accomplished long ago. We should have pulled out in 2002. If al Qaeda establishes another safe haven in Afghanistan, we should take it out before they hit us a second time. Mark Steyn doesn't condemn Will. He might be the only conservative pundit who doesn't.

Thomas Sowell says the west is surrendering to Islamic terrorists on the installment plan.

"Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about "upholding the law" but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.
There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot-- and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed and the film has been shown on the History Channel.
So many "rights" have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don't meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn't protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.
That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.
But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect."

Executing terrorists is a centuries long American tradition and millennium long world tradition that we should continue to embrace.

GLOBAL WARMING:

It may be technically feasible to engineer earth's climate, but right now it would stupid. We know so little about the climate, very few scientists predicted the current global cooling, for example, it would be like a monkey performing brain surgery. Heck, plenty of politicized scientists haven't even acknowledged that global warming is not a problem yet.

Obama's pushing to get tax and trade legislation into law before December. We never get a moment's respite from this human disaster.

POLITICS:

This guy may have been the first to predict that Obama would win the presidency, but he's not the first to predict that the radical leftist agenda in Washington would end with health care. My essay from July (not posted until August) predicting health care would end Obama's radical presidency. Here's my comments from August 11:

"When I heard that Democrats were sending Obama to the front lines to make the case for Obamaoppressioncare, I said this would end his radical presidency. I get more convinced of that every day.

Obama and the Democrats are self destructing at a record pace, and we'll soon have big government, anti-American, slightly less worse than Democrats Republicans in charge again. Woohoo."

I stand by my prediction, but I still fear Democrats, who aren't stupid, just evil, like Republicans but slightly worse, see the writing on the wall the same as I do and would prefer to go out in a blaze of destruction than conform to the will of the people.

MISC:

What in the world do we need new digital crosswalk signals in Montgomery County for?

"You’re less than halfway across a busy intersection when the “Walk” signal suddenly becomes a flashing red “Don’t walk."
Should you turn back or make a run for the opposite corner? Either way, the idling motorists seem only too eager to mow you down.
New countdown walk signals in the Dayton area are eliminating the guess work for pedestrians and relieving crosswalk anxiety. The digital screens start a countdown when the flashing “Don’t Walk” symbol appears so pedestrians know exactly how many seconds they have before the intersection light changes from green to yellow."

Are you frigging kidding me? When you think of all the problems we have in Dayton, including over 13 percent unemployment, where would you rate crosswalk anxiety? And what is up with this article? It's got to be a reprint of a government press release, right? Pravda during the 80s was more objective than this. Now I understand the culprit:

"Currently, signals are timed for a walking speed of 4 feet per second. New traffic regulations about to be adopted by the federal government will lower the speed to 3.5 feet per second.
...
Shoup said other localities will soon be joining the switch since new federal traffic regulations now in draft form will require them. The new regulations are expected to be adopted later this year, giving localities a 10-year period to come into compliance."

My blood pressure is off the scale right now.

Nicholas Biddle, Ben Bernanke's 19th century predecessor, eventually taken down by Andrew Jackson. The comparisons of the overt culture of corruption to today's politics and the Fed are amazing.

"When you hear about the Federal Reserve Transparency Act getting stalled in committee, think of Daniel Webster, bought and paid for with central bank money. When you read Fed apologia in the New York Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal denouncing the "reckless populism" of the Act, think of the newspaper editors in Biddle's pocket."

Great story.

Boortz injects some common sense into the torture debate. But waterboarding is not torture. Threatening somebody's life or the lives of their family members is not torture. Scaring people is not torture, and we better get that straight. Almost all interrogations use fear as an element, how do you think good cop, bad cop works, and we can't allow these weirdos to stop all interrogations. I love his suggestion that anybody who claims not to support harsh interrogation techniques explain to his or her spouse and kids that they'll just have to die in his scenario because they refuse to perform them or let others perform them. Tell your loved ones you care less about their lives than some political position masquerading as a moral code.

Anybody who wishes another dead is a dangerous weirdo regardless of political persuasion.

Are Obama's czar's constitutional? Does he care?

Lessons from the term limit movement. This essay suggests they backfired to a large extent because lower level professional politicians just keep climbing the professional politician ladder. That's why I propose meaningful term limits - term limits that require the politician to work in the private sector in a non-government related job (i.e. being something other than a government employee, lawyer, lobbyist or government contractor) for four years before obtaining another elected office. Let's see how these politicians succeed in the private sector working alongside their potential constituents.

Japan to build solar power satellite and beam power back to Earth. Have you noticed how other countries have all the innovation going on instead of the US anymore? That's because the burden of the government in the US is destroying innovation in the US. If our government didn't suck so many resources out of our economy, if it didn't subsidize so many energy projects based on political expediency, if it didn't have a monopoly on space flight, we'd have developed alternate sources of energy long ago.

I'll let this speak for itself:

"Tour company Ride the Ducks is suing rival tour company Bay Quackers, alleging that it holds trademark rights to the sound made by tourists using duck call devices, while on amphibious vehicle tours."

How do you trademark a duck call? Do you have to sue every duck in the world to defend your trademark? This illustrates just one of the millions of ways government creates problems in our society and our individual lives. I'd like to say that we've reached the epitome of the theater of the absurd, but I know that tomorrow will bring something more ridiculous. I swear it's like we're stuck living in a carnival fun house.

Pat Buchanan argues that Hitler didn't want to conquer Europe or the world.

Ron Paul wins critical support from Barney Frank on his audit the Fed bill.

Mark Steyn destroys the fawning media and Ted Kennedy with the only essay that remembers Chappaquiddick I read after he died.

"When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."
You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?"

The lack of moral grounding of the leftists is on display again. This is a fantastic essay. One of Steyn's best.