Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama moving closer to pushing a VAT tax in addition to all our other taxes.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Because the Fed has done such a wonderful job at running our economy (how's that working out for you?), Ben Bernanke wants Congress to seize regulatory control of all big businesses and give it to him. Why can't people understand that this too big to fail baloney implies that nothing will ever change. If we don't let big companies fail, they will dominate our lives forever. They will become part of the government, using government to squash competition right and left. They'll be able to destroy our resources and our wealth like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without repercussion. For all those people who wanted change, why would you support institutionalizing the corporatist status quo that Obama, Geithner, Bernanke and Democrats are pushing?

"Bernanke also urged lawmakers to set up an oversight council, and said the broad task of monitoring and addressing systemic risks "may exceed the capacity of any individual supervisor.""

So Bernanke thinks a single central planner maybe overwhelmed, but a handful of central planners will work just fine. How transparent is this guy?

HEALTH CARE:

Mises scholar explains why health care is so expensive. List of health care essays by Mises scholars.

Now we have government deciding what lifestyle choices insurance companies can charge more for. I'm all for insurance companies charging more for higher risk lifestyles, but government letting government make these decisions is frightening.

Senate Finance Committee finds a way to get government option into the Baucus bill. If you thought this battle was won, you were wrong.

Luxury items commonly scene on welfare cases getting health care paid for by the taxpayers.

GLOBAL WARMING:

More on how British scientists cherry picked tree ring data to create the phony hockey stick graph.

"But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself!Had these been added to Briffa's small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.
...
I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion."

Scientists are people too, with all the political biases, selfish motivations and human weaknesses as any other people. The process of peer review was devised to mitigate the errors and corruption natural from human weakness. Carbon credit markets are collapsing. I think this is a growing scandal. When a scientist or group of scientists refuse to turn over the data for peer review, their papers should not be published, let alone sensationalized by frauds like Al Gore. Maybe this will finally put the dagger through the heart of this global warming scam. Then opportunistic Democrats will start pushing for legislation to regulate and control scientists and science papers. Want to bet?

The Yamal scandal in layman's terms makes clear just how much of a cover-up these frauds were engaged in. The British scientist in question doesn't disagree that the data set was cherry picked. He just blames Russians for doing the cherry picking, not himself. But he still used it. He still didn't use the more representative data that was available to him. He still covered it up. This is a growing scandal, and at some point in the future the people are going to see through this scam in huge numbers. Maybe not from just this scandal, but from everything. When that happens, the politicians are going to jump off this bandwagon like crazy and blame the fraudulent scientists.

Just to drive the point home about scientists being human and therefore as weak as any other human, NASA climate scientist busted for funneling no-bid contracts to his wife's firm and failing to disclose.

Because of the lack of solar activity in no-show solar cycle 24, galactic cosmic rays at space age high leading at least one scientist to claim they are responsible for global cooling.

WAR:

Obama takes Copenhagen opportunity to meet with top Afghan general. It was a convenient side-meeting for him. You would think that our troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan would be higher priority to the commander-in-chief than partying with a bunch European aristocrats, but not for Obama.

House overwhelmingly votes to block Obama from bringing Guantanamo terrorists to US. Will the Senate? Will Obama veto if the Senate agrees? Obama continues to split the Democrats. Enemy combatants have no due process rights. They forfeited all rights when they took up arms against the US.

MISC:

Obama's ego and image trashed when Chicago eliminated from Olympic contention in first round. I've consistently bashed Obama's policies, but now I resent him personally for making me choose between what's good for my country overall versus what's good for my country in the short run. I would have loved for Chicago to get the Olympics, but it's more important for America that Obama's agenda fail. By injecting himself in this Olympic decision, which no president had ever done and he shouldn't have done, Obama made me root against my own country, and I resent him for it.

"When Obama himself decided to go, it seemed like the wind was behind the U.S. bid. No one has better vote-counters than the president, and political wisdom held that he wouldn't stick his neck out if there weren't a very good chance of a win."

Apparently not. Once again the so-called experts and mainstream media cheerleaders are exposed as idiots. I wondered why Obama, after spending 9 months traveling the world and trashing America, would put his reputation on the line by personally lobbying to bring the Olympics to the country he hates. Then I remembered Chicago has the most corrupt political system in the country. Mayor Daley has all the dirt on Obama and therefore has power over him. I think it's likely that Daley forced Obama to make a personal plea to bring the Olympics to Chicago. And now Obama lost, which will harm him politically, and that's good for America.

Congratulations to Rio and Brazil. They must be thrilled to be the first city and country in South America to host the Olympics. I like how the media is trying to spin the loss as resulting from European domination of the committee, like the Europeans were homers. If that was the case, Madrid would have won. I think it's more likely the reason Chicago lost is Obama has trashed America all over the world. He's running unheard of deficits and debt and the IOC would be fools to think the US would be in good shape to host an Olympics in 2016 after all the damage Obama will have done. And who would want to put the Olympics in the hands of the most corrupt political system in America?

According to Mises, Chicagoians are better off without the Olympics. I'm sure much of this is true. But I'm also sure that local businesses get big boosts in income during and after the Olympics, and that boosts the local economy for everybody. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a net loss because of the taxes and diversion of resources by government though.

Amazing image from Herschel Space telescope shows section of Milky Way in unprecedented detail.

Interesting take on the Letterman extortion. What is the crime here? Everything was purely voluntary. Letterman could say no or yes to paying the $2 million. Either it was worth it to him or it wasn't. He could have bargained for a lower price in a purely voluntary exchange. Why should the staffer have been arrested for this? Why is blackmail a crime? Because rich, powerful men want to behave badly without having to pay a price for it. They want to have affairs. They want to be corrupt. They want to use their money and power to do bad things, and they don't want staffers to be able to profit from their knowledge of the bad deeds or have any power over them. Since rich, powerful men control government, they make this purely voluntary activity into a crime to protect each other from exposure of their bad actions.

Another way of explaining it: If you think you have something that would be valuable to somebody, say labor to clean their house, you make an offer. If they're not interested, you go away. If they are interested, you negotiate the terms, make a contract, either in writing or not, and you each carry out your part of the contract. If one party breaks the contract, you reach a settlement or go to court to obtain a settlement. How is that different than blackmail? The staffer has something he thinks is valuable to Letterman - his silence about Letterman's affairs. He goes to Letterman and makes an offer for this silence. If Letterman doesn't like the offer, he can either refuse the deal or negotiate until a deal is reached or the parties end negotiations. If they reach an agreement then one subsequently breaks it, they should have the same recourse to settlements. There's no reason for this to be a crime other than rich, powerful men don't like regular people being able use the rich man's bad behavior to advantage against them.

I purposely focus on men because I don't think that if men were virtuous and generally never had to worry about blackmail, that they would create the crime of blackmail to cover-up the bad behavior of women. The crime of blackmail was created to use the power of the state to protect men of power from suffering the consequences of their misdeeds. The rich and powerful didn't create blackmail laws to protect others. They did it to protect themselves.

I have no problem with these TSA scanners. I have a problem with government running security at airports. Let the airports and airlines take care of their own security. Who do you want keeping you safe on a plane, some bureaucrat buried in a cube in D.C. or Captain Sully Sullenberger?

Glenn Beck blames godlessness for America's problems. Give me a break. I agree that government usurping the role of religion is a problem, but blaming godlessness is ridiculous. This is why I can hardly stand to watch Beck.

Memo from ACORN counsel telling ACORN to straighten up ASAP.

"ACORN, as it turns out, is an ugly, corrupt organization. It is just as bad, just as evil, as people said it was. If you don't believe me, ask Elizabeth Kingsley."

Who would have guessed?

North Carolina requires plastic bottles be recycled.

Reason brings some sanity to the issue of Roman Polanski's arrest:

"The subsequent skirmish over Polanski's arrest—not exactly a momentous international incident—isn't between right and left or blue state and red or secularist and social conservative. It's a gaggle of actors and directors against everyone with a moral IQ higher than Woody Allen's."

Thank you.