Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

It's hard to come up with a more striking sign of the impending suicide of western civilization than having China's President Hu be the world's most powerful champion of free markets. That's why China is enjoying stunning growth while we regress.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The dollar continues its collapse.

Inflation's impact on morality - social, spiritual and cultural cost.

"Inflation is what happens when people increase the money supply by fraud, imposition, and breach of contract. Invariably it produces three characteristic consequences: (1) it benefits the perpetrators at the expense of all other money users; (2) it allows the accumulation of debt beyond the level debts could reach on the free market; and (3) it reduces the PPM below the level it would have reached on the free market.
While these three consequences are bad enough, things get much worse once inflation is encouraged and promoted by the state (fiat inflation). The government’s fiat makes inflation perennial, and as a result we observe the formation of inflation-specific institutions and habits. Thus fiat inflation leaves a characteristic cultural and spiritual stain on human society. In what follows, we will take a closer look at some aspects of this legacy.
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These effects [of inflation] are "especially strong among the youth. They learn to live in the present and scorn those who try to teach them ‘old-fashioned morality and thrift.’ Inflation thereby encourages a mentality of immediate gratification that is plainly at variance with the discipline and eternal perspective required to exercise principles of biblical stewardship—such as long-term investment for the benefit of future generations."
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The spiritual dimension of these inflation-induced habits seems to be obvious. Money and financial questions come to play an exaggerated role in the life of man. Inflation makes society materialistic. More and more people strive for money income at the expense of personal happiness. Inflation-induced geographical mobility artificially weakens family bonds and patriotic loyalty. Many of those who tend to be greedy, envious, and niggardly anyway fall prey to sin. Even those who are not so inclined by their natures will be exposed to temptations they would not otherwise have felt. And because the vagaries of the financial markets also provide a ready excuse for an excessively parsimonious use of one’s money, donations for charitable institutions will decline.
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In such an environment, people develop a more than sloppy attitude toward their language. If everything is what it is called, then it is difficult to explain the difference between truth and lie. Inflation tempts people to lie about their products, and perennial inflation encourages the habit of routine lies. The present writer has argued in other works that routine lies play a great role in fractional-reserve banking, the basic institution of the fiat money system. Fiat inflation seems to spread this habit like a cancer over the rest of the economy."

And we wonder why we see such moral degradation in our society, but because inflation is invisible, we never think of it as powerful cause."

There seems to be no choice, then, but for everyone to have constant regard to his own pile, and to try to outwit the economic moth and rust that threaten to erode all but the largest fortunes: He must speculate, or risk losing nearly everything. The question of whether it is best to hold shares, or bonds, or property, or some combination of them, is constantly before him. Further, funds’ managers and investors do not always have the same interests. A man trying to preserve a competence learns to trust neither himself nor others.
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I still remember the letter that the bank sent me when I was a student, pointing out with considerable asperity that I was almost £3 overdrawn and asking when I would correct this serious irregularity. Nearly 40 years later, I briefly overdrew my account again and wrote to the bank, explaining that I would clear the balance in a few days. Unusually, the bank called me: a banker wanted to see me, and would like to come to my house.
When he arrived, I repeated that I would pay off the overdraft in less than a week’s time. “Oh, we don’t want you to do that,” he said. “I’ve come here to ask whether you want to borrow more money.”
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Some time later, I was thinking about buying another house, for which I would need a short-term loan. Passing my bank, I entered and inquired about how I would arrange such a loan. Within five minutes, the bank had offered me a sum that was 20% larger than the single asset that it had evidence that I owned. I came away feeling that the bank was careless to the point of frivolity. The bank was nationalized two years later and its three million shareholders wound up virtually expropriated.
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But asset inflation as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes imprudence, sobriety becomes mean-spiritedness, self-control becomes betrayal of the inner self, patience steadiness becomes inflexibility. And circumstances force almost everyone to join in the dance.
Except in one circumstance: the possession of a salary and a pension that the government promises to index against inflation. This is the situation of public-sector workers and is a pyramid scheme, too. But meantime, such employment will seem a safe haven, and the temptation will be for government to expand it, with the happy consequence -- for itself -- of increasing dependence. And dependence, too, undermines character."

And it's going to get a lot worse.

This bet on Bear Stearns couldn't be luck.

"On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody – nobody knows who – made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness – "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…"

The Fed had to be complicit in this.

Ron Paul just rips Ben Bernanke and our government by telling the truth. Wow.

EDUCATION:

Liberal homeschooler.

"My wife will talk as long as you want her to about the fact that there's no real evidence to back up the recent move toward "academic," full-day kindergarten, and plenty of evidence that young children need more unstructured playtime than most of them get. The real purpose of all this formal schooling is to get the kids out of the house and train them to stand in line and follow instructions while mommy and daddy get back to their ultra-important lives as economic production units."

No kidding.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Prosecutors suborned perjury at Enron executives' trial and conflicts of interest in the reporting.

WAR:

Defense authorization bill is more security welfare to the world. As with all forms of welfare, both recipient and provider are addicted to it.

It costs $400 to deliver one gallon of fuel to troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistan takes a second Taliban stronghold. Pakistan has the ability to defeat the Taliban in Pakistan without our help. They always have had. The best way we can help them is to stop creating instability in Afghanistan.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iran pushes back deadline to agree to nuclear enrichment proposal.

MISC:

Caves on the moon.

Why is government setting milk prices?

US government bans import of Spanish ham, supposedly for health reasons.

Cato scholar exposes weak argument of Heritage Foundation scholar over the Patriot Act. Problems with Patriot Act and intelligence gathering.

"In recent hearings, Justice Department officials made quite clear that they vacuum up reams of telephone, Internet and bank records in the preliminary phases of investigations to "close down leads" and spot suspicious patterns. This is another way of saying that the vast majority of people surveilled are innocent — not when this authority is misused, but by design. The FBI issues tens of thousands of National Security Letters each year, and the majority seek information about U.S. citizens. That information isn't discarded; it goes into a massive FBI database containing literally billions of records. Simple math suggests there just aren't that many terrorists out there."

So these intelligence agents are not targeting suspected terrorists. They're casing huge nets over innocent Americans in the hopes of finding a few terrorists. That should not be allowed.

"So-called sneak-and-peek warrants that were sold as a vital tool for terrorism investigations are now overwhelmingly used in ordinary criminal investigations — contrary to what the public was told, certainly, but in accordance with the letter of the law. If we look back to those abuses uncovered by the Church Committee, we find some cases in which surveillance of journalists, activists and even Supreme Court justices was initiated for manifestly unlawful political purposes. But just as often, information gathered in the course of an initially legitimate national security investigation was later used for an illegitimate political end."

Yet more abuse. The longer we allow abuses like these to go on, the more they will become institutionalized, and the worse they will get.

REAL ID is rearing its ugly head again, this time under the name PASS ID. This has nothing to do with stopping terrorists. This is about controlling citizens while endangering us with a false sense of security.

Congress uses financial crisis as an excuse to grab power over payday loan businesses.

Powerful argument that the US is a failed state. If this essay didn't name the US, you would think it was about some banana republic. Wait a minute...

A tale of two hoaxes.

"I am amused at the reaction of government officials who feign indignation – and threaten criminal prosecution – over individuals or groups who engage in harmless hoaxes to promote their interests, but who pip not a squeak when the state – with the support of its paid propagandists (AKA as the mainstream media) – actively fosters hoaxes that serve its ends.
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I am reminded of the role played by the "joker" in medieval society. He was a bright person, whose general irreverence for established interests allowed others to observe and to laugh at the absurdities present in the society in which they lived."

I doubt the media will change anything.

Never letting a good crisis go to waste, Obama declares swine flu emergency. If this is to remove bureaucratic hurdles so patients can be treated more easily, why don't we just do that all the time? This is misinformation. Our government is the emergency, not the swine flu. If only we could wash our hands of the government as easily.

Female Saudi journalist sentenced to 60 lashes for story about extra-marital sex. The man who had the affairs and told the story was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and five years prison. That's barbaric.

Shop owner electrifies sidewalk outside his shop to shock vandals who urinate on his shop. Ouch. This illustrates a breakdown of law and order. I have a feeling this is going to dramatically escalate the vandalism, not solve the problem. He'll be lucky if somebody doesn't burn the place down.

My Bearcats finally have a football program. I don't think I went to one football game while I was in school.

RFID chips smaller than a grain of sand. OMG. These are going to be in everything. They'll be in our clothes, our food, our money, everything. We'll be transmitting RFID from our stomachs and never know it.