Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Peter Schiff on the ramifications of China pegging its currency to the dollar (hint, that's what's keeping us afloat.)

"While the peg certainly is responsible for much of the world's problems, its abandonment would cause severe hardship in the United States. In fact, for the U.S., de-pegging would cause the economic equivalent of cardiac arrest. Our economy is currently on life support provided by an endless flow of debt financing from China. These purchases are the means by which China maintains the relative value of its currency against the dollar. As the dollar comes under even more downward pressure, China's purchases must increase to keep the renminbi from rising. By maintaining the peg, China enables our politicians and citizens to continue spending more than they have and avoiding the hard choices necessary to restore our long-term economic health.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, when China drops the peg, the immediate benefits will flow to the Chinese, not to Americans. Yes, prices for Chinese goods will rise in the United States – but so will prices for domestic goods. As a corollary, the Chinese will see falling prices across the board. As anyone who has ever been shopping can explain, low prices are a good thing."

We benefit from China pegging its currency to ours. It's like they send us a check with every Chinese product we buy. That's good for us and bad for the Chinese. The problem is it enables runaway government spending that's doing us far more harm than the low prices are doing us good.

Giant French bank advises costumers on how to survive a global economic collapse.

"The bank said the current crisis displays "compelling similarities" with Japan during its Lost Decade (or two), with a big difference: Japan was able to stay afloat by exporting into a robust global economy and by letting the yen fall. It is not possible for half the world to pursue this strategy at the same time."

We don't export much of anything anyway.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

A little more on inflation. The consumer price index (CPI) is designed to hide inflation from the consumer for as long as possible so the government, the banks and Wall Street can profit from inflation as long as possible. For example, somewhere in the US, a mining firm is pulling iron ore from the ground right now, and inflation is making it more expensive. But it will take that iron ore will have to go through a number of production steps before it reaches the consumer. For example, it may take three years for that iron ore to finally reach the consumer in the form of a new car, so the consumer won't feel the effects of inflation on that iron ore for three years. Inflation is happening today, but we see it only sporadically as it reaches the consumer. The CPI is hiding it from us so aristocrats, bankers and CEOs can profit from the invisible transfer of wealth from us to them for years.

In another example, Bernanke recently purchased $400 billion in treasuries. That means he created $400 billion out of thin air to fund the government. Over the course of the next few years, consumers will loose $400 billion in purchasing power to pay for that purchase. There is no free lunch. It's an invisible tax that requires no legislation to pass. The Fed chairman has the power to tax us at will without oversight of any kind, and since Fed chairmen are appointed by presidents with advice and consent by the Senate, they serve their aristocrat masters and tax us into these boom-bust cycles. That way the aristocrats don't have to suffer the political consequences of raising taxes by $400 billion.

EDUCATION:

Government schools are bad for your kids.

"Before compulsory, tax-supported government schools became the norm around 1890, American society had survived and thrived without them for over 200 years [2] while creating one of the most successful and literate societies in human history. The United States was well on its way to surpassing prior world leader Great Britain in per capita GDP before even half of its states adopted compulsory education.
...
“A broad range of evidence from Victorian England and Wales and nineteenth century America shows that near-universal schooling was achieved before the state intervened in education. The evidence suggests that the impact was to curb what was already flourishing―so much so that the picture of education in this and previous centuries seems far bleaker than it would have been had the private alternative not been suppressed and supplanted.”
...
In sharp contrast, today in Western countries with compulsory free schooling, as much as twenty percent of the population is functionally illiterate. Schooling may be universal; education is not. [6] Even universal schooling is a myth. As many as ten percent of government students are absent on the average day, more than twice the rate of private school students."

You don't say. Government schools have nearly completed their mission of wiping out Catholic schools.

"For 150 years, subsistence-wage nuns, brothers and priests allowed the Catholic schools to compete by keeping tuition low. However, because of a sharp decline in their numbers, and their replacement by lay teachers paid at market rates, the government school system is finally beginning to realize its original mission: to knock off Catholic schools. The religious orders fought the good fight for 150 years. Without a major change in policy that levels the playing field, Catholic schools, with one-half of all private school students, will soon be in deep, deep trouble. Projecting out current trends, they will dwindle down to a few schools for the children of bankers, corporate executives and doctors that will hardly deserve the name “Catholic” which means universal."

You can't help but be impressed by the way Catholic schools have held out against the constant pressure. I don't see them going away unless they are outright banned. There's a religious devotion to them by a lot of wealthy families, which is exactly what government hates.

"So, government schools were not established out of any dire need for them but rather for a variety of crass religious, political and economic motives. They were not immaculately conceived but rather were born out of a toxic stew of religious absolutism, Prussian militarism, utopian socialist leveling and special interest greed and power lust."

Like everything else government does.

"One way or another, all the defects of government schools described in this book arise out of the simple, fundamental and inescapable fact that government schools are top-down coercive bureaucracies while private schools are based on voluntary relations."

How hard is that to figure out? In a voluntary system, the provider must satisfy the consumer. In a coercive system, the provider doesn't have to satisfy anybody but his boss who is ultimately a professional politician, or a group of them.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Hacker breaks into leading taxpayer funded climate fraud research facility and publishes 61 Mb of information showing how the climate frauds posing as scientists manipulate and suppress data to support the fraud. Captured emails show that the frauds don't believe their own reports. It also shows how they've been forcing climate skeptics out of the peer review process so they don't have to face honest criticism. As I've been reporting, this has been a scam all along, and now some white knight has blown the lid off of it. It's a fraud. It's always been a fraud. And it isn't just this facility. The entire global warming science industry (it's a three billion dollar per year industry in the US - larger worldwide) is a fraud. Head of facility confirms hacking. Recently we've seen a series of bigger and bigger pseudo-scientific scandals by the frauds being exposed. It's about time.

We need to watch out for the backlash. The Obamas, Gores, Waxmans, Kerrys, Boxers and all the other political accomplices to this fraud will turn around and try and use it to seize control of all science, as if the problem wasn't government money poisoned by political corruption to begin with. Not right away because they won't give up their best chance at implementing world-wide communism that easily. But when it's clear this whole thing is crashing down around their ears, they'll try to seize the new opportunity it provides to seize more power.

The people care about this. The wattsupwiththat post breaking this story was the most visited post on wordpress today. Lord Monckton video gets 3.5 million views in a month.

Mike's nature trick is a way a guy named Mike managed to manipulate data to produce the hockey stick graph that wasn't exposed for years.

I don't have a problem with Al Gore airbrushing this picture other than Al Gore is a fraud in general. If Al Gore really thought that we were going to suffer a future of constant hurricanes and rising sea levels, he can generate a picture of that future. It would be like me generating a picture of destitute future America. The difference is the evidence supports my claims, and I truly believe them. The evidence doesn't support Al Gore's picture, and he knows it. Al Gore is a fraud just like the pseudo-scientists above. Video of Gore showing he's incredibly ignorant of basic science. So maybe he's not a fraud. Maybe he's a willing tool. Or maybe he thinks his true believers will never question him so he'll just lie on national TV. I think the Justice Dept. should spend a couple years going through every file he's ever had and find out.

CO2 still rising. Temperature is not.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Released grand jury transcripts show that Julius Rosenberg was a spy but Ethel Rosenberg almost certainly wasn't. It appears she was convicted on perjured testimony trumped up by prosecutors angry that Julius wouldn't confess.

"Under the common law, grand jury secrecy was a protection for grand jurors from intimidation by the government. It is said to have first arisen in England in 1681 when the King demanded that a grand jury indict his rivals – the Earl of Shaftesbury and Steven Colledge – for treason. The grand jury won the right to hold its proceedings in secret – away from the watchful eyes of the Crown prosecutor. For two and a half centuries afterward, grand juries had the right to operate in secret – but to waive secrecy and issue public presentments when they concluded their investigations. Today, however, the Federal Rules place the prosecutor directly within the grand jury room and expose any grand jurors who expose governmental improprieties to possible five-year prison sentences."

How can government keep grand jury records secret for 50 years or indefinitely? Maybe they forget the government belongs to us, not them.

WAR:

How war systematically erodes liberty. This why we should end the war on terror.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Author predicted that illegal immigration was the result of the housing bubble and would reverse when the bubble popped.

"I then predicted that when the housing bubble bursts, the demand for labor from illegal immigrants would fall and the flows of new immigrants would slow and that many would even return to Mexico when they failed to find work."

Here's the prediction essay. That was pretty much perfectly accurate. Another problem created by government. Damn.

"[I]t is difficult to imagine government bureaucrats accomplishing anything of note. A dozen or so federal bureaucracies and the mighty US military failed to protect us from the 9/11 attacks. The TSA army of airport security personnel has failed multiple tests to prevent weapons from being brought on airplanes. The FDA has allowed deadly drugs into the market, while preventing useful ones. Meanwhile under its so-called protection the number of food poisonings seems to be increasing alarmingly, while it wages war against the relatively benign and low-cost industries that provide vitamins, supplements, and alternative medical approaches to health care."

Nice rant.

"You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to solve these problems. We need to return to the sound monetary policy of the gold standard, which will help prevent bubbles, and an America where education, health care, and assistance to the needy are in the hands of the private sector, not government bureaucrats."

And nice ending that proposes simple solutions to our problems.

MISC:

Switzerland has caved to bullying by the US and others, and as a result, it will be easier for those countries to raise taxes.

Lincoln wasn't interested in freeing slaves. All he cared about was power.

"The very first public statement that Abraham Lincoln made after being inaugurated as the sixteenth president was an ironclad defense of slavery: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He then quoted the Republican Party platform of 1860 that said essentially the same thing; pledged his support for the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution “with no mental reservations”; and supported a proposed constitutional amendment (the “Corwin Amendment”) that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with slavery. In fact, it was Lincoln who instructed William Seward to see that the Corwin Amendment made it through the U.S. Senate, which it did (and the House of Representatives as well).
In the same speech, Lincoln promised a military invasion and “bloodshed” in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff on imports, which had just been more than doubled two days before his inauguration. “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority,” he continued. Thus, mere minutes after taking an oath to protect the constitutional liberties of American citizens, Abraham Lincoln threatened to orchestrate the murder of many of those same citizens."

You won't read this in any conventional history of Lincoln.

"The Congressional Globe propagandized that “only a traitor would advocate peace,” and newspapers all over the North that were openly affiliated with the Republican Party (as was common during that period of time) quoted this statement. As for Northern newspapers that did not support the waging of war on their fellow Americans, the government had already begun to “squelch the most effective . . . criticism by stopping distribution, seizing equipment, and arresting publishers. Unionist mobs had collaborated in that suppression of free speech during the summer of 1861, destroying the offices of antiwar journals and attacking the editors.”"

They didn't teach me that in history class. This is the man Obama wants to be compared to. And you can bet Obama knows the history.

"Marvel writes that on his very first day in office as Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton “would exercise a cool, dictatorial demeanor” as he commenced to enforce the new definition of treason. The U.S. government was failing to recruit enough soldiers for its war despite the fact that it was offering enlistment “bounties” of as much as $415. Despite the totalitarian crackdown on Northern antiwar newspapers, there was still pervasive verbal opposition to the war in Northern cities. Consequently, Stanton “unilaterally abolished” that freedom of speech on August 8, 1862, writes Marvel. Having enacted a policy of military conscription, Stanton “appointed a special judge advocate to deal with dissent and issued instructions for local and federal law officers to imprison anyone who ‘may be engaged, by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy . . .’” The vagueness of this order allowed the government to imprison anyone who said anything negative about Lincoln, the Republican Party, or their war on fellow citizens."

This Republican assault on the freedom of speech during the civil war (it sounds like the best name for this war should be the war of federal oppression) sounds eerily similar to Obama supporters' attacks on freedom of speech. Think SEIU. For all Bush's supporters declaring that anybody who didn't want to invade Iraq were unpatriotic, the administration and its supporters never used the law to suppress speech. In fact, they did just the opposite. When the New York Times published material that indisputably aided the enemy, the Bush administration didn't lift a finger. Freedom of speech is not freedom to commit treason. Americans who told Russians of US secrets were arrested, tried and convicted, but Bush looked the other way.

"All of this “antidraft, antiwar, antiadministration sentiment” led the Republican Party to form “secret societies,” writes Marvel, that would produce a deluge of pro-Republican propaganda for years and years after the war was over. The “Union League” was one such society. One of the things the Republican Party propaganda machine did was to manufacture the myth (i.e., lie) of “national unity” during the war, suggesting that Northerners were united in waging total war on their fellow citizens. The truth is that it was the Republican Party that waged war on the South, not a “united” Northern population. (I have written elsewhere of how there was such a desertion crisis in the Union Army that entire regiments frequently deserted on the eve of battle.) The myth of “national unity” is a Grand Ole Lie.”"

I'm going to have to read that book.

The same problem of government money poisoned by the political motives of the aristocrats who dole it out that we see in the global warming fraud power the pseudo-science, hype and alarmism associated with non-pandemics like legionnaire's disease, SARS, bird-flu and swine-flu.

""Although some 30-odd people have died [in France]...the disease is not really frightening," it said. "Dangerous liaisons between certain experts, the labs and the government, the obscurity of the contracts between the state and the pharma firms have added to the doubt.""

That's exactly it.

"However, in Britain, health authorities' original worst-case scenario – which said as many as 65,000 could die from H1N1 – has twice been revised down and the prediction is now for around 1,000 deaths, way below the average annual toll of 4,000 to 8,000 deaths from seasonal winter flu."

But they hype enables the aristocrats to take more money from the people by force. Afterward they can always claim their policies kept the death count low. What a scam.

A little more positive reminder of what we learned when the Berlin wall fell. Even a version of capitalism heavily burdened by government is light years better than a planned economy.

Drug to increase sexual desire in women. If this works, it will quickly become the best selling drug in history.

Role reversal between the US and China.

"This Odd Couple started out on opposite sides of the central planning-individual freedom spectrum, have moved to the center locked in each other's financial arms, and are moving on past each other in certain crucial ways. If Obama gets his way, the U.S. will be vastly more centrally planned than China actually is, but that fact will be largely censored out of the Media and politics, while China will likely be less and less planned because the Party is losing control to freer and freer business people and workers, but that fact is largely hidden by the fraying rhetoric about Marxist central planning."

This is why so many things happening in America seem backwards. We still use the terminology of freedom but government domination of the economy is far closer to Marxism than freedom. Take a look at the Marx's ten conditions for transformation to communism and see we how close we are.

1. Property rights are under unprecedented attack in America. Think smoking bans. Think minimum wage.
2. Income tax.
3. Death tax.
4. Seems like this is part of number 1. If Marx were alive today, he'd replace it with seizing control of health care.
5. Can you say credit crisis? TARP? Fed? Remember when I said it was a coup?
6. Obama trying to seize control of subways and passenger rail.
7. GM, Chrysler and farm subsidies.
8. Card check. SEIU.
9. I don't see this.
10. Government schools.

I have a suggest for a good political platform - advocating the exact opposite of all of these.