Free kibbles

KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

I don't know if this woman is a flake or not, if you only knew her from the internet you can't help but think so, but calling for Americans to carry weapons to protests is not calling for a rebellion. If we don't exercise our rights, we will lose them, and the right to keep and bear arms provides the ultimate check against government oppression. The American people should peacefully carry personal firearms to anti-government protests.

EDUCATION:

I hadn't heard that schools had stopped teaching spelling.

HEALTH CARE:

It strikes me that the intersection between the nullification/secession movement, especially on Obama's signature legislation, and Obama's ambition to have a presidency like Lincoln could be violent.

JUSTICE SYSTEM:

The state monopoly on the justice system has the same problems as all monopolies.

"It is claimed that a state with a monopoly on dispute resolution powers is the very prerequisite of a civilized justice system. So such power is bestowed upon the state or seized by it. Now we have a situation in which, if one wants dispute resolution services, one must go to the state. What are the ramifications of this monopoly? Like any monopolist, the state will tend to charge more for its services than private arbitrators would. Moreover, since its revenue is guaranteed, and the courts have little incentive to attract or please its “customers,” government courts have little incentive to incur the costs of producing justice: the intellectual, moral and physical effort required to achieve true justice. Thus, overall and in general, state-provided justice will tend to be expensive, time-consuming, and of relatively poor quality."

That sounds about right."Thus, government courts, unconcerned about securing or satisfying customers, tend to be more concerned about looking after their own interests and the interests of their allies. They adopt, for example, elaborate and fairly inflexible rules of procedure, most of which seem designed to serve the needs of the court, not the litigants. Litigants are forced to hire expensive attorneys, usually specialists who know their way around in that particular court. Dispute resolution agencies which cannot monopolize business tend to adopt much simpler procedures. This banal example makes the larger point. Government courts, being monopolies, tend to serve their own interests, not those of the litigants, in all aspects of their work, from procedure to substantive decision-making. This lack of solicitude is the direct and inescapable result of the very monopoly powers we are told courts must have!"

WAR:

Two prisoners of war released from Guantanamo are behind the attempted terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines flight. I know Republicans are trying to use this against Obama, but Bush released these guys. There's no such thing as good government.

Apparently similar bombs in the past failed to take down the airplane though one killed a passenger. How weird is this?

"Janet isn’t the first of Our Rulers to divulge this damaging info. In 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that the TSA "considers…able-bodied passengers to be an important layer of aviation security" because they will "engage in self-defense actions should an incident occur onboard commercial aircraft." That’s right: taxpayers deprived of all weapons and defenses but fingernails, whom the TSA suspects for terrorists and abuses accordingly, not only comprise one of its often-hyped "layers of security" but an "important" one! Is this complete, jaw-dropping insanity or what? And why are we paying $7 billion a year for these thugs to molest and insult us when, in the end, they count on us to defeat terrorists?"

Well said. If TSA wants passengers to be an effective layer of security, quit taking their knives (and clippers and whatever else) away.

Why is the no-fly list secret? Several competing services providing publicly accessible terrorist threat lists that people could get off of would be far more effective. We always hear that government doesn't have enough resources to check everybody. Thank goodness. But the problem isn't lack of resources. The problem is, because government security is inherently socialist, there are no prices to guide the distribution of those scarce resources. Do you need more people? More machines? Different machines? Different techniques? Where should they go? When should they be applied? In the private sector, prices signal how resources should be distributed. Supply and demand drive those prices. The distribution of those resources is driven by political expediency instead of effectiveness. And there's no competition, so government has no means of judging the quality of its efforts against other security services.

The solution is to return security to the people in the private sector who have a life and death stake in it - the airports, airlines and customers. Think of it this way: A terrorist is trying to get on your flight and blow it up. Who do you want to be responsible for your security? Captain Sully and his staff or Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Janet Napolitano and her bureaucrats?

CIA fails to circulate warning about would-be jet bomber.

""What we have here is a situation in which the failings were individual, organizational, systemic and technological," the [anonymous] official said."

That's the nature of government. The same problem exists in all facets of government security.

POLITICS:

The next time somebody tells you politics is more rancorous now than ever, you don't have to be limited to telling them that it's hard to top vice-president Burr killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, you can also remind them that the speaker of the house, Henry Clay, burned President Tyler in effigy on the White House lawn.

MEDIA:

I don't care one bit that Obama didn't go to church on Christmas. Long before Obama was elected, we knew his church was just political cover. He achieved his ambition and doesn't need it anymore, though he still is driven by the same insane hatred of America that drew him to Rev. Wright.

Does the entire media in the US hate freedom? That's a very good question. I'd say pretty much everybody but Reason, John Stossel and Judge Napolitano. News organizations are corporations that depend on the government for their survival. What do you expect?

"Take the Martha Stewart case, for example. According to the Usual Pundits on both the right and the left, the conviction and imprisonment (albeit rather brief) of Stewart represented a triumphant moment in which we once again affirmed the Principle that No One is Above the Law. Actually, it demonstrated a more fundamental condition fully supported by the mainstream media (or MSM): the state and its prosecutors are above the law, and the press will make sure of that.

Why do I make such a charge? There was no way the feds could charge Stewart with insider trading, and they knew it. Thus, they hatched a plan with the NYT and Wall Street Journal being complicit in lawbreaking: prosecutors fed secret grand jury information to those papers that was designed to damage the stock price of Martha Stewart Living and compel Stewart to meet with prosecutors and investigators in order to stop the bleeding. (In fact, Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators during that fateful meeting.)

It is a felony to leak grand jury information and is punishable by up to five years in prison. Yet, the feds did it and no one – no one – in the media complained about this episode of lawbreaking which was done in order to trick someone into committing a "crime" so that the press could have its Big Story and the prosecutors could indict and convict its Big Fish."

Nice of example of how prosecutors conspire with media to break the law in order to entrap a victim.

MISC:

Author calls Krugman a liar, and I think he's right. There's no doubt a top economist, even one as misguided as Krugman, knows the history of financial deregulation under Carter and Reagan. He's lying about it on purpose.

Value is subjective. How valuable is that second helping of potatoes? Third? Forth? Ask men how valuable a tenth pair of shoes is, and most will say not valuable at all. Ask women how valuable a 50th pair of shoes is, and most will say as valuable as the first pair. Even the law of diminishing marginal utility plays out subjectively.

Ben Stein calls Ron Paul an anti-Semite. Republicans are so afraid of Paul that they're going nuts at his prominence.