Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Peter Schiff thinks the unusual behavior of the markets shows investors fear both inflation and deflation and can't make up their minds which will happen.

Markets reward value, not merit.

TAX AND SPEND:

Government housing policies creating suburban slums.

John Stossel highlights The Road to Serfdom.

"According to the Tax Foundation, 60 percent of the population now gets more in government benefits than it pays in taxes. What does it say about a society in which more than half the people live at the expense of the rest? Worse, the dependent class is growing. The 60 percent will soon be 70 percent."

Yet Obama only won 53 percent of the vote.

Cato explains that the three day shut down of the US government saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars. Did your life fall apart? We pay billions of dollars a day for a government that only does us harm, not good. Too bad Washington doesn't have snow like that permanently.

Cato calls to abolish HUD. Why stop there?

FEDERAL RESERVE:

In analysis of Bernanke's unwinding strategy, we get this sad tidbit:

"I think their #1 fear is loan defaults by commercial real estate owners. The commercial real estate market is in the pits -- the tar pits. It will get much worse over the next two years. Bankers will not be lenders until commercial real estate moves back up."

Yikes. The more I read Bernanke, the more I notice oblique references to Keynes's animal spirits.

"First, our financial system during the past 2-1/2 years has experienced periods of intense panic and dysfunction, during which private short-term funding became difficult or impossible to obtain for many borrowers."

To Bernanke, there's nothing wrong with the economy. To Bernanke, the problem is panic and dysfunction. The problem is the lack of confidence of the people - animal spirits.

EDUCATION:

Supposed eighth grade graduation test from 1890s along with beautiful quote from Mark Twain:

"Don’t let schooling interfere with your education."

This test has been verified to be a graduation test from the 1890s, but not necessarily for the eighth grade. But if you read it, it seems like it would be an eighth grade test, not a high school test. There's no calculus or trigonometry. But man, I'm glad I didn't have to take it now. What I really like about this test is every answer for every subject is written. You have to know how to write to pass this test. You have to know how to think. You can't just memorize for this test.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Cambridge Massachusetts, home of Harvard, to force citizens to go green. Maybe smart people will quit going there and getting brainwashed to be stupid.

Discredited CRU director Jones apologizes for some of his actions, but not all.

"Phil Jones, the professor behind the “Climategate” affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.

He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics – a decision he says he regretted.

But Professor Jones said he had not cheated the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.

He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.

But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period."

Jones never admitted those facts when he was busy manipulating data to cover them up. He's trying to avoid prosecution and save his career, but I doubt he'll succeed.

More lies from NOAA uncovered about its cherry-picking of weather stations. The political power of these climate frauds is disgusting. Had scientists been busted performing such flagrantly fraudulent acts in non-political areas of science, they would bagging groceries for the rest of the lives. No scientific organization would touch them with a 10 foot pole. But because the political powers are still invested in the climate fraud, these frauds still control billions of dollars in funding, so they have staying power. This is another way government money corrupts science. It stinks. Editor of Nature forced to resign because of political bias. Skeptics are making some headway, but until the government money is taken out of science, science will be political.

Because the IPCC is at the heart of this fraud, scientists are calling for it to be disbanded. But it controls the political money, so that's unlikely to happen.

And as if posted in response to my above entry, scientist quits organization because of the politicization of his organization. Good for him. Americans deify non-politicized scientists far too much, and most are aware of the corruption politics has created in science.

One of the huge discoveries from the climategate emails was how the frauds had formed a clique of frauds to peer review each other's papers. Now CRU is going to have another group of frauds re-review it's papers. That'll help.

As if response to this whole section, Cato releases a study on how the politicization of science has corrupted it.

"Recent information, however, shows that government agencies may cause more problems in this area — a worrisome development considering that health care legislation recently passed by the United States Senate would allow federal agencies to punish organizations whose researchers publish results that conflict with what the agency feels is appropriate."

No matter how bad it is, it can always get worse.

Mark Steyn funny as always commenting on the green fascist Audi Super Bowl commercial.

"Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure ... . To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!
But now Audi flogs you its vehicles on the basis that it's the most convenient way to submit to arbitrary state authority. Forty years ago, when they first began selling over here, it's doubtful the company would have considered this either a helpful image for a German car manufacturer or a viable pitch to the American male."

That commercial was bizarre.

"I've been saying for months that the difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament, demanding to know why government didn't do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets. You can shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multitrillion-dollar porkathons."

I love that difference, but those Americans quickly turned back to big-government Republicans as if they know anything about fiscal responsibility.

WAR:

US and Afghan troops begin Afghan offensive. I don't like the sound of this at all:

"The bigger test, commanders say, will be using millions of aid dollars to roll out what they are calling "government-in-a-box," a ready-made administration that is intended to allow the Afghan government to quickly reassert its authority in an area where its representatives didn't dare set foot earlier in the week."

It sounds US troops are delivering tyranny packages to Afghan villages. Our troops are installing governors by force. This doesn't sound like helping a village govern itself. It sounds like forcing a top-down central government on people who don't want it. Our entire nation-building strategy in the middle east is centered on forcing top-down government on disparate tribes. It's doomed to fail. Self-government comes from the bottom-up, not the top-down, but the central planners in Washington are incapable understanding that.

"The key will be limiting destruction and civilian casualties in Marjah. Senior commanders in Kabul said they didn't want a repeat of the 2004 invasion of Fallujah, Iraq, an operation that gutted the city, making for a propaganda victory for insurgents, even though U.S. forces won the battle."

At least we learned something.

"The assault was delayed for days, first to allow President Hamid Karzai to return from a trip abroad, and then to give Afghan officials time to try to convince tribal elders from Marjah to align themselves with the government and talk the town's young men into putting down their arms. Whether officials won any local allies will become more clear in the coming days."

That's a big uncertainty. It sounds to me like the tribal elders don't want to be under a central government, and that's the situation all over Afghanistan.

""This is about convincing people that their own government can take care of them better than the Taliban can," U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Frederick "Ben" Hodges, director of operations for southern Afghanistan, said during a walk-through of the battle plan on a football-field-sized mock-up of Marjah's farms, homes, canals and markets."

This is the kind of people who rise to the top in America - the kind who think that government is supposed to take care of the people. We're using tanks and bombs to export the welfare state mentality that's brought the US to the verge of collapse. And this is supposed to be for the benefit of the poor, backward foreigners who aren't sophisticated enough to develop the welfare mentality on their own. What a load of condescending, deadly crap. What this shows is that domestic policy can never be divorced for foreign policy. When aristocrats think they should help their own citizens by force - welfare - that same philosophy permeates their foreign policy. The result is always violence. That's what libertarians mean when they talk about the welfare-warfare state. Looks like the Brits are involved as well.

In case you were wondering how all the US intervention in the Middle East is working out for the rest of the world, a terrorist killed eight in an Indian restaurant. I'm sure India loves the instability we've generated in Pakistan.

Judge Napolitano continues to think that Congress did not declare war on al Qaeda, but he still hasn't explained where the Constitution grants Congress the power to authorize use of force other than a declaration of war. I have the answer - nowhere. The authorization to use force is and can only be a declaration of war. It has nothing to do with rhetoric, i.e. calling it a war on terror,m or populism. Those are straw-man. It's a matter of law including the plain language of the Constitution.

POLITICS:

Reason sees through the tea parties.

"The tea party movement started as a welcome protest against the alarming growth of federal spending and federal control. It had a strong anti-statist flavor, or seemed to. But judging from the applause for Sarah Palin at its convention, the movement's suspicion of government power is exceeded only by its worship of government power."

From the first one I visited, I suspected they were extremely vulnerable to the usual Republican suspects. Now they've become little more than Republican campaign events. What a huge opportunity lost. Iran's protesters have resisted the attempts of aristocrats to weaken them. The tea partiers did not. I'm not sure we'll get another chance like this before the collapse.

While we're fighting off many of Obama's most onerous policies, he's enacting plenty of only slightly less onerous ones.

"Yet even with the noisy dissent on his left flank and record-setting disapproval ratings from the public at large, the president kept getting stuff done, not least of which appears to be the single largest entitlement expansion since the 1960s. The busy month of December also saw passage of an omnibus spending bill and subsequent Pentagon package that together helped jack up federal outlays by more than 10 percent over the previous year amid only scattered national discussion. The House of Representatives passed a massive financial regulation overhaul that would create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the national debt ceiling was raised once again, and the Environmental Protection Agency took the potentially monumental step of regulating carbon. For a guy who seems perpetually on the verge of losing his political mojo, Obama manages to accomplish quite a bit.

Is that a paradox or a managerial style?"

I think it's a strategy. From the day Obama was inaugurated, he's attacked America relentlessly on issue after issue, day after day. His modus operandi is to overwhelm us so that although we stop the big, public issues, he can force through much of his agenda while we're busy on the other stuff. He knows we have jobs. He spends 14 hours a day attacking us, but we don't have 14 hours a day to defend ourselves. That's why Americans are so angry. And the 60 votes was huge.

"While there is much to be gained from the righteous, economics-based pessimism of those who never had gauze over their eyes in the first place, much of the anti-Obama literature too readily imagines secret agendas and maximally malevolent intentions, leading to only two possible conclusions: Either we’re screwed or we’re totally screwed."

Guilty as charged. But that's because I did the work to understand who Obama is and the agenda he and his partners have had his entire adult life.

MEDIA:

This SNL parody of Foxnews is hysterical.

MISC:

Professor who murdered three colleagues had shot her brother dead 24 years ago in apparent gun accident. I've always wondered about these reports of fatal gun accidents. Even if the gun accidentally went off, it's highly unlikely it would kill anybody. You have to aim to do that. Unless you're stupid and you look down the barrel of the assembled gun for something. I've seen people do that.

New research on antioxidants to extend life.

Whatever national news channel we had on this evening wondered if it was really that hard to clean up after snow. Everybody is starting to catch on.

I think trying to use central authority for libertarian purposes is doomed to fail. I think state's rights is far more likely to protect freedom than a central authority.