Free kibbles

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Reason offers a thorough summary of the McDonald case before the Supreme Court.

ECONOMY:

Gold and silver gained 10 percent per year or more versus currencies over the last 10 years.

""Gold isn't going up, currencies are going down," says James Turk, GoldMoney.com's founder. "The purchasing power of gold remains basically unchanged against commodities. In contrast, the purchasing power of national currencies is being constantly eroded."

...

In an interview three years ago ("Yes, $8,000 an Ounce," May 29, 2006), Turk predicted that the metal could go as high as $8,000 an ounce in inflation-adjusted dollars somewhere between 2013 and 2015, and he's sticking with that price target. "I don't think this [uptrend] is going to reverse anytime soon," he says.

That's because governments are debasing currencies, he says, destroying their citizens' purchasing power by spending beyond their means and using debt to stay afloat. The U.S., as one example, is trying to goose its economic recovery through massive deficit spending, but it may worsen the situation should the dollar tank, Turk asserts. "

We may think we're treading water, but government is drowning us.


TAX AND SPEND:


Federal workers get paid approximately 20 percent more than private sector workers doing similar jobs.


The praise for Bunning illustrates how far our expectations have fallen.

"Republicans and Democrats want to rush through a bill to spend more money on everything from highways to healthcare to joblessness. Senator Bunning is simply saying that the new spending should be financed by reallocating some of the unspent money from the so-called stimulus. For this modest proposal, Bunning is being treated like a porcupine at a nudist camp, with both Republicans and Democrats expressing irritation that he is making it harder for them to buy votes with other people’s money.

I am delighted that Senator Bunning is putting some roadblocks in the path of bigger government, but this episode also illustrates how our hopes and expectations have been eroded. For all intents and purposes, Sen. Bunning is saying that if we want to waste money on A, B, and C, then we should not waste as much money on X, Y, and Z.

Even in the unlikely event that he succeeds, all Bunning will have accomplished to keep a bloated federal government at its current size, which is about twice as big as it was when Bill Clinton left office about nine years ago.

Whatever happened to getting rid of the Department of Education and Department of Energy? Who has a proposal to get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development? Are any politicians even talking about getting rid of the Department of Transportation? Or Department of Commerce? I could go on, but I’m already getting suicidally depressed."

It was only 30 years ago Reagan called to end the Dept. of Energy and Dept. of Education. Other than Ron Paul, I don't know of anybody in power who has done so since.

Welfare to the states is unconstitutional as well.

Any VAT tax won't be used for deficit reduction. Don't even fall for that. We need to stop the VAT tax.

This is what you get when you unionize government agents.

"The Las Vegas Sun reports that the often fit and buff firefighters call in sick at twice the rate as rank-and-file county employees and four times more than managers.

Maybe it has something to do with union rules requiring that replacement firefighters be paid time-and-a-half when they fill in for a sick worker.

The Sun article singles out Battalion Chief Renee Dilligham who “worked about 75 percent of her scheduled 2,912 hours in fiscal 2009. Her sick leave plus vacation totaled 28 shifts, or about three months away from work. So she worked about 2,200 hours.

“But even after being sick for 382 hours and on vacation for 292 hours, Dillingham managed to pull down an extra 1,199 hours of ‘callback’ pay — overtime pay, plus a contribution to the employee’s retirement fund. Callback pay amounted to about $80,000, almost equal to Dillingham’s $93,144 base salary.”"

What a scam.

Let's hope Obama's super-train dream never gets off the ground.

The Post Office has 600,000 employees. I think Obama pushed the federal payroll to 2.1 million not counting Post Office, so that's 2.7 million federal employees. And they're unionized. And they make $83,000 a year on average. That's unbelievable.


EDUCATION:


Federally funded education researcher bravely calls for the federal government to stop funding education research.

"The reasons for keeping the federal government out of education policy research should be obvious to everyone not blinded by the desire to keep eating at the trough.  First, the federal government develops and advocates for particular education policies, so it has a conflict of interest in evaluating those policies.  Even when those evaluations are outsourced to supposedly independent evaluators, they are never truly independent.  The evaluation business is a repeat-play game, so everyone understands that they cannot alienate powerful political forces too much without risking future evaluation dollars.  The safe thing to conclude in those circumstances is that the evidence is unclear about the effectiveness of a policy but future research is needed, which, not surprisingly, is what many federally funded evaluations find.

Unfortunately, political influence in education policy research is often more direct and explicit than the implicit distortions of a repeat-play game.  Every federally funded evaluation with which I am familiar has been subject to at least some, subtle political influence. 

...

In addition to being politically influenced, federally funded research is almost always overly expensive.  The cost of federal education policy research is many-fold more expensive than that research has to be.  There are several federal evaluations where the cost of the evaluation rivals the annual cost of the program being evaluated.

Beyond being politically distorted and cost-inefficient, a whole lot of federally funded research is really awful.  In particular, I am thinking of the work of the federally funded regional research labs.  For every useful study or review they release, there must be hundreds of drek.  The regional labs are so bad that the Department of Education has been trying to eliminate them from their budget for years.  But members of Congress want the pork, so they keep the regional labs alive."

These argument apply to all research. The federal government should not fund any research for these reasons and outright corruption - not listed by this author for obvious reasons.

California continues to go down the tubes.

Obama's home weatherization plan has failed too.

REGULATION:

A new consumer protection agency would create more problems. The only successful regulator of an economy is free competition. It takes 300 million Americans to regulate our complex economy. A handful of bureaucrats only create problems.


HEALTH CARE:


Lew Rockwell calls for Obama to be consistent and order life insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions - in this case death - with no price penalty so families can buy and cash in on life insurance after a loved one dies. I wish a reporter would ask Obama something like this.


Cato compares Obama's newfound openness to including Republican ideas in Obamacare to sterilizing a needle before a lethal injection.


Yet another article points out that Obama is asking Democrats to trust him.

"In private pitches to Democrats, President Barack Obama says he will persuade Congress to pass his health care overhaul even if it kills him and even if he has to ask deeply distrustful lawmakers to trust him on a promise the White House doesn't have the power to keep.

...

Some answers, however, rely more on faith than fact. Confronting party unrest on his left and right, Obama is calling for political courage, citing historic opportunities and essentially saying "trust me" in areas inherently murky, uncertain and out of his control.

...

Obama is asking his party's House moderates to have a different kind of faith. The party's strategy calls for House Democrats, despite many misgivings, to go along with a health care bill the Senate passed in December. Obama would sign it into law, but senators would promise to make numerous changes demanded by House Democrats. Because Senate Democrats no longer have the numbers to stop GOP filibusters, the changes would have to be made under rules that require only simple majority votes.

Republicans are playing on House Democrats' suspicions of their Senate colleagues, saying Senate Democrats may not keep their end of the bargain. The taunts often hit their marks."

This seems unusually honest from the mainstream media. What's going on here?


Obama's newest health care oppression plan is not meaningfully different than the others.


This is another uninspiring piece from Mark Steyn, but he makes one good point I haven't seen anywhere else, and I hadn't made myself yet:

"Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?""

Republicans wouldn't roll back Obamacare even if they could, and they'd have to get 60 seats in the Senate to do it if they wanted to. I don't think that's going to happen soon. Republicans don't roll back anything. They're as corrupt as Democrats. They advance their careers by using government power to buy votes just like Democrats. Rolling back government is inconsistent with those things. Don't buy the hype. Steyn must be depressed or something.


GLOBAL WARMING:


If you don't support tax and trade, John Kerry thinks you're against America. John Kerry thinks taxes are what made America great. I'm against John Kerry and tax and trade. Shouldn't he be out hunting for a richer widow to marry?


Global warming frauds continue to push their case so they can get rich with our tax money, but this is what passes for science in today's corrupted world:

"Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century."

"Very likely". He might as well come out say that no data supports his opinion (none does), so it's meaningless. Here's what he bases that opinion on:

"There is no question that natural causes, such as changes in energy from the sun, natural cycles and volcanoes, continue to affect temperature today. Human activity has also increased the amounts of tiny, light-scattering particles within the atmosphere. But despite years of intensive observations of the Earth system, no one has been able to propose a credible alternative mechanism that can explain the present-day warming without heat-trapping gases produced by human activities."

So after admitting that natural causes change the climate, and that he has no data to show that man-made CO2 is warming the planet, he claims since scientists don't understand the exact heating mechanism, it must be man-made CO2. With that kind of reasoning, it could just as likely be a demon trying to destroy the planet. These guys are pathetic. Natural causes are perfectly capable of explaining the climate change we've seen. Solar activity and the changes in the Atlantic and Pacific decadal currents are enough to explain it. But scientists don't have the systems in place to understand that complex system, gather data and show it. But they will.


WAR ON DRUGS:


More lies government told you about drugs:

"The data is remarkable: 8.5 million Americans have tried crack, but there are only 359,000 regular users. (The government defines "regular use" as using a drug at least once in the past 30 days.) More than 12 million tried meth, but only 314,000 still take it. The story is similar for heroin. Most people who try these "instantly additive drugs" do not get "hopelessly addicted." They give them up on their own."

So much for the addiction problem. And just like in prohibition, people use harder, more dangerous drugs because they're illegal, supply is inconsistent and they fear getting caught.

"But on the news, we constantly see people whose lives have been destroyed by drugs. Sullum says: "When you have prohibition, the most visible users are the ones who are most antisocial, most screwed up. They're the ones who come to the attention of the police. ... People who present themselves as experts on drug use because they come into contact with all these addicts have a very skewed perspective because they are seeing a biased sample. The people who are well adjusted, responsible users are invisible.""

Of course.


Cracking down on raw milk speakeasies.


WAR:


Infamous American al Qaeda terrorist captured in Pakistan. He should be tried in a civilian court for treason. Let's see if Obama can get this one right. Another option is Pakistan can deal with him according to Pakistani laws first, but I doubt the US will allow that to happen.


Terrorists kill 38 in dozens of attacks meant to disrupt Iraqi elections. You can't help but feel happy for Iraqi voters.


Obama ignores surveillance abuses.

"Still more incredibly, investigators sought records pertaining to more than 3,500 telephone numbers without any process at all, simply requesting records verbally or via scrawled Post-It notes. Many of those data requests were either unrelated to any authorized investigation or had to do with domestic criminal investigations -- meaning they could not legally have been made via NSLs. Despite this, the letters would routinely, and falsely, claim that an NSL or subpoena was already being sought."

The individuals who falsified these requests should be prosecuted for abrogation of rights under color of law.

"When the OIG interviewed the agents responsible, it found that "no one could satisfactorily explain their actions," instead offering only "unpersuasive excuses." When supervisors attempted to implement a database to track these requests, agents revolted, refusing to use the new system "because they did not want the responsibility for inputting the data," which suggests either an extreme aversion to clerical work or an awareness that something not quite Hoyle was afoot. When information obtained by these extralegal means was later cited in warrant applications to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the applicants falsely claimed that legitimate NSLs or subpoenas had been used."

This is a perfect opportunity to get rid of these bad agents and put them behind bars where they belong.


POLITICS:


President Obama promised to put bills on the internet for five days before he signed them. I don't know what that's all about. It seems meaningless to me (why do we care if he's going to sign them anyway?) but Cato has been counting, and so far Obama has kept his promise only seven out of 142 times. Obama is Clintonesque in that way. He'll promise anything having no intention of keeping his promise.


Ron Paul likes to talk about how young adults receive his message, but this poll shows us what the majority if young adults really think, and it's not pretty.

"Two-thirds of Gen Y voted for Barack Obama, a candidate just half of their elders backed, the largest generational disparity recorded in 40 years of polling. Millennials "are significantly less critical of government" than their predecessors, Pew says. They're the only one of the four generations polled in which a majority says "the government should do more to solve problems.""

That's scary. How could they have been so blind when they were kids? Government schools. More government cannot make the country socially liberal. They need to get over that fantasy. More government can only lead to more oppression.


Obama wanted to be transformational like Reagan, but Reagan had an agenda that aligned with the majority of Americans. Obama doesn't.


LOCAL:


Lawyers suspect favoritism in juvenile court appointments. You can't sneak one past those guys.

"Two of the five — Swift and Jeffrey Livingston — each made $350 campaign contributions to Judge Tony Capizzi in 2004. Campaign finance records for the last time Kuntz raised money to beat an opponent are no longer available, according to the Montgomery County Board of Elections."

Isn't that convenient.


MISC:


The Constitution fails to protect property rights. This is a pretty egregious failure, and the author makes the case it was intentionally left out by Hamilton and the Federalists.

"A government that has the unlimited power to seize the property of its citizens can afford to be magnanimous when it comes to free speech. Yet, for the citizen who no longer owns the fruits of his own labor, the right to complain makes him no less a slave."

The Founders may have counted on representative government to protect our property, but that hasn't worked out very well.


Cato knocks down a straw man regarding government marriage. Government shouldn't ignore marriage. It should stop regulating it, defining it and forcing it on people who don't want to get married (common law). Government should enforce the voluntarily entered into marriage contract - nothing else.


History of Byzantine Empire provides lessons we could use today. The contrast of the bureaucratic CIA to Byzantine spies is especially enlightening and supports my claim that our intelligence services should be privatized.


You may think there's lots of diversity on TV because of all the different cable stations, but they're all owned by six companies. That's why when you look at your 157 channels, there's nothing you want to watch on.


How economic freedom empowered so many Chileans to survive their 8.8 magnitude earthquake while lack of economic freedom doomed so many Haitians to die in their 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

"The Chilean quake was nearly 500 times stronger than the one in Haiti, yet Chile has suffered only a fraction of the deaths. The media blather about strict government enforcement of building codes, but that misses the point. Once again, George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux is on the mark:

With a market-oriented economy, per-capita income in Chile is more than ten times higher than is per-capita income in Haiti.  One result is that Chileans demand and can afford better-constructed buildings - buildings designed by more-skilled architects, made of stronger materials, and erected (and maintained) by better-trained and more highly specialized workers.

Chile has - and enforces - tough building codes because it can afford them.  Building codes of equal stringency in Haiti would be dead letters because Haitians simply cannot afford the level of safety that Chileans now enjoy.

Credit Chile's low death toll not to what its politicians do, but rather to what they don't do: meddle excessively in the market.

Per-capita income in Chile is $14,900, versus $1,300 in Haiti.  Economic freedom saves lives. The ultimate tragedy in Haiti was not the earthquake. It was Haiti’s lack of economic freedom. That tragedy plays out every day in much of the world."

Economic freedom saves lives, and we're going the wrong way.


Herschel Telescope identifies organic molecules in Orion.


Our highways are falling apart because Congress used the trust fund as a piggy bank. The solution is privatize the highways.


Alice in Wonderland as mathematical satire.


This is a better essay by Steyn contrasting the wests nanny states supposedly protecting us from ourselves with their inability to defend us from actual threats.


Four out of five people around the world think internet access is a human right. Give me a break.