Free kibbles

EDUCATION:

Thanks to government domination of funding for college students, college has turned into a scam, driving the price sky-high. Many students get a four year degree, go deep in debt, then can only find a job they could have gotten without the degree.

HEALTH CARE:

The rhythmic nature of Obama's name worked for him during the campaign. Now that he's been exposed it works against him. The link to this article trying to explain economics calls his supporter Obamasites. Too funny.

"Consider what would happen if car insurance worked the way health insurance does. What if it was determined that gasoline was a right, and should be covered by your car insurance policy? Perhaps every gas station would have to hire a small army of bureaucrats to file reimbursement claims to insurance companies for every tank of gas sold! What would that kind of system do to the costs of running a gas station? How would that affect the prices of both gasoline and car insurance? Yet this is exactly the type of system Congress is now expanding in health insurance. In a free market system, health insurance would serve as true insurance against serious injuries or illness, not as a convoluted system of third-party payments for routine doctor visits and every minor illness."

Great analogy.

GLOBAL WARMING:

The arctic ice cap is growing and has been growing. Debunking the myth of man-made CO2 causing runaway global warming. The opening quote from the Washington Post 1922 could have been written yesterday.

"The Arctic is apparently highly sensitive to changing climatic conditions, regardless of their origin. Scientists know the region was toastier from 1920–40 than it is now. They also know it was significantly warmer in the more distant past. Blaming any of these past warmings on man would strain the very limits of credulity. These changes are cyclical, and often pronounced, as the introductory passage strongly suggests. The point being, the late twentieth century warming was in no way a singular event worthy of mass hysterics."

Alarmism never goes out of style, especially when papers are losing readers every day. You would think it would occur to them maybe they could stop the bleeding if they started reporting honestly about the issues that matter to their audience, but no.

"Imagine if you will the atmosphere as one hundred cases of one-liter bottles, or 2,400 one-liter bottles. Out of those one hundred cases, ninety-nine aren’t even greenhouse gases and are therefore irrelevant to our purposes. Just one case out of one hundred actually represents greenhouse gases. Out of that one case that represents greenhouse gases, only one bottle out of twenty-four represents carbon dioxide – the other twenty-three are mostly water vapor. Out of that one bottle that represents carbon dioxide, only about fifty ml represents mankind’s annual contribution, about a shot glass worth. So out of our theoretical atmosphere of 2,400 liters, we’re responsible for about a shot glass worth of CO2 emissions. Or if you imagine the atmosphere as a 100-story building, man’s CO2 concentration amounts to the linoleum on the first floor.

Yet this piddling amount is predicted to send this lugubrious ball on a gadarene rush towards a runaway global warming that will bring industrial man to his condign ruination.

Color me skeptical. I contend that if the climate was that sensitive to moderate increases in a trace gas essential to life, we probably would not be here today. The whole darn thing probably would have jumped the rails long ago. Yet here we are. I simply do not believe we stand so precariously on the devil’s shovel."

That's exactly right. We know that CO2 levels have been as much as 16 times higher in the past (he says 25x), yet here we are today. Imagine if every time in the last 4.5 billion years some natural event increased atmospheric CO2, a positive feedback mechanism increased the greenhouse effect. It would produce runaway heating and the Earth would look like Venus. We wouldn't be here to be defrauded by Al Gore. Man-made CO2 is not a problem because the planet has feedback mechanisms that mitigate any greenhouse effects.

POLICE STATE:

Gerald Ford authorized warrantless wiretapping during the Cold War.

Cities shorten yellow light times so red-light cameras will ticket more motorists. Government is the greediest entity ever created by man.

How the left loves the FBI during liberal administrations and hates it during conservative ones. The right seems to always love it.

WAR:

Several reason why we should abolish the CIA. The CIA can't spy.

"The first lesson is that the CIA has never been able to spy on America's potential enemies. The CIA was caught completely by surprise by every major development: the Soviet A-bomb, the Soviet H-bomb, the Korean War, the arrival of missiles in Cuba... right up to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which the CIA absolutely denied would happen even as it was underway. A few years later the CIA turned around and stated that absolutely for sure, Saddam had WMDs. Dick Cheney was presumably lying about the WMDs... Weiner is pretty sure the CIA just didn't know."

Not to mention the Indian and Pakistani nuclear bombs.

"The Agency's record on economic intelligence is similar. The CIA was still reporting that the USSR's economy was growing at a whopping 6% per year, even as that sickly economy collapsed in real life and the Berlin Wall fell. According to the CIA figures (which Weiner says they obtained by just taking the Soviet Five-Year Plan propaganda releases and tweaking them), apparently the USSR had solved the problem of calculation in a Socialist economy."

The CIA can't overthrow dictatorships.

"The CIA has served as a great shield to the dictatorships of the world, by recruiting people who wanted to oppose tyranny and turning them over to the respective secret police agencies. Thousands of anti-communist Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Tibetans, Germans, Hungarians, Cubans etc. etc. were parachuted to certain death by the CIA, year after year and decade after decade. And decade after decade the CIA covered up its failures from the American people, and kept the money flowing.

The few covert operation "successes" the CIA boasts were not about overthrowing totalitarian regimes. The CIA did "succeed" in installing dictators in Greece, Guatemala, Iran, and other places where CIA money was sufficient to buy enough thugs. Of course when these regimes finally fall, as in Iran, they leave the people who lived under them permanently embittered against the US."

They've installed quite a few dictatorships and overthrown elected governments, but that's backwards from America's principles. The CIA is only secret to Americans.

"Of course the world is a dangerous place, and we need defenses. But the CIA has never been an effective part of America's defenses. The military detests the CIA for its refusal to turn over what little intelligence it has during wartime. CIA ineptitude and coverups have left US Presidents unknowingly blind during crises, thinking that they knew what was going on when they didn't.

The CIA creates enemies in places where we had none, while it gives our real enemies more ability to spy on us (and on their own dissidents) than they would have without it."

What else would you expect from a giant, unaccountable bureaucracy? We should abolish the CIA and redesign our intelligence agencies from scratch making them small and accountable by leveraging competing private sector intelligence firms.

I find it hard to believe that the US is going to run a covert op into Cuba to get Castro's records. Peter Phelps died.

Three car bombs kill 30 in Baghdad. We should get our troops out of there because Iraq's internal affairs are none of our business, but when we do, the violence will increase, not decrease, like those idiots who blamed us for the violence claim.

Pat Buchanan describes what would happen if we went to war with Iran. If this was the only way to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, it would be worth it, but we still have no evidence Iran's weapons program is anything but peaceful plus this isn't the only way to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. How come we always have to declare total war on a country? Is it ego or is it part of the character of our dangerously warped political class? Israel destroyed one reactor to stop Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. They attacked one nuclear site in Syria and Syria didn't notice until the next day. But the US has to wage total war. Baloney. We should stay out of it, and if an attack becomes the only option, Israel will protect itself with a much more limited strike than we would employ.

MISC:

I'm always happen to see science catching up with me. I've long postulated that near death experiences were a biological response to death which evolved to calm the family members and friends of the dying person. The living have to keep on reproducing, so nature evolved a mechanism to make death of a loved one less traumatic. Now a scientist postulates a similar mechanism to describe heaven. They should have called me up a couple a decades ago. They'd be further along.

Government to discard 71.5 million doses of swine flu vaccine that it purchased by taking money from us by force and doling out to a politically connected drug company. Or maybe they'll just gin up hysteria over swine flu again to coerce people into using them. Have you ever heard of a private sector firm discarding 71.5 million doses of a drug because nobody wanted it? I didn't think so.

Here's why we have to deal with all this damage to our economy done by government.

"Like every other group, academics like to exert influence and feel important. Few scholars in the social sciences and humanities are content just to observe, describe, and explain society; most want to improve society and are naive enough to believe that they could do so if only they had sufficient influence. The existence of a huge government offers academics the real possibility of living out their reformist fantasies."

So-called experts inevitably think they know better than everybody else (think Ben Bernanke), and they can't help but try and engineer our economy which is our society to meet their preferences. And it's doomed to fail. These people are not God. They cannot understand the complexity that drives a person to want one thing one minute and other thing the next minute times 300 million people, and they fail to understand their limits. Thus every intervention, each of which is a threat of violence or violence against the people, by even the most benevolent social engineers creates problems. Then they have to perform another intervention intended to alleviate those problems, but that intervention creates worse problems, and so on in a downward spiral of totalitarianism. But government is never benevolent, it's corrupt and self-serving, so the problems are far worse.

"Of all the policies that we discussed, one stands out in my mind — if for no other reason than because it is so thoroughly counterintuitive. I asked him to name the one reform that he was most proud of. "I abolished the collection of statistics," he replied. Sir John believed that statistics are dangerous, because they enable social engineers of all stripes to justify state intervention in the economy."

Since government statistics are invariably corrupt and self-serving, we should put an end to government statistics.

Walter Williams explains how government divides, and bigger government divides further until it inspires violence.

"Different Americans have different and often intense preferences for all kinds of goods and services. Some of us have strong preferences for beer and distaste for wine while others have the opposite preference -- strong preferences for wine and distaste for beer. Some of us hate three-piece suits and love blue jeans while others love three-piece suits and hate blue jeans. When's the last time you heard of beer drinkers in conflict with wine drinkers, or three-piece suit lovers in conflict with lovers of blue jeans? It seldom if ever happens because beer and blue jean lovers get what they want. Wine and three-piece suit lovers get what they want and they all can live in peace with one another.

            It would be easy to create conflict among these people. Instead of free choice and private decision-making, clothing and beverage decisions could be made in the political arena. In other words, have a democratic majority-rule process to decide what drinks and clothing that would be allowed. Then we would see wine lovers organized against beer lovers, and blue jean lovers organized against three-piece suit lovers. Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena. Why? The prime feature of political decision-making is that it's a zero-sum game. One person's gain is of necessity another person's loss. That is if wine lovers won, beer lovers lose. As such, political decision-making and allocation of resources is conflict enhancing while market decision-making and allocation is conflict reducing. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict."

Every action government takes divides the people into winners and losers. Every action harms some people and benefits others. Every action creates conflict. The bigger government is, the more conflict it creates. That's why fascism fosters racism, political violence and secret police actions, and that's the point we've reached because of Obamacare. And Williams get right to that point.

"Interestingly enough, the very people in our society who protest the loudest against human conflict and violence are the very ones calling for increased government resource allocation. These people fail to recognize or even wonder why our nation, with people of every race, ethnic group and religious group, has managed to live together relatively harmoniously. In their countries of origin, the same ethnic, racial and religious groups have been trying to slaughter one another for centuries. A good part of the answer is that in the United States, there was little to be gained from being a Frenchman, a German, a Jew, a Protestant or a Catholic. The reason it did not pay was because for most of our history, government played a small part in our lives. When there's significant government allocation of resources, the most effective means of organizing for the gains are those proven most divisive, such as race, ethnicity, religion and region."

Our country is in dire straits.

You might be a statist if... Some of these are pretty good.

"You think that a person who happens to show great skill in one narrow area, such as public speaking, is qualified to make decisions about the lives of others across many areas, as if the fastest runner in a tribe is automatically qualified to be Chief."

"You hate greedy corporations, but think an organization such as a government – itself beholden to (and factually a horribly-mutated form of) a greedy corporation – will protect you from (… wait for it …) greedy corporations."

Government really is a grossly degenerate form of corporation. Both are run by elected officials, but governments only allow us two choices. Anybody can be elected to a corporate board. Both ostensibly operate for the benefit of the elected officials, but if corporate officers don't do a good job, they get ousted unlike elected officials. The main differences are that government is funded by taking money from people by force whereas corporations are funded by selling a product or service that people pay for in a system of voluntary exchange. And participating in a corporation is voluntary, whereas being a subject of the government is not.

"You think the land mass – and the people inhabiting it – on one side of an imaginary line in the sand called a border, are objectively better than the land mass – and the people inhabiting it – on the other side of that imaginary line in the sand."

That one's off base. For well over a century, because Americans valued freedom and individual rights and anybody could go from pauper to riches based on their own abilities, the US attracted the most hardworking, self-reliant people in the world. The US had a superior population to other countries because of it. This is the root of what is commonly called American exceptionalism. But not anymore. Our welfare state today poisons Americans born here and attracts the welfare rejects from other countries as much as hardworking, self-reliant people. The welfare state has degraded our population. The good news is that ending the welfare state will turn that around almost instantly.

"You think the moral nature of theft, murder, slavery, assault, and kidnapping change dependent upon the size of the group that authorizes these actions."

Great finale.


Recommendations for a natural medicine chest. This is pretty interesting.