Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Democrats propose borrowing more money to bail out municipal pensions to buy votes from labor unions. It may seem that Democrats don't need to buy the votes of labor unions, but they do. Aristocrats have to buy the same votes over and over every election.

Democrats are intentionally not going to pass a budget this year even though they're obligated to. This is dereliction of duty, but they're going to do it because they know the people won't punish them for, but the people would punish them for proposing a budget raises taxes and spending, which their next budget will. Punish them anyway.

REGULATION:

Republicans caved on financial reform so we're going to see oppressive new regulations that put some companies out of business and make other companies bigger and more irresponsible than ever. Once again the politicians and their Wall Street cronies win and everybody else loses. Bill passes.

EDUCATION:

Fraud at Head Start centers. Of course. Government is corruption, so corruption in government shouldn't be news. A non-corrupt government program would be news.

GLOBAL WARMING:

After climategate broke, I predicted that global cooling would once again become the bogeyman and that the same frauds who promoted the global warming alarmism would promote global cooling alarmism. This headline starts the process:

"Global Cooling Is Coming -- and Beware the Big Chill, Scientist Warns"

At least this guy is right that the planet is cooling, just like it's cooled millions of times before. Unfortunately solar cycle 24, after finally starting up, seems to have shut down again, so we may suffer a serious cold spell.

"“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists. This, he says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell from 2060 to 2090."

I doubt the cyclical nature of this will make it into the headlines or mainstream consciousness. The problem is we know from the climate record we're on the verge of entering a new ice age. It may happen tomorrow. It may happen 1,000 years from now, we have no way of knowing for sure, so the opportunity for alarmism is much greater than with global warming. Won't that be fun?

"Easterbrook made several stunning claims about the effects of the coming cold. There will be twice as many people killed by extreme cold than by extreme heat, he predicted, and global food production will suffer because of the shorter, cooler growing seasons and bad weather during harvest seasons."

These are not stunning claims. I've posted them numerous times. Warming is good for life. Cooling is bad. Look for Al Gore to jump on this bandwagon and throw the global warming frauds under the bus soon.

"Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) also points to a warming trend. The agency recently reported that global land and ocean surface temperatures for the first four months of 2010 were the warmest it had on record."

That's because of el Nino, which just dissipated. Sea temperatures are now plunging.

"Based on new analysis of ice cores from Greenland to Antarctica, Easterbrook said global temperatures rose and fell from 9 to 15 degrees in a century or less -- swings that he said were "astonishing.""

And they happened naturally, like the climate changes we're experiencing now.

POLICE STATE:

John Stossel on police seizing property.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

One a government as anti-American as our government would reward temporary work visas and drivers licenses to arrested illegal immigrants and put them on a path to citizenship. Do you think any Americans who get arrested get rewarded for it?

The right pulls those false rights claims too. Some woman from Arizona is saying the people of Arizona have a right to feel safe. No they don't. There is no such right. This is like the non-right to health care - the claim is that others can be forced to provide health care and to provide a feeling of safety. Both are false.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The sinking of a ship by torpedo is not an act of war? We have no business being involved in this, but South Korea should consider it an act of war.

POLITICS:

Dont be fooled by the focus on Republican class of 1994. All politicians are corrupt. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only different between the class of 1994 and any other class is the class of 1994 was huge, so in raw numbers, it has more aristocrats caught in scandals. This is propaganda to scare people from repeating the Republican wave of 1994 in 2010.

How come we never heard about the primary results in Oregon? Maybe it's because the Republicans nominated a real scientist who is adamantly outspoken against the global warming fraud.

Everybody can find something about Rand Paul to love. He's not principled enough for me (where does this self-identified constitutional conservative find a power to fund education in the Constitution?), but I think he'll be the second least bad member of Congress after his dad. I think this supposed controversy about Rand Paul's civil rights act comments is a government-media created story, but they made him say he would have voted for the civil rights act even though it violated the natural right of freedom of association and property rights. They've already got him compromising his principles. He's been corrupted, and he hasn't even been elected yet.

LOCAL:

Do we really need the EPA to show up for this fire?. I'm sure we have enough expertise locally to handle it. This sounds like typical government overreaction, trying to justify their jobs, to me.

"The fire comes two days after a bomb disposal unit from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base removed an artillery shell from the scrap yard. Some workers found the shell, which was 8 inches in diameter and stood 30 inches tall.

The discovery of the shell closed about a half-a-dozen blocks of East First Street for more than four hours."

Oh come on. It's an artillery shell, not a 2,000 pound bomb. All Dayton schools ordered to shut windows. What are we? The home of the irresponsible over-reactors? These exaggerated reactions are government's way of scaring us into submission.

MISC:

I don't agree with Reason (or Scalia and Thomas) about the originalist interpretation of the Constitution here. Cruel and unusual is clearly subjective unlike most of the Constitution. It seems to me the original intent was that cruel and unusual would change over time. Freedom of speech will not. Well regulated militia will not. Very little of the Constitution was written to change with time, but cruel and unusual was.

It's draw Mohammad day.

Real satellite images of oil spill show it's big, but not as big as doctored images.

Scientists create synthetic DNA, put it in a host cell, and the DNA then controlled the cell. It's not exactly artificial life, but it's a step in that direction.

Get ready for android based Google TV.

This explanation of the Marxist and environmental roots of modern environmentalism provides interesting insight into why leftists hate Christianity.
"Ancient pagans saw gods in the wilderness, animals, and the state. Modern environmentalism shares that belief, and adds – courtesy of a New Age-Hindu-California influence – a hatred of man and the Western religious tradition that places him at the center of creation.
...
Christianity, adds ecologist Lynn White, Jr., "bears an immense burden of guilt" for violating nature. It brought evil into the world by giving birth to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution."
I wish people would understand this:

"If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can't know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services."

A free market sets a price on everything, and that price carries the information about supply and demand we need to make intelligent decisions. Since free markets are by far the most effective system for allocating scarce resources, recycling is a waste of resources unless it's profitable. If you're not getting paid to recycle and you recycle anyway, you're wasting more resources than if you just threw your stuff away.

Microsoft has learned the lessons of the internet age - to capture marketshare, make your tool free. Software has no manufacturing costs and is virtually free to distribute. Trying to charge for something that is free, unless you have an extremely limited natural market, is doomed to fail because somebody else will give it away for free.

How governments use (more accurately manufacture) crises to seize more power, and how they're doing that right now.