Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Hugo Chavez's interventions in the market have led to 80,000 tons of food rotting in government warehouses while troops raid people suspected of hoarding food because there's not enough to feed everybody. This is an inevitable milestone on the road of increasing socialism.

ECONOMY:

Women replacing men.

"As the economy attempts to cleanse itself of the malinvestments of the decade-long bubble, jobs dominated by men have been sacrificed: construction, finance, and manufacturing. Hanna Rosin writes in the Atlantic, “The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.”

Rosin makes clear that whatever it is that men bring to the party is not needed anymore. Job categories dominated by women are expected to thrive in the coming years and women are earning half again as many college degrees as males."

The emasculation of the world continues.

REGULATION:

Great analogy for regulations:

"If a sports league set up a permanent office with a number of lawyers to write new regulations for its particular game (basketball, for instance), what do you think would happen after a few years? The lawyer-regulators would know that if they stopped writing new regulations, whether needed or not, they would be out of a job. Over time, the regulations would grow in both number and complexity, and the players would have a more and more difficult time understanding what the rules were and would increasingly, though unintentionally, run afoul of them. The fans also would no longer understand all the rules and probably would begin to lose interest in the game. Finally, the game would die under the weight of all the new regulations."

That's what regulations do to our economy too.

EDUCATION:

More great insight about government schools:

"What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

 Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated."

Government schools are designed to keep children from growing up and taking responsibility for their lives, leaving them dependent of government from cradle to grave. They're becoming more effective at this task every year.

"[Menchen's] article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern."

No wonder government schools look so much like military institutions.

"But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable.""

Government schools are in complete opposition to our founding principles of individual rights and personal responsibility. The excuse that everybody has a right to a proper education, another one of those phony rights claimed by the left, is used to strip Americans of their real rights and power as individuals. Naturally Republicans jumped right on board and tried to manipulate governments schools to their political advantage instead of abolishing them.

"I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

 Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole."

Sometimes you read things you didn't know before that are just obviously true. This is one of them.

"We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.""

Thanks, government.

"But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing."

That's a link I hadn't thought of.

"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up."

It would be better said that schools insure that adults continue as children.

"If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt."

I completely agree. Virtually every kid has the potential to be a genius but government schools oppress it out of them.

You would think that we would have learned of the folly of federal education standards with No Child Left Behind, but no.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Virginia prosecutor fights spurious claim that Michael Mann is immune from a fraud investigation because he's an academic. Obviously the judge should reject Mann's argument, but because this is all political, you never know.

Climate alarmist admits he was irresponsibly alarmist about arctic ice cover in 2007.

"In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it."

This is a good sign. Honest scientists who got caught up in the fraud are regaining their independence.

It looks like Democrats plan to pass tax and trade during the lame duck session. The congressional session should end with the election to stop damage like this.

In a big blow to wind farm supporters, the British government will pay owners of wind farms not to generate power when the wind is blowing because the power grid can't handle the intermittent surge in power.

Another scientist predicts we're heading into a Dalton Minimum-like solar period. That would mean terrible cold and starvation. I hope this isn't true.

ENERGY:

So Obama, Democrats, the media and everybody else beat up BP CEO Hayward so badly that he was removed as the point man for the oil spill, but now the press is beating him up for attending a yacht race. What's he supposed to do? Sit around all day and wring his hands? I had no sympathy for any big-wig or stockholder at BP since they've taken advantage of the political economy to loot us for decades just like every other big corporation and by doing so were able to take the irresponsible risks that led to this oil spill, but Obama, Democrats and their accomplice press, by behaving even worse than BP, have made me feel sympathy for them.

HEALTH CARE:

More and more Americans are leaving the US for health care because of our government dominated system.

"When you are paying your own money, it matters whether a procedure is $20,000 or $250, and it is not entirely uncommon for the price disparity between the U.S. and Costa Rica to approach that level. Why? It goes without saying that Costa Rica is far less regulated that the U.S. system: the public system is socialist and awful but the private system is really, genuinely, and almost thoroughly private. So what this physician and his partners are expecting is to pick up many customers from the U.S. who are coming to this country to get their medical care.

The irony is remarkable: Americans doing medical business with Americans in another country. As Richterpoints out, the final stage of socialism is emigration. The more the U.S. system is regulated and socialized and cartelized, the more we can expect sectors of this industry to emigrate in these strange ways."

Not to mention that means that fewer doctors are practicing in America, so the costs here are rising faster. Socialism is pushing more jobs overseas.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Since Portugal decriminalized all recreational drugs in 2001, crime and usage has fallen. I knew crime would fall, but I'm surprised usage fell.

POLICE STATE:

Cops showing their sadism by shooting dogs.

DHS already monitors the internet for terrorists, but because it does such a crappy job, it wants more money and more power to do so.

WAR:

Soldier apologizes for killing civilians and journalists in Apache attack that was leaked on Wikileaks. I doubt he would have apologized if he hadn't got caught. He also reports that soldiers in Iraq were ordered to kill every man, woman and child in the area with 360 degree fire if an American tripped an Iraqi mine. We've put fine men and women into a situation they can't win and ordered them to behave like monsters.

MEDIA:

Illustrating how we've turned the world upside-down to our detriment, Pravda links to lewrockewell.com.

LOCAL:

A bunch of busybodies and central planners are afraid that a giant Jesus statue undermines the image of Dayton they're trying to project. It's not their job to project an image for everybody in Dayton. Get over it. Stop pressuring people to conform. Project your own image and don't pretend to speak for anybody else.

Here's another poor kids story designed to make us feel bad about government spending cuts closing a community center. And of course kids have trouble coping with violence, so government must take money from people by force and do something with it.

MISC:

IP laws seem especially anachronistic in the information age. In nearly all aspects of society, we've embraced the fact that society functions better the more information it has, but IP laws are specifically designed to limit the flow of information, much like insider trading laws. We be best served to eliminate those anachronisms.

Libertarian sci-fi book Wither We.