Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Oliver Stone calls for nationalization of the film industry. Oops, I mean the oil industry.

REGULATION:

Here comes regulations against looks discrimination. I'm looking forward to Hollywood implementing that, but why stop there? Why not height discrimination? Or hair color discrimination?

Government increase regulation of baby products to "protect the children." Government regulations don't protect anybody but irresponsible manufacturers, retailers, bureaucrats and politicians. It would nice and effective if manufacturers and retailers took responsibility for their own products and third party, private sector regulatory agencies provided a watchdog. That's how you do effective regulation.

The King Hates Gold. Quoted in its entirety.

"The late Burt Blumert, coin dealer, libertarian intellectual and activist, and my best friend, used to say, “The king hates gold.” He meant that all governments fear and despise independence on the part of the tax victims, and demand that we use only their funny money. Financial privacy is despised as well. As the state enlarges its security apparatus, and secret classifications for itself, it seeks to strip us naked, with its scanners at the airports and secret edicts buried in 2,000-page bills. It turns out that gold dealers and customers are specificallytargeted by a provision of the health-care legislation, along with all small businesses. The fascist state–including our social democratic variant–can’t stand small, independent business people, a prejudice shared by the corporate oligarchy. Making every economic entity–business, charity, etc.–file a 1099 on every entity it does more than $600 in business with, is an incomprehensible burden. But in the case of small gold dealers especially, this is death dealing. Not only in the paper work, but in the verification. Even jail beckons for a tricked dealer. The result will be increased concentration, less competition, less freedom, and fewer people owning precious metals. But then, the plebs shouldn’t own gold anyway. That is for our betters. Forget your declining living standard. Focus on the nation and its eternal greatness. One people, one empire, one president, hail victory!"

I hadn't thought about this. Gold is $1,191 an ounce today. So every time a gold coin collector flips a coin, he has to send a 1099.

""Coin dealers not only buy for their inventory from other dealers, but also with great frequency from the public," Piret said. "Most other types of businesses will have a limited number of suppliers from which they buy their goods and products for resale.""

"With spot market prices for gold at nearly $1,200 an ounce, Heller estimates that he'll be filling out between 10,000 and 20,000 tax forms per year after the new law takes effect."

Ouch. This does hit gold dealers especially hard. They are required to take the name and info including tax ID from all these customers. That means many people won't bother selling the gold because they don't want to give it up. This will put many out of business.

""Large corporations have whole divisions to handle such transaction paperwork but for a small business, which doesn't have the manpower, this is yet another brick on their back," Lungren said in a statement e-mailed to ABCNews.com. "Everyone agrees that small businesses are job creators and the engine which drives the American economy. I am dumfounded that this Administration is doing all it can to make it more difficult for businesses to succeed rather than doing all it can to help them grow.""

Stop being dumbfounded and figure it out: they're intentionally trying to destroy our country.

I've often claimed that Republicans don't really want to get rid of Obamacare, they just want to share in the looting. John Boehner doesn't exactly admit that, but he tells us exactly what's going to happen if Republicans take back the House:

"“I guarantee there will be a bill on the floor that will repeal the healthcare bill and replace it with common sense reforms,” Boehner promised, if they indeed take back the House.

But wait, said Roger in Hamilton, Republicans will be able to accomplish little while Barack Obama is still president. “No matter what you guys pass, Obama will veto it, right?” he said.

Not necessarily, Boehner responded. He said there is bipartisan support to repeal cuts to Medicare, and if they can’t do away with healthcare reforms, they can cut the funding to hire people to run it."

They can't win the fund-cutting battle politically, but they'll increase the money for Medicare to share in the looting. I'm sure Republicans will resist some of Obama's agenda, but overall we're going to get bipartisan big-government. Lovely.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

I recently linked an article reporting that the Dept. of Energy had suspended funds to CRU in the wake (over six month later) of climategate. That article reported that the DOE paid about $200,000 a year to CRU. Investigation of the climategate emails reveal that the DOE in fact paid significantly more money to CRU than that. Another government lie exposed.

The Senate climate bill is once again on hold, but don't believe for a second that it's dead. I bet Democrats decided to try and pass it in the dark of night during the lame duck session after the election. Don't count on anything being dead until this Congress is finally gone, and not even then.

Map of the cold spell in South America. Wow. Good luck finding out about this record cold in the news.

Satellite data clearly shows that so far 2010 is not as warm as 1998, so don't fall for the baloney about this being the warmest year on record so far.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Small pot growers in Oakland try to use government to stop large scale pot farms from competing. It's seductive to think people who claim to want freedom want freedom for all, but that's not the case. As long as government has the power to protect some businesses from competition, business owners will try and capture that power to promote their interests, and the interest with the biggest money will almost always win. In a year or two, Oakland will create some regulations that burden the small pot growers and help the big pot farms.

WAR:

British minority party coalition leader puts British PM Cameron on the spot by claiming the Iraq war was illegal.

POLITICS:

Black USDA supervisor caught on tape speaking at NAACP event reporting she did not want to help an struggling farmer because he was white so she turned him over to a lawyer of his own kind (white) forced to resign.

"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn't give him the full force of what I could do.

I did enough so that when — so I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had attended some of the trainings that we had provided because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer.

So I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him. That's when it was revealed to me that the job is about poor, versus those who have. And not so much about white — it is about white and black, but it's not — you know, it opened my eyes. Because I took him to one of his own."

Good for Obama. Bigots like her should suffer the consequences of their bigotry. It's tempting to think she learned her lesson, but this speech and the words she chose make it clear she did not. The backlash from the left must have been powerful because now the administration has apologized for firing her.

I always enjoy how well Republicans pretend to support limited government when they're in the minority. It gives me a good belly laugh.

MEDIA:

Vast left-wing media conspiracy exposed. I know that sounds like hyperbole and a rip-off of Hillary Clinton, but it's neither. Apparently Andrew Breitbart got a hold of the Journolist files, and this article uncovers one issue, the issue of how the media intentionally covered up Barack Obama's relationship with virulent black supremacist Rev. Wright.

"According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage."

We always knew this was the case, but now we've got it documented.

The Washington Post's Top Secret expose exposes how much wealth is confiscated and transfered to top secret bureaucrats. I like it when government organs go after each other.

MISC:

The non-violent black market in information can only happen because information - online movies, music, etc. - is not a scarce resource. Unlike lumber, salt and cars, everybody can use online information at the same time. The government's attempts to create artificial scarcity of information through patents and copyright are doomed to fail.

High praise for new book Libertarianism Today.

Scientists discover largest known star with a mass 265 times more than the sun. That's going to make for one huge explosion when it burns out.

Interesting tidbit in essay calling Thoreau the first American libertarian:

"At any rate, young David Henry Thorough or Thor′-o went off to Harvard in 1833 at the age of 16. He graduated four years later, in 1837, at the age of 20, having taken a year off to teach grammar school in the small town of Canton, Massachusetts, around 15 miles southwest of Boston, probably to earn some money to help ease the burden on his parents, who were paying for his matriculation at Harvard."

If not for government's monopoly on our schools, this would be the norm today. None if the dumbing down or infantilization of the people, but teens working hard and getting a far superior education at a far younger age. Thoreau understood the nature of government:

""This American government," he wrote, "never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.… Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.""

A statement of fact.

Overuse of disinfectants creating super-duper-bugs.

40 ton whale breaches, lands on sailboat and breaks mast. Yikes.

How can lithium in one cloud be composed of bosons while lithium in the other cloud is composed of fermions? Something is wrong with this description.

An astronomy book written in a language nobody knows or can decipher? It might be a centuries old hoax. Or it might have been coded to keep the author from being excommunicated.

Marijuana may prevent Alzheimer's. I thought marijuana caused memory loss.