Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Peter Schiff issues an "I told you so", listing many of his past predictions and showing how they've come true, and contrasts them with the so-called experts who are invariably wrong. Good for Schiff. Maybe more people will start listening to him instead of the idiots posing as experts.

TAX AND SPEND:

FEMA sends emergency crews up and down east coast in case hurricane Earl hits so they can retard efforts to save lives, clean up and rebuild.

Three waves of new taxes.

REGULATION:

Because they are heavily regulated by government, flight data recorders haven't advanced in 50 years. Government is the enemy of progress and humanity.

Whole Foods CEO flatly states Whole Foods will never do another merger because the FTC makes the process too difficult and too expensive.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Ben Bernanke is making outlandish, incorrect claims. Of course he is. Do you expect him to tell the truth? He's an aristocrat like any other, so he says whatever it takes to keep his phony-baloney job. More translation of Bernanke's remarks show how the Fed has really screwed us.

HEALTH CARE:

Empowered patients fed up with being railroaded by our government dominated health care system are pushing back against doctors for unnecessary tests.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Deepening La Nina portends cold winter like in 2008.

"An independent investigation into the UN’s climate change body has warned it to stop lobbying and to restrict its role to explaining the science behind any changes in global temperature."

That and a dollar will buy you cheap cup of coffee. Calls for IPCC head to resign. If he does, he'll just be replaced by somebody equally as corrupt or worse.


POLICE STATE:


Red light camera increases accidents by 40 percent in Baytown, Texas. The uniformed tax collectors don't care about safety. They're in it for the money and the kicks.


Showboating cops kill peaceful man whom they could have easily arrested in the parking lot since they regularly met him there to set him up for a drug bust.

"When the cops invaded Cole's apartment, the lights were out and a television offered the only illumination. In defiance of protocol, Yant -- acting without backup -- kicked in the bathroom door. He found Cole squatting in front of the toilet, apparently trying to dispose of a minuscule amount of marijuana. 

According to the story Yant told the inquest, Cole "turned towards me, rotated his body," and assumed a shooter's stance. The detective was supposedly able to see all of this despite the fact that it was dark and the barrel-mounted flashlight on his rifle wasn't working.

That account can't be reconciled with the findings of Dr. Lisa Gavin, a medical examiner with the Clark County Coroner's Office, who said that the physical evidence shows Cole was facing away from Yant when he was fatally shot. The bullet that killed Cole followed a downward trajectory through his cheek into his neck. "

Of course the trigger-happy cop who shot him lied about the circumstances on the stand.


FOREIGN POLICY:


Tensions on the border between giants China and India.

"The highly respected British magazine The Economist featured a front-page article in their 21 August issue about the possibility of a major war between China and India.

I’ve been thinking about this scenario for over a decade, and authored a book, War at the Top of the World, that warned of the dangers of a future Sino-Indian conflict.

Just thinking about this topic staggers the imagination. China and India account for 2.3 billion people, a third of the world’s total population."

Yikes.

POLITICS:

One of four Americans now believes that President Obama is a closet Muslim. I like how this article calls these people wrong as if this is a matter of fact, not opinion. All I know is Obama is not who he says he is, and I don't believe a word he says.

LOCAL:

Everywhere I drive in Dayton, workers are tearing up more roads. It never ends. Obama's stimulus boondoggle is literally funding the digging of holes and refilling them in. I just traveled to Maryland and back and no place in between is as torn up as the Dayton area. Because so many workers have been siphoned out of the productive economy into this political boondoggle, wealth creation in Dayton is plummeting and unemployment continues to rise.

MEDIA:

Never missing a chance to sell papers by alarming people, this story says hurricane Earl is heading for the east coast when actually the projected track shows it missing the US entirely.

MISC:

Mark Sisson's definitive guide to grains. Executive summary: they're bad for you.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Obama calls for full-scale attack on economy. This is wonderful reminder that no matter how bad things, they can always get worse.

GLOBAL WARMING:

In a stark reminder that judges have no interest in the law, and because of our absurdly complex laws, they can rule arbitrarily and find any justification in law to back up their rulings, a judge ruled that the Virginia prosecutor failed to present evidence that Michael Mann defrauded the citizens of Virginia with his hockey stick graph and blocked the prosecutor's attempt to obtain Mann's data. This is a great victory for the proponents of fraud and secrecy and terrible defeat for the champions of freedom, openness and science. Science cannot exist without free access to data. Mann is an enemy of science.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

I wouldn't be surprised at pseudo-amnesty for illegal aliens as an October surprise. Everything Obama does is bad for him politically and bad for the country, but I'm not so sure this bad for him politically. Republicans are already fired up and Democrats are not. It's hard to see how this would energize Republicans any more, but it might energize Democrats. Obama's either stupid or evil, mostly evil I think, and amnesty for illegals fits his agenda and his pattern.

POLITICS:

I don't care whether Republicans give voters another contract with America or not. What I want to hear is an admission that they screwed up big-time while Bush was in office. I want to hear them repudiate their big-government ways of the past. That's never going to happen though.

This one is easy:

"How could a bunch of people who ran such a brilliant campaign be doing such a lousy job at the politics of governing?"

Obama is a communist ideologue. He's intent on destroying America and turning it into Mao's China. Anybody who hasn't figured that out yet is a moron. Campaigns are just words. Candidates say whatever it takes to get elected. Governing is an action. Actions have consequences, and the consequences of more central planning can only be bad. Frankly, I think Obama believes he's done a fine job of governing. He's advanced his agenda considerably in a very short time.

MEDIA:

"Obama, Democrats got 88 percent of 2008 contributions by TV network execs, writers, reporters" I'm surprised it's that low.

Have you ever noticed how there's no controversy of the number of people who attend liberal rallies? Everybody agrees they're always huge even though they never look huge. But when a conservative like Glenn Beck has a huge rally, there's controversy.

MISC:

Telling statistics, mostly about race:

"By age 4 the average child in a professional family hears 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family and about 35 million more than the average child in a welfare family."

Wow.

This guy's is exactly right: big government, big business and big labor are conspiring to run our country for their own benefit even more than they have in the past. But the only difference between what's going on now and what's gone on in the past is a matter of degree. This is another step down the Road to Serfdom which we've been marching down for a century at least, and we're very nearly at the end. Economic collapse and serfdom is right about the corner if we don't do a 180 fast. As far as socialism goes, that's Obama's goal. This fascist step is only an intermediate step to communism on Obama's path. He's already nationalized Fannie, Freddie, AIG, GM and more. That's pure socialism.

Free kibbles

REGULATION:

The Heritage Foundation supports forcing employers to enroll employees into automatic IRAs at the point of the government's gun so the government can easily steal them in the near future.

HEALTH CARE:

Post mortum on last year's government flu fiasco and predictions that this year's fiasco will be worse. Some highlights:

"Key WHO Pandemic Advisors had Financial Ties to Vaccine Makers"

"Flu Vaccine Does Not Prevent Death in Elderly, CDC Director Admits"

"The news for this year is that the flu vaccine you'll get this fall will be a combination vaccine that contains both the regular flu- and the swine flu vaccines – you will not be given the choice to take them individually."

"Flu Vaccine Doesn't Work for Seniors, So Their Dose is Quadrupled!"

"Is the Vaccine Safe for Pregnant Women? Nobody Knows!"

Do you feel safer?

"One More Time – Vitamin D to the Rescue"

Nature to the rescue.

GLOBAL WARMING:

NASA busted modifying the pre-2000 GISS data to make it look like temperatures have been rising since 1998 even though all data sets including GISS previously had 1998 as the hottest year. The frauds have lost pretty much everything because global temperatures topped out in 1998 and never went up since then. This is a blatant attempt force a false narrative on unsuspecting people. James Hansen should prosecuted for fraud. Our tax dollars fund this fraud.

POLICE STATE:

The criminalization of everything.

WAR:

How the US used an ex-Soviet arms dealer to assist operations in Iraq, then once things settled down, arrested him.

LOCAL:

Warren Co. returns $330,000 in stimulus funds to federal government.

"Warren County has returned more than $330,000 of stimulus money to the federal government this year.

A majority of the reason is because the county is not able to comply with rules attached to the money, but commissioners are not shy to show their distaste for the stimulus money."

That didn't stop them from accepting more stimulus money. Stolen money is always corrupting.

"Rule changes effective June 30 made it difficult for the county to comply, Perry said. The definition of “obligated” changed from identifying a property for possible acquisition, rehabilitation and re-selling to actually having bid specifications drawn up, bids let and awarded and under contract."

At it always comes with regulations that are poisoned by politics and therefore in a constant state of flux. Nothing good can come from a system based on theft at the point of a gun.

MISC:

Brains get addicted to junk food.

Silver as an antibiotic and preservative.

Online math and science school. I bet the government tries to shut this down.

Chile passes net neutrality law. Let's hope nobody else follows suit.

Free kibbles

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Choice quotes from entertaining translation of Bernanke's speech:

"

This list of concerns makes clear that a return to strong and stable economic growth will require appropriate and effective responses from economic policymakers across a wide spectrum, as well as from leaders in the private sector.

Translation: There is going to be central planning like we have not seen since the end of World War II. Corporate leaders are going to fall in line, or else they will face some really daunting problems."

Grab hold of your wallets...

"

At best, though, fiscal impetus and the inventory cycle can drive recovery only temporarily. For a sustained expansion to take hold, growth in private final demand – notably, consumer spending and business fixed investment – must ultimately take the lead. On the whole, in the United States, that critical handoff appears to be under way. However, although private final demand, output, and employment have indeed been growing for more than a year, the pace of that growth recently appears somewhat less vigorous than we expected.

Translation: "Somewhat less vigorous" means "the Democrats will surely lose the House in November."

Importantly, the painfully slow recovery in the labor market has restrained growth in labor income, raised uncertainty about job security and prospects, and damped confidence.

Translation: The Democrats may even lose the Senate."

That'll be an improvement, but not much.

"

Federal fiscal stimulus seems set to continue to fade but likely not so quickly as to derail growth in coming quarters.

Translation: With the Republicans in control of Congress, they will play spoilers. Obama will get no more big spending bills into law."

That's why we'll see some improvement, but Republicans will continue to loot us on behalf of their cronies, just at a lower pace.

"

Although output growth should be stronger next year, resource slack and unemployment seem likely to decline only slowly. The prospect of high unemployment for a long period of time remains a central concern of policy.

Translation: The job market will be a disaster for years. "A central concern for policy" means nobody knows what to do about it; nothing has worked."

Keynesianism doesn't work. It can't work.

Another analysis of Bernanke's speech concludes he's a mad scientist.

GLOBAL WARMING:

El Ninos changing character and getting stronger.

Nature magazine blames man-made CO2 (by using the new term "climate change"), which we all know is a greenhouse gas which leads to heating, for South American cold.

POLICE STATE:

Government deploys portable nude scanners in vans.

"American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss."

These pictures are scary.

"AS&E’s Reiss counters privacy critics by pointing out that the ZBV scans don’t capture nearly as much detail of human bodies as their airport counterparts. The company’s marketing materials say that its “primary purpose is to image vehicles and their contents,” and that “the system cannot be used to identify an individual, or the race, sex or age of the person.”"

I guess that makes warrantless searches OK.

"Reiss adds that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”"

Just like the airport model.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Ron Paul laments the Republican take-over of the tea party movement and its schizophrenic devotion to big, interventionist foreign policy while claiming to support small government.

MISC:

Huge coronal hole in the sun last week.

Beer is low in calories and carbs. But grains are still toxic.

High fructose corn syrup, that poison created by government corn subsidies, is cancer's favorite food.

Robert Murphy shoots down the myth that in our debt-based monetary system there isn't enough money to pay off all the loans and the interest.

This is what private property rights should mean:

"Carried through consistently, the right of property would entitle the proprietor to claim all the advantages that the good's employment may generate on the one hand and would burden him with all the disadvantages resulting from its employment on the other hand."

That would solve most of the world's social ills.

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Don't buy the hype about GM's success.

ECONOMY:

Recession may have pushed US birthrate to all-time low. The welfare state reduces birth rates by taking away hope for the future and the vibrancy of culture and the economy.

Graph shows stunning drop in home sales to all-time record low.



TAX AND SPEND:

Government workers are the new privileged class. New? When weren't they the privileged class? It's just gotten worse.

Prediction that the municipal bond market is about to collapse. Peter Schiff agrees.

"Schiff basically declares the bond market the mother of all bubbles, and noted that when the bubble bursts, the loss will dwarf the combined losses of the bubbles of stock market and the real estate. Eventually, the government will either inflate or default. Either way will ultimately makebond investors go bust."

Ouch.

It pays to riot. Because the Greeks rioted against austerity measures, the Greece government get special deals from the EU and the IMF. Because the Irish did not riot, they don't.

"The true National Debt of the United States is $18.964 Trillion." That doesn't include entitlements.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

December, 2008 post from mises.org predicts Bernanke will continue damaging our economy with unprecedented inflationary monetary policy. That's exactly what we've seen since. Fast-forward to today:

"The brilliant Bernanke: “”In particular, the [Federal Open Market] Committee is prepared to provide additional monetary accomodation through unconventional measures if it proves necessary, especially if the outlook were to deteriorate significantly.”

Just so we are clear: if something doesn’t work, even if it doesn’t work dozens of times, we should do more of the same."

The central planners are destroying our country because we empowered them to do so.

EDUCATION:

Obama's efforts to further nationalize education are unpopular. That hasn't stopped him from doing anything else.

Obama cuts off federal school funding for New Jersey in act of political payback. This is the norm when the politicians control welfare money. New Jerseyans should welcome this because it frees them from federal education oppression. This will backfire on Obama politically.

HEALTH CARE:

Three huge segments of the population that will be forced to change health care plans because of Obamacare.

Doctors angry at Obamacare regulations. That's why so many doctors are leaving private practice and hooking up with big corporations to our detriment.

Obamacare is forcing health care companies to lay off employees.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

New government regulations may keep Gulf oil wells idle.

The evidence the sun is in a Dalton Minimum-like cycle continues to grow. If it plays out that way, we're in for a couple of cold decades.

Anthony Watts rips a global warming fraud over cherry-picking the start and end dates of graphs in a pretense of extracting alarming predictions that the graphs don't really support.

"Tamino has named me “Mr. Cherry” for picking start dates of graphs which are different from the ones he chooses to cherry pick. For instance, he considers 1975 to be the start of “the modern global warming era.”

Living up to his high standards, I declare August 16, 2010 to be the start of “the 2010 La Niña cool down”.  Since August 16, UAH channel 5 global temperatures have been dropping at a rate of 1,554 degrees per century.

See below how that plots out.

If the trend continues, the earth will reach absolute zero in about 15 years."

Man, that's too funny. Science humor.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Good for Jimmy Carter for obtaining the release of an American prisoner in North Korea. I'm sure this was all set up in advance, but so what? Good for him.

POLITICS:

Boortz gets this right.

"Now even Democrats are admitting that they may lose the House entirely. Maybe this is why ... voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on all 10 of the important issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen. Those issues would be education, Iraq, the economy, healthcare, social security, government ethics, national security, Afghanistan, taxes and immigration. As of right now I don't necessarily think that the Republicans have earned the trust of the American people on these issues ... it's just that the Democrats have destroyed the trust people had in them."

I doubt Republicans understand that or care.

Primary voters put two more establishment Republicans out of business. Good riddance.

"Democrats believe that if they saddle taxpayers with enough obligations to provide enough free stuff to enough people, the country will riot if anyone ever tries to rein in the wild spending.

Republicans, meanwhile, believe that bankrupting the country with unpaid-for wars and tax cuts will force the government to collapse and become smaller."

I think that description of Democrats is pretty accurate, but that description of Republicans is just stupid. Republicans don't want government to collapse and become smaller.

LOCAL:

Lebanon government is checking eight restaurants for bad eggs, all Asian restaurants, because of the language barrier. This sounds fishy to me.

MISC:

This guy is advocating a war to destroy capital so our economy can grow again. I kid you not.

"“We can not run trillion dollar deficits year after year. That is just an impossible one for the market to absorb. The second thing would be, how would we service that debt down the road? Are we increasing of our productive capacity enough that we can pay it off? If we just are borrowing money to do consumption we will never be able to pay it off.

And guess what, Roosevelt’s debt got paid off by WWII. WWII was the biggest destruction of capital, and human beings too. So the debt got paid off. We had to build new stuff, and we had an income generation again, and we paid it off. So, destruction of old capital is the solution to building new capital.”"

That's nuts, and this is from "Director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University". Our tax dollars are funding this guy.

The skinny on salt.

Scientists discover and measure solar cycles in a star 100 light years away, but they measure about a year unlike the 11 year cycle of our sun.

This tornado of fire looks like a biblical pillar of fire.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Now the government is going after the people who comment on blogs.

"The Federal Trade Commission is now actively policing comments left on commercial websites and punishing individual commenters who do not disclose their business interests to the government’s satisfaction. In a proposed order announced today, the FTC accused Reverb Communications, Inc., a public relations firm and its owner, Tracie Snitker, of violating § 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act — which bans “unfair methods of competition” — because the company’s employees left positive reviews on Apple’s iTunes store for a video game marketed by one of Reverb’s clients."

I've often explained that we are on the verge of turning into the Soviet Union. This is another good example. We're 230+ years from the Republic founded by the Founding Fathers, but we're only a couple of years from turning into the Soviet Union. The only difference between the oppression of our federal government and the Soviet Union is a matter of degree, and it's fast disintegrating.

Remember how the government wants complete control over the internet for security reasons? Two years late, the Pentagon confirms that the 2008 attack against it was the worst ever. Do you want your internet to be as primitive as the government's? Of course not. The vibrant marketplace has the best internet security, not the dinosaur government.

ECONOMY:

Peter Schiff uses the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker to show that people must produce before they can consume. The idea that government can spur consumption and consumption spurs production is bass-ackwards.

New home sales drop to record low in July, and the housing market is going to get worse.

"On Tuesday the National Association of Realtors announced that existing home sales in the United States dropped a whopping 27.2% in the month of July. The consensus among analysts was that we would see a drop of around 13 percent, so when the 27 percent figure was announced it sent a shock through world financial markets."

The government economic so-called experts are always wrong.

"What we are seeing unfold is essentially "Armageddon" for those involved in the housing and real estate industries. The real estate market is grinding to a standstill and a shockingly low number of people are actually in the market to buy a home right now. In the months ahead home sales may pick up a little bit, but only if housing prices start to fall. Why? Because right now there are tons of houses on the market and there are very few qualified buyers available to purchase them and potential buyers are starting to realize this. Buyers are beginning to understand that they have all the leverage now and they are waiting for prices to fall.

Anyone who has taken Economics 101 in college knows that when supply is high and demand is low prices will fall, and that is exactly the situation we have in the U.S. housing market right now."

But the government non-experts can't seem to grasp it.

Dow closes below 10,000 again. Frankly, I'm impressed with the success of the aristocrats' plan to reinflate our economic bubbles. I didn't think they could fool the people this long, yet the Dow continues to hover near 10,000. It's a tribute to how much money Bush, Obama, government aristocrats of both parties and the Fed have stolen from us during the last two years. The longer it lasts, the worse the collapse will be. We're all way more poor than we think we are. Stop the madness.

TAX AND SPEND:

This is an unusually libertarian position from a Cato member: the deficit is on the symptom - the disease is spending. In five years of reading Cato, I have never seen them take such an unequivocal libertarian position. Just like many conservatives who are seeing the light. Welcome to the fight, Cato.

HEALTH CARE:

The supposed author of Obamacare, Max Baucus, admits he never reads bills and never read Obamacare, the bill he supposedly wrote.

"Baucus replied that he “essentially” wrote the socialized medicine bill, but admitted that he had subcontracted the details to unnamed – and unaccountable — “experts,” which is how things are routinely done in Washington: “I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill. You know why? It’s statutory language. We hire experts.”"

Waste his time? The accomplice press knows this, both sides, but neither reports it because each is in bed with one of the ruling class parties.

The stem-cell scam. A few reasons why private funding is superior to government funding. Contrary to this headline, federal funding is bad for stem-cell research and all research, not good for it.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Early snow in Russia. Winter is coming early again.

In a fit of honesty that will probably get somebody fired, Canadian government admits its climate data is unreliable. Note the problems with the data won't get anybody fired, but the honesty will. If only our government was this honest.

Obama urges Supreme Court to reject lawsuits naming CO2 as a nuisance. You read that right. Obama has argued against a powerful tool of enviromarxists. Apparently the economic interests in the Obama administration won the debate over the enviromarxist interests. And of course they would. Where are the enviromarxists going to go? They aren't going to vote Republican, that's for sure. But the people unhappy about the economy will most definitely vote Republican. Too some degree, the people still have power.

Global warming frauds plan to target seniors. As if they haven't already.

Yet another study confirms the link between tiny changes in solar radiation and the earth's atmosphere. Duh. As obvious as it seems that tiny changes in the gazzilowatt output of the sun would have significant impact on the puny earth's atmosphere, the global warming frauds claim otherwise. That's like saying jumping in a blast furnace has no effect on your skin. They're wrong.

POLICE STATE:

This quote will do:

"Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements."

No. Not even if your car is parked on the street. No.

WAR:

The Taliban threaten to attack foreign aid workers helping Pakistanis devastated by floods. This illustrates what I keep saying: the Islamic extremists are the natural enemies of mainstream Muslims. If we stopped invading their countries and killing them, mainstream Muslims would take out the extremists. Instead, our aggression is pushing mainstream Muslims into the hands of the extremists.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Mossad in America.

"Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations."

Is believed by who? This would be amazing if true, but I have no confidence in naked assertions like this.

Lebanon allows synagogue near Beirut. It's a little premature to call Lebanon more tolerant than the US. The Islamic center four blocks from Ground Zero hasn't been oppressed yet.

In shades of the Cold War, a British spy is found murdered in his bathroom.

MISC:

Hitler had Jewish and African ancestors.

Discovery of skeleton of 10,000 year old boy in underwater Mexican cave supports hypothesis that southeastern Asians colonized America before northeastern Asians.

This article answers the burning question: Why natural health?

"Why not, would you rather be unnatural?"

Duh. But it goes on...

"Think about it, huge amounts of money go into our medical system – mostly from pharmaceutical companies that are pushing drugs that are most definitely not natural.

If you are wondering what is wrong with drugs, just listen to some of the many commercials for drugs on television – or read a magazine. I was astonished by the number of drug advertisements in Prevention magazine – based on the majority of their advertisers, they should consider changing their name. But the point here is the total # of pages dedicated to the warnings and side effects of each drug. Each drug had 2–3 pages and the print required some pretty strong reading glasses.

Now what I really object to is that none of the drugs do more than control symptoms. I will be the first to say that there is a time that controlling symptoms is absolutely necessary, but should our entire medical system be dedicated to this??

Under these rules, the sick just get sicker. Follow the average person over a few years. First they take a blood pressure medication, then add one for cholesterol and then they need to add another one because they now need 2 for blood pressure, and then they have to control acid reflux, then they need some to sleep and so on.

Something just is not right about this kind of system. Who gets rich? And whose health is better?"

It's all another scam. Doctors don't want to heal us. They want to keep us sick so we come into their offices every six months year after year and get ever stronger prescriptions and ever more prescriptions to offset the damage caused by the first prescriptions and failing to actually heal us. It's a scam. Eat like caveman a lot. Exercise a little. Don't fall into the government dominated health-care scam.

If you want to use a recreation center in Montgomery County, Maryland, you'll have to scan your finger.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

New home sales fell an unexpected 12.4 percent in July. The central planners were wrong again. They're always wrong. They can never be anything but wrong.

How "regime uncertainty" - the uncertainty over what policies government will implement and what effect they will have on business - effect business.

Nine economic principles necessary to understand economics. This one is arguably the one that's most under fire in the modern world:

"6. People are Rational. This is a lot more controversial than it should be. When we say that people are rational, we mean that they will tend to do things that they expect to provide them with net benefits. We don’t mean that they will always make the right decision, that they have complete information, or that they will never make mistakes. We mean that they have goals, they tend to choose the means that they believe are appropriate to achieve them, they respond to incentives, and they learn from mistakes."

Everybody makes mistakes, but if you make a mistake in a system of voluntary exchange, only you and the people around you suffer. When central planners make mistakes, and since central planners know less about your wants and abilities than you do every decision a central planner makes is a mistake, everybody suffers with the possible exception of the central planner and his cronies.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The Fed doesn't have a clue. Really.

"Before the meeting, officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which manages the Fed's portfolio, had grown concerned, according to people familiar with the matter. The Fed's portfolio of mortgage-backed securities was about to begin shrinking much more rapidly than anticipated, as low mortgage rates led more Americans to refinance their mortgages. That in turn meant the mortgage-backed securities held by the Fed were being paid off. 

The size of the Fed's portfolio has become one of the central bank's major monetary tools. A shrinking portfolio in the face of slowing economic growth was unwelcome to many officials, including New York Fed President William Dudley. It amounted to prematurely applying the brakes.

The New York Fed's markets chief, Brian Sack, had been revising up his estimates of how much the portfolio would contract. In a memo circulated by Mr. Sack's group a few days before the meeting, the estimate was revised up again. In March, the group projected the portfolio would contract by a bit more than $200 billion by the end of 2011. In a memo circulated by Mr. Sack's group a few days before the meeting, the estimate was revised to up to $340 billion. In addition, about $55 billion in debt issued by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the Fed held would likely be paid off. Taken together, it represented a potential 20% drop in the Fed's holdings in 18 months' time"

They are always surprised at the consequences of their policies. This is the fatal conceit of central planners.

EDUCATION:

Government school plans to tag children with RFID chips. We did this to ourselves.

HEALTH CARE:

"AIDS and HIV: Lies, Cover-up, Deception, Profits and Genocide"

Never allowing a crisis to go to waste, government is using the egg salmonella issue to push for more central planning of our food supply. As we know, government uses every power it obtains against the people. Like we need more swat teams invading food suppliers. Our food supply is already lower quality, more expensive and more disease-prone that it would be in a system of voluntary exchange, and centralizing more power over it will make things worse.

"Inquiring minds are asking exactly how many eggs were originally found to be contaminated, leading to this recall and media hysteria. Given the history of these events, we suspect it is not dissimilar to the Chilean grape scare of the 1980's in which two grapes in Chile were found to be "tainted" with Cyanide, leading to a nationwide panic surrounding imported fruits.

It should be noted that the author had soft-boiled eggs, and mopped up his egg yolks with toast for the last two days. Symptoms to look for, as reported by the mainstream media, have yet to surface. Of course, this could be due to the fact that we prefer to eat eggs originating from free-range, vegetarian fed chickens that were bred on small farms."

Which is what almost everybody would eat if government hadn't already taken so much control of our food supply.

"As to the issue of increased regulation about which the commissioner, and undoubtedly larger food manufacturing plants, are anxiously interested, it is important to point out that the FDA does have authority to inspect the facilities, specifically the two main facilities where this salmonella crisis originated. But guess what? They never did:

The Food and Drug Administration, which has responsibility for the safety of whole eggs, had never inspected the two Iowa-based facilities at the heart of the massive recall that began 10 days ago. Nor had the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. In the case of Wright County Egg, the company had a history of labor and environmental infractions, including one that stemmed from workers handling manure and dead chickens with bare hands.

"It is shocking that nobody was in these facilities, but it also illustrates that egg-laying facilities have fallen into the crack between the government agencies that are responsible for food safety," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group."

How many times are we going to fall for this scam? This is what invariably happens when government takes over responsibility for safety instead of producers in a competitive marketplace. The problem isn't too little government power. The problem is far too much government power.

"For those following the economic crisis and the BP oil disaster, it should all make sense. Just as the SEC failed to enforce existing laws to stop market manipulation and prevent extreme leverage in the system, and as Minerals Management Service regulators failed to inspect the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the FDA failed at their job.

Yet, in all three cases, the bureaucrats in power, rather than admitting their own failures and turning in their resignations, hit the mainstream media news channels and tell us the problems could have been prevented with more legislation."

Don't forget the mine collapse in West Virginia and every other disaster in areas regulated by government. Think about it. The marketplace least regulated by government is the internet, therefore there are no disasters on the internet. Another lightly regulated market is high tech. There's no disasters in high tech. The marketplace doesn't allow them. Government creates the environment that leads to disasters.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Recommended reading of several books about blowback.

LOCAL:

Montgomery Co. stole money from taxpayers at the point of a gun, taking that money out of the productive economy, it wasted a bunch of it on bureaucracy and vote buying, and now it's giving a smaller portion of that money to city governments who will waste more of it on bureaucracy and vote buying before they finally inject it into the unproductive, political economy into projects people won't pay for voluntarily, which means they don't produce wealth, all in the name of economic stimulus. Only an evil or deluded person would think this provides stimulus compared to allowing (I hate that word) the people to keep their own money and use it as they choose to in the productive, private economy. The private economy, because it is funded by voluntary exchange, creates wealth. The political economy, because it's funded by theft at the point of the government's gun, always destroys wealth.

MISC:

The Art of the Steal: How government and its cronies use the police power of government to rob people blind.

Author exposes owners of the Florida Marlins for lying about how much money they make in order to get taxpayers to fund a stadium.

"It’s also noteworthy that the Marlins’ fraud was not uncovered by any traditional bastion of establishment “journalism,” but by Internet-based reporting, not just from Passan but the sports blog Deadspin, which obtained and published financial statements for a number of MLB clubs including the Marlins. (Funny how Congress and the media never has time for stuff like this, but they have inexhaustible interest in the personal drug habits of baseball players.)"

Not so funny.

Marketing lessons explain why the Grateful Dead was the most popular touring band of all time. Hint: they didn't hide behind intellectual property.

"The uninitiated wouldn't associate the Grateful Dead with finance or commerce or business practices of any sort. But this impossible-to-categorize, San Francisco Bay–area band is, in its various iterations, the most successful touring band of all time.

By no means the best instrumentally or vocally, the band built its success on an approach to the music business that was 180 degrees from their competitors. While other bands posted signs at the entrances to concert venues saying, "Recording and photography of tonight's performance is strictly prohibited," the Grateful Dead encouraged fans to record their concerts and shoot pictures of the show."

The result was unlimited free marketing for the band, and it paid off.

This is a great point: the free market is not something anybody has to take on faith; it's an empirical measurement. There's nothing invisible about the free market. Prices are exact. Quantities are exact. Voluntary exchanges are unequivocal. If people want to buy a product at the offered price, they buy it. If they don't want to pay that much for the product, they don't. Compare this to government enforcing regulations and setting prices such as the minimum wage.

Germany's industrial rise was largely because it had no copyright laws.

"Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time — 10 times fewer than in Germany — and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development — in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom."

I don't find this astonishing at all.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

The city of Philadelphia taxing bloggers by forcing them to pay a $300 dollar business fee and income tax. On the surface this may look like a simple scheme to collect more revenue, but underneath is the desire to wipe out bloggers because government doesn't control their speech.

ECONOMY:

Gary North shoots down my pet conspiracy theory that central bankers engineered the financial crisis.

"The conservatives who theorize that the 2008 crisis was an engineered crisis have a better understanding of the power of central banking in politics than the economists do. But the critics fail to understand that central bankers are constrained by free market competition. Bankers do not understand or accept Mises's theory of the business cycle. They do not understand monetary cause and effect. They are either Keynesians or Chicago School monetarists, and both schools of opinion are supportive of the concept of central banking. So, they don't know what they are doing.

Every once in a while, their policies produce a financial panic and recession. But they do not learn from experience. They do not go looking for a new theory to explain their policy failures. They are committed to faith in government and government's licensed monopoly, the central bank."

I have trouble believing central bankers are this stupid. I often say that the Ivy League is the world leader at brainwashing smart people with stupid ideas, but at the same time, I have a hard time believing it. When I took economics, I knew immediately that the macro-economic part of it was baloney. I asked the teacher about it. He brushed me off. I don't believe that smart people can really fall for that crap. So maybe I'm wrong about the Ivy League. Maybe it brainwashed stupid people with stupid ideas. Maybe these people have always been incapable of learning from history or understanding simple logic. But I don't believe that either. I still believe Bernanke knows darn good and well he's destroying the dollar, and he's doing it on purpose. I think Greenspan knew exactly what he was doing, and that's why he retired before the shit hit the fan.

EDUCATION:

Government grows and metasticizes like a cancer. The same thing is happening with schools in my home town.

I love this:

"I hadn’t made the connection, but this is the same lady who runs the Free Range Kids blog, a neat blog that a reader pointed out to me last year. The central theme of Lenore’s blog is based on her statement that “mostly I’m afraid that I, too, have been swept up in the impossible obsession of our era: total safety for our children every second of every day.” Lenore adds, “it is really up to us parents to start renormalizing childhood. That begins with us realizing how scared we’ve gotten, even of ridiculously remote dangers……We have to be less afraid of nature and more willing to embrace the idea that some rashes and bites are a fair price to pay in exchange for appreciating the wonder of a cool-looking rock or an unforgettable fern.”"

Has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe the reason the world is so dangerous is we've turned our children into sheep and they grow up being easy prey for wolves?

POLICE STATE:

TSA launches new, aggressive groping technique for searching airline passengers. I wonder if the perverts get a few minutes to themselves after the assault.

The city of Cleveland is going to put chips in recyclable garbage cans and garbage trucks so it can detect if a household is recycling enough and fine the owner if not.

Leon, Mexico government installs iris scanners around the city to track people.

WAR:

Sweden conveniently files rape charges against WikiLeaks founder Assange only to almost immediately withdraw those charges. Sounds trumped up to me.

General Petraeus orders troops if Afghanistan to not access WikiLeaks.

Obama to keep 50,000 US troops in Iraq. So much for ending that war.

MISC:

Map of area around Ground Zero showing proposed Islamic Center site as well as many strip joints.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Support for the Hindenburg Omen and fears of an impending market crash.

TAX AND SPEND:

Lord Geithner says our economy, you know the same economy that hasn't recovered after nearly three years and is on the way further down the gutter, can withstand higher taxes on the rich who already pay such and inordinately disproportional amount of taxes. Geithner is a political tool.

China sells off US treasuries in favor of buying debt from Europe and Japan because European and Japanese governments have embraces austerity programs to cut spending and debt but the US government hasn't.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Inflation hits in the UK, and the creator of that inflation, the Bank of England, warns Britons to expect more. Nothing like intentionally destroying the value of the currency and the savings of the people with it.

"Mervyn King, the Bank's Governor, voiced surprise that prices are higher than he had expected in a letter of explanation to the Chancellor George Osborne. While the overall consumer prices edged down to 3.1pc from 3.2pc in June, it remains above the Bank's own 2pc target, and the small decline will do little to ease the fear of some economists that a high cost of living will undermine Britain's fragile recovery."

Yet another government so-called expert is surprised at the consequences of his central planning. When aren't they surprised? Why do we call them experts?

Apparently the BBC posted a headline today claiming that inflation in Britain is down. But only by comparison.

EDUCATION:

Ohio to force government schools students to do a fluoride rinse. The government doesn't care about the dangers, adverse effects or that it's usurping the role of parents and undermining their authority and their right to raise their children as they see fit. That's what you get when you allow the government to lock your children away in military-style prisons 180+ days a year.

HEALTH CARE:

Because the federal government has usurped responsibility for the safety of food from manufacturers, eggs with salmonella are being recalled. Government has made this commonplace. This would happen much less frequently in a free economy.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Changes in the sun's conveyor belt may be responsible for the extended solar cycle 23 and weak solar cycle 24. But don't tell the global warming frauds. Despite all the evidence, they claim that changes in the sun have no effect on earth.

WAR:

Suicide bomber kills 60 outside major military office in Baghdad. The terrorists don't want Americans to leave Iraq. They'll lose a major recruiting tool when we leave.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

This article is a good reminder that the illegal immigration problem is really a welfare problem.

"If Congress pushes through amnesty, hold onto your wallets. Taxpayers will get robbed and illegal aliens rewarded.

The 11 million illegal aliens who get legalized will then qualify for many taxpayer-funded government programs, including health premium subsidies, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid. This redistribution of wealth will add billions to the government’s red ink—not to mention deprive productive Americans of their own money."

End the welfare programs, and this problem will go away.

POLITICS:

Walter Williams understands that Republicans won't save us. I wish we could get the rest of conservatives to understand that.

"There are numerous blocking tactics that a Republican-controlled House can take against those hell-bent on trampling on our Constitution. The question is whether they will have guts and principle to do it. After all, many Americans, including those who are Republicans, have a stake in big government control, special privileges and handouts."

Isn't that the truth. Republicans will block some things, but mostly they'll just compromise so they and their special interests can share in the looting.

Forget term limits. Remove the aristocrats' perks. I contemplated the idea that government employees get no benefits. No health care. No pension. But on the flip side, if we don't pay them those things, somebody else will and win the benefits of the government's gun in response. So that's no solution. The only solution is to take away their power.

Republican stalwart Dick Armey claims to have written a tea party manifesto declaring the tea parties want to take over the Republican party, not be a junior Republican wing. So a stalwart Republican wants to take over the Republican party? This is a non-sequitur.

MEDIA:

The mainstream media looks the other way while Obama takes more vacations than president in memory, but they slammed George Bush for taking far fewer. That's because the mainstream media is first and foremost a propaganda tool for the Democrat party.

MISC:

Ten signs the US is becoming a third world country.

Best Buy sends cease and desist letter to priest with God Squad sticker on car. The sticker and the car looked similar to the Geek Squad trademark used by Best Buy. Unfortunately, Best Buy was right that the law really gave them no choice. If they allowed the priest to "infringe" on their trademark, it would reduce their ability to protect it from real frauds. The culprit here is the law, not Best Buy nor the priest. Without the stupid laws, both Best Buy and the priest would have gained from allowing the priest to use his God Squad car and stickers, and Best Buy would still have been able to protect itself from frauds. But because the law is mindless, one size fits all, it wouldn't allow that.

Imam of proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero was called on by US agents to calm relations with Muslims in 2003.

Because IP prohibits people from building on the ideas of others, it drags us down toward the level of animals.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Malinvestment may not make much of an impression as an abstract concept, but these pictures of thousands of railroad cars designed to haul lumber built during the housing boom sitting idle is a specific example of malinvestment.

"I marked 22 miles of steady empty rail cars on dad’s truck odometer as we drove along the rail line, and I subtracted 2 miles for short breaks here or there where the road crossed or farm houses were allowed a unobstructed view. The Wallowa County Chieftain reports however that up to 30 miles of rail line have been leased for the purpose of mothballed lumber car storage."

That's an example of malinvestment created by the Fed and government policy.

It's kind of funny to watch Obama and Democrats claim how successful their policies have been at reviving the economy. If things stay about the same, they'll beat that drum until November. But what will they do if the double-dip because obvious before November, as I think it will. Of course as Peter Schiff points out, it's not really accurate to call this a double-dip even though the artificial numbers say it is. It's all one big depression that's getting deeper by the day.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Because of fractional reserve banking, our money supply is based on debt. If everybody pays off their loans, our money supply is gone.

Peter Schiff on how the Fed has trapped us into an economy decline that we can't escape until the dollar collapses and we're freed from the Fed.

"Like their patrons in the White House and on Capitol Hill, the Fed is totally dedicated to postponing the short-term consequences that would result from breaking America's addiction to cheap money and easy credit. Compared to this imperative, the long-term economic health of the country barely gets a second thought."

People don't vote in the long run. They vote in the short run, so the aristocrats never care about the long run, but they will when the system collapses and the people hold them responsible. Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd escaped by dying before the collapse, and others might, but the people will not treat the aristocrats still alive when the system collapses kindly. I shouldn't worry for them. They probably all have escape plans that include fleeing the country and living high on the hog overseas while they watch the country they set on fire burn.

"The problem is that each round of stimulus, as with each hit of an addictive drug, requires ever larger doses to produce the same result. The more leveraged an economy becomes, the bigger the lever required to move it. So the more the Fed stimulates now, the more it will be forced to stimulate later. The only exit strategy this course allows is an overdose – hyperinflation."

"Those who fear a double dip recession are justified in their concerns, but they are also missing the big picture. The 2008 recession never ended. It was merely interrupted by trillions of dollars of stimulus that purchased GDP "growth" with borrowed money. But as the bills come due, GDP should now contract so we can settle up – but instead we'll take on more debt.

I expect the coming doses of quantitative easing will finally spark adverse reactions, first in the dollar and later in the bond market. When a falling dollar forces consumer prices and long-term interest rates to rise, the Fed's actions will be rendered impotent. The Open Markets Committee will have to make a horrific choice: fight inflation by tightening policy into a weakening economy, or fight recession by allowing inflation to burn out of control. I think it's obvious that they will choose inflation, all the while pretending that it doesn't exist."

Isn't central planning fun? It is for the central planners who have robbed us blind and who will escape all the damage they've caused.

EDUCATION:

Atlanta government schools fraudulently inflating graduation rates. I bet all school districts do this.

Principles write textbooks then buy them for classes in their schools with taxdollars.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Yet another fraudulent manipulation of data to make modern times appear warmer compared to the past discovered, this time in New Zealand. The amount of blatant fraud that's been uncovered in the last year is phenomenal. That these frauds have escaped prison compounds the crime.

Britain backs off green laws because of economy. The British government is turning around amazingly fast for a government. Good for David Cameron.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Boortz claims that border patrol agents are being pulled out of Cochise County, Arizona because the area is filled with Mexican drug dealers, but he doesn't provide a link. I found this link about a new sheriff's unit that is interdicting Mexican drug dealers in Cochise County. Here's an article about a drug bust by US border agents and local police. I can't verify Boortz's claim, and it seems the opposite is true at least at the moment, but I don't put it above Obama to pull the border patrol out just to punish Arizonans for the law Obama doesn't like.

POLICE STATE:

Recommendation of three documentaries showing the development of our national security state starting with Truman and focusing on Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.

WAR:

Accusation that western agents had UN weapons inspector David Kelly murdered.

"The weapons inspector's body was found after he was unmasked as the source of a damaging BBC news report questioning the grounds for the Iraq war. 

Officially, he took his own life.

Yesterday Dr Spertzel told the Mail that the British authorities were 'intentionally ignoring' the issue.

He believes that there is something 'fishy' and insisted that a coroner should examine the death as soon as possible.

His demands come 24 hours after nine of Britain's leading medical experts wrote an open letter to minsters demanding a full inquest." 

"Concern over the cause of death has been mounting after it emerged in January that all medical and scientific records, including the post-mortem report and photographs of the body, were secretly classified for 70 years in 2004."

70 years?

If you're a disgraced ex-General who severely screwed up in Afghanistan, what government-loving institution would you expect to land a job at? McChrystal to teach at Yale.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Supreme Court says that babies born to members of an invasion force are not automatically made US citizens. This makes perfect sense, we wouldn't want them to be, but it violates the plain language of the Constitution. The Constitution didn't give the government power to exclude anybody. And illegal immigrants are not an invasion force anyway.

POLITICS:

There has to be hope for conservatives, because they're our only hope. If they don't reject the big-government Republicans who have been working with Democrats to destroy America, our country as we know it won't survive.

Even the poor are jumping ship on Obama. Of course they are. This idea that if half of Americans received benefits from government, Democrats would hold a permanent majority was always a stupid claim. The poor don't want to stay poor forever, and Obama is locking them in poverty as he pushes the rest of us into poverty with them. Government handouts are part spider and part spider's web. People don't want that. They want jobs. They want opportunities to move up the ladder.

Obama pulls out the tried and true scare tactic of claiming that if Republicans take back power, they'll kill Social Security. Give me a break. Republicans love the entitlements as much as Democrats.

LOCAL:

The local news in Dayton is abysmal. I'm afraid we're a bell-weather for the country.

Since when did having a weapon on your own property while under the influence become a crime?

"Christopher Heizer, 37, was still in the Miami County Jail as of 2:30 p.m. Monday, Aug.16. He was arraigned Monday morning in Miami County Municipal Court on charges of tampering with evidence and having a weapon while under the influence. Judge Mel Kemmer ordered a $5,000 cash bond for each charge and ordered that Heizer receive a mental health evaluation."

This is another case of a man who didn't hurt anybody suffering the government violence.

Government cuts in Medicare payments pushing Ambulance services out of business. Only government kill such a wonderful, life-saving service.

Because we've given so much power over our lives to government, the benefits for winning make a huge lottery payout look like peanuts, politicians and special interests are videoing every word said by their opponents. The days when politicians might accidentally speak the truth are at end. It's too costly for these professional liars to make that mistake.

Declining economy is forcing Daytonians into longer commutes, and with our horribly torn up government roads that will probably never be repaired, that means more wrecks and more deaths.

Declining economy is hurting area festivals. Cityfolk charged $10 for pins this year - they're generally five - and they're still claiming they're underfunded.

MISC:

Deleted scene from Return of the Jedi showing Luke assembling his light saber.

More fear-mongering about imposing Sharia law in the US. The problem isn't that taxpayers are funding Sharia compliant insurance through AIG. The problem is government owning any business including AIG.

More on Obama's land grab. I had no idea the federal government already owns 30 percent of US land. That's incredible. D.C. isn't counted in this because most of it is privately owned. It's just managed by the federal government.