Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Japan has suffered two lost decades, but the dollar just hit an eight month low compared to the yen.

The case for legalizing capitalism. It's never been tried before, but when it's been approximated, it's worked wonders.

"Consider this remarkable irony: most citizens put their faith in government — the entity that steals from us, causes wars, imprisons and starves innocent citizens, and is an absolute monopoly — to provide for us and keep us safe.

At the same time, they see businesses — which have eradicated diseases and starvation, engaged in peaceful exchanges instead of war, produced virtually everything we currently own and enjoy, paid us our wages and provided capital for us to improve our productivity, all the while being fully restrained by hungry competitors (in free markets) — as our enemies from whom we need protection. These commonly held but irrational prejudices for government and against businesses form the very foundation of the political arguments espoused by professional anticapitalist "thinkers.""

I love this point.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama says tax hikes necessary to make the rich pay their fair share. How will we know when they're finally paying their fair share? They won't be rich any more. That's not a joke. That's Obama's goal.

Obama's stimulus money helping train foreign workers overseas.

EDUCATION:

Feds blocks schools from putting textbook on Kindle.

HEALTH CARE:

70 percent of Missouri voters vote to nullify the health care mandate in Obamacare. That's almost a 3-1 margin. The Obamacare flowchart is enough to show you how bad this program would be if it was implemented. Enlarged.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

US government admits that 3/4 of the Gulf oil has been cleaned up or broken down by natural forces.

Democrats give up hope for passing narrow energy bill before the August recess, but you can bet some ugly energy bill will come back in the lame duck session.

Obama won't let this little setback halt his agenda for destroying America. He's ordered the EPA to regulate CO2 despite having no legislation.

"The Environmental Protection Agency will soon begin regulating greenhouse gases factory by factory, power plant by power plant. That could be unwieldy, expensive and unpopular — even President Obama has said it’s not his preferred solution."

Obama would rather be able to pass the buck, but the destruction of America is his primary goal.

WAR:

Regarding the WikiLeaks leak:

"The Obama administration and the Pentagon insist release of these old reports from 2004–2009 "endanger our boys." Nonsense. The only thing the truth endangers are the politicians who have hung their hats on the Afghan War and some paid Afghan informers who are most likely well known to the Taliban and its allies."

I wish I had written that.

"Here’s the bottom line on Pakistan’s "duplicity." After 9/11, the US threatened to "bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age" unless it turned against Taliban, a religious, anti-Communist movement, and opened Pakistan to US military forces and intelligence operations. This was told to me be a former head of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service whose directors I have met with since 1985.

Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf says his nation was forced to give in to Washington’s threats of all-out war against Pakistan it did not accept all US demands that resulted in Pakistan becoming a semi-occupied nation.

Musharraf was compelled to abandon Taliban, which served as Pakistan’s proxy army in Afghanistan battling the still active Afghan Communist Party-Tajik Northern Alliance. Russia and Iran also backed the Northern Alliance. Islamabad had used Taliban to counter intensifying efforts by India to extend its influence into Afghanistan.

Pakistan was thus forced by the US to act against its own vital strategic interests. Southern Afghanistan has long been Pakistan’s sphere of influence and was seen as giving wasp-waisted Pakistan strategic depth in a major war with India.

This column revealed that in 2007, Pakistan and India concluded that the US and its dragooned allies would be defeated and driven from Afghanistan. Both old foes began implementing a proxy war to control strategic Afghanistan.

Pakistan adopted a dual-track policy: accepting semi-occupation by the US and $1 billion annually from Washington and paying lip service to the US-led war, while keeping open links to Taliban and tribal militants."

That's the best, concise description of the extent of the mess we've created in central Asia I've read yet.

"What Washington really wants is a totally obedient, obsequious Pakistan, not real ally. But the interests of the two nations must at times diverge. Trying to make Pakistan into a satellite state will result in that enormously important, nuclear-armed nation of 170 million one day exploding with anti-American hatred, as was the case in Iran in 1979. The US-led war in Afghanistan is putting the two nations on a collision course. Over 90% of Pakistanis already say that their nation’s primary enemy is the United States, followed by India."

Yikes.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Video of panelist who debunks all the misinformation about the Iranian nuclear program.

POLITICS:

The praise for the ruling class essay keeps rolling in.

"It is the arrogant presumption on the part of the governing elite that they are better than their inferiors, that “the elite is neat and the masses are _____.”  And what are asses but dumb beasts of burden which labor for their masters.  This is comparable to the aristocratic disdain of the peasantry in pre-Revolutionary France found in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities."

This is why I constantly call them aristocrats. I'm happy to see a conservative who finally understands this, who finally understands that both Republicans and Democrats are aristocrats, and maybe if other conservatives finally realize it too, that'll be a good thing. But libertarians know this. You have to realize it to be a libertarian. It's nothing new.

"Angelo Codevilla traces this arrogant posture of the elite back to its origins in progressivism."

This is baloney. The arrogance of aristocrats is as old as man. It's human nature. Some have always felt they were better than others and destined to rule others through violence. Progressives weren't the first to feel that way. The rationalizations used to justify this human urge aren't important. They change with the ages and they'll continue to change into the future. The intellectual aspect is window dressing and worrying about it is a distraction. This is basic human nature. Those people who can get away with looting others tend to because it's easier than working hard and profiting in a system of voluntary exchange, and our genes program us to take the easy route whenever possible. It doesn't matter if they use religion or mysticism or beauty or inheritance or intellectual arguments to obtain power. What matters is the rest of us are fools to allow it. Americans, because we are a self-selected subset of the world's population selected for fierce independence managed to hold off the ruling elites for longer than any country in history, but as our ancestors tamed this land and created riches, more and more people who were not fiercely independent immigrated here and enabled the aristocrats to seize power. To this day, that's why Democrats, the party of slightly bigger government, are beloved by immigrants.

The public doesn't get to lament "What happened to the adults?" when talking about the aristocrats. The public elected them. Washington aristocrats are the most evil people in America, serial looters and killers, yet Americans re-elect them 94 percent of the time.

Obama can't yet claim to be more divisive than Lincoln.

Barney Frank involved in MaxineWaters's corruption case. Is anybody surprised?

Another case of the government and the press being in bed together - literally.

MISC:

Earth weathers solar storm.

Primal snacks.

Now the FTC declares it will determine what changes Intel can make to its chips. Our government has gone nuts. It no longer cares about the illusion of operating in our interests.