Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

15 economic indicators that show our economy continues to tank.

TAX AND SPEND:

The Social Security scam. You would wildly better off if you were free to invest that money yourself.

Obama steals money from us and give it to homeowners with underwater mortgages. I was torn on whether this will happen or not. On the one hand, it would be a terrible political move for Obama. He could buy a million votes, but he'd probably lose 10 times that number. On the other hand, all of Obama's policies are terrible politically because they're designed to destroy our economy, and they've been very successful at that. That's why his poll numbers are tanking. Now we know he chose to take the political hit to do more damage to the economy.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Peter Schiff explains why the dollar is tanking and what to expect.

"But the oil market holds far more near-term significance. On Monday, oil busted through the $80 price ceiling that had held since May. Any additional breaks to the upside would be extremely significant and could potentially send crude up to the mid-$90s before another correction takes hold. The danger for the dollar is that rising oil prices could be considered one of the unforeseen “negative shocks” of which Fed President Bullard warns, triggering a new round of inflation.

If the government fears the “recovery” will be derailed by higher energy prices, then look for quantitative easing to become the driving force of our economic policy. The Fed will perversely argue that rising oil prices are deflationary, as they will cause cash-strapped consumers to reduce spending on other goods. In reality, higher oil prices are merely evidence of the inflation the Fed itself has been creating. Instead of solving our problems, quantitative easing could tip the dollar into a death spiral."

Bernanke is helping Obama destroy America.

EDUCATION:

How the Dept. of Education intentionally dumbed-down schools and Americans. This is also why it wages war on Catholic schools - they don't follow the program.

HEALTH CARE:

Comparison cost of a birth in the Philippines.

"My son was born in Maasin City, Philippines, in 2004. It was a difficult birth and he was born not breathing. We ended up staying in the hospital for 6 days/5 nights. My boy Kinley was in intensive care for 24 hours and then closely monitored for the next few days. Now Kinley is a solidly built 6-yr old, speaks 3 languages interchangeably, and is quick witted…in other words he turned out just fine. Total cost was about $360, including medications. The funny thing is that my father-in-law was upset that they overcharged me because I was American."

That's what government regulations do to prices.

Is the cholesterol myth just a marketing gimmick by big pharma?

"Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the new cholesterol guidelines had been making money from the drug companies that manufacture statin cholesterol-lowering drugs."

That's quite the conflict of interest.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

This is an interesting question: Is Al Gore sane enough to stand trial? I think he is. I think he's evil, not insane. He knows darn good and well that the CO2 man produces has a negligible effect on climate. He's just using this cause to rob people blind and try and obtain a high position in the one world government.

"I’d have to guess that most people believe that Al Gore is merely using his knowledge of political corruption for profit; and getting an extra kick from screwing his old political foes. But it seems to me that a slick politician, with all his marbles in the right place, wouldn’t go over the top too much for fear of looking like a loony."

Al Gore will quit looking like a loon as soon as it's no longer profitable for him, and no sooner, unless his lawyer tells him to so support an insanity defense. It's a scam.

"A lying politician? Perhaps so. But for years he’s been begging us to believe that he believes. A cry for help? Maybe that’s true too. If he is indicted, I’m not betting against an order for a psychological evaluation. The test is whether he can distinguish right from wrong. I’ve never seen any evidence that he can."

That's an interesting point. Maybe he thinks destroying America and getting revenge on his enemies is the right thing to do. I've always said leftist ideology was insane because it believes that destroying people's lives is good for them. It believes disarming people so they can't defend themselves is good for them. It believes stealing from them until they're destitute is good for them. That's insanity. The problem for Gore is that people seeking revenge are never found insane. I think the reason Gore appears more and more unhinged is he realizes his house of lies is collapsing on him, and he knows he's subject to criminal prosecution.

"Now we learn that a U.S. funded agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has become mired in a new scandal involving numbers for the Great Lakes region that misrepresent average temperatures there. The latest word as of Wednesday, August 11, is that NOAA has removed an entire NOAA-16 satellite data set from its website – leading some to wonder if a decade’s worth of North American data will be discredited.

In sum, do not trust NOAA and most definitely, do not trust the Environmental Protection Agency that is desperately trying to get authorization to regulate carbon dioxide on the grounds that it is causing global warming. This isn’t just a rogue agency. The EPA has the look of a criminal enterprise bent on destroying the U.S. economy."

Of course it does. Look who ultimately runs it.

Government weather prediction, like all government services, is corrupt.

Yet another study smacks down Mann's absurd hockey stick.

POLICE STATE:

Judges are just as corrupt as prosecutors and police.

"A federal judge conspired with the Bush Department of Justice to plan the largest immigration raid ever in the United States, and then presided over the trial of the plant’s manager, eventually sentencing him beyond even prosecutors’ recommendation.

New documents show Linda Reade, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, was involved in the planning of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raid on the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant at least six months before it occurred in May 2008. She asked for briefings from law enforcement and went as far as to ensure the raid was conducted around her vacation schedule.

But the judge never said a word of this to the defense lawyers for Sholom Rubashkin, the Agriprocessors manager, when she presided over his trial on bank fraud. She didn’t recuse herself from the case, either."

They all obtain their salary by theft, so what would you expect?

Police cars now equipped with license-plate readers that can read and verify 5,000 license plates per eight hour shift. While on the surface this may seem innocuous or a good thing, it allows police departments to build up a huge database of the movements of individuals.

How linking RFID tags and personal info can be used to monitor every aspect of people's lives which will be accessed by government.

WAR:

The reason for blowback is simple.

"Last week the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report on the effect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that confirmed what critics of our foreign policy have been saying for years: the killing of civilians, although unintentional, angers other civilians and prompts them to seek revenge. This should be self-evident."

"According to Former General Stanley McChrystal’s so-called insurgent math, for every insurgent killed, 10 more insurgents are created by the collateral damage to civilians. Every coalition attack leads to 6 retaliatory attacks against our troops within the following six weeks, according to the NBER report."

This is why we can never win the war on terror with bullets and bombs. We have to re-embrace America's founding principles to win this war.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Because welfare to dictators, often called foreign aid, is so destructive to the people of foreign countries, Africa is the textbook case, we should end it.

MISC:

10 ways retiring abroad can keep you young.

The blood diamond hoax.

How to keep some of your assets in a foreign country.

Here's a great line from Codevilla's Ruling Class essay:

"The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity."

The ruling class prays to itself. I love when I read something that conveys such a powerful point in such elegant fashion. That one line is worth reading the whole essay.

"Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so."

The libertarian streak that runs through the vast majority of Americans is coming to the fore.

"Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the [ruling] class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts."

Another well-communicated observation.

"If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps."

I have no doubt there are hundreds if not thousands of stories like this every year.

"And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority."

So much had been made of this essay before I began to read it, I was skeptical that it would live up to the hype, but so far it has.

"Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower."

And we know that without reading.