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.