Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

I made a similar comment to my girlfriend about the explosion of commercials for government after Obama was elected:

"Just as in the Soviet Union, we are being bombarded with government tv ads. I saw one this morning, a rip-off of Cinderella, hectoring parents to use government-approved child seats until the kid is 4’9″–or else. Land of the free."

I've long said we were transforming into the Soviet Union. The transformation is almost complete.

This is why Democracy is the most dangerous form of government known to man:

"Democracy is the highest form of tyranny. It keeps people from noticing that theys have no power over anything. Democracy means ‘rule of the people,’ usually by Wall Street looters and blockhead generals with the minds of giant clams and all sorts of feathers and colored tinsel stuck to them. They look like Byzantine mosaics. And lobbies, never forget the lobbies, draining the treasury in the manner of bloated leeches on a suppurating udder. People in democracies have the freedom of molten plastic being poured into a mold, but they probably think less than plastic does."

The last sentence should read "some people", not all people. What isn't mentioned here is that democracies carry the weight of legitimacy because they're supposedly supported by the majority even though that's not close to accurate.

ECONOMY:

In another example of the Nobel Prize for economics being used for government propaganda, three economists win for supposedly showing that government policy is critical to minimizing unemployment. Baloney. Austrian economist exposes the Nobel Prize winners.

TAX AND SPEND:

Boortz reminds us that when it comes to government spending, Democrats have been in control since 2007, not just 2009.

Graph from Cato shows how absurd these tax cut discussions are as spending dwarfs them.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Maybe I'm slow, but it just now struck me that the rampant consumerism Americans are always criticized for is a product of inflationary monetary policy. Inflationary monetary policy encourages people to borrow and buy, and it punishes them for saving. Over generations, it changes the culture. That's exactly what's happened in the US. That's consumerism.

EDUCATION:

Have you ever wondered why some charter schools do so well and others do so poorly?

"City charter schools represented by the teachers union scored significantly lower on city-issued report cards this year than did their nonunionized counterparts, a new analysis found.

The seven charter elementary and middle schools whose members belong to the United Federation of Teachers scored a collective

C-minus on this year's report cards, which are based largely on whether students improve on state reading and math tests.

By comparison, the remaining 50 nonunion charter schools averaged a more respectable B-minus grade, according to the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability in Albany."

Unions.


Lately I've been enjoying running across people who long ago recognized and talked about things I recognized on my own and have never been able to find somebody who thought about them. Here's an example from education:

"Caplan subscribes to a "signaling" model of education (although really it's a model ofschooling, which is different from education) as popularized by the economist Michael Spence in a1973 article.

In this approach, the reason an employer will offer a higher salary to, say, a Harvard physics major with a 4.0 GPA than he would to someone with a 2.5 GPA and a literature degree from a community college isn't that the job will require knowledge of Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism. Rather, Spence's signaling model says that the type of person who chooses to major in physics at Harvard, and can graduate with a 4.0, is also the type of person who will do well in many jobs. So it's not that college (and graduate school) actually endow students with useful skills, it's just that they provide mental hoops for students to jump through and thereby exhibit their intrinsic abilities to employers."

I've been saying that since I was in college. My college classes taught me zero skills I used in my job. Electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati when I went there could best be described as a test to see which students could deal with the copious amounts of bull**** piled on them. It had nothing to do with education. It had to do with perseverance. Those that could tolerate the bull**** enough to get good grades could be counted on to be good engineers in the work place. College was a racket. I could have started my same job right out of high school five years earlier and had just as successful a career. Of course, many of my fellow engineers actually learned useful skills at college, to their advantage. I wish I had discovered these authors decades ago.

HEALTH CARE:

Obama grants Obamacare waivers to teacher unions and big corporations. The god of government is bestowing favors on those who pay sufficient tribute. The rest of us are screwed.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

In the span of a week, arctic sea ice has gone from below normal because of this year's hot summer to rapidly increasing as a cold winter approaches. We had a powerful el Nino which made it a hot summer, and now the rapid advancement of a strong la Nina will make it a cold winter. Ouch.

That EU plan to force airlines to engage in carbon trading schemes goes forward.

WAR:


Did you ever wonder why North Korea and Iran might want to develop nuclear weapons and a missile system that would give them a credible nuclear deterrent? Maybe it's self-defense.

"From the 1950s Pentagon to today's Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War.

Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea's capital during the war. The U.S. military services later vied for the lead role in any "atomic delivery" over North Korea. In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed U.S. warplanes stood by in South Korea on 15-minute alert to strike the north.

Just this past April, issuing a U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "all options are on the table" for dealing with Pyongyang — meaning U.S. nuclear strikes were not ruled out."

North Korea was never a threat to the US, but...

"The stream of new revelations about U.S. nuclear planning further fills in a picture of what North Korea calls "the increasing nuclear threat of the U.S.," which it cites as the reason it developed its own atom-bomb program — as a deterrent."

"In a report on global nuclear threats, analysts at Washington's Stimson Center identify six overt warnings by high-ranking American officials since 1976 that the U.S. would resort to nuclear weapons against North Korea if warranted. But U.S. threats go back more than a half-century, to long before North Korea split its first atom."

I have no doubt the same is true of Iran since 1980. And we wonder why these governments have such an entrenched, defensive mentality and such hostility toward the US. These countries are developing nukes to defend themselves from 60 years of nuclear bullying by our government. Once again, our aggressive, interventionist nuclear policy has made us less secure.

British aid worker killed by US friendly fire during rescue attempt, not by Taliban as originally reported.

"So now we’re told that aid worker Linda Norgrove didn’t die at the hands of her captors, but may have been killed by a US grenade. As Benedict Brogan points out, David Cameron is getting a swift lesson in the agonising choices that face prime ministers and presidents who have to approve these sorts of operations.

But surely the principal thought discernible on the PM’s face was “Why, a week after the child benefit fiasco, have I been left looking like an ill-informed and gullible patsy by our chief allies in the world, the Americans?”"

Considering how terrible our government is, we're lucky to have any allies.

POLITICS:

New England Democrats who have never feared being beaten by Republicans in our lifetimes, are suddenly in danger of being beating by Republicans. As much as Republicans disgust me, I can't help but feel some satisfaction at this. I still hold out hope that enough Republicans will "get it" that things might change in 2012. But my rational brain tells me otherwise. Oh please let this Republican beat that national embarrassment and corruption king Barney Frank.

Why would anybody be surprised Obama has an enemies list? Doesn't every president, especially the most dangerous president in our lifetimes, have an enemies list?

This is article makes fun of Nancy Pelosi for saying Democrats are winning. There's no doubt Democrats are winning. They've been pulling the country inexorably toward communism for 100 years, sometimes faster than others, but at an ever accelerating rate. Republicans have been tagging right along behind them, pretending they support small government while helping push the country toward communism. As for this election:

"“She believes deep in her soul that the Democrats will keep the majority,” said Larry Horowitz, a friend and adviser."

Either she's really putting on a positive face, or she knows something we don't. Don't discount the last possibility.

Is Christine O'Donnell really a neo-con?

MISC:

Somebody else has noticed America is being crushed by laws.