Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Analysis of unemployment trends in different sectors fits Austrian business cycle theory.

TAX AND SPEND:

Rumor has it Democrats are planning to try and cram through a $1 trillion spending bill in the lame duck session.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Apparently even the New York Times can see the parallel of our failing monetary policy with the lost decades in Japan:

"Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West.

But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy."

Bernanke knows this too. He's doing it on purpose. The difference is Japan had the US and to a lesser extent Europe to keep it from collapsing. Nothing can keep the US from collapsing.

HEALTH CARE:

How Obamacare gutted Medicare in favor of Medicaid.

GLOBAL WARMING:

The UN has no power to ban anything including attempts block sunlight. Imagine what all they would ban if they had that power. No thank you.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Pharmacist refuses to sell inhaler to woman suffering acute asthma attack because she was $1.99 short. Fortunately her boyfriend's paramedic friend came to her rescue and kept her from being another victim sacrifices on the alter of prohibitionism. This would never happen in a free society.

POLICE STATE:

15 off-duty police officers beat a cab driver nearly to death, but the only officer punished is the one who stopped the assault.

"As the assault grew uglier, a Park Avenue doorman frantically dialed 911. “You got to get the cops over,” he pleaded. “They’re beating the sh*t out of a cab driver. About 15 guys. They’re f*****g jumping him…. They’re getting a two-by-four. I’m witnessing a big two-by-four being picked up.”

Calling the police for help — which is never a good idea — was a gratuitous act in this case, since the assailants were the police: rookie officers who belong to the NYPD’s Manhattan North Impact (MNI) unit."

"After uniformed officers arrived on the scene, Acosta identified himself as both a policeman and an eyewitness. He was immediately assaulted and handcuffed, and then put in a police vehicle. He was taken to a nearby station house and detained for most of the night in the roll call room. He was eventually approached by Inspector Michael Harrington, who insisted that Acosta follow a carefully written script: He was to sign a statement claiming that he had broken up the fight but had not identified himself as a police officer when he was arrested.

“Listen, this is an unfortunate incident,” the Inspector told Acosta. “This is what you’re going to say.”

After Acosta refused to perjure himself, he was forced to turn in his badge and gun, and placed on a “modified assignment” for the “good order of the department.” He was eventually hit with five spurious administrative charges: “Conduct unbecoming,” failing to identify himself, interfering with an off-duty police officer, improperly filling out line-of-duty injury paperwork, and improperly preparing witness statements. Predictably, his police union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, did nothing to help him.

None of Ming’s assailants was ever charged with a crime. A few of them endured trivial administrative discipline before returning to duty. Captain Pla, who permitted his subordinates to attack the cabbie and supervised the post-beating cover-up, wasn’t punished in any way.

Meanwhile, the victim of the police assault was arrested and charged with “aggravated unlicensed driving,” and forced to pay a fine by a judge who insisted that Ming had been brutalized during a traffic stop."

This is what government worshipers have turned our country into.

A professional pilot describes his experience trying to get to work. In a change of policy, TSA had implemented nude scanners for pilots, and the pilot refused. He also refused to be groped in a secondary screening. For this he was detained, repeatedly hassled and harassed and ultimately denied access to his job. Good for him. I hope all the pilots in America strike against the policy. Maybe a union can be useful after all.

WAR:

Predator drones accused of using pirated software, but don't think for a minute government will be hoisted on its own petard. Even if this is ruled to be true, there's no way the predators will be grounded.

What do we get for nine years of war and tens of thousands of deaths in Afghanistan? Al Qaeda moving back into Afghanistan.

"Al Qaeda-connected fighters are streaming back into eastern Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan despite the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops earlier this summer, putting fresh doubts into whether the surge will be effective at stopping a resilient insurgency.

According to a report Monday in National Journal online, "several dozen" al Qaeda fighters have ventured into the Nuristan and Kunar provinces in the eastern part of the country, a development which "could trigger fresh attacks on coalition and Afghan targets and hamper the intensifying push to strike peace deals with moderate elements of the Taliban.""

Several dozen doesn't sound like much, but there never were very many al Qaeda there to begin with. Bin Laden is showing what fools our government is. Americans have been fighting and dying in Afghanistan for nine years. We've killed tens of thousands of Afghans and made enemies of pretty much every Muslin the Middle East. All the while bin Laden and al Qaeda have been sitting on the sidelines in Pakistan.

POLITICS:

There's a number of great quotes in this rant against democracy: Here's just one:

"Most of government just does what it wants, in plain sight, and nobody sees it because there is too much of it, in too many places, and who has time?"

Here's another:

"I must be having visions again. A gal on the box says the US is foundering in debt, so the government is going to borrow more money from China and spend it. Even when you are tripping hard, you can tell the delusions because they don’t make sense."

Funny stuff and possibly enlightening to government lovers. But I doubt it.

"I’m told that mid-term elections approach, a premonition much like the fugue state before a migraine. Change is in the air. Excited people join movements and talk about bringing the country back to its principles, getting America back on track, watering the American Dream, and throwing the rascals out. Wait: I’m the one who’s supposed to be hallucinating here. The elections will decide little or nothing, spending will remain exuberantly profligate, China will rise and America sink, and in two years we will again hear about Getting America back on track, the American dream, and the rest."

Sad because it's true.

Boortz has a theory about the Democrat attacks on the Chamber of Commerce.

"Democrats have been on a relentless campaign against the Chamber of Commerce and the supposed foreign campaign contributions to Republicans. Just take a look at this video of chief dogwasher David Axelrod over the weekend. With appearances like this and others for weeks on end, what the Democrats are setting up is this: They know that the Republicans are going to win big in November, so they are trying to preemptively discredit their wins by saying that the Republicans "bought" the election with foreign money."

That's a pretty good theory. The two parties are always finding innovative ways to divide and conquer.

"While there is zero evidence that the Chamber of Commerce has used foreign money to fund US elections, guess who IS at the receiving end of foreign money? Democrats! An analysis compiled for The Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics found that House and Senate Democrats have received $1.02 million this election cycle from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies. Almost $510,000 of that money is from PACs funded entirely by contributions from U.S. employees of subsidiaries of foreign companies.

Well isn't that just a kick in the teeth? Democrats make unsupportable charges about the Chamber supporting Republican candidates with foreign money ... and durned if it doesn't turn out that it's the Democrats themselves who are taking the foreign money."

This shouldn't surprise anybody. Democrats are masters at falsely accusing Republicans of doing what the Democrats are really doing. Racism and sexism come immediately to mind.

Obama supporters hurl violent threats at owners of anti-Obama billboard. Don't you love those non-violent lefties?

Barney Frank sends his boyfriend to heckle his political opponent. I wonder if that's the same boyfriend who ran a sex service out of Frank's house, or if this is a new one. Can we please get this ultra-corrupt embarrassment out of Congress?

MISC:

Discovery of ancient Chinese coin in Africa is evidence that the Chinese visited there 80 years before Europeans.

I've known a lot of people who advocate government seizing children from parents. Those people seem unable to comprehend that when you give government any power, it turns around and uses the power as a weapon against the people.

This NFL war against helmet to helmet hits is ridiculous. It's a violent game. Instead of trying to legislate it away, they should just make safer helmets. This isn't rocket science.

"Despite his practical safety upgrades, Princip does acknowledge that the Bulwark won’t fare well in the marketplace if it isn’t stylish. “Players aren’t going to wear it if it doesn’t look good,” he says."

And now you know why this hasn't happened yet. The basic helmet design hasn't been changed in 60 years or more.

Essay attempts to define the state. It rejects this genesis theory:

"Somewhere, in some far-stretching, fertile country, a number of free men, of equal status, form a union for mutual protection. Gradually they differentiate into property classes. Those best endowed with strength, wisdom, capacity for saving, industry and caution, slowly acquire a basic amount of real or movable property; while the stupid and less efficient, and those given to carelessness and waste, remain without possessions. The well-to-do lend their productive property to the less well-off in return for tribute, either ground rent or profit, and become thereby continually richer, while the others always remain poor."

Of course this idea is wrong. There was never a community of free men of equal status. Wolf packs have lead dogs. Bands of gorillas have leaders, usually silverbacks. Humans have always had tribal chiefs and clan leaders. In some ways, it's a natural extension of the family unit. Any way you look at it, it's instinctual. Not only that, but dogs understand property rights. All you have to do is watch two dogs interact over a bone to realize that. The one using the bone owns it. As soon as it stops using it and another dog picks it up, that dog owns it. I'm sure gorillas understand property too. It's also instinctual because property rights are an optimal way to minimize conflict in a social group. And packs of wolves fight over territory and property. Bands of apes fight over territory and property. Groups of people fight over territory and property. It's instinctual.

"Since land could not have acquired "natural scarcity," the scarcity must have been "legal." This means that the land has been preempted by a ruling class against its subject class, and settlement prevented. Therefore the state, as a class state, can have originated in no other way than through conquest and subjugation."

This theory isn't right either. There was never some a community of free men of equal status who were conquered by ruler. The ruler has been with our ancestors for far longer than our ancestors were human. The ruler is older than primates, let alone humans. Obviously tribes conquered each other through war, consolidated and grew. It seems that as communication advanced, the number of people that could be united by a sword, then a gun advanced with it. But there was no first human who conquered his neighbors and took charge. Again, this instinct to have a leader is an extension of the family hierarchy. It seems to me the evolution of the state has just been the evolution of rationalizations and legalisms to justify and formalize the social implementation of this instinct.

"The state, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors."

This definition works if you classify the result of any clan conquering another as a state, but it's not very satisfactory. That definition means states are millions of years old. Think of the scene at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when one group of pre-humans picks up bones and conquers their another.

"The little history learned in our school days suffices to prove this generic doctrine. Everywhere we find some warlike tribe of wild men breaking through the boundaries of some less-warlike people, settling down as nobility and founding its state. In Mesopotamia, wave follows wave, state follows state — Babylonians, Amorites, Assyrians, Arabs, Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Mongols, Seljuks, Tartars, Turks; on the Nile, Hyksos, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks; in Greece, the Doric states are typical examples; in Italy, Romans, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Germans; in Spain, Carthaginians, Visigoths, Arabs; in Gaul, Romans, Franks, Burgundians, Normans; in Britain, Saxons, Normans."

But once again, this was going on for millions of years before civilization. It was going on before humans and even primates evolved. I bet when wolf packs fight, the victor sometimes captures wolves from the other pack and forces them to join the conquerors. Bands of chimpanzees attack each other and kidnap members of the other band. We know American indians did the same. Our governments are the product of the same instinct which became more sophisticated when our ancestors transformed from nomads and created settlements, when they came to own more property to loot. The richer we become, the more property there is to loot, the more justification and legalization government requires.