Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

This is a sad indictment of our trade situation.

"Historians tell us that by the very end of the Roman Empire, goods were pouring into Rome from all over the known world, but about the only thing being sent out of Rome was human waste and garbage. America has not yet reached that point, but we are certainly well on our way. In 2010, the number one U.S. export to China is "scrap and trash." Yes, you read the correctly. The number one thing that China buys from us is our garbage. According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China's number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment (nearly $50 billion) while our number one export to them is waste paper and scrap metal (approximately $8 billion)."

The Japanese bought tremendous amounts of scrap metal from the US too right up until they bombed Pearl Harbor.

I can't tell if this hysteria over foreclosure fraud is real or ginned up. With the explosion in foreclosures, I'm sure the process got royally screwed up, but how bad in reality?

TAX AND SPEND:

Boortz asks a wonderful question:

"This tax cheat was sentenced to work in a pizza joint for the next year.  What about the tax cheat running our Treasury Department?"

This is the kind of all-pervasive corruption government breeds.

Britain and Sweden reducing their welfare states to avoid collapse. But Obama wants the US to collapse, so he's expanding ours. Frankly, this gives me hope for November. It's possible Republicans will find it in their interests to cut the size and scope of government for the first time in our lifetimes. Unlikely, but possible.

More on government confiscation of retirement accounts to fund Social Security. The problem with this politically is senior have retirement accounts, they don't want them confiscated, and they vote.

Another prediction that the next big bubble to pop is US Treasuries.

REGULATION:

The fallacy of child labor laws. Parents are best positioned to determine what's best for their families, not bureaucrats.

Right after the rescue of the Chilean miners, I predicted that government would play the lead role in causing the mine collapse. Sure enough:

"Sure the government got behind the rescue, but the state was the body responsible for regulating the safety of the mine. Yet one third of the cost of the rescue is coming from private donations. And as it turns out, according to an article from Associated Press, "The Aug. 5 collapse brought the 125-year-old San Jose mine's checkered safety record into focus and put Chile's top industry under close scrutiny. Many believe the collapse occurred because the mine was overworked and violated safety codes...Also suing the San Esteban company is Gino Cortez, a 40-year-old miner who lost his left leg from the knee down a month before the accident as he was leaving the mine after his shift and a rock fell on him. He contends he was hurt because the mine was short on the metallic screens that protect miners from such collapses."⁴ So the accident occurred in a mine owned by the state and regulated by the state."

It had to be.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

This line right here should open up anybody's eyes who doesn't understand what the Fed does by design:

"What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale, in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1% interest cost? This is the game that is being played today."

Legally, nothing. Think about it. The Fed could print up enough money overnight to buy every asset in the world, and then do it. Obviously when people saw what was happening, they would stop selling and let prices settle, but by then the banksters could own half the world. The rest of us would be destitute. The only thing stopping them is fear of what the people would do to them afterwards. So they steal from us constantly at a lower pace so we don't get mad and stop them.

"Finance has become the new form of warfare – without the expense of military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign real estate and natural resources, infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership.

Who needs an army when you can obtain monetary wealth and asset appropriation simply by financial means? Victory promises to go to the economy whose banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources."

Allowing the Fed to exist is nuts.

"U.S. officials demonize countries suffering these dollar inflows as aggressive ‘currency manipulators’ for what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner calls “‘Competitive nonappreciation,’ in which countries block their currencies from rising in value.”[1A] Oscar Wilde would have struggled to find a more convoluted term for other countries protecting themselves from raiders trying to force up their currencies to make enormous predatory fortunes.

Competitive nonappreciation’ sounds like ‘conspiratorial non-suicide.’ These countries simply are trying to protect their currencies from arbitrageurs and speculators flooding their financial markets with dollars, sweeping their currencies up and down to extract billions of dollars from their central banks."

Tell me this doesn't sound like the death throws of our economic system.

"At issue is how long nations will succumb to the speculative dollar glut. The world is being forced to choose between subordination to U.S. economic nationalism or an interim of financial anarchy. Nations are responding by seeking to create an alternative international financial system, risking an anarchic transition period in order to create a fairer world economy."

That's why middle eastern nations are moving away from using the dollar for oil.

HEALTH CARE:

Because Big Pharma and Big Med were created by government and are protected by government, pharmaceutical companies are giving doctors kickbacks for prescribing medicines.

"Although the industry’s financial dealings are still private material, lawsuits aimed at Pharma’s marketing have required many of the larger companies to disclose much of their payout information. Although the details are scattered in public websites and documents, ProPublica compiled the information from these various resources. The result? A list of 17,000 doctors and $257 million dollars in payout. Additionally, the organization found that hundreds of physicians on the Pharma payroll lacked board certifications in their claimed fields or had been sanctioned by state medical boards for unprofessional (and in some cases heinous) behavior."

This is another example of the all-pervasive corruption bred by government.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

In today's reminder that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse, the EPA previews future regulations:

"Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed in a "Notice of Intent" that passenger vehicle fuel economy average as much as 62 miles per gallon 14 years from now. The agency was able to arrive at this lofty mark by conveniently ignoring everything we know about the state of automotive art and the marketplace today."

They can and will get a lot worse before they get better.

The enviromarxists hate this truth:

"We are no more “addicted” to fossil fuels than we are to food, housing and clothing. It’s simply that fossil fuels give us more abundant, reliable and affordable energy, from less land, than any alternatives we have today. They enable us to have jobs, hospitals, cars, schools, factories, offices, stores – and living standards better than royalty enjoyed a mere century ago. As fossil fuel consumption increases, so does agriculture, commerce, mobility, comfort, convenience, health and prosperity."

They hate the advance of man.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Look at all these cell phones confiscated in a prison. If guards can't keep cell phones out of prisons, how can government keep drugs off the street? Rhetorical question. Reason and all evidence says it can't.

By embracing liberty on one or a few issues, Presidents can insure popularity. Roosevelt won Americans' hearts and votes by repealing prohibition.

"Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. After dealing with the banking crisis and the budget during his first week on the job, on March 13 he called on Congress to repeal Prohibition. On March 23, he signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which legalized the sale in the United States of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2 percent.

He wasted no time: he signed it one day after Congress passed it. He said with great élan, "I think this would be a good time for a beer."

Only then, on March 16, did FDR begin to work on his New Deal agenda. Then he had the wind at his back."

How about we elect a president who embraces liberty on all issues?

"Somehow the historians have failed to credit his popularity to one of the greatest restorations of liberty in American history. The majority of Americans were drinkers, and the alcohol industry represented something like 5 percent of the overall economy. Prohibition made alcohol much more expensive, harder to find, and generally of a much lower quality.

In fact, because hard liquor is easier to conceal, Prohibition had turned Americans from beer to rot-gut whiskey, which as the name implies was of low quality and often was dangerous to your health. While total alcohol consumption remained about the same during Prohibition as before, whiskey's market share rose from 40 percent to as high as 90 percent."

The same effects have happened with drug prohibition.

POLICE STATE:

The American people don't mind going through TSAs nude scanners. I'm telling you, some TSA pervert is going to stalk some little girl or boy he sees and destroy the life of that child. I guarantee you TSA is hiring perverts left and right right now. Every pervert in America is applying for work there.

WAR:

After nine years of fighting in Afghanistan, the military has finally improved troop survivability from IEDs. While this is a good thing, can you imagine if a private sector company took nine years to improve like this? It could never happen. That company would have gone bankrupt eight years ago. I have a better plan to improve troop survivability. Bring them home.

POLITICS:

All presidents and all government aristocrats are an adversary to the American values of freedom and personal responsibility. Obama is the worst in our life, but that's the natural next step down the road to serfdom. Obama isn't our problem. Democrats aren't our problem. Surrendering our freedom to government no matter which party is in power every day, every year, and every decade for a century is our problem. We're on the verge of the coming of the strong man.

Washington elites understand this. They say the tea parties won't change anything.

"Washingtonians involved in the political or policy process believe overwhelmingly that tea party candidates will not “be able to bring change to Washington.” Only 11 percent of D.C. insiders polled said they thought the tea party could bring change, compared with 77 percent who did not."

They're right. A handful of noobs won't change anything.

Obama complaining Washington is broken is a farce.

"If your party has the White House, 59 Senate seats, and 255 House seats, though, for all intents and purposes it is Washington. The Obama Democrats have completed a period of surpassing legislative mastery.

They got a 1,073-page stimulus bill, a 2,409-page health-care bill, and a 2,319-page financial-reform bill passed. That's 5,801 pages in just three pieces of legislation, at a very conservative cumulative estimated cost of $1.9 trillion over ten years. If this is what Obama's broken Washington produces in three bills, what would a functioning one do?

For all their reputation as obstructionists, Republicans weren't able to stop any of this. Unlike in the early Clinton years, Republicans aren't benefiting from obstructionism so much as from failing to block a president's deeply unpopular priorities. Washington worked for Obama - and now he's paying the price."

That's exactly right. Everything government does is destructive, and Obama and his Democrats accomplished a lot of destruction in two years.

A little reminder on what Republican promises mean.

"Before even examining the text of the "Pledge to America," I would like to point out two major practical problems. First, like the "Contract with America," this is a House Republican document. And like what happened with the "Contract with American," there is no guarantee that Senate Republicans will pass legislation proposed by the House – assuming that Republicans even regain control of the Senate. The second problem is, like what happened with the "Contract with America," we have a Democratic president with veto power. So, even if the Pledge is a good thing (it isn’t), and even if the Republicans are sincere (they aren’t), there is no guarantee that Republicans will accomplish anything even if they do win back control of the House. And as it was pointed back out in 2000: "The combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%." Is there any doubt that things will turn out any different this time?"

As I pointed out above, you can't get blood from a turnip. It's possible, though unlikely, Republicans realize Americans are at the end of their rope. With the Fed printing and dragging us into an inflationary depression, voters aren't going to get any happier, and the only thing aristocrats respond to is voters. So maybe Republicans will make some tiny cuts around the edges. Whatever they do, it's guaranteed to be too little, too late. And they'll get blamed for failures right after they take power too. Maybe there's hope in that: hope that the American people will figure out our problems are a century in the making.

Another great quote:

"If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."

That's funny.

Hillary Democrats want to payback Obama and his gang for 2008 including Rahm Emanuel.

LOCAL:

Cincinnati high school holds mock election to teach students to vote, but only puts Democrats on the ballot. For voting Democrat, the students got an ice cream reward. Naturally, school officials don't think they did anything wrong. This is the kind of all-pervasive corruption that government breeds. Corruption becomes the norm, and the corrupt people perpetrating it don't even know it.

MISC:

These NFL head injuries are no joking matter, but I get a big kick out of the Roger Goodell and the owners pretending they care about the health of the players at the same time they're pushing to add two more games to the season. They haven't done any analysis to see what effect that would have on player health. The only concern they have for the players is how those players can make them more money. That's what happens when government creates cartels. Over the last 60 years, players have gotten bigger and faster, but players haven't advance nearly as fast as technology, yet the basic helmet design hasn't changed in that 60 years. That helmet is designed to be a weapon instead of armor. This sudden concern about player health is a farce. Far and away the simplest thing to do to protect the players' health is to design a new helmet. The second is to stop trying to extend the season.

One of the advantages of the BCS system is that every regular season game matters until you lose. If you take a game off and lose, your national title hopes are shot. But the downside to that is that once a team loses, it doesn't really matter any more. If you're an alum who goes and tailgates every game, maybe that's not true, but for the vast majority of fans, the excitement of the season is gone for good. A playoff system would insure fans stay interested all season long.