Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Jim Rodgers calls commodities a win-win investment. If the economy picks up, people will want more commodities. If the economy falls off, the Fed will print more money. That sounds like a recipe for a future bubble in commodities. The key word is future.

TAX AND SPEND:

I did a search for Republican hypocrites, and I'm surprised I found nothing with substance. This story about Republicans who voted against the stimulus boondoggle but who then tried to get stimulus funds for their district is the closest I found high in the rankings. Taken by itself, there's nothing hypocritical about that. They voted against stealing the money from the American people, but since Democrats stole it anyway, they want to bring some to their district. But Republicans are such obvious hypocrites in the bigger picture, and I think Paul Ryan is the most dangerous hypocrite in a party of hypocrites. He voted for No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Bush's Porkulous Farm Bill, expanding SCHIP, TARP and more, yet he's convinced people he's the Republican fiscal responsibility guru. It's amazing how voters fall for those liars. Here's an article on ethics problems of Republican leaders. All aristocrats are corrupt.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

G-20 pays lip service to avoiding currency war. I don't believe a word of it. Ben Bernanke is still going to print $1 trillion new dollars, doing exactly what the G-20 said not to do. Our government is trying to force everybody else to behave one way while it behaves another, and it won't work. This only ends one way: with the destruction of the dollar.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Drug prohibitionists caused 13 more people to be murdered.

"Attackers in two vehicles pulled up to the houses in a lower-middle-class Ciudad Juarez neighborhood late Friday and opened fire on about four dozen partygoers gathered for a 15-year-old boy's birthday party.

The dead identified so far were 13 to 32 years old, including six women and girls, Chihuahua state Attorney General Carlos Salas told reporters at a news conference at the crime scene. The majority of the victims were high school students, a survivor said."

The scary part is most prohibitionists probably feel good about themselves over this. Most probably feel these people deserved what they got because they did drugs. Obviously the murderers are responsible for their own actions, but so are the prohibitionists who created this black market knowing full well that black markets always and inevitably lead to murder, crime and destruction far worse than the substance prohibited would if it was legal. How many times to we have to relearn this lesson?

POLICE STATE:

Janet Napolitano refuses to go through nude-scanner. Of course. They aren't for the ruling class, but the rest of us must submit.

WAR:

Weapon sales to the Middle East are motivated by politics, not security. On the same theme, this article shows that military spending is about propping up the ruling class, not protecting the American people. This chart of US exports should freeze the blood of American. Don't look at this if you have a history of heath trouble:


This is about as perfect an illustration of how government spending seizes resources from the productive private sector where they were being used to solve problems and improve the lives of the people into the political economy where they're used to buy votes for the aristocrats. Not only do we pay for this by government stealing our money from us at the point of a gun, we pay for it a second time with significantly higher prices for the goods and services we purchase to improve our lives. This is what we've done to our country by empowering Republicans and Democrats to rule us instead of keeping our wealth and power in our own hands.

POLITICS:

Obama campaigns for Harry Reid. Let's hope he continues to be the kiss of death.

Comparing the 2010 election to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

""Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." ~ H.L. Mencken"

No kidding.

"Like the Titanic, the Washington/Wall Street ship of state hit a Federal Reserve created iceberg under the command of George W. Bush with the recession/depression. Again, like recent evidence suggests, the original Titanic hit the iceberg and sank so fast because of a steering mistake turning the ship in the wrong direction which could have been avoided.

In a similar fashion, both Obama and Bush, following the self-serving orders of Bernanke and Wall Street steered the nation directly into the current depression and coming national debt and dollar collapse by following Keynesian economic principles instead of letting the market quickly resolve the crisis."

The difference is Obama's goal is to collapse the US.

"America today is a one-party state much like the Soviet Union, China or Nazi Germany and both nominal political parties are just façades presented to the public to create the illusion of competition and choice. The establishment leadership in both the GOP and the Democrats represent the goals of the same special interests."

They all have the same power and money for sale: ours. It's the only thing of value they have, so naturally they sell it to the highest bidders. The same groups are bidding to buy our power and money from all of them.

"Before the summer of 2011 is over, the Tea Party supporters will already be angry and disappointed as the GOP elites will maintain the status quo and there will only be empty rhetoric rather than political action to control spending, curtail the deficits and limit government. When the coming debt and dollar crisis takes hold, I guarantee the GOP will have an action plan supported by the Democrats which will pass with bilateral support to solve the economic crisis. The solution will be the theft of your private wealth and promised benefits all done in the public interest to save America."

That's guaranteed.

Lew Rockwell on the oligarchs:

"How fun to see the late Sam Konkin‘s vivid coinage “Kochtopus” hitting the MSM. But writers like Joe Conason do not understand the power elite. The goal of plutocrats like the Kochs is not free markets and less government. Nor is George Soros’s goal helping the poor and bringing honest peace to the Middle East. Nor does Warren Buffett seek to make us all good investors. Like the Rockefellers, such political magnates lust for more money and power through the State. That is, they itch to rule us, though not openly. That’s why they own so many politicians and public intellectuals: to cover their tracks. The Kochs even control swaths of large government universities. And speaking of the Kochs, here is the complete program for their latest secret meeting, with all the interesting names. As usual, regime-libertarians are indistinguishable from neocons. See also the interesting Lee Fang, though he doesn’t understand the ruling class either."

But this program for the Koch meeting stresses dramatically increasing economic freedom. I'm all for that. No doubt these people hope to do that through the political system, and no doubt they intend to profit along the way. But increasing economic freedom is good for everybody. It really is a noble goal and stands in direct opposition to claims to want to help people by stealing money from others.

Case for Bush the Younger as the worst president ever. This is an impressive case, but it's not even close. I put him way down with LBJ whom he most resembled, but Lincoln has to be by far the world president in history. He killed at least 618,000 Americans back when the population of the United States was 31,443,321. That would be like killing 6 million Americans today. That puts him in a similar category to Adolf Hitler. No other president compares. Not even FDR who's obviously second worst. But this is a really important point that conservatives still don't seem to get to our great detriment:

"The worst shame of Bush – worse than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars – is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro-free-market rhetoric in the very process of destroying those institutions. That makes his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters Bush caused on the free market simply because Bush constantly said he believed in it."

Exactly. Barack Obama is an obvious Marxist. He surrounds himself with Marxists. He implements policies designed to pave the way to Marxism. But we know it. We know he hates freedom. But Bush might have been more destructive of freedom than Obama because he pretended to support freedom including free markets while his policies did tremendous damage to them. Obama could never have become president without Bush pretending our economic problems were the result of market failure not government failure. To this day Obama acts like Bush and Republicans supported freedom and free markets, and he's using that against us. It's a lie just like their rhetoric in support of them was a lie.

"And he’s left OBAMA! with a fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars."

A great observation and comparison.


MEDIA:


Juan Williams embraces Laura Ingraham's metaphor about what happens to blacks "if they stray off the [leftist] farm". The allusion to slavery is obvious and accurate. The left treats blacks like property. They've punished those in the public eye who don't behave for centuries. From slavery to the Klu Klux Klan to Jim Crow to segregation to gun control, the minimum wage, the war on drugs and welfare, to attacking prominent blacks like Williams who stray off the leftist plantation, the left's history of racism is older than America, and the only thing that's changed is how they implement it. I'm not saying there aren't racists on the right too. There's plenty. But racists on the right are marginalized and pushed to the fringes. Racism on the left has been institutionalized for centuries, and it still is.

MISC:

Nice follow-up to my post about government subsidies making our food supply unhealthy.

"You've no doubt noticed that for about the last 60 years the majority of health care officials and the media have been telling you saturated fats are bad for your health and lead to a host of negative consequences, like elevated cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Meanwhile during this same 60 years the American levels of heart disease, obesity, elevated serum cholesterol and Alzheimer's have skyrocketed compared to our ancestors, and even compared to modern-day primitive societies using saturated fat as a dietary staple.

Did you know that multiple studies on Pacific Island populations who get 30–60% of their total caloric intact from fully saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease?^[1]"

That's because coconut oil is healthy. I cook exclusively with it now. Here's why:

"I only use two oils in my food preparation.

The first, extra-virgin olive oil, is a better monounsaturated fat that works great as a salad dressing.

However, it should not be used for cooking. Due to its chemical structure, heat makes it susceptible to oxidative damage.

And polyunsaturated fats, which include common vegetable oils such as corn, soy, safflower, sunflower and canola, are absolutely the worst oils to use in cooking. These omega-6 oils are highly susceptible to heat damage because of their double bonds.

I strongly urge you to throw out those omega-6 vegetable oils in your cabinets.

Why?

Reason # 1: Most people believe that frying creates trans-fat. That is not the major problem, in my opinion. Although some are created, they are relatively minor. There are FAR more toxic chemicals produced by frying omega-6 oils than trans-fat.

Frying destroys the antioxidants in oil and as a result oxidizes the oil. This causes cross-linking, cyclization, double-bond shifts, fragmentation and polymerization of oils that cause far more damage than trans-fat.

Reason # 2: Most of the vegetable oils are GMO. This would include over 90 percent of the soy, corn and canola oils.

Reason # 3: Vegetable oils contribute to the overabundance of damaged omega-6 fats in your diet, which creates an imbalance in the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. As you know from my extensive writing on this subject, I believe that excessive consumption of damaged omega-6 fats contributes to many health concerns.

They are all highly processed and consumed in amounts that are about 100 times more than our ancestors did a century ago. This causes them to distort the sensitive omega-6/omega-3 ratio which controls many delicate biochemical pathways which results in accelerating many chronic degenerative diseases.

There is only one oil that is stable enough to resist mild heat-induced damage, while it also helps you promote heart health and even supports weight loss and thyroid function – coconut oil.

So, whenever you need an oil to cook with, use coconut oil instead of butter, olive oil, vegetable oil, margarine, or any other type of oil called for in recipes. Even though I don't fully recommend frying foods, if you must fry, by all means use coconut oil – it's your smartest choice."

He doesn't mention anything wrong with butter, but it must be mostly Omega-6. I do eat extra-virgin olive oil, but I don't cook with it.

Japanese Obama action figures.

Lew Rockwell ties the bad social trends we've been seeing - more young adults living with their parents, having no job, not marrying, getting a college degree but no job - to the Nixon abolishing the gold standard.

"However, if we take a longer-term look, we can see that these trends date back decades, with the turning point being the severing of the dollar's last link to gold in 1971. This is the event that set up the explosion of government growth, of credit addiction across the population, of massive malinvestment in housing and many other sectors, of the gutting of American savings, and, most seriously, of the loss of freedom to the national-security state.

Long term, our living standards have been eroded in fundamental ways that have a profound cultural effect. The American family once lived well on one income. Now, two incomes is the expected reality. That shift took place following the great inflation of the late 1970s. Many people saw this as the great news that the workplace was being opened up to women. More likely it was not a sign of liberation, but of a dramatic demographic adjustment required to maintain high living standards. And the state didn't mind: it added millions to the tax rolls. One wonders if "liberation" is really the right word to use for this change.

Such adjustments are ongoing. The hidden tax of inflation, combined with the growing regulation of labor markets, makes maintaining the illusion of high living standards ever more difficult. This explains Generation Boomerang, the delay in entering the workforce, the delay of marriage, unemployment among the young, the dashed dreams after graduation, and the advent of the phenomenon of the lifetime student. These fundamental indicators are not reflected in the GDP data, which count government spending as economic growth and credit-fueled consumption as evidence of rising living standards."

All these effects corrode and coarsen our culture and our society. They undermine morality and personal responsibility.

"Abstracting from the periods of boom, we can see that these declines in living standards are making American society less of a place of dynamic change, risk taking, independent living, and opportunity, and more of a place of static living, struggling to get by, delayed adulthood, greater dependency, and ever-fewer opportunities for production, saving, and planning. These changes are making this country less of what it was, and more of what Europe is today."

This is how inflation rots a society and souls.

"It is not enough to cut back or even end the welfare state; the imperial warfare state must also be dismantled. That means taking apart the national-security apparatus as surely as we end the economic intervention in domestic life. To oppose one while supporting the other — and this is the very essence of the Republican Pledge to America — is self-defeating if not deliberately deceitful. We know the results of this kind of intellectual incoherence because we've seen it so many times before."

You can't have violent interventionism abroad without violent interventionism at home for a host of reasons. First, if we elect people with the character to violently force their will on foreigners, that same character will lead them to violently force their will on us. Second, if we violently force our will on foreigners, those foreigners will fight back, leading the security state interventions we're being crushed by today. Third, if you build an apparatus for violently forcing its will on foreigners, that apparatus will never be satisfied. It will demand more and more resources from us.