Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Cute video explaining how government kills businesses.

TAX AND SPEND:

A month or so ago, I posted an article about the real national debt being $137 trillion, but I can't find that link in my blog. Maybe I got one of the digits off. That was the highest estimate I'd heard at the time. But this guy says the real "fiscal gap" is $202 trillion. Look for "fiscal gap" to become the new euphemism for government debt.

Clergyman makes the moral case against Social Security.

REGULATION:

Baltimore handing out tickets for transfat violations.

HEALTH CARE:

The director of the Congressional Budget office says:

"Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf says that the greatest effect ObamaCare will be driving people out of the job market.  Read that again.  The greatest effect of ObamaCare will NOT be lowering healthcare costs, it will NOT be covering more Americans, it will NOT be better quality care.  No.  The greatest effect of ObamaCare will be driving people out of the job market.  CNSNews explains, "He explained that people would choose not to work because they could subsist on the generous federal insurance subsidies and Medicaid payments contained in the health care overhaul.""

I bet Democrats hate this guy with a passion.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Husband and wife doctor and nurse sentenced to 33 and 30 years respectively for proscribing pain medication. All the evidence is sealed so nobody can see it. Secret courts are the province of totalitarian governments.

POLICE STATE:

While mounting cameras on tasers sounds like a good idea, don't fall for it. This has nothing to do with accountability as the headline says. Just the opposite. This is about building up support for the electrocution of citizens by police. Except for the extremely rare exception when some honest police officer leaks a tape of police abuse to blow the whistle on the abuse, we'll only see tapes that are blessed by the police department. In all other cases the police department will lose the tape, claim it wasn't running at the time or hide behind some policy claiming they have no power to release the tape just like they do with the cameras mounted on police cars. But in fact, pretty much all taser uses are abuse. Remember when police only used their weapons in self-defense? Neither do I, but that's what they used to tell us. It was never true. Remember when they sold us the idea of tasers saying police would only use it in self-defense? That was a lie too.

WAR:

What you're not supposed to know about war. It's a racket.

"Murray Rothbardquoted Buckley as saying in the January 25, 1952 issue of Commonweal magazine that the Cold War required that

we have got to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged … except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … [We must support] large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington.

"We" must advocate the destruction of the free society in the name of defending the free society, said "Mr. Conservative," a former CIA employee."

No thanks. I prefer a military powerful enough to deter and defend against aggression, and that's it. We do not need one base in a foreign country to do that. Bases in foreign countries divert resources from defending America and put a bullseye on our backs, making us less safe.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Remember all that baloney that legal Hispanic immigrants and Hispanic American citizens supported illegal immigration? As I long claimed, it was a bunch of crap.

POLITICS:

Obama says he has kept 70 percent of his campaign promises. Factcheck says he's kept 24 percent. And this is from a liberal newspaper.

The Democrat party has out-raised the Republican party by $270 million this election cycle. But third party sources favor Republicans. That's why Democrats want to stop them. And while Republicans are enjoying them right now, they ultimately want get rid of them too. Government wants to control everything. Guess where the Democrats are getting all that money from. Public employee unions. They're using our tax dollars to empower politicians to steal more of our money from us and funnel it to them.

MEDIA:

I thought "everybody knew" that Jefferson had fathered children with his slaves. It's common knowledge everywhere I go. People joke about it. But apparently there's strong reason to believe this claim is false, intentionally created to undermine Jeffersonian principles and advance the cause of collectivists.

"I went on a tour of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, yesterday with some friends.  It had been a long time since I had visited The Great Man’s home, and I fully expected to be exposed to a strong dose of political correctness, which now pervades all of American society.  It didn’t take long before the school-marmish tour guide announced that “historians tell us” that Jefferson fathered six children with slave Sally Hemmings.

She didn’t say which historians say this, nor did she indicate why anyone would expect historians to have knowledge of DNA science, which would be necessary to come to such a conclusion.  Nor did she mention that there are many prominent scholars who have objected to (and ridiculed) this assumption.  For example, as Professor Marco Bassani writes in his great new book, Liberty, State, & Union: The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson:

“John Works, a Jeffferson descendant in radical disagreement” with the Jefferson slave child story “has established a ‘Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society,’ charging a board of well-known scholars (including Lance Banning, Robert Ferrel, Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr. and Paul Rahe — the latter dissenting) with the task of looking anew at the whole matter.  In spring 2001, the results were published without much fuss since the conclusion was that the charges weren’t proved and that they were in all likelihood a hoax.”

Professor Bassani, who teaches political theory at the University of Milan, gets to the heart of the matter when he writes:

“If the spokesman of American freedom had, in fact, fathered children with a slave woman and kept them in slavery, then the ultimate hypocricy of the way America was founded, and of a history told only through Dead White Males, as has always been claimed in radical [Marxist] circles, would be exposed once and for all.”"

This might be another Big Lie. I had never heard that possibility mentioned before this article. Apparently Jefferson and Washington owning slaves isn't hypocrisy enough. I won't condemn the Founding Fathers for being human and men of their times. They advanced the world in the greatest leap forward in history. The Declaration of Independence laid the groundwork for abolishing slavery all around the world and as well as freeing and empowering peasants around the world as well. I won't condemn them for being unable to abolish slavery at that moment.

MISC:

Estimating the age of death from ancient bones is virtually impossible, so estimates of the age of death of our ancient ancestors is unreliable.

Amazing quote from government worshiper Joe Biden.

"Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive," he said. "In the middle of the Civil War you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. ... No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years."

Of course he goes back to Lincoln.

Mohammed is the most popular name for newborn boys in Britain. Britain as we know it is history.

Robert Murphy plugs his plan to pressure Paul Krugman into debating him and tells how he came up with the idea, celebrating entrepreneurship all the way.

Scientists discover the same thing Dr. Atkins espoused long ago and the same thing paleo dieters know today: to live a longer, healthier life, cut out the carbs. It's like our bodies were designed by nature for a low carb diet for millions of years or something.