Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Big-wig corporate insiders are selling stock at an unprecedented rate.

TAX AND SPEND:

Why nobody wants to talk about America's $200 trillion debt.

REGULATION:

Judge orders God to break up into several less powerful deities. How funny.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Hyperinflation is arriving:

"The two key commodities that have been rising as of late are oil and grains, specifically wheat, corn and livestock feed. The BLS report on Producer Price Index of commodities is here. 

  

Grains as a class have risen over 33% year-over-year. Refined oil products have risen just shy of 13%, with home heating oil rising 18% year-over-year. In other words: Food, gasoline and heating oil have risen by double digits since 2009. And the 2010-‘11 winter in the northern hemisphere is approaching."

It gets worse:

"Furthermore, as regards the Federal Reserve policy, the upcoming Quantitative Easing 2, and the actions of its chairman, Ben Bernanke: There is an increasing sense in the financial markets that Backstop Benny and his Lollipop Gang don’t have the foggiest clue about what they’re doing. 

  

Consider: 

  

Bruce Krasting just yesterday wrote a very on-the-money précis of the trial balloons the Fed is floating, as regards to QE2: Basically, Bernanke through his WSJ mouthpiece said that the Fed was going to go for a cautious, incrementalist approach, vis-à-vis QE2: “A couple of hundred billion at a time”. You know: “Just the tip—just to see how it feels.”

  

But then on the other hand, also just yesterday, Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge had a justifiable freak-out over the NY Fed asking Primary Dealers for their thoughts on the size of QE2. According to Bloomberg, the NY Fed was asking the dealers how big they thought QE2 would be, and how big they thought it ought be: $250 billion? $500 billion? A trillion? A trillion every six months? (Or as Tyler pointed out, $2 trillion for 2011.)

  

That’s like asking a bunch of junkies how much smack they want for the upcoming year—half a kilo? A full kilo? Two kilos? 

  

What the hell you think the junkies are gonna say?"

Prediction:

"Therefore, I am confident in predicting the following sequence of events: 

• By March of 2011, once higher commodity prices reach the marketplace, monthly CPI will be at an annualized rate of not less than 5%. 

• By July of 2011, annualized CPI will be no less than 8% annualized. 

• By October of 2011, annualized CPI will have crossed 10%. 

• By March of 2012, annualized CPI will cross the hyperinflationary tipping point of 15%. 

After that, CPI will rapidly increase, much like it did in 1980."

That ought to be fun.

"Once the Fed realizes that the rising CPI is not a sign of a reignited economy, but rather a sign of the collapsing dollar, they will pursue a puerile “inflation fighting” scheme of incremental interest rate hikes—much like G. William Miller, the Chairman of the Fed from January of ‘78 to August of ‘79, pursued so unsuccessfully. 

  

2012 will be the bad year: I predict that hyperinflation’s tipping point will be no later than the first quarter of 2012. From there, it will accelerate. By the end of 2012, I would not be surprised if the CPI for the year averaged 30%. 

  

By that point, the rest of the economy—unemployment, GDP, all the rest of it—will be in the toilet. By that point, the rest of the economy will no longer matter: The collapsing dollar will make 2012 the really really bad year of our Global Depression—which is actually kind of funny. 

  

It’s funny because, as you know, I am a conservative Catholic: I of course put absolutely no stock in the ridiculous notion that “The Mayans predicted our civilization’s collapse in 2012!”—that’s all rubbish, as far as I’m concerned. 

  

It’s just one of those cosmic jokes that 2012 will turn out to be the year the dollar collapses, and the larger world economies go down the tubes. 

  

As cosmic jokes go, all I’ve got to say is this: 

  

Good one, God."

Aren't you glad you voted for those Republicans and Democrats who make this all happen all those years now? While everybody is distracted the donkey and elephant show, the man behind the curtain is destroying our currency, our economy and our lives with it.

HEALTH CARE:

So you think Republicans are against state run health care. How's Medicare Part D working out for us?

"The authors find little evidence that the large increase in prescription drug use created by the passage of Part D was associated with any change in outpatient service use, hospitalization, functional health, or general health status for most of those affected. They conclude that “much of the additional use of prescription drugs that results from gaining prescription drug insurance is [of ] relatively low value in terms of health benefits,” although they cannot conclusively rule out small improvements."

In other words, Medicare Part D was just another way to transfer wealth from the American people to political connected special interests, in this case Big Pharma.

While we're talking about government-created Big Pharma,

"What would you say to a person who claimed that some 90% of medical studies were false – flawed in their parameters, riddled with basic error, skewed by presumption and bias? (No, it’s not me sayin’….) I’m talking about an insider: a highly esteemed, widely acclaimed, much admired, often cited medical researcher who has to turn down speaking engagements left and right. He’s a professional with a flair for statistics and penchant for credibility. His initial groundbreaking research (meta-research, actually) hit the medical scene years ago, but he’s still going strong and in more public headlines these days as the focus of an in-depth Atlantic Magazinefeature."

I'd say this is the inevitable result of government domination of health care research. This is just another example that proves government corrupts everything it touches, and government has thoroughly corrupted science. This wouldn't happen in a competitive environment because in a competitive environment, companies busted for fraudulent or sub-par research would go bankrupt and the researchers would get fired.

Obama tells John Stewart that Obamacare is the first step in transforming America's health care system. He doesn't go on to say to full-blown socialized medicine, but that's exactly what he means.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Global temperatures dropping rapidly thanks to la Nina. Tell me about it. it's 36 here right now.

POLICE STATE:

Both CNN and ABC speak out against the nude-scanners and gropes at the airport. The propagandists for the aristocrats are getting a taste of what it's like to live like a peasant, and they don't like it. They're beginning to realize they're not all part of the aristocracy, and they don't like it.

Pilot who refused both the nude-scanner and the grope sues TSA. I just learned at psychiatrists recently created a mental illness for people who reject authority. The criteria include actively defying or refusing to comply with the rules of adults (check), deliberately doing things that would annoy other people (check), blaming others for the consequences of his actions (check), being angry and resentful (check) and significant impairment in occupational function (check). So if Roberts continues to miss work because he won't submit to the nude scanners or grope, he could be declared mentally ill. That's insane. This could and will be applied to anybody who resists government. I love this quote:

"Usually individuals with this disorder do not regard themselves as oppositional or defiant, but justify their behavior as a response to unreasonable demands or circumstances."

Of course the demands of authority are never unreasonable.

WAR:

Report of two mail bombs being intercepted on trip from Yemen to Chicago. It's kind of hard to defeat this with tanks. It's really sad that every time I read a report like this, I have to wonder if it's a false flag operation or an October surprise. Especially since the Times Square not-bomber. That wasn't even a bomb. It was just a bunch of firecrackers disguised to look like a bomb. Yet we're supposed to believe the person that confessed was a hardcore jihadist. Baloney. If he was, he would have made an actual bomb. And I have yet to see any pictures that show the guy who confessed being bald on top like the guy in the surveillance video.

US intelligence budget tops $80 billion. And for that we get very little. That's three times more than it was in 1998. We could get far more accurate and timely intelligence at a fraction of the price by purchasing intelligence from competing intelligence gathering firms.

POLITICS:

The Abigail Adams Project lists positions for candidates.

Obama's imperial travel arrangements.

MISC:

Four driverless vans successfully navigate Marco Polo's path from Italy to China. No word on how many people the other 12 killed. Just joking.

"Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as passengers just in case of emergencies. The experimenters did have to intervene a few times. The vans got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and humans were needed to handle toll stations. At one point, a van stopped to pick up hitchhikers."

Humans aren't irrelevant yet. You still need them to pick up hitchhikers. If you think I'm just being a curmudgeon about irresponsible trust in technology, check out the story about the guy with the prosthetic arms who killed himself driving a car.

"It is not yet clear if it was the prosthetic arms that caused the accident, such as failing to respond or locking up, but the entire situation begs the question of whether or not he should have been allowed to drive at all, both for his own safety and the safety of others."

With government corrupting science and making it unsafe, I have a lot of questions.

Dow Jones predicted from tweets. Who said twitter was useless?


John Locke believed:

"In a natural state all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a natural right to defend his “Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions", basis for the phrase in the American Declaration of Independence; "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".^[19]"

Such a state never existed. Mammals have had leaders for millions of years, much longer than humans have existed. We evolved having clan leaders similar to other great apes and wolf packs. I don't know why this is so hard for people to recognize or admit.

"Locke assumed that the sole right to defend in the state of nature was not enough, so people established a civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way with help from government in a state of society"

People didn't invent government. Government evolved along with us just like property, free markets, money, etc. The form, power and rationalizations for government have changed over the centuries, but government has been around longer than human's have.


Faults with the Constitution illustrate it was intended to become a central authority from the beginning. It fails to mention the most glaring mistake: giving the federal government the power to seize property in the form of taxes and imminent domain.