Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Who gives a damn about government giving $1 billion to dead people? This is undoubtedly the least destructive thing government does. These stories are pushed by aristocrats to create the illusion that there's such a thing as good government. There's not. They're pushed to keep us divided into partisans so we can't recognize that government itself is evil. We're 202 trillion in debt, and the aristocrats are distracting us with this bull****. If government only gave away $1 billion to dead people, we'd be tremendously better off. Government waste isn't the problem. Government non-waste is. The trillions government spends perverting our economy from a productive private sector economy to a parasitic political economy is the problem.

This modest proposal to cut all government spending by 10 percent per year every year isn't a bad idea, but I prefer abolishing all of the unconstitutional bureaucracies and laws and holding all other spending flat.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

A call for fraud laws to be applied to government officials and grant recipients. Absolutely.

"Few examples are as immediate, costly and far-reaching as the new ozone, dust, mercury and carbon dioxide rules that EPA regulators are trying to impose, under the guise of protecting air quality, planetary climate and human health. Few corporate executives or citizens are as exempt from basic legal standards as the energy and climate czars, czarinas, bureaucrats, and government-funded scientists and activists who seek to inflict their anti-hydrocarbon agenda on us, regardless of the science – or the impacts on jobs, prosperity, families and civil rights progress.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury, ozone and soot rules alone would eliminate up to 76,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2015, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation calculates. That’s 7% of total US electric generating capacity – enough to power 38,000,000 homes under normal conditions. It’s 1.2 times the all-time peak electricity demand record for the entire state of Texas."

But it would have to be done by the state prosecutors. The feds can't police themselves.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Study determines that alcohol is the most dangerous drug.

"MCDA modelling showed that heroin, crack cocaine, and metamfetamine were the most harmful drugs to individuals (part scores 34, 37, and 32, respectively), whereas alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine were the most harmful to others (46, 21, and 17, respectively). Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug (overall harm score 72) [emphasis mine], with heroin (55) and crack cocaine (54) in second and third places."

The perceived dangers of heroin and cocaine are really the result of the war on drugs, not the drugs themselves. During prohibition, people tended to drink much stronger and poisonous alcohol because it had to be made in secret. Many more Americans became sick and died from alcohol during prohibition than before or after. The same is true with drugs today. There was no great cocaine problem before government made it illegal. It was an ingredient in coca-cola. There was no great opium problem before government made opium illegal. There were opium dens. The problems arose when government banned these substances, forced their production onto the black market, and forced drug users to buy a super-strong, dangerous supply on the black market. The same is true with steroids.

POLICE STATE:

Another letter to Disney regarding the nude scanners. Letters by themselves are worthless. If Disney sees a drop in revenue, then their officers will pay attention. For this to work, it has to be letters and a significant boycott.

Crime is making a comeback in America. These are signs that America as we know it is collapsing around us. You can bet more and more Americans will be prosecuted for defending themselves too.

Banning cargo traffic from Yemen makes no sense. The last people who want to have bombs blow up on planes are the people on the planes. The next to last are the owners of the planes. After that are the insurance companies. The cargo and insurance companies are in the best position to deal with this problem. This strikes me as another example of government doing something just to say it's doing something, and what it's doing is counterproductive.

WAR:

Long list of sanctioned American military abuses.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Brazil has been rapidly climbing up the wealth ladder, but after electing a former Marxist rebel, that'll quickly turn around.

POLITICS:

Here's your real radicals:

"If you want to see pictures of politicians likened to Hitler, you wouldn't find them at any Tea Party rally ... but you did see them at this Rally to Restore Sanity over the weekend."

I was too busy enjoying Halloween to pay attention.

This observation by Boortz shows how fast Americans are becoming fed up with the federal government:

"It took House Democrats 40 years to become out-of-touch enough to get thrown out of office in 1994. It took 12 years for the Republicans to be repudiated in 2006. Now it appears that the current Democrat majority has lost voter confidence in only four years."

This is because the problem is government, not one party or the other.

Harry Reid is pandering to the Hispanic vote by promising to bring up the Dream Act in the lame duck session. Maybe this might excite them, but they don't have to vote for Reid to do this. He's be smarter to promise to bring it up in the next session of Congress and not the lame duck session.

Rudy Guiliani fears the tea party.

"Rudy himself then appeared (well, his talking head did, anyway), and announced:  “We need a strong Republican National Committee that will punishRepublicans who criticize other Republicans.  Look at all those incumbents who lost in the primaries!!” (emphasis in original)."

The ruling class is scared, but I don't think they're scared of the tea party today. The ruling class knows what's going on. They know their charade is almost up. But they expect the people to remain docile even as they turn us into paupers. The tea party is an indication that the people will be anything but docile. I'm sure they all have escape plans, but they don't want to use them.

Gerald Celente gets it right:

"Regardless of who wins, nothing of consequence will change.  Campaign 2010 is no more than a "Political Reality Show.""

""Republicans ousting Democrats is like the Gambino’s replacing the Bonnano’s.  "Whoever wins, the people lose.""

Government is the ultimate monopoly, using its power to legalize its crimes.

This libertarian pledge to America sounds similar to my hope for a president who will nullify 90 percent of government.

Polls show how angry Americans are, but they're going to get angrier when the country continues to go downhill after this election and even more angry when the country continues to go downhill after the 2012 election.

"In the weeks leading up to the election, poll after poll after poll has shown that the American people are angrier at government than at any other point in modern U.S. history."

I doubt that. I bet Americans were more angry during the Civil War, but they didn't have polls back then.

"Both political parties are busy pointing fingers at each other, but what all the major polls in the weeks leading up to the election clearly show is that the American people are placing the blame on both the Republicans and the Democrats. In fact, as you will see below, a clear majority of the American people now wish that they could throw every member of Congress out of office and a clear majority of the American people now wish that they had a third political party to vote for."

As positive as that is, it won't change anything this year.

"There are 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the very most, about 100 of those seats are actually "in play" – meaning that they have a chance to change hands.

So that means that we are going to see at least 335 of the exact same faces when the U.S. House of Representatives begins a new session.

The cold, hard reality is that our current system greatly, greatly, greatly favors incumbents.

Over the past five elections, incumbents have been re-elected to the U.S. House of Representatives at an average rate of 96 percent.

Wouldn't you like to have a 96 percent chance of winning?

Sure, in 2010 things will be a little different, but we will still likely see incumbents winning at least 80 percent of their matchups.

So much for "change," eh?"

We created the two party system over centuries. We have nobody but ourselves to blame for it. But we still have hope Americans will vote a fierce libertarian into the presidency in 2012.

Conservative sees three different tea party factions, but he fails to mention libertarians, probably on purpose. Of course maybe most libertarians have come to the same conclusion I have: the tea party is still part of the problem. But libertarians would be stupid to cut themselves off from tea partiers. The tea parties will evolve, and the more we can get educate them toward libertarian positions, the better.

Tom Delay is just now going to trial? Whatever happened to swift justice?

"At the heart of the case is one transaction: DeLay's political committee in Texas sent $190,000 to the Republican National Committee, which donated the same amount in noncorporate money to seven Texas candidates supported by DeLay."

If this is accurate, that charge is ridiculous. This just shows the law is ridiculous.

MEDIA:

CBS affiliate's reporters mistakenly leave message on Alaska senatorial candidate Joe Miller's message machine relating how they can make up stories about him. Conservatives are up in arms, but this just sounds like they were joking to me. Obviously they're hardcore Democrats, just like the vast majority of news people, but it doesn't sound like they seriously planned to make up a phony story. If they were serious, they wouldn't be laughing.

MISC:

Android reinvents keyboard for mobile devices. I have no idea if this will be revolutionary or ignored.


In the wake of Oracle acquiring Sun, Openoffice.org declares independence and spins itself off as The Document Foundation, taking 33 developers with it.


I think kinect brings the final piece of technology to make 1984 real. Check out these features:

"Kinect uses a motion sensor that tracks your entire body. So when you play, it’s not only about your hands and wrists. It’s about all of you. Arms, legs, knees, waist, hips and so on."

"As you play, Kinect creates a digital skeleton of you based on depth data. So when you move left or right or jump around, the sensor will capture it and put you in the game."

So it can track your every move.

"Kinect ID remembers who you are by collecting physical data that’s stored in your profile. So when you want to play again, Kinect will know it’s you, making it easy to jump in whenever you want."

It can differentiate everybody in the room.

"Kinect uses four strategically placed microphones within the sensor to recognize and separate your voice from the other noises in the room, so you can control movies and more with your voice."

It can also differentiate the voices of everybody in the room. Now that it exists, all they have to do is build it into the TV, and big brother will watch us 24/7. They probably don't even need to build it into a TV. All they have to do is invent some sort of game that people will want to run all the time. At first people will voluntarily broadcast their every move and sound to the server somewhere for government to monitor, but they'll quickly evolve this technology so it's on all the time. Obviously there's currently bandwidth limitations to widespread audio uploading, but by the time they have the bandwidth for that, Americans will already be conditioned to have this running 24/7. A Google search turned up nothing about this possibility.


Is the International Space Station worth $100 billion?

"Asking the International Space Station to justify its existence is a tall order. NASA estimates the station has cost U.S. taxpayers $50 billion since 1994 — and overall, its price tag has been pegged at $100 billion by all member nations."

"Now, as NASA celebrates the 10th anniversary of astronauts living on the space station — and with construction essentially complete, the question remains — will the International Space Station ever really pay off scientifically? [Graphic: The International Space Station Inside and Out]"

Debating this is useless. There's one and only way way to discover the value of the ISS. Sell it. The ISS is worth whatever somebody will pay for it voluntarily and not a dime more. I'd be shocked if anybody would pay $100 billion.

"Naturally, Tara Ruttley, NASA's associate program scientist for the International Space Station, said she sees things differently. "I think those who are naysayers haven't given us a chance — haven't given us enough time to show what we can do," she said."

Naturally. That's the excuse government-worshipers always use. Ten years isn't enough. If it was in use for 100 years, the head bureaucrat would still say it wasn't enough. No amount of time is ever enough for government because government can't be effective since it operates without prices and profits to guide it.