Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

WikiLeaks brouhaha being used as an excuse for an internet Patriot Act. More people join the cyber-war, inviting the heavy hand of government to smack us all down. Here's a better solution, hackers can't take down Amazon because of excess capacity, but government prefers force. This take may be correct:

"As I read an article about the arrest in the Netherlands of a computer hacktivist, Anonymous and Operation: Payback, and an attack on the attackers, my wife said to me “I can’t follow it.” I replied, “Well, it’s the first computer war in history.” Actually, the Gulf War is sometimes given that description. But this feels more like the opening battle in a prolonged war. So I say it’s the First Internet War in history. It’s the People vs. the U.S. Government. The initial fronts are Sweden, Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, and so on. It’s a war on the internet and being fought over the internet and internet freedom. It’s a war over freedom of communication. In my opinion, this is a huge news event, on the order of Watergate. It will go on for a long time. Like all wars, it will transmute over time and go into all kinds of unexpected directions. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have begun the First Internet War."

I don't think you can say WikiLeaks started the war. WikiLeaks was the first victim of a DDoS attack in this cyber-battle. But governments wage war, and they hate competition.

How Julian Assange has changed the world.

ECONOMY:

WikiLeaks exposes that Shell had infiltrated all Nigerian ministries so it was on top of all government decisions. So? That sounds like smart business to me. What are they supposed to do? Stay willfully ignorant? Allow their competition to climb in bed with government? Government is god to corporations so in order to rise to the top, they need to be in bed with the government. Complaining about the corporations is worthless. Government has all the power. If you don't want corporations in bed with government, take away government's power, then corporations will focus on providing better goods and services at better prices, not infiltrating government.

TAX AND SPEND:

UK aristocrats supposedly surprised at the anger students exhibit over them raising tuition rates. They want us to think they had no idea just how poisonous welfare and the entitlement mentality it breeds is. Baloney. They always knew they were poisoning people and destroying their lives with welfare. They just never cared until fiscal reality forced them to slightly reduce the welfare.

Non-profits, organizations that feed on tax dollars, urge Democrats to block reductions to the death tax. Because you can never pile on enough pain to grieving family.

REGULATION:

Litter cop fines woman $100 for dropping her newspaper in a trash can because household trash is not allowed in city trash cans. All regulations are about stealing money from the people and transferring it to the ruling class.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

It seems that Republicans will allow Ron Paul to chair the monetary policy subcommittee. This is great news not only because Paul will subject the Fed to real oversight but because that means establishment Republicans still fear the backlash of voters. Official notice.

"Domestic monetary policy, currency, precious metals, valuation of the dollar, economic stabilization, defense production, commodity prices, financial aid to commerce and industry."

One of these things is not like the others. Defense production?

GLOBAL WARMING:

Criticism of study of cloud formation that concludes cloud formation provides a positive feedback mechanism for global warming. If this was true, the earth would have become a hellish planet like Venus billions of years ago.

Lord Monckton provides more details on the punishing agreements being reaching in Cancun while the mainstream media dutifully cover them up. Some highlights:

"Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West."

"Western countries will jointly provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each year."

"In all but name, the UN Convention’s Secretariat will become a world government directly controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers’ money ostensibly paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse consequences of imagined (and imaginary) “global warming”."

"Hundreds of new interlocking bureaucracies answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power and reach. In an explicit mirroring of the European Union’s method of enforcing the will of its unelectedKommissars on the groaning peoples of that benighted continent, the civil servants of nation states will come to see themselves as servants of the greater empire of the Secretariat, carrying out its ukases and diktats whatever the will of the nation states’ governments."

"The failed Copenhagen Treaty draft stipulated that the “government” that would be established would have the power to set the rules of all formerly free markets. There would be no such thing as free markets any more. In Cancun, the Chairman’s note merely says that various “market mechanisms” may be exploited by the Secretariat and by the parties to the Convention: but references to these “market mechanisms” are frequent enough to suggest that the intention remains to stamp out free markets worldwide."

It sounds like a huge victory for the one world government crowd, but once again I'm skeptical. It sounds more like their wishlist or a one world government bureaucrat's wet dream, not anything real.

Data from Vostok ice core shows that 20th century warming is very typical in this interglacial period.

WAR ON DRUGS:

It cracks me up when conservatives talk about supporting the Constitution but still support the war on drugs.

Now the prohibitionists want to ban the e-cigarette.

"Citing the precautionary principle, legislators have already banned them in Australia and Canada."

All governments are oppressive.

POLICE STATE:

Now that we've seen the government cut off much of WikiLeaks's supply of funding by pressuring Mastercard, VISA and PayPal to cut it off, it become clear why governments are pushing for a cashless society and why we need an alternative source of money.

Kilt wearers going au natural through TSA.

Argument in favor of privatizing airport security.

The FBI finds another Muslim patsy and tricks him into trying to detonate the phony bomb they gave him. It seems the FBI is the only organization successfully radicalizing Muslims in the US.

Never talk to the cops.

WAR:

Only one in four previously released Gitmo detainees has returned to terrorism. The article wants us to believe that's terrible. What's terrible is three out of four people who weren't terrorists were held without charges. I know this isn't what I said in the past, but in the past I mistakenly believed the war on terror was a war legally declared by Congress. Now I realize Congress set an expiration limit on the war of 90 days, so it ended in early 2002. What this also shows is these people aren't that dangerous. They're certainly not enemy army dangerous.

POLITICS:

On the verge of a dictatorial democracy? We've been one of those for a long time. Obama is the most dictatorial president in my lifetime if not since FDR or Lincoln.

MISC:

The psychology of giving up your favorite junk food. Easy. Don't give it up completely. Treat yourself to it every couple of months.

Failed college of devotes to Ayn Rand gives libertarianism bad name. Why would devotes of Ayn Rand want to join a school that appears to be modeled on socialist universities? I don't think they really understood libertarianism.

If you want to understand how prices are determined, go to an auction. Cost of production has no role in determining price.

"For Menger, the market price of a good is determined solely by the relative valuations of goods and money by the buyers and sellers of the good, in conjunction with the number of units of the good currently in existence. The records and memories of how much money was spent to enlist the labor and other resources needed to produce the good have absolutely no effect on how much money people are currently willing to exchange for a unit of the good."

And so we can see every time we buy or sell something.