Free kibbles

ECONOMICS:

What the hell does Rich Lowry know about the middle class' economic problems? Don't you love it when some rich ruling class member tells us about our lives?

TAX AND SPEND:

Tea party county executive bankrupts one of the wealthiest counties in the nation by cutting taxes but not cutting spending. Duh. This isn't rocket science.

REGULATION:

It's not often somebody other than me complains we have too many laws. You can't have the rule of law when you have too many laws. You can't have the rule of law when laws are tools of oppression. You can't have the rule of law when government uses the law as a weapon against the peaceful activities of the people and ignores it when it becomes an obstacle to government's lust for power. The abuse of laws produces a state of lawlessness.

""It's not true that bipartisanship is dead in Washington," Will Marshall at the Progressive Policy Institute recently observed. "There's a perfect bipartisan conspiracy to bankrupt the country.""

Absolutely. It's good to see this in the Washington Post.

"A healthy democracy must make fresh choices. This requires not mindless deregulation but continual adjustment of laws."

This is a fallacy. We just need to limit laws to responding to aggression and leave them alone. We don't need to continually revisit laws against murder, rape, assault, theft or fraud.  But all laws of aggression, the vast majority of laws in the US, are illegitimate and should be repealed.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The Fed vastly expands moral hazard.

Why the price of gold is going to continue to go up unlike in the early 1980s: because Volker raised interest rates in the 1980 and Bernanke is trying to keep them at zero.

HEALTH CARE:

Federal judge rules Obamacare mandate unconstitutional. Thank goodness some judge did. They all could easily have just fallen in line.

Sterile environments depressing kids. I knew sterilization was making us less healthy like this:

"We”re all familiar with how the extreme sterility of modern environments negatively impacts the ability of our immune systems to do their jobs. We get more exaggerated and sustained inflammatory responses to things that don’t really merit them. We get a lot more asthma and allergies, especially as kids."

But I had no inkling about this:

"...dysfunctional inflammatory responses of imbalanced immune systems due to sterile environments are causing depression in kids. A lack of exposure to “old friends,” or the microorganisms normally present in dirt, food, and the gut, increase levels of depressogenic cytokines, so the natural inflammatory response to psychosocial stressors is “inappropriately aggressive.”"

Wow.

The government sets new recommended daily standards for vitamin D that are way too low insuring Americans will be sicker and have to buy more drugs from Big Pharma and more service from AMA doctors.

"How they could come to this conclusion is truly beyond belief, because there are literally hundreds if not thousands of studies showing that it benefits dozens if not hundreds of clinical conditions."

"As Dr. Cannell points out in our interview, these recommendations [600 IU per day for an adult] do not take into account the amount of vitamin D you need to prevent influenza, heart or liver disease, respiratory infections, cancer, or any of the numerous diseases that have a clearly documented link to vitamin D deficiency."

The lowest suggested level in this article is 1,000 a day, and many recommendations are much higher. But even the 600 IU per day recommendation improves on the current 400 IU per day recommendation.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Cold and snow records set all over the US.

Remember when scientists were trying to scare us because frog populations were dwindling? Guess why.

"Perhaps the biggest irony in all of this, is that while researchers fell all over themselves to link anthropogenic environmental impacts to the frog declines, turns out that as they traipsed through the woods and rainforests to study the frogs, the researchers themselves quite possibly helped spread the chytrid fungus to locations and populations where it had previously been absent."

The scientists were killing them. Those are the same scientists who want to engineer our climate. If we allow them to do that, they'll end up killing us just like the frogs. But our population won't bounce back like the frog population is.

POLICE STATE:

Speaking of laws producing a state of lawlessness, Congress plans to hold hearings to develop a law to prosecute Julian Assange. Maybe they haven't heard of that prohibition on expost facto laws in the Constitution.

On political prisoners:

"I’m reminded by something a spokesman for the Chinese government said top the BBC about Liu Xiaobo: “Every government has ways of dealing with people who the state deems are threats to the security of the state and the safety of the people.” Indeed they do."

Go tell it to Julian Assange.

Apparently an arsonist in Cape Cod is burning down buildings as a political statement. Or it's a government agent provocateur.

POLITICS:

Obama defers to Bill Clinton. Maybe he's learning to accept his limitations. Maybe he should replace Gibbs with Clinton.

Jonah Goldberg thinks Hillary was right in a debate against Obama. She was, but not for the reason Goldberg thinks. It isn't about being a CEO of bureaucracies. The bureaucracies do their own thing. Nobody can change their culture. They have to be abolished. What she was right about was the 3am phone call. Obama has wilted. Hillary would have continued fighting.

MISC:

Scientists build bacteria that can be programmed with logic gates like computer chips. This has the potential to spark an explosion in genetically engineered bacteria. All we need is for kids or terrorists to unleash thousands of strains of genetically programmed bacteria into the world.