Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Federal Court of Appeals overturns lower court's order that internet content provider remove defamatory comment posted after an article. That's a rare win for freedom of speech.

ECONOMY:

Corporate profits are up and corporations are hiring - overseas. Government has made the cost and risk of hiring too high in the US.

I don't buy these claims that storms cost retailers money in the long run. There's no doubt that human action is changed by the storm, but a guy in the market for new TV or woman in the market for a new purse who wanted to buy one Monday will almost certainly buy one in a few days. Sure, they may go to different stores and buy different models or designs, but the vast majority of people are still going to buy the item they wanted when they get the chance.

Home values continue to fall and underwater mortgages continue to rise.

America is the new Argentina, a prosperous country looted by government until it became a third world country.

""There are a lot of ways to ruin an economy. Argentina has experimented with most of them. It has devalued its currency, and revalued it. It has pegged it, and then knocked down the peg. It has regulated, controlled, inspected, taxed and confiscated. Following the 2001 crisis, earnings fell by 30% – with half the nation slipping below the official poverty line. What is remarkable is that the Argentine economy has survived at all." ~ Bill Bonner"

That's what we're suffering right now.

"In 1916 a new president was elected in Argentina; he had a foreign sounding name I can't hope to pronounce it but it is spelled Juan Hipólitodel Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Irigoyen Alem. He led a party called the Radicals, and their slogan was "fundamental change," with an appeal to the lower middle class. Doesn't this platform and campaign rhetoric sound familiar? "Change we can believe in" with a different phrasing."

That's kind of eerie.

"By 1994, Argentina's public pensions – the equivalent of Social Security – had imploded. The payroll tax had increased from 5% to 26%, but it wasn't enough. So Argentina implemented a value-added tax (VAT), new income taxes and a personal tax on wealth. These crushed the private sector. I fear we will soon see a similar increase in Social Security payroll taxes over the next decade in the US."

Sound familiar?

REGULATION:

Blaming airport failures in bad weather on corporate greed is ridiculous. In a competitive marketplace, airport failures would result in bankruptcy, so airports would be prepared to deal with bad weather. The problem is heavy government regulations that prevent competition.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Arthur Burn's diary explodes the myth of Fed independence by showing how closely the Fed chief worked with the Nixon administration.

"However, Arthur Burns spent lots of time with Richard Nixon and Nixon's staff and advisors....There are numerous entries in Burns's diary that start with "President telephoned," "The meeting at Camp David," "President called and asked me to come over." It's a good thing the Eccles Building and the White House are just a few blocks apart."

"Burns's diary is page after page of political dirty dealing, lying, and backstabbing. Nixon went so far as to plant negative press about Burns and threatened to expand the Fed's Board of Governors to dilute the chairman's influence, all to bring Burns in line with the president's economic meddling. None of that seems necessary; Burns's diary would indicate that the president had him at hello."

The Fed chief is just another government aristocrat.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

This is an ominous headline:

"Support builds in fight to dim light pollution"

That can only mean aristocrats are closer to using the government's gun to force us manipulate our lights to meet their standards.

"Dark-sky legislation — laws that require measures such as shielding outdoor lighting to reduce light pollution — have been embraced by about 300 counties, cities and towns.

More than 50 state bills have been introduced in the past two years and seven were enacted. Eighteen states —Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut,Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming — have adopted dark-sky legislation in recent years, according to Bob Parks, executive director of the Tucson-based International Dark-Sky Association."

Yep. If you don't like city lights, move. Stop using violence to force your will on everybody else.

Here's yet more propaganda from the phony science department: article claims that the sun is entering a new phase of solar activity so intense it will push the Aurora Borealis south into the continental US. Let's take a look at the sun and see if this is true.


Funny. I don't see much solar activity going on there. Just one speck of a sunspot. Maybe the graph of solar geomagnetic activity will show a sudden increase.


Nope. Solar activity is abnormally low and falling. So basically that story is just a bunch of crap.

On the nature of science:

"But, like advocates in court, scientists can nonetheless be expected to put forward only one very partial case – and that as strongly as possible – and no-one should expect a scientist to be anything other than a biased advocate."

Scientists are human and therefore have human weaknesses. In that regard science is no different from any other economic activity. But that's not the problem with global warming, or any other, science. Government, because it is based on violence and funded by theft, attracts the worst and rewards the worst in people resulting in low quality products and services. Free markets, because they are based on voluntary exchange, attract the best and reward the best qualities of people and competing interests incentivize quality products and services. The problem with the fraudulent global warming scientists isn't that they're biased or weak. It's that they're funded by government, and therefore the most biased and corrupt have risen to the top instead of being washed out. Further, those who weren't naturally biased or corrupt have been corrupted in order to profit from the government's money which is doled out only to those who advocate the fraudulent position the aristocrats want to hear. The problem is government funding of science.

POLICE STATE:

Netherlands proposes criminal penalties for calling for a bank run. This would be a purely political crime.

FOREIGN POLICY:

I know many people thought of this Tsvangirai character in Zimbabwe as a great statesman who might be able to replace the incumbent dictator Mugabe. WikiLeaks exposed that. Apparently Tsvangirai told western leaders he wanted them to continue sanctions against Zimbabwe, sanctions that impoverish and kill Zimbabwe citizens, in hopes they would help him wrestle power from Mugabe. He exposed that he's happy to see his countrymen suffer and die if it helps his chances to advance his personal power. I'm sure he'd say it's for the greater good, as if starving children to death is for the greater good. He's probably no better than Mugabe. I don't blame the attorney general for investigating him for treason. It's interesting the author of this still views him as a statesman-like figure. Sanctions are just power battles between aristocrats, and none of them give a damn about the people they impoverish and kill.

MEDIA:

What could possibly be the motivation for using a picture of Tucker Carlson and referencing his appearance at Paul's 2008 Minneapolis rally if not to slime Ron Paul by association because of Carlson's outrageous comment?

The Washington Times reached a new level of fear-mongering that I have never seen before with this quote this month:

""China's strategy is simply to have us negotiate with North Korea and Iran until its nuclear weapons start to kill us," he told Inside the Ring."

Right. China intends start a nuclear war with the US. This comment is insane. I can see why somebody would print it - it'll sell newspapers - but it's still insane and Gertz should have pointed that out.

I hate it when the media call politicians 'leaders'. They aren't leaders. I think one simple change that would quickly make the world a much better place is if every news editor in the world changed the word 'leader' when used to describe politicians to 'looter'. Think about it. "Leaders fail to reach an agreement" sounds like a bad thing, but when you correct the word "Looters fail to reach an agreement", you instantly understand this is a good thing.

MISC:

Amazon getting deeper in bed with government. Government turns all corporations into government agents, or it destroys them.