Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Washington residents are the happy recipients of government's looting of the rest of us:

"The Washington region posted the highest year-over-year home price gains in the nation this fall, as real estate values slumped in nearly every other metropolitan area, a key housing report said Tuesday.

A healthy job market, particularly for high-salaried workers, buoyed demand and prices for housing in the D.C. area, local economists said. Home values climbed 3.7 percent in Washington in October from a year earlier, making it one of only four regions nationally to avoid a dip in prices, the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home-price index said."

It's good to be a crony of the king.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bernanke's diabolical plan to destroy the dollar doesn't stop at QEII.

"Recently, Ben Bernanke indicated that Quantitative Easing II (QE2) might be followed by QE3, etc. In an interview at the beginning of December, Bernanke was asked, "Do you anticipate a scenario in which you would commit to more than $600 billion?"

Bernanke's answer was startling. "Oh, it's certainly possible," he said. "And again, it depends on the efficacy of the program. It depends on inflation. And finally it depends on how the economy looks."

The answer is interesting because it not only indicates the possibility that the Federal Reserve (Fed) will purchase more government bonds but also implies that Bernanke thinks that inflation and QE are different concepts, because otherwise his claim would be a meaningless tautology: more inflation depends on inflation."

This inflation is going to hurt. Bernanke's going to act so surprised when the dollar is destroyed, like he had no idea it could happen or that he was making it happen. Central planners always act surprised when their plans fail.

"QE2 has a slightly different purpose than QE1. QE1 directly supported struggling banks by buying their problematic assets. QE2 supports the government."

In other words, the problem with our economy has metastasized from a housing-financial crisis into a sovereign debt crisis. What else would you expect when government simply transfers debt from some sector of the economy to itself?

POLICE STATE:

Christian leaders support the false god of government and tell their followers to humbly submit to whatever TSA orders them to do.

POLITICS:

The anatomy of the state.

"The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the "organization of the political means"; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.[4] For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively "peaceful" the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.[5]"

I'd call it a government which institutionalizes predation. Maybe I'll start using that term instead of the more generic government because people can establish governments that don't institutionalize predation. Of course that's what I continually advocate for our governments: we should take away their power to tax and commit other aggressions against us. In the case of the federal government, enacting a constitutional amendment to take away its power to tax, to force it to rely on the on the voluntary contributions from the states, would be the first step. That would quickly and dramatically change the character of the federal government so that afterwards it would be much easier to take away its other predatory powers. This wouldn't abolish the government, but based on this definition, it would abolish the state.

"The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute."

As I often describe.

"Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State's advantage. If "Ruritania" was being attacked by "Walldavia," the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of "nationalism" has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles."

The aristocrats and their propagandists did this wonderfully after 9/11. 9/11 was an attack on the ruling class. An attack on the plutocrats. But because we all identify as Americans, and some Americans were attacked, it was easy to convince us this was an attack on all of us and on our way of life instead of an attack on our government and its policies. This hints at another possibility why al Qaeda hasn't performed attacks on soft targets like malls and schools: maybe their jihad is limited to the ruling class. That makes perfect sense to me, but I don't know if it's true or not. Other options include they don't realize how disruptive that would be or they're using our government against us and don't want to undermine it to that degree.

MISC:

I lost a ton of respect for Jim Tressel for blackmailing these players into making a commitment to return next year by threatening to keep them from playing in the Sugar Bowl if they didn't. This is a direct threat against their future earnings. I hope all five of them play the best games of their lives, give Tressel the finger after the game and become high draft picks and millionaires in the NFL next season. The NCAA is robbing these young men, and Tressel is aiding and abetting.