Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

President Obama makes it clear he wants the US economy to be no better than average forever.
"“We said in Pittsburgh [at] the G20 that it was important for us to rebalance, in part because the U.S. economy for a long period of time was the engine of world economic growth; we were sucking in imports from all across the world financed by huge amounts of consumer debt,” Obama said Thursday during a joint press conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. 


“Because of the financial crisis, but also because that debt was fundamentally unsustainable, the United States is not going to be able to serve in that same capacity to that same extent,” the president added.

“We are obviously still a huge part of the world economy. We are still going to be open. We are still going to be importing as well as exporting,” Obama continued. “But the economic realities are such that for us to see sustained global economic growth, all countries are going to have to be moving in some new directions.”"
...
“We are in a very good position now of being able to deliver relatively strong growth rates to which we are seeing in major economies,” Geithner told BBC. “But I think the world understands now that world growth in the future can’t depend on the United States as much as it did in the past. So, for the world to grow together, we have to see more growth in the other major economies. Not just in the emerging markets, which are very strong now, in the United States.””
This is bull****. The US could quickly become the most powerful economy in the world again, and we could enjoy such strong growth that we wouldn't be overtaken this century. The way to make that happen is to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government and free the American people to rebuild our economy and work together to solve everybody's problems. This is Obama intentionally doing harm to Americans.

Monsanto is getting hammered in the market. It's amazing how this company flies under the radar despite all the damage it does.

TAX AND SPEND:

Democrats refuse to allow Americans to fix the economy by trying to steal more money from them and hand it out to people who don't work. They hope to get Republicans on the record for blocking unemployment benefits, thinking it will win them votes, but how can standing on solid principles or siding with the 80 percent of Americans who are working against the 20 percent who are not harm Republicans?

The US government now has a fire administration. I guess local fire departments couldn't be counted on to put out fires without central government help.

The US government owns 46 percent of foreclosed inventory.

Get ready to pony up another $1 trillion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

From Boortz:
"How about $1.44 million of your tax dollars for the government to estimate the size of the population andexamine the "social milieu" of male prostitutes in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam?"
You can't make this stuff up.

REGULATION:

How the FTC, in the name of promoting competition, kills businesses.

The financial oppression bill will harm small banks and meaning fewer loans will be available to regular people at higher prices, making the giant Wall Street firms richer, more powerful and more dangerously risk-taking. That was Democrats' goal all along.

HEALTH CARE:

A doctor explains what many of us have been saying about Obamacare for a year:
"The end result will be rationing and delay of elective procedures, denial of expensive but effective treatments a la England, and most likely a single-payer system the likes of which is seen in other, less advanced health care systems around the world."
That was Democrats' goal all along.

And this is how it's going to turn out: socialist hospital (VA) infects 1,800 servicemen with HIV and hepatitis.
"John Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis has recently mailed letters to 1,812 veterans telling them they could contract hepatitis B, hepatitis C and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) after visiting the medical center for dental work, said Rep. Russ Carnahan."
Our veterans and every American deserve better than socialized medicine.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Record cold in Australia.

Now humans started global warming by killing off the mammoths, ending the ice age. These people aren't qualified to write children's books.

ENERGY:

After 70 days, Obama finally relents and allows in some, 12 of 30, foreign countries to offer aid to deal with the Gulf oil spill. He only relented because of political pressure. He wanted this thing to continue leaking and continue harming America to help collapse our country.

Obama's moratorium on drilling the Gulf has forced oil companies to move overseas. Another win for Obama.

POLICE STATE:

UK police harass and kidnap blogger for photographing a police cadet unit.

Backlash against the police state in Britain grows as judge orders police to delete DNA database of innocents which they were already supposed to do by law.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The CIA says Iran has enough nuclear material to make two nuclear bombs.

POLITICS:

Accusations that White House staff use private email to communicate with lobbyists. It would suck to have every email you wrote be public. That restriction forces people to find alternative ways of communicating.

LOCAL:

Dayton's central planners have a new central plan to undo the old central plan and restore the Great Miami and Mad rivers to their natural state. It would have been a lot cheaper to leave them natural all along, but central planners can't do that. They have to justify their existence. The natural state of those rivers are the reason Dayton exists, but central planners had to screw it up. I expect this central plan will be an improvement, but the best idea is to privatize that land along the rivers so the owners can make a profit that will improve the standard of living of everybody in Dayton.

MISC:

You used to never hear of cease and desist orders. IP has made them all too commonplace. Police and federal agents shut down websites over IP laws.

British scientists discover secret code in Plato's writings.

First ever picture of an alien planet. Apparently this is not the first ever picture of alien planet. It's the first ever picture of an alien planet around a sun-like star taken from the ground. Somebody must have got their panties in a wad.

This Russian non-spy story is really goofy. These guys weren't any threat. They had no access. Why were they busted? Why now?

It cracks me up that senators complain about the judicial nomination process. They own the process. Ever since they voted for Ginsberg despite her not answering any questions, nominees haven't had to answer any questions. If they really wanted to stop it, they would all vote against any nominee who refused to answer questions. Non-problem solved. The problem is the party of the president always puts partisan politics ahead of their constitutional obligation.

Police and federal agents shut down websites over IP laws.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The Next Century of Flight

The Next Century of Flight
by Mark Luedtke

Introduction

Room 026 doesn't look special. The windowless lab in the basement of the Russ Engineering Center at Wright State University with the drab walls and black lab stations looks like any other college engineering lab, but a detailed look past the clutter of plastic gears, tiny motors and tools on the work tables reveals something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world - tiny, artificial dragonfly wings. Under the direction of Assistant Professor Dr. Haibo Dong, twelve mechanical and material engineering seniors just designed, built and demonstrated a proof of concept model of a robot dragonfly in room 026. Dayton is once again hosting the leaders in revolutionary flight technology.

As far back as literature informs, man dreamed of soaring like a bird. The Wright brothers made that possible. But birds aren't the only flyers in nature that inspire men. Dr. Dong considers the Wright brothers to be the epitome of engineers, but he took his inspiration for this project from nature and his education in aeronautical engineering. Before joining Wright State in 2006, Dr. Dong researched bio-hydrodynamics of swimming fish and applied that knowledge to autonomous undersea robots. But once he landed in Dayton, his focus turned to dragonflies. When asked why, he replies, "I just have tons of ideas for some reason." Maybe it's something in the water. Or more accurately something in the air. According to Dr. Dong, the grassy fields around Wright State are teaming with dragonflies.

Background on Flying Robots

Because of the war in Afghanistan and the lawless areas of Pakistan, the word drone has become commonplace in American lexicon. Predator drones spy on Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, and pilots operating the vehicles by remote control half a world away drop bombs on suspected enemy leaders. The value of these large, fixed-wing robot fliers is well known. They've even been deployed over the Mexican border. US troops also utilize smaller drones to survey the battlefield. But researchers envision an entire new class of missions for much smaller flying robots called Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), a subclass of which has recently been dubbed Nano Air Vehicles (NAVs). As Dr. Dong told Desktop Engineering, "Any time you can use robotics instead of people to gather information in areas that may be unstable, toxic, or hard to reach, you minimize the risk to public safety workers. And any time you can use robotics in spaces that are too dangerous or too small for people to enter, you create an opportunity to prevent a catastrophe that might otherwise have occurred, or you create a chance for rescue where there might otherwise have been no hope."

Because fixed-wing aircraft can't hover and have poor maneuverability and rotary aircraft are too noisy for missions requiring stealth, flapping-wing craft have become the focus of NAVs. Dr. Dong calls the most popular class of flapping-wing craft clappers because they have two wings on each side of the craft that clap together like hands clapping. Laying claim to the world's smallest aircraft equipped with a camera, the Delfy Micro was developed by a four man team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Looking like a butterfly with an airplane tail, this NAV has a four inch wingspan, weighs just over three grams and can fly at five meters per second for over three minutes.

But there's a reason nature didn't develop mechanical designs like these - they're not power efficient. The future belongs to nature inspired designs. Harvard University engineers have developed a NAV modeled on a fly which is about the size of horsefly, but to make it that small, they had to power it by tether. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently awarded Aeronvironment in Monrovia California a $2.1 million contract extension after engineers demonstrated a NAV modeled on a hummingbird that flew for 20 seconds.

Dr. Dong hopes to outperform all these robots by modeling his robot on the king of flying insects: the dragonfly. By flapping two pairs of wings at independent frequencies, curving the wings, and with subtle body movements, the dragonfly can hover, move forward and backward, up and down, and side to side. Dragonflies use significantly less energy to manipulate their body weight relative to birds. They intercept their prey in flight. The Dragonflyer has the potential to fly faster and longer, maneuver better and carry more weight than these other robots - all in a smaller package.

The Dragonflyer Project

When Dr. Dong's students signed up for this senior project, they probably didn't expect they'd spend so much time chasing dragonflies, but they did. Much of Dr. Dong's funding comes from an Air Force Research Labs (AFRL) unit at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and it provided a pair of high speed cameras to video dragonflies in the lab from two different angles. At first the students kept the dragonflies in an upside down aquarium, but they quickly discovered the dragonflies were cooperative test subjects. In the absence of any predators or food to hunt, they would rest on a perch so the aquarium became unnecessary. Unfortunately, because the students repeatedly agitated them to fly, recaptured them, then repeated the cycle many times during a day, the exhausted dragonflies couldn't survive the night. The team adopted a catch, film and release strategy to insure they had plenty of dragonflies to capture and record every day.

Tools and techniques to build and analyze tiny, fast devices like the Dragonflyer are in their infancy, so the students had to learn several new technologies. The high-speed videos were fed into a new computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program which created 3D video models of the vortexes and air flows created by the flapping wings. The seniors spent most of the winter quarter studying the raw videos and the CFD videos so they could understand how the dragonfly maneuvered. The videos also work great as a recruiting tool, so Dr. Dong will have no shortage of student-engineers. After all this observation, it was time for subteams to build the three pieces of the proof-of-concept model - wings, actuator and tail - about 50 percent larger than an actual dragonfly.

Matthew Mills, Wesley Moosman, Joe Parsley and Cody Wright had the task of developing artificial dragonfly wings that weighed less than a gram each, that deformed like the dragonfly wing (camber) and had comparable structural integrity. Through a process of trial and error, these students used carbon fiber tow, ultra-think polyester film, and resin to produce wings that met their size, weight and camber design goals.

The task of designing an actuator to independently control both pairs of wings, flap both faster than 25 times a second and which would weigh under ten grams and be smaller than five cubic centimeters was assigned to Asela Benthara, Adam Harp, Conrad Jett, and Rich Martin. To make the design independent of a tether, the team chose to use tiny gears and motors. They used an amazing piece of technology, a 3D printer device that fabricates plastic pieces from technical specifications, to implement their increasingly sophisticated designs, ultimately meeting their design goals.

Zach Votaw, Adam Mays, Aron Brezina and Andy Walker set out to prove they could maneuver the Dragonflyer by manipulating a tail that lacked the traditional control surfaces of an airplane like a dragonfly does. They purchased a WowWee dragonfly toy, a form of clapper, and replaced the radio controller and tail. The flexible tissue tail design with no horizontal stabilizer ultimately settled on by the team enabled the WowWee to fly more level and turn in a tighter radius, proving they could better maneuver the aircraft through center of gravity manipulation - bending the tail - than with a control surface.

At the end of May, the Wright State assembled the three parts, added a battery and radio control receiver and successfully demonstrated the Dragonflyer proof-of-concept at their design review on June 5th, meeting the schedule and cost goals. But no engineering project is truly revolutionary. Of great benefit to Dr. Dong's students was the previous work developing a clapping MAV by Wright State professor Dr. George Huang's students, and they used his leading-edge equipment to produce their model.

What's Next?

Analysis, refinement and miniaturization. The performance of the design must be evaluated as a unit in a wind tunnel. The wings have yet to be analyzed under load. Friction is a major impediment to the efficient operation of the actuator. Some parts must be fabricated in metal to reduce friction and increase rigidity using another fantastic machine that cuts simple metal structures with wire. The model bends the tail with fishing string, which isn't practical. The designers suggest using smart materials that contract like muscles, but they're expensive. Then the design must be shrunk to the size of an actual dragonfly. Dr. Dong's goal is to demonstrate an actual sized Dragonflyer in flight in nine months.

And the project doesn't stop there. Dr. Dong communicates with biologists, roboticists and computer vision experts as part of his long-term vision to develop Dragonflyers that can navigate independently and operate in swarms to meet mission objectives. And improved manufacturing techniques are critical. Manually assembling these robots from such tiny parts while looking through a magnifying glass is less than optimal to say the least. Dr. Dong hopes to see a commercial product in five years.

As for the students, their future looks bright. After the design review, while they enjoyed that treat coveted by all college students - free pizza - pride out-dueled relief and exhaustion on their faces. This project gave them expertise that few other engineers can claim in what is sure to become a booming, new technology market in the next few years as products are commercialized. They know about the $2.1 million contract Aeronvironment won.

And the future of flight looks bright for Dayton. The Dragonflyer, a four-winged flapping robot, will be the most sophisticated NAV in the world. Maybe one day room 026 will be a historical landmark.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Why government needs a kill switch for the internet.
"The Internet is a destabilizing force to established interests in the world. It is premised on the free exchange of information which, in turn, is an expression of the liberty of individuals to act in furtherance of their particular interests. Government schools, the mainstream media, and other institutional voices, relentlessly work to condition the minds of people to think and to act within limits that are consistent with institutional purposes. Ideas or actions that do not challenge established interests may be welcomed (if supportive of such ends) or tolerated (perhaps as entertainment). But as the institutional order continues its decentralizing collapse into alternative social systems and practices, its domination of humanity continues to weaken. The struggle confronting mankind comes down to the question of whether human beings are to be the masters of their own lives, or whether they are to remain as resources to be exploited for institutional ends."
Government can't allow people run their own lives, now can it? The thing I find most funny about this, is the cure is worse than the disease. It's like saying because somebody might get sick, we need to give the president the power to kill him. A cyber-attack can't shut down the internet, but the president wants to be able to. The private sector is best equipped to deal with a cyber-attack. Never government.
"Do not allow yourself to be misled as to what is at stake in all of this. The established order is fighting to preserve its preeminence over all of humanity, and no appeals to traditional liberal sentiments or humane values, or constitutional or moral principles, will be allowed to stand in the way of this institutional imperative. Those who pay attention to what is implicit in events are quickly discovering that, regardless of the forms under which they operate, every state system is grounded in the exercise of arbitrary force."
It's like giving the president power to seize control of every business in the US in case of an attack. We don't allow that, and we better not allow this.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Reminding everybody how lawless government is, Chicago plans to continue with gun control laws despite Supreme Court decision. This is where Obama learned his lawlessness.

STATES RIGHTS:

Washington aristocrats are afraid of Thomas Woods's Nullification. It's great that the people can finally learn about the proud, and sometimes not so proud, history of nullification in the US and how we can use it to limit the damage of modern aristocrats.
"Most intriguing, Woods suggests that nullification could take the form of states requiring its citizens to send federal income tax money to the states where it would be put into escrow accounts, where the states then individually determine what legitimately should go to the federal government, with perhaps the states sending the rest back to its citizens."
I love this idea. I've long thought the states should find a way to indemnify their citizens from withholding taxes for unconstitutional government actions. This is one way to do it.
"A book that provides a playbook on how to reverse out of control government is selling like hotcakes just blocks from the White House. I get it. Some people are very afraid of this book and need to find out what is in it real fast. They know this book has nation changing potential. I say buy the book, get the nullification argument down cold, get in on the debate and scare the hell out of Washington D.C."
There's no doubt that the aristocrats in Washington don't want us to read this book  Buy it before they ban it.

ECONOMY:

Removing the mystery of credit default swaps.
"Due to this self-reinforcing spiral of distrust in banks and rising funding costs, people have regarded CDSs as one example of Warren Buffet's infamous financial weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, CDSs can be used to take down banks by lowering the confidence in them.


Yet, such an attack can only be successful if banks are vulnerable. Only if banks violate the golden rule of banking, i.e., if they mismatch currencies or maturities or engage in a combination of both, they become vulnerable to attacks through CDSs. Only then will the distrust spurred by higher spreads translate into funding problems that threaten a bank's liquidity.
When a bank matches maturities and currencies, holding 100-percent reserves, the attack will be unsuccessful and will not bring down the bank. In this case, speculators may ultimately suffer losses. Increased spreads may spur distrust and bring about a loss of costumers that do not roll over funds or withdraw deposits. However, a sound bank would not become illiquid or insolvent by such an attack. Only fractional reserves, mismatching of maturities, and mismatching of currencies make banks vulnerable.

CDSs are powerful corrective instruments that discipline banks. CDSs are not weapons of mass destruction but instruments of providing discipline and order. It is possible that without rising CDSs spreads, Icelandic banks would have survived longer. They would have had time to cause additional distortions and make the collapse even more disastrous."
Another valuable function of speculators.

Because of the increase in parasitic government and stimulus jobs, it appears that personal income has recovered to pre-crash levels, but those results of phony. They don't reflect any increase in production that by definition is required for the economy to recover.

TAX AND SPEND:

The other day I explained that it makes more sense to subtract government spending from GDP than to add it in. Now a Mises scholar explains it better.
"Keynesianism promises that we can all pick one another's pockets — and all get rich doing it!"
All government spending is first taken from the private sector by force.

Since the new home purchase tax credit expired in May, the housing bubble it re-created has popped.
"New home sales, not to be confused with existing home sales, fell 32.7 percent from April to May."
That's an impressive implosion.

REGULATION:

Democrats still short of 60 votes necessary to pass financial oppression bill.

The EU allows eggs to be sold by the dozen.
"Reports had suggested that the EU was planning to ban shops from selling eggs by the traditional measure and instead rule that they be sold solely by weight.
Renate Sommer, the German MEP in charge of steering the new food labelling rules through the EU Parliament, was forced to intervene to quash fears that shoppers would have to change the habit of a lifetime.
"Labels will still be able to indicate the number of food items in a pack, whether of eggs, bread rolls or fish fingers," she said in a statement. However, the weight will also have to be included on the box, which has led to fears that retailers and producers will have to incur extra costs, which will be passed on to shoppers."
That's very benevolent of the dictators. I can't imagine how I've lived nearly a half a century and never run across the terrible problem of not having the weight of the eggs in a carton labeled. Thank goodness these benevolent dictators solved that non-existent problem at added cost to the consumer, making everybody poorer.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

I can't help but laugh every time I read about some aristocrat complaining that China manipulates its currency when the Fed is the world's leading manipulator of currency.

HEALTH CARE:

Government behind schedule implementing Obamacare. They're going to be behind schedule and over budget on every health care need they're supposed to supply, and the result will be rationing.

Life expectancy in the District of Columbia is significantly lower than the rest of the nation.

GLOBAL WARMING:

It's going to be hard to top this alarmist article from the global warming frauds: Global warming could cause mankind to go extinct in 50 years.

Obama's environmental agenda costs Americans jobs.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Mexican drug cartels kill front-runner for governor in Mexican state on US border.

POLICE STATE:

Illinois prison guards allow 36 year old man to bleed to death internally without medical care despite his repeated requests for help over days.

Is anybody surprised that the report of the officer who tased the 86 year old bedridden granny doesn't jive with the report of the victim and her grandson?
"Having “exhausted attempts at verbally getting Varner to comply,” Duran used his Taser, which mis-fired. One of his comrades, Officer Sandberg, shot Varner with his Taser, which operated as expected and “rendered Varner incapable of any further aggressive action.”
















To this point, Varner had not engaged in what reasonable people would call “aggressive” action. Even if one assumes that the feeble invalid were capable of using the knife to injure Duran or the other officers, she was acting in a defensive manner. True to the martial law mind-set that defines contemporary police work, Duran apparently perceives a refusal to cooperate as “aggression.”
Tinsley was “detained” after he “tried to interfere with Officers” when they assaulted his grandmother with their portable electro-shock torture devices, according to Duran’s report. While being conveyed to the hospital by EMTs, the grandmother “made several statements of killing the police,” Duran writes. “Varner told me she was going to kill every officer that was in her apartment when she got out. Varner told me she was going to snap my neck like a twig just like she did during World War II.”

Once again, Varner denies making such threats, and Tinsley also disputes that claim. Taking Duran’s version at face value, furthermore, would merely underscore the fact that the police had no business interfering in this matter: Varner wasn’t objecting to help, she was reacting to the uninvited, unjustified intrusion by agents of state coercion for whom “officer safety” is the paramount consideration."
The big, strong policemen had to tase the 86 year old, blind in one eye, bedridden granny who just wanted them to leave her house for their own safety.

So what have these Russian spies done that is illegal? As far as I know, it's not a crime to attend parties, chit-chat or pass briefcases. If they stole some classified material, why haven't they been charged with that?
"Last week, an undercover agent pretending to be a Russian official arranged a meeting to talk about the weekly laptop exchanges, pretending to be ready to send the sexy spy on a mission to deliver a fake passport to another female agent, according to the federal complaint."
Here we go again. It looks like the only actual crime committed was the crime instigated by the feds.

Airport scanners greater cancer risk than government told us.

MEDIA:

If you're a mainstream media leftist, Bush's Supreme Court nominees are conservative while Obama's are centrist.

MISC:

How the US got into WWII.
"At a White House meeting on November 25, FDR raised the subject of Japanese relations. He "brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked [by Japan] perhaps (as soon as) next Monday [December 1], for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do." Secretary of War Stimson stated the dilemma succinctly: "The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.""
If you ever wondered if FDR manipulated the Japanese into attacking us, now you know.
"Among the Japanese intercepts sent from Tokyo in their J-19 code, decoded and translated by our Navy cryptoanalysts in Washington on December 3, was a "ships in harbor" message to the Japanese consul in Hawaii. Tokyo asked that Hawaii report twice a week, instead of irregularly, the locations of US "ships in harbor" at Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor officials had never been advised that "ships in harbor" reports were being compiled by the Japanese consul in Hawaii and sent to Tokyo. Nor were they told of this "ships in harbor" intercept.
On December 3, "highly reliable information" was received in Washington that the Japanese diplomatic and consular posts in Hong Kong, Singapore, Batavia, Manila, Washington, and London — all in American, British, or Dutch territory — had been ordered to destroy most of their codes and ciphers and burn all other important confidential and secret documents."
...
"On December 4, radioman Ralph T. Briggs at Cheltenham, MD, intercepted a message containing the phrase Higashi no kaze arne — "East Wind Rain" in English. The hidden meaning of "East Wind Rain" was: "War with England (including Netherlands East Indies, etc.); war with the U.S.; peace with Russia." Thus Russia was not to be a target of Japanese aggression, but England (Singapore), the Dutch East Indies, and the United States (possibly Manila, Pearl Harbor, or the Canal Zone) would be involved at the start in whatever aggression Japan was planning.
This message, with its hidden meaning — "War with the U.S." — written in bold, was hand-delivered to the director of naval communications in Washington. There it vanished, its significance apparently not recognized. At least no hint of this crucial intercept, or its interpretation that an attack on US territory was coming, was ever relayed to any responsible official who would admit receiving it. All trace of its receipt was lost and none was ever found in spite of a thorough search during the many post-Pearl Harbor investigations."
...
"The papers Lieutenant Schulz delivered to FDR on the evening of December 6 consisted of 13 parts of a 14-part message: Japan's answer to the United States' rejection of the latest Japanese attempt at a compromise. It announced that the Japanese were breaking off negotiations and that US–Japanese relations were de facto ruptured."
...
"On the morning of December 7, President Roosevelt received part 14 of Japan's reply to the US "ultimatum," as well as the "One P.M. Message," intercepted early that morning, advising her ambassadors to deliver to Hull the 14-part reply to the US "ultimatum" at precisely 1:00 pm Washington time. According to FDR's personal physician, Dr. Ross T. McIntire, who was with FDR from 10 am to noon that day, FDR did not think that, even given "the madness of Japan's military masters," they would risk war with the United States. McIntire wrote later that FDR thought "that they [the Japanese] would take advantage of Great Britain's extremity and strike at Singapore or some other point in the Far East, but an attack on any American possession did not enter his [FDR's] thought.""
The fatal conceit of central planners once again.
"On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. Administration officials found it difficult to believe the news of the Japanese attack when it first reached Washington. Hull thought it must have meant Manila. But Stark knew it meant Pearl Harbor; he knew the phrase "This is not a drill" heralded a real attack, not a practice.
When Roosevelt heard of the attack, he was surprised, but several witnesses reported that he actually seemed relieved at the news — at least until he learned the extent of the disaster. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins said "that night … in spite of the terrible blow … he had nevertheless a much calmer air. As we went out [of that evening's White House meeting, Postmaster General] Frank Walker said to me, 'I think the boss really feels more relief than he has had for weeks.'" In Perkins' oral history, "His surprise was not as great as the surprise of the rest of us." And Eleanor. Roosevelt wrote, "In spite of his anxiety Franklin was in a way more serene than he had appeared in a long time. I think it was steadying to know finally that the die was cast.… [Pearl Harbor] was far from the shock it proved to the country in general. We had been expecting something of the sort for a long time.""
Too bad they didn't have the base on alert then.

Kagan, who wrote a 1995 article complaining that senators don't do enough hard questioning of judicial nominees and make them answer, backpedals and dissembles from that position now that she's the nominee in question.

I love it when passavists, people who refuse to use violence to stop an evil empire from conquering others, try to have it both ways and complain the US didn't do enough to against the Soviets.
"In modern history’s greatest betrayal, the Allied war leaders handed half of Europe to Soviet rule, betraying tens of millions of its people to the gulag, dictatorship, and confiscation of all their property."
What were they supposed to do? Turn and declare war on the Soviets? To be fair, I don't know that this guy is a passavist. And maybe there was some option that didn't involve war. Maybe they could have negotiated a better deal, but the Soviets wouldn't have honored it anyway, just like they tried to take over Berlin. But Great Britain and the US had had enough of war. I don't begrudge them opting not to risk war with the Soviets at that time. What I get upset about is that we didn't re-embrace freedom at that time which would have cause the Soviet empire to quickly collapse. Instead our government became huge - more like the Soviet government - and therefore it took us decades to out-compete them.
"The heavy machinery used by Stalin to industrialize the USSR and build its arms factories was largely bought from the United States."
So he's also complaining that we allowed trade with the Soviets, even though free trade with all is the main foreign policy plank of libertarianism. Free trade is how you make connections with people, bring countries together and overcome differences. Maybe this guy's not a libertarian at all, but this is posted on a libertarian website. It reads more like an anti-American article than a libertarian article.
"It has generally been forgotten that Stalin’s concentration camps and mass murder peaked in the mid-1930’s, at least five years before Hitler began mass murder. Yet America rushed to the Soviet Union’s aid when it was attacked by Germany, supplying huge amounts of material aid, arms, fuel and cash."
That's because American leftists, useful idiots all, were sympathetic to their seeming ideological brethren in the Soviet Union and the Roosevelt administration was packed with Soviet spies.
"How could warlords Roosevelt and Churchill been so foolish and cowardly? Stalin had 12 million soldiers moving into Eastern Europe. Stalin’s might intimidated Roosevelt and Churchill, causing them to replace one totalitarian dictator, Adolf Hitler, by appeasing an even more dangerous one, Stalin."
Well, duh. Is this guy really criticizing Churchill and Roosevelt for not challenging Stalin's 12 million soldiers in Eastern Europe? It must be really self-satisfying to sit in your comfy academic library 65 years removed and rip the men who had just been through years of the worst hell the world has ever seen. For all their faults, I don't fault them for making peace instead of more war.
"After German forces surrendered, US general George Patton was ready to turn his famed 3rd Army against the Russians in Eastern Europe. The US had the atomic bomb, Russia did not. But the US and bankrupt Britain decided to buy off Stalin."
Instead of waging more war against the only major power left in Europe. I agree that Eastern Europeans suffered, but I can't believe anybody would advocate we should have continued the war against the Soviets. Wasn't 75 million dead enough? I wonder if this guy is a loon. I just emailed to ask him if he really thinks we should have continued the war. He replied that he thinks they should not have given in so easily to Stalin's terms.

Barack Obama's mentor, insane Rev. Wright, gave us more insight into the character of our president today with his racist tirade and criticism of Martin Luther King.
"The civil rights movement "was always about becoming white," Wright said at the seminar."
"According to the New York Post, Wright also alleged that the American education system is built to poorly educate black students "by malignant intent" and criticized civil rights leader Martin Luther King for advocating nonviolence."
That last part is critical to understand. Obama isn't looking for a peaceful revolution. He's trying to spark a violent revolution. He told us as much when he said he wanted to have a presidency like Lincoln's. For those of you who think it's inaccurate to use Wright's words to paint Obama, maybe you don't know the history of Obama and Wright. Young community organizer Obama searched Chicago for a long time to find a church with a mentor he could identify with. He chose Rev. Wright's virulently racist church. Obama had Rev. Wright marry him. He named his book after a Wright sermon. Obama considers Wright family. Obama tied himself to Wright. I'm just following his lead.

Scientist studying the brains of psychopaths and serial killers discovers that his brain is the brain of a psychopath. As is his DNA. No wonder he's fascinated with serial killers. Yikes.

Amazing picture of a nuclear explosion in the middle of an abandoned military fleet.

This article about slowing and stopping light sounds really weird. What do atoms have to do with the speed of light? Light travels in a vacuum, and it either ignores atoms or is absorbed by them. I've never heard of light traveling in matter. I don't even know what that means. It sounds like photons are being absorbed, then re-emitted to me, but there's nothing new about that. I'm sure this is something special, but this article doesn't explain it very well.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Free kibbles

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

The Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. Of course it does. The right to keep and bear arms is a natural right, and the Second Amendment is unique in that it offers one of many reasons why the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed - the security of a free state. That explanation enjoins the states in the right to keep and bear arms. None of the other bill of rights amendments enjoins the states. But that isn't the argument they used. Why the Supremes went out of their way to say this decision doesn't strike down all gun control laws is beyond me. What part of "shall not be infringed" don't they understand? But centralizing power always has its downside. The power a central authority has, no matter how well intentioned it is given, is always twisted back and used against the people.

STATES RIGHTS:

Tom Woods released his new book on the history and future of nullification today.

ECONOMY:

Peter Schiff claims the US is in a depression.

TAX AND SPEND:

Owner of shop gives product to Vice President Biden and his entourage for free but jokes that he wants lower taxes. Biden insults him and calls him a smartass. I really can't stand these corrupt, elitist aristocrats.

From the Telegraph:
"At last, we are having the right argument for our time. Virtually everybody who is in touch with political reality now accepts that the old contest – socialism vs capitalism – is over. We all believe, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, in free-market economics."
...
"If we learnt anything from the terrible ideological crimes of the 20th century, it was that over-powerful states were dangerous: that even if they did not commit murder or enslave their own populations, their good intentions ended up producing perverse effects simply through the gross, insensitive interventions of central bureaucracy which could take no account of individual needs. Can anyone still believe that the largely catastrophic consequences of Big State solutions to poverty, to housing shortages, to unemployment, to educational disadvantage, have been pure coincidence?"
...
"...when the state creates a mass, collectivist solution to a problem, it ends up treating people as categories (“the poor”, “the deprived”, “the homeless”) rather than as individuals who are ultimately going to have to determine their own fate."
...
"It is the basic premise of Big State thinking that has produced the monstrous edifice that we know as the benefits trap: the idea that “the poor” are a fixed and immutable section of society who must be “protected”. Sadly, what “protecting the poor” generally amounts to in practice is “protecting poverty” – which is to say, preserving it. Welfare dependency creates huge disincentives to entering employment because few jobs at entry level can offer a competitive package of payments and support equivalent to the benefits system."
...
"The tragic inevitability of government intervention is that when you create a permanent agency to deal with a problem it has an inherent tendency to make the problem itself permanent. This is not only for self-serving reasons – to justify its own continued existence – but because it prefers to deal in fixed entities such as poverty, deprivation, or educational inequality, rather than to view the infinite range of human possibilities and personal circumstances as a dynamic, ever-changing spectrum in which individual vagaries matter more than any total result."
Draft Janet Daley for president in 2012 (if she was born here). Despite all the damage done by the British government, they are having this public debate while we are not. This is one thing we need to take from Europe.

Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that the federal debt is the greatest threat to US national security. I've been saying for nearly a decade that the war on terror was incidental compared to our debt problem because you can't fight wars if you have no money. It's nice to see some people are finally catching on.

Krugman predicts disaster if governments cut spending like every government but the US federal government plans to do. If governments do cut their budgets, economies will experience painful healing process, so Krugman will be able to claim he was right during that time. When economies rebound, he’ll be able to claim they would have rebounded without the cuts. Krugman is in a no-lose position. He can always blame every economic problem on not spending enough.


14 reasons the US government will never balance its budget. A couple of select choices:
"Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama's 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf."
That's $2.17 trillion spent on vote buying.
"Over 40 million Americans are now on food stamps and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is projecting that more than 43 million Americans will be on food stamps by the end of 2011."
That's an impressive measure of how effective the government has been at creating poverty and subsequent dependence.
"Interest on the U.S. national debt now makes up 7% of the budget and it is climbing rapidly.  This is an expense that must be paid or else U.S. government finances collapse."
That sounds more like a reason government will balance the budget.
"The vast majority of the American people have become soft and don't know how to take care of themselves any longer.  We now have millions upon millions of people who are totally dependent on the U.S. government for survival.  As the government takes care of more and more people the red ink will increasingly get worse."
Baloney. The government and the mainstream media want to us to believe that's true, but it's not. The tea party movement is just the start. The only question is will the great libertarian mainstream of America get involved in politics enough to stop the collapse before government destroys our country.
"According to an official U.S. government report, rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019.  That is before one penny is spent on anything else.  As the U.S. government graph below reveals, the financial picture only gets more bleak in the years beyond that.... "
Now do you see why these wars are worse than worthless?

REGULATION:

The financial oppression bill further entrenches and empowers the corrupt Wall Street financial firms. The senate may still stop this new financial oppression bill.

Unions get exemption in new campaign finance law.

How government regulators, little Napoleons, kill business.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Central banks around the world are buying gold.

EDUCATION:

Here's a perfect of example of how government takes little problems and turns them into big problems. Some parents got into an argument at a children's kindergarten graduation. Really. Kindergarten graduation. As dumb as kindergarten graduation is, and as dumb as parents getting into an argument at kindergarten graduation is, you what happened next. School lockdown. Government makes sure that everybody suffers.

HEALTH CARE:

FDA denies procedure to eight year old burn victim. This kind of rationing is going to explode under Obamacare.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Carbon sequestration schemes have similar problems to nuclear waste sequestration schemes, but the frauds who hate nuclear power advocate carbon sequestration in a blatant double-standard.

Frauds publish a paper claiming AGW skeptics aren't as expert as believers in AGW. Right. Like we have to be experts to recognize the well publicized lies by the frauds.

ENERGY:

Our economy is addicted to oil kind of like our bodies are addicted to oxygen.
"The use of the term ‘addiction’ is no accident. It is an attempt to psychologise and pathologise what is in fact the attempt to satisfy perfectly rational human desires using the tools and resources available to us. The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a significant problem which will take a lot of human energy - and a plenty of fossil-fuel energy - to sort out. Both the companies involved and the US government must take responsibility for doing that. But the most dangerous pollution of all is the hypocrisy of the relatively wealthy, who damn the very things that enable them to live so comfortably and who would happily condemn the rest of us to a life of shivering immobility."
Oil is another great equalizer. Without it, the rich and powerful could still freely travel the world, but the rest of us would be much more limited.

How moronic is this?
"Now that President Barack Obama has settled on Gen. David Petraeus to lead the war in Afghanistan, maybe he can focus his attention on putting the right general in charge of the other war that's going badly for the administration.










You know, the one in the Gulf ... of Mexico."
We're the stupidest people on the planet. We're paying the salaries of people like this guy and everybody in government who want to declare wars on domestic problems instead of freeing people to solve them.

Is anybody surprised that Obama's panel on new regulations on drilling is packed with Marxist-cum-environmentalists and others who hate offshore drilling? I hope BP is happy with the consequences of all that money they gave to Obama and Democrats. They're some of Obama's useful idiots.

Turtle deaths not caused by oil or dispersants but shrimp nets. Now the Marxist will demonize shrimpers.

BP and other oil companies based their oil spill response efforts on grossly inaccurate government projections because the government forced them to.

How BP, the darling of the Democrats, manipulated the political economy to its profit and our loss.
"As BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig was sinking on April 22, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was on the phone with allies in his push for climate legislation, telling them he would soon roll out the Senate climate bill with the support of the utility industry and three oil companies — including BP, according to the Washington Post."
...
"But the Kerry-BP alliance for an energy bill that included a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases pokes a hole in a favorite claim of President Obama and his allies in the media — that BP’s lobbyists have fought fiercely to be left alone. Lobbying records show that BP is no free-market crusader, but instead a close friend of big government whenever it serves the company’s bottom line.


While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels."

If course it has. All big corporations do it. They get a far greater return on investment in the political economy than in the private economy.
"Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG: Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.





As Democrats fight to advance climate change policies, they are resorting to the misleading tactics they used in their health care and finance efforts: posing as the scourges of the special interests and tarring “reform” opponents as the stooges of big business."

That's exactly what they do. As if we had anything approaching a free market in the US.
"BP has more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans. It employs the Podesta Group, co-founded by John Podesta, Obama’s transition director and confidant. Other BP troops on K Street include Michael Berman, a former top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale; Steven Champlin, former executive director of the House Democratic Caucus; and Matthew LaRocco, who worked in Bill Clinton’s Interior Department and whose father was a Democratic congressman. Former Republican staffers, such as Reagan alumnus Ken Duberstein, also lobby for BP, but there’s no truth to Democratic portrayals of the oil company as


an arm of the GOP."

Imagine that.
"Two patterns have emerged during Obama’s presidency: 1) Big business increasingly seeks profits through more government, and 2) Obama nonetheless paints opponents of his intervention as industry shills. BP is just the latest example of this tawdry sleight of hand."
This may be the only skill Obama has.

POLICE STATE:

I really don't get conservative schizophrenia regarding cops. In one breath they'll blast them as unionized tax feeders. In the next breath they'll tell you how noble they are and defend them for grossly abusing their powers.

How a corrupt police department killed a city.
"...the Maywood, California Police Department, is being liquidated. In fact, the entire municipal government of Maywood, a Los Angeles suburb of roughly 40,000 people, is being dissolved on account of bankruptcy. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will provide law enforcement coverage to Maywood, and a rump city council will coordinate delivery of services provided by neighboring Bell.
In Maywood, as elsewhere, the economic crash has choked off the tax revenue on which the municipal government subsists. The town is currently facing a $450,000 deficit. But what finally broke the city, reports the Los Angeles Times, was the decision by the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority to terminate "general liability and workers' compensation coverage because the city posed too high a risk."
More specifically, the city was un-insurable because of "a large number of claims filed against the police." This is because the department (which also afflicted a neighboring town called Cudahy) had become the police equivalent of The Island of Misfit Toys – a sanctuary city for criminals in state-issued costumes."
Once again I'm saddened that this doesn't surprise me. I'm more surprised this isn't happening all over the country. I bet it will be soon.

This old legal precedent requiring people to resist government overreach is unfortunately long gone.

Americans are quickly reaching a breaking point, just like Obama wants them to. What he fails to understand is that when the Americans break, they'll break the opposite way of what he wants.

WAR:

Pat Tillman's family releases a movie about the US cover-up of his cause of death by friendly fire.

McChrystal to retire from military. Good.

Malou Innocent advocates getting back to basics on Afghanistan, reminding us that al Qaeda is not an existential threat, Afghanistan is not critical to our security and that its mineral wealth is not vital to the US.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Reason argues we should keep birthright citizenship. I don't believe that birthright citizenship is filling America with illegal aliens, but nobody should be rewarded for sneaking across the US border then using the political economy to pay for giving birth in a US hospital at taxpayer expense. Birthright citizenship makes sense for people who come here legally to become Americans, not for people who are trying to steal it.

I'm all for hearings on the abuse of lethal force by all government agents including border agents.

Obama appoints sanctuary city supporter to head ICE. He's poking his finger in the eye of the American people and laughing.

Obama punishes Arizona citizens by having federal agencies boycott the state.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The tension between South Korea resolved the tension with North Korea in spite of the US trying to stoke it. Get our troops out of there and let South Korea take care of itself.

Japan can take care of itself too.

POLITICS:

Ex-KKK member, senator for 51 years and one of the strongest advocates for the government take-over of our lives, and pork barrel spending champion Robert Byrd died last night. Hopefully West Virginians will replace him  with a small government advocate given Democrats want to destroy the coal mining industry.

Blagojevich talked about appointing Oprah to senate seat.

The Telegraph is quickly becoming my favorite paper. In this story, it exposes how aristocrats - foreign diplomats in Great Britain - are all corrupt.
"Foreign diplomats based in the capital owe more than £37 million in unpaid congestion charges, parking fines and non-domestic rates, new figures show."
...
"In addition, dozens have been able to get away with crimes including sexual assault, threats to kill and actual bodily harm by claiming diplomatic immunity.
The United States was responsible for the highest level of unpaid fines, owing nearly £4 million for congestion charges dating back to 2003, followed by the Russians with more than £3 million and Japan on £2.77 million.
In total, embassies and high commissions based in London failed to pay £36 million.
In addition, diplomats were responsible for nearly 5,000 parking and traffic violations last year, owing a total of £534,000."
Aristocrats love using the government's gun to force new laws on us because they're above the law. You know this is way worse in New York because of the United Nations.

Mark Steyn cuts through the bull to tell it like it is, or wars, for BP, Obama, Democrats and leftists.
"The executives of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam."
How's that working out for us? All leftist policies are based on violence, and therefore they're all corrupt. This is why BP was able to break so many rules and regulations and not worry about the consequences. Now Obama and Democrats are demonizing BP to cover up their complicity.
"White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stonepiece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?"
Of course it's all about Obama. I bet Obama is the most narcissistic president ever. That our troops are dying because of restrictive rules of engagement being applied in a war we cannot win doesn't faze him. That McChrystal has lost control of his command doesn't faze him. But the perceived personal slight is a firing offense. Obama makes your typical corrupt, lying, egotistical, elitist, cut-throat politician look good by comparison.
"Only the other day, Sen. George Lemieux of Florida attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, over-manned, and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “super-skimmers”: Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Senator Lemieux found the president unengaged and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” reported the senator."
Of course not. He's too busy obsessing over the gray in his hair.
"“It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. . . . The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.












“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”












Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses."
That's because Obama is on the side of the tyrants, not the oppressed. We knew that before the election 2008 election. He's fine with China and Russia oppressing their people. He sympathizes with the mullahs when they order demonstrating Iranians to be shot in the street, not the victims. Obama is a Marxist. He thinks of himself as the American Vladimir Lenin, but better. What part of that don't people understand?
"Moveon.org have quietly disappeared their celebrated “General Betray Us” ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the “anti-war” movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don’t care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c’est la même chose."
There's nothing anti-war about the left. Get over it.

Victor Davis Hansen on the lawlessness of the Obama administration.
"All this is eerie; it has a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another, and which often appealed to foreign nations for support."
Yikes.

48 percent of Americans see government as a threat to individual rights. The other 52 percent are fools.

Republicans promote a positive agenda.

Ron Paul supporters have taken over the Idaho Republican Party. One down, 49 to go.

Europe is changing direction, albeit slowly, but Obama is putting the pedal to the metal taking America toward collapse.

MEDIA:

Significantly more Americans trust Google, Microsoft and Apple than trust the media, as well they should. The media profits by misinforming Americans. If those companies did the same, they would go broke.

In praise of Judge Napolitano.

MISC:

Researcher concludes that thinking you are good or evil, especially evil, increases physical capabilities. This is going to be controversial.

Criticism of Justice Stevens on his way out the door. More criticism of Stevens and the mainstream media misrepresentation of his record.

This author beats me to writing about the other Supreme Court decision today. It's being presented as a victory over Christians, but it's no such thing.
"In this one, the Christian Legal Society (CLS) at Hastings law school (a state school in San Francisco) challenged a school rule that prohibits student groups from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation."
...
"Predictably, observers in certain libertarian circles are decrying this as a violation of freedom of association.  But that’s the wrong way to look at it."
...
"After all, how can a libertarian think the CLS is entitled to a state subsidy?  Why should taxpayers who abhor discrimination against homosexuals — as we might reasonably imagine that most of Hastings’ taxpaying neighbors do — be forced to subsidize, even slightly, a student group that engages in such discrimination?












(Here, the funds apparently came out of a mandatory student fee, not directly from taxpayers, but at best this changes the question to why other students should be made to subsidize the CLS.)
Also, if it violates the CLS’s freedom of association to make them accept homosexuals, why doesn’t it violate the rest of the law school’s freedom of association to make them accept the CLS?
I’m sure the CLS is right that being forced to accept all comers could undermine its mission.  But what really undermines its mission is getting in bed with a state institution.  It shouldn’t be shocked by what’s happened because almost all government money comes with government control.  (School voucher advocates, take note.)

For the libertarian, there is no good solution to the issue in this case except to keep as much property as possible private and then let its legitimate owners decide what rules to have."
Exactly. This group is free to exclude homosexuals. They're just not free to exclude them and to accept stolen money from the government. The school has freedom of association rights just like the Christian group.

Hayden Panettiere opens a bottle of champaign - or something.

US arrests 10 Russian agents.

Sirhan Sirhan still proclaims his innocence.

Seven myths about grilling steak.

Questioning the validity of compensation for the victims of disasters. Of course people harmed by others deserve compensation, but the level of compensation should be appropriate.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Jobless Americans benefits to expire. That will prompt many to get jobs, and that's a good thing. Many will switch from being parasites to producers to benefit of us all.

TAX AND SPEND:

The Greek government is privatizing islands to pay off its debt. Why would it have kept 6,000 islands locked away from development? That's nuts. The people of Greece should be livid the country kept that land from their use.
"Only 227 Greek islands are populated and the decision to press ahead with potential sales has also been driven by the inability of the state to develop basic infrastructure, or police most of its islands. The hope is that the sale or long-term lease of some islands will attract investment that will generate jobs and taxable income."
If course it will, that was true last year, last decade, last century, etc. It's ridiculous that the government used its gun to deprive its citizens from the profits of that valuable land.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Divine right didn't go away. It just transformed into immunity for government officials.
"In school, we are taught about an ancient idea that is long out of favor: the divine right of kings. What did it mean? I think most people would find it difficult to say. It meant that there was no earthly court of appeal above the king. The king's judicial word was law, because no higher authority could lawfully overturn his word.
The two revolutions of the seventeenth century brought that doctrine to an end in England and the colonies. First Cromwell (1649), then Parliament (1688) removed kings from their thrones. Over the next century, the West substituted a new doctrine: the divine right of legislatures. This sovereignty was never called divine right, because in the era of the Enlightenment, intellectuals have been hostile to the idea of a God who interferes in history. Civil governments have claimed autonomy, which is another word for divinity. Maybe we can say that divinity abhors a vacuum."
Somebody has to be the final judge of disputes, or else disputes would never be resolved. But no entity should be above the law. To make that happen, there has to be multiple, competing dispute resolution systems. Federalism gave us that to some extent - states could prosecute federal agents - but federalism is practically dead.
"The Federal Reserve System possesses so much sovereignty that it holds the U.S. Government's gold in trust. Anyway, it says it does. There has been no government audit of the gold since 1951. No one in government knows how much gold there is in Fort Knox and the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a private bank. The government does not assert its right to know."
I want to know where the gold is.
"With the central bank ready to bail out the big banks, the senior managers of these banks can put their banks' capital at risk by investing in high-return, high-risk investments. Think "derivatives." Then think "toxic assets." Then think "exchange our toxic assets at face value for liquid T-bills." This is what the Federal Reserve did for the major banks.
The result? The six largest American banks have been highly profitable in 2010 – far more so than in 2009. But they have made their money through trading, especially high-risk derivatives. They did not make it by lending to businesses. In short, they are back to the pre-2008, pre-TARP world. Happy days are here again! For them."
I wonder how much the Fed governors get paid.
"If Congress nationalizes the FED and inflates, then the FED will have failed. It will be proven for all to see that it was not too big to fail.
On the other hand, if the FED refuses to buy the Treasury's debt, the Federal government will default. It will be proven as not too big to fail."
That'll be interesting. I pick Congress to win. It'll nationalize the Fed and print money to buy its own treasuries before it defaults. Just like this article points out over and over, Congress has all the power. It just refuses to use it with the Fed. But it won't refuse to use it when the Fed stops doing what it wants.

HEALTH CARE:

British doctors call for homeopathy banI have mixed feelings about this. The less the government pays for the better, but I don't want to see doctors get a more powerful monopoly on health care.


GLOBAL WARMING:

Picture of shuttle Atlantis docked with international space station silhouetted against unusually quiet sun.

NOAA satellite image showing Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect which has been discounted by the media so far because it inflates temperature readings in cities and the global warming frauds extrapolate those localized temperature increases in cities to the whole planet.

ENERGY:

It turns out that the government owns the oil spill models and it forces oil companies to meet its standards. Inevitably, the government's models are wrong, in the Gulf they predicted no oil from a deep leak would reach land and that it would evaporate, and BP was forced to design based on that erroneous model. Every new layer of the onion we peal back exposes more and more government responsibility for the Gulf oil spill. As Judge Napolitano points out, the oil company gets sued and the bureaucrats get raises.

BP prepares to radically alter the architecture it's using to capture oil showing once again how the private sector is flexible and improves things in contrast to government which is still stuck decades behind.

POLICE STATE:

This is too funny.
"A gang of thieves has stolen everything, including the kitchen sink, from a police station near the World Cup city of Johannesburg."
...
"Politicians said it was 'terrible' that the site had not been properly secured. 
Police have launched an inquiry."
Only government.


WAR:


Criticism of Harry Truman.


POLITICS:


Politics in a two party system has an important quality in common with The Price is Right. You know how in the opening  competition, one person will bid one price, say $950, and the next guy, trying to be closer but not going over, will bid one dollar more, say $951? That's how politics in the two party system works. One candidate will stake out a position, and the next candidate will stake out almost exactly the same position but slightly modified on the side he thinks will win more votes. So if a Democrat wants to increase spending by $1 trillion, Republicans will want to increase spending by $900 billion knowing small government supporters don't have another other viable options.


LOCAL:


State promises to build marina at Ceaser's Creek. Why? If there's a market for a marina, a private individual or group could build one. Why should the state take money from 11 million Ohioans by force to build a marina for some local boaters? No thank you. If this project happens, we'll all be poorer for it.


MISC:


British think tank advocates keeping children who are wards of the state as wards of the state until they're 24. Why not? These people want to make every individual a ward of the state from cradle to grave. The infantilization of the western world continues.