Saturday, July 31, 2010

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The illusion of recovery is fading, and aristocrats were forced to retroactively adjust down their numbers for the past few quarters.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Fossil fuel subsidies dwarf renewable energy subsidies. That's like complaining the Yankees spend more money than other baseball teams. Of course they do. Fossil fuel companies have far more money to influence the aristocrats. When are people going to wake up to the nature of government?

As expected, the government's response to the oil spill was far more damaging than the spill itself.

POLITICS:

Police clear Gore in masseuse case, but they can't clear him of the fraud he should be charged with.

MEDIA:

Can you imagine how the liberal media would howl if a right-wing power-broker paid three million dollars for his or her daughter's wedding? Funny how these liberal aristocrats are only against conspicuous consumption and carbon footprints when somebody other than one of their own is doing it. And now we know the Clintons are literally in bed with Wall Street just like the press is literally in bed with our rulers and Republicans are literally in bed with Democrats.

MISC:

In a funny reminder that government is the enemy of progress, the UK government refuses to upgrade from IE6, which is about a bazillion computer years old.

Unusual pattern of cosmic rays at south pole.

New solar spaceship produces amazingly detailed pictures of sunspots.

In essay about Trotsky, even Karl Marx "saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production." Too bad Marx's solution was create ultimate bureaucracy to run a slave state.

The role of religion in forming the classic liberal tradition.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Free kibbles

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Record cold in South America intensifies as La Nina strengthens. All you hear about in the news is the heat in the northern hemisphere, but the globe has two hemispheres.

POLICE STATE:

This is a great question, and you won't like the answer: "Why are police trained to be cowards?"

POLITICS:

As expected, the ethics investigation of Charlie Rangel that pundits were hyperventilating over was actually a farce, recommending only a reprimand. That's not even a slap on the wrist.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

The British continue to make more sense than Americans.
"Ministers want to end the “illogical” situation where people are effectively paid to remain unemployed because state benefits are more valuable than wages."
Who would have thought that when you pay people to not work, they won't work? Let's see if the British government really cuts welfare benefits.

REGULATION:

The financial oppression bill exempts the SEC from FOIA requests. How's that transparency working out for you?

The FAA has declared a no-fly zone over Chelsea Clinton's wedding.

EDUCATION:

New Jersey Gov.Christie is doing what I've long advocated, turning the greed argument around on leftists. People in the private sector aren't greedy. They provide quality goods and services that they voluntarily exchange with others. Greed is in the political economy where people are taking wealth they didn't earn from others by force. In this case, it's government teachers. We have no way of knowing the value of teachers because they are paid with stolen money, not in a system of voluntary exchange.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The New York Times claims that nuclear energy is more expensive than solar, but the New York Times has an anti-nuclear agenda, so I don't know if this is true or not. I also bet most of the cost of nuclear energy is the cost of meeting government regulations, not actually producing energy.

New report supposedly combining all temperature data sets claims that global warming is unmistakable. Not in the last 12 years it isn't. 1998 is still tied with 1934 as the hottest years on record. Climate warmed over the last 40 years, but so what? Climate changes. Climate has been changing for 4 billion years, and it will continue changing for 4 billion more. It's natural.

Even ultra-liberal Slate magazine acknowledges the Gulf oil spill has not been anything approaching a disaster.

POLICE STATE:

Obama to make it easier for FBI agents to get information on a person's internet activity without a warrant. No thank you.

POLITICS:

Because Obama is ruling exactly the way his record indicated he would, women, white men, Jews and Hispanics are abandoning him. But since he's exactly what we knew he'd be, why are they leading now? Why did they support him to begin with?

MEDIA:

Time magazine calls Rush Limbaugh "the obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh." I'm happy to see the leftist media is dropping the charade that it's unbiased.

The bigoted Dept. of Agriculture woman who refused to help a white farmer and pawned him off on "one of his own kind" is suing Breitbart for publishing the video. A judge should throw the case out because it has no merit - he just published a video of her speech - but in our messed country who knows what will happen.

MISC:

Science is losing credibility because it has been politicized and adopted an authoritarian tone. No doubt about that. Anything that becomes politicized becomes authoritarian. Another big reason it's losing credibility is all the pseudo-science posing as real science.

Eating local has led to me eating more fruits and vegetables.

Mises Academy is offering four courses this fall.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's economic advisor Christina Romer says a one percent tax increase reduces economic output by three percent. That's because you have to pay for spending twice. But Obama loves that. He wants to raise taxes specifically to reduce our economy and make us all poorer.

I always get a good laugh when I see Obama's claim on the campaign trail that he would cut spending.


REGULATION:


Here's another reminder that government is the enemy of progress:
"The Federal Trade Commission’s time machine worked its magic again, restoring the market for a particular group of herbicides to its pre-2008 condition"
The FTC dragged the country backwards 3 years.


GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:


Prizes offered for solutions to clean up the oil in the Gulf. Let nature do it. Send me my prize.


WAR ON DRUGS:


George Will reminds how stupid the war on drugs is and how misguided the prohibitionists are:
"In “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson,” historian David S. Reynolds writes that in 1820, Americans spent on liquor a sum larger than the federal government’s budget. By the mid-1820s, annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol reached seven gallons, more than three times today’s rate. “Most employers,” Reynolds reports, “assumed that their workers needed strong drink for stimulation: a typical workday included two bells, one rung at 11 a.m. and the other at 4 p.m., that summoned employees for alcoholic drinks.”"
End these wars on Americans.


POLICE STATE:


FBI agents busted for lying on test. Suppose you or I had been busted for lying on a test about national security given to us by the FBI. What do you think would happen to us? Needless to say, the FBI agents are above the law.


WAR:


Any honest rally supporting the troops would call to bring them home so they can live. Forcing them to fight and die so some politically connected rich guys and corporations can control the Afghanistan mineral wealth is abominable.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Obama deports illegal aliens in record numbers.


Federal judge temporarily blocks key sections of the new Arizona immigration law. This is all we're going to hear about for God knows how long. I have a better solution for Arizona. End your welfare state. Then the illegal aliens who don't pull their weight will go elsewhere.

POLITICS:

Democrats' new campaign finance bill, called the disclose act, favors Democrat donors. Imagine that.

MISC:

Doomsday shelters on the rise.

Blackmail should not be a crime. It's one of government's ways of protecting the rich and powerful from the consequences of their actions and from having to made honest deals with the common people.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

This explanation of why profits are soaring but jobs are not, while not without merit, misses the much greater problem of credit expansion. Note how the study identifies the Greenspan-Bernanke era as the era when things changed?

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Nature did what nature always does: cleaned up the Gulf oil spill. Clean-up crews can't find it. This is wonderful, expected news for the people who live on the Gulf and for everybody else except the environmental Marxists. It's terrible news for them because it reminds everybody that humans are just minuscule creatures on the face of this awesome planet and are unable to do any serious damage.

Pat Sajak (yes, that Pat Sajak) slams the global warming frauds for their hypocrisy. He does it very nicely as you would expect Pat Sajak to do.
"Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.
Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.
Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically."
The frauds aren't going to take their fraud that far, where they actually have to sacrifice themselves, and hooray for Pat Sajak for calling them on it.

Going green in Britain means the people wills suffer 33 percent higher bill even while being forced to cut their energy use. Thanks, global warming frauds.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Mexican prosecutors allege that prison guards use prisoners as hit squads in Mexico's drug war, letting them out, arming them, and letting them use prison vehicles to travel to and from the hit. But who's really on a drug cartel payroll? The guards? The prosecutor? Both? There's no way to know because the war on drugs has enriched and empowered drug cartels to the point that everybody is subject to corruption. The only way to put an end to that is to end the war on drugs.

WAR:

Some key findings of the Wikileaks documents.

POLITICS:

The new black panthers don't scare me. Without government backing, they're just some punks. Government scares me.

LOCAL:

Apparently this is supposed to make us feel good or proud or something:
"Ohio has been named one of 19 finalists in the second round of the federal “Race to the Top” school reform grant competition which comes with a chance to win a share of $3.4 billion."
Yay. Ohio government is in the running to steal part of $3.4 billion from the rest of Americans. How does it feel to be the possible recipient of a huge amount of stolen money? How does it feel to be the victims of theft who might not get any back? I didn't know the Dept. of Education was using stolen funds to fund a lottery. Dayton could receive millions of the stolen money too.

MISC:

Southwest Airlines kicks normal sized woman off airplane to make room for obese teenager who needed two seats. That's a load of crap. That teen should have been charged for two seats up front. If you consume two seats, you have to pay for two seats. I realize this is a stand-by issue, but still.

The longer you sit, the shorter your life. So that means that educated, wealthy, white-collar professionals live shorter lives than uneducated, less wealthy, physical laborers? I doubt it. Non-desk-bound professionals and desk-bound non-professionals must skew these numbers, and stress is probably the single most important factor.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's fraudulent debt commission is expected to call for 10s of trillions in new taxes. Of course it is. This is the only reason that debt commission exists.

Swindlers race to the Gulf coast to steal a portion of the $20 billion Obama extorted from BP.

REGULATION:

Aristocrats don't want you to know this fact about regulation:
"There's been plenty of government regulating, and as regulations grow, the incidences of financial booms and panics grow in step, as Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson chronicle in their wonderful new book Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System. Looking back at financial crises, the authors note "the impacts of rampant speculation, government involvement or poor government responses, misguided monetary polices, ill-designed regulation and misunderstood new financial technology, as well as the oft-repeated failure on the part of policy makers and legislators to draw the appropriate lessons from painful experiences" have been constant themes."
Inevitably, when government ostensibly tries to solve a problem, it makes it worse.

The US government regulates our economy more than the Nazis regulated Germany's.
"In sum, it would be very difficult to argue against the proposition that the US economy today is even more heavily controlled, regulated, and regimented by the state than Germany was at the time Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. Americans have travelled many miles down the road to serfdom by deluding themselves that the god of democracy will somehow save them from statist slavery. But as Hayek warned 56 years ago, "There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary…""
And you thought you were free.

HEALTH CARE:

Because socialized medicine has been such a disaster in Great Britain, Great Britain is reforming away from socialized medicine while Democrats are forcing us at the point of a gun toward full-blown socialized medicine.

The more government dominates our health care industry, the more unsafe hospitals become.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Inspector General investigating claims that Obama's Dept. of the Interior falsified statements made by experts to justify its ban in drilling in the Gulf. Obama will fire this guy ASAP. He won't let facts or honesty get in the way of his agenda.

Desperately seeking swelter. The frauds are working overtime to convince us that any hot spell is a sign of impending doom like hot weather never existed before. They don't let little things like the Dust Bowl or the Medieval Warm Period get in the way of their agenda. Every hot spell is a sign of man-made global warming but every cold snap is a reason to remind us that weather is not climate. These frauds would be funny if they weren't so dangerous.

Last year's blizzards weren't caused by global warming. Neither were any other blizzards in the past.

Who needs cap and trade legislation when Obama can dictate the EPA to tax CO2?

Documentation on BP's lobbying to release the Lockerbie bomber.

If BP has the choice to hire cheap prison labor versus more expensive labor and can get more productivity for its money, that makes good business sense. Guess who's selling the prison labor and is not demonized in this article.

WAR ON DRUGS:

The war on drugs claims another innocent life. This woman would be alive today, as would millions of others around the world, if not for this abominable war. Only evil people who enjoy using violence to force their will on others can rationalize that it's worth killing people to stop some from smoking pot or snorting coke.

POLICE STATE:

The next logical step in auto surveillance will be requiring cars to call the cops when their drivers are speeding. The police won't even have to send out an officer. The car's communication will be received by a computer which will print out a ticket and mail it. Or email it. No human need be involved until you open the ticket in the mail.

Walmart to put RFID tags in individual clothing items. The way to combat this is to force the Walmart check-out person to wand each item you purchased and remove all RFID tags before you purchase them. That'll cost Walmart a lot of money, and they'll rethink that policy.

WAR:

Wikileaks leaks Afghan war logs to the press. Our socialist masters are angry. War is socialism. The US government is waging war in Afghanistan in the name of all the people. It's a collectivist effort. Other than battle plans before they're implemented, there should be no classified information.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

This article wants me to feel sorry for Mexico because the Arizona law will lead to a flood of deportees. It didn't work. Mexico should be trying to entice workers to come back and build Mexico, not complaining about workers coming back.

Illegal aliens fleeing Arizona, one to Pennsylvania. This is the power federalism. This illustrates the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. This is why the Constitution doesn't give the federal government power to control the borders. The Tenth Amendment reserves that power to the states and individuals protecting their private property by expelling trespassers. If we obey the Constitution, federalism will solve this illegal immigration problem. As some states take hard stands, other states will suffer under the increased welfare burden until they either take a hard stand against illegal immigration, get rid of their welfare programs or collapse under the weight of their welfare states. Federalism works.

POLITICS:

Maureen Down complains that Obama's White House is too white. How's that post-racial presidency working out for you? What a joke.

Young voters fleeing Obama. Of course they are. Young voters always resent the man, and Obama is the man now. Democrats are the party in power.

LOCAL:

Local government determines who can build a hospital or not, as a result a couple of big corporations own all the hospitals so they face virtually zero competition. The result is higher than average incidences of disease, and higher prices I'm sure.

MISC:

America is divided into two classes: the ruling the class and the rest of us.
"Members of the two classes do not like one another. In particular, the ruling class views the rest of the population as composed of ignoramuses who are vicious, violent, racist, religious, irrational, unscientific, backward, generally ill-behaved, and incapable of living well without constant, detailed direction by our betters; and it views itself as perfectly qualified and entitled to pound us into better shape by the generous application of laws, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and unceasing declarations of its dedication to bringing the country—and indeed the entire world—out of its present darkness and into the light of the Brave New World it is busily engineering.
This class divide has little to do with rich versus poor or Democrat versus Republican. At its core, it has to do with the division between, on the one hand, those whose attitudes are attuned to the views endorsed by the ruling class (especially “political correctness”) and whose fortunes are linked directly or indirectly with government programs and, on the other hand, those whose outlooks and interests derive from and focus on private affairs, especially the traditional family, religion, and genuine private enterprise. Above all, as Codevilla makes plain, “for our ruling class, identity always trumps.” These people know they are superior in every way, and they are not shy about letting us know that they are. Arrogance might as well be their middle name."
Tell me something I don't know. Why do you think I call them aristocrats? The most interesting thing about this is that apparently some people don't realize it, and that makes it valuable.
"Despite the rulers’ chronic complaints about people’s exercising “discrimination” of one kind or another, they have no intention of treating everybody equally. Hence, “[l]aws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally.”  As the recent health-care and financial-reform statutes illustrate perfectly, however, much of the inequality is achieved not directly, but by the statutes’ delegation of authority to countless regulatory and administrative bodies, which will use their ample discretion to do the desired dirty work."
Stating the obvious again, but until every American who isn't in the ruling class or favored by the ruling class understands it, it bears repeating.

On the so-called mosque at ground zero:
"Islam has a rich history of building Mosques at the sites of great Muslim conquests"
What religion doesn't? You don't think Christians built churches on land they conquered? Or Hindus? Give me a break. Here's my email to Boortz in response.
"If you don't want Muslims to build a Muslim center four blocks away from ground zero, put together a coalition to buy the property. Make them an offer they can't refuse. Otherwise, shut up and support their property rights. This is the USA, and property rights are supposed to be an American value that every American should champion. If we don't support the property rights of everybody, we end up living in country where government confiscates the property of everybody and is the real owner of all property because it exercises final control. Sound familiar?"
Let's see if he has the balls to print it. Militant Muslims behind this project. Tell me something I didn't know, but it doesn't matter who bought it. This is America, and we have to stand for American values. Buy the land or quit complaining and defend property rights. That's how we win.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

If the Dow continues to follow the trends of the Great Depression like it has because Bush and Obama are repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, we can expect it to fall to 7,500.

Peter Schiff's prediction of the falling dollar is finally coming true as investors realize it's not a safe haven but a sinking ship. Shadowstats.com has alternate inflation at just under nine percent.
"Schiff predicts that when prices do start going up significantly, as the inflation train rushes towards us, it may be too late for anyone to do much about it, because the inflationary stimulus policies of the US government and its Federal Reserve have made the US economy so febrile that anypunitive Volcker-style interest rate rises required to shut down rapid price inflation will cripple the US economy completely. The analogy Schiff uses is of a man who has got rid of his party hangover (the 2008 bust following the preceding boom) by taking another large cup from the punch bowl (the Keynesian stimulus policy). This may have made the pain go away temporarily (producing the infamous green shoots of recovery), but have left the man in an even worse state to cope with reality when the second hangover inevitably kicks in (which is starting about now)."
Obama is achieving exactly what he wanted to achieve: making us all much poorer.

REGULATION:

The conspiracy against hemp. Too many producers of competing products don't want it legalized.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

If you believe the alarmist mainstream media stories, every place on earth is heating much faster than average, which is obviously impossible.

POLICE STATE:

On the hundreds of new top secret intelligence programs:
"Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers’ money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It’s loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.
And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one. It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade—after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI “captures” the unfortunate victims of the government’s entrapment.)
So, the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small—not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent. Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can’t be done won’t be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime."
Not only can we endure them, we have no choice. This isn't about stopping terrorism. It's about controlling the people. It's about power. In-depth description.

Pilot program in Britain using GPS satellites to identify and confiscate money from speeders. Take the battery out.

WAR:

Afghanistan war to get worse, but we'll be in control by the end of the year. The first rings true, the second does not.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Our situation with Israel shows that:
"you can’t have a republic and an empire: it’s one or the other. This is true not only because empires are constantly defending and extending their frontiers, and are in a state of constant warfare, which requires a centralized authority and the consolidation of State power, but also due to the peculiar vulnerability of democratic institutions to foreign subversion. An America that refused on principle to interfere in the affairs of other nations would have little or nothing to fear from foreign lobbyists and fifth columnists: on the other hand, a “democratic” empire in which the emperor is subjected to all sorts of political pressures, including the necessity of raising obscene amounts of money just in order to keep his throne, is indeed “something that can be easily moved,” as Bibi put it."
I choose Republic.

MEDIA:

Journolist - the vast left-wing media conspiracy.

LOCAL:

It looks like the MRSA problem is at Kettering Medical Center. But government didn't provide that information, a family member of a victim did. Once again, private individuals are helping each other while government attempts to keep that from happening.

MISC:

99 out of 100 people taking statins for cholesterol don't need them, and cholesterol does not cause heart disease.

Benefits of alcohol. I have to get another beer.

Anger at the ground zero mosque.
"To begin with, the proposed Islamic center – not a mosque, but the Muslim equivalent of the YMCA – a nonprofit foundation wants to build in New York City isn’t at "ground zero," it is four blocks from the site of the World Trade Center."
I haven't heard that in any of the stories. Funny how it's omitted.
"Never mind the fact that there is already a mosque four blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center (see here), which has been there for many years."
I hadn't heard that before either.

Of course language shapes the way we think. We think in the words we know.

Cool looking, centrally planned city Masdar, UAE. I wonder if people will make it thrive.

Smart drugs. I wonder if baseball will outlaw them.

Is our universe inside a black hole in a higher universe?

Alternative news links.

Why is Google buying a spy drone that can see through walls?

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Free kibbles

EDUCATION:

Washington D.C. school system to fire 200 teachers, and the teachers' union is unhappy. Of course these evaluations are not perfect, and since they're done by government bureaucrats, they're probably terrible. But teachers who face a fear of being fired for poor performance will do a better job.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

BP had turned off the safety alarm on Deepwater Horizon so people could sleep. BP to drill in deep water off the coast of Libya. I bet they do a better job there. One of the great things about the private sector is businesses learn from their mistakes. Only government doesn't have to learn from its mistakes. It not only repeats them, it makes them worse and worse every time.

LOCAL:

Ohio state bureaucrats are investigating a local hospital for an outbreak of deadly bacteria, but because government hates the people, they won't release the name of the hospital. Maybe they get their kicks out of watching citizens play deadly bacteria roulette, or more likely, they're beholden to the medical industry, not the people. But you can bet if some local in their family gets sick, they'll know which hospital to avoid.

MISC:

Here's my model legislation backing up the constitutional power to make interstate commerce regular:
"Any product or service that meets the requirements for legal sale in one state is deemed to have met the requirements for sale in all states. Any federal law to the contrary is hereby repealed, and any state law to the contrary is hereby overruled."
That's the definition of making interstate commerce regular. That simple law would dramatically improve our economy virtually overnight. It would wipe out thousands of lines of federal code and probably hundreds of thousands of lines of state code that restrict trade and make us all poorer, yet every American can read it and understand it in seconds. In order to reestablish the rule of law and to regain our freedom, we must pass simple laws that protect freedom like this and wipe out all the complex, oppressive laws on the books today. But because this law would be of such great benefit to Americans, the chances that the Republican and Democrat aristocrats would pass it are zero.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Here's the Charlie Rangel story people should be talking about: Rangel introduces legislation to bring back slavery.
"To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes."
And you thought slavery was a thing of the past.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

I have zero confidence that seven Republican senators can stop Obama from enacting net neutrality. Government wants control of the internet.

TAX AND SPEND:

Grotesquely overpaid bureaucrats in Bell California referenced previously resigned and made off with hundreds of thousands of dollar a year pensions.

A few Democrats are pretending they don't want to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. Don't buy the hype. They're just saying what they think the voters want to hear before November.

Are you ready for the tax tsunami?

Ann Arbor government laying off firefighters but spends $850,000 on building a new sculpture.

REGULATION:

Obama's never-ending assault on America continues with proposed new unconstitutional regulations forcing:
"U.S. businesses to provide to the government data about employee pay as it relates to the sex, race and national origin of employees."
Obama will not stop until all that's left of America is rubble or we remove him from power.

EDUCATION:

Of course government schools don't teach or encourage entrepreneurship. Government doesn't want people to think for themselves. Especially leftists. That's why Obama is trying to destroy small business in America. Corporations can be controlled. Independent small businesses cannot.

HEALTH CARE:

Just like many of us warned, Obamacare was designed to fail so government would usher in full-blown socialized medicine. Democrats didn't waste any time either - they're already pushing a revived government option.

POLICE STATE:

Perverts in government aren't limited to the TSA. An investigation has uncovered many government security agents who purchased and downloaded child pornography.

WAR:

Gen. Petraeus scraps Gen. McChrystal's plan to take Kandahar and reworks entire Afghan strategy. That's good news, but it would be better news if he was leading our pullout.

Now that Obama has taken over Bush's wars, conservatives are losing interest.

POLITICS:

Obama's cabinet has far and away the least private sector experience of any cabinet since 1900. Seven percent. The next lowest was Kennedy's at 28 percent. I'm surprised it isn't zero percent.

How true is this? While America at large has obviously moved past race, Obama's election proves it, Obama, Democrats and race activists have not. I predicted Obama would be the most racially divisive figure since the 60s, and I was right.

MEDIA:

The smoking gun for media bias? That's quite the understatement. Journo-gate is smoking gun for the mainstream media as the propaganda arm of leftists in government. We've always known this to be true, but now it's undeniable.

LOCAL:

Fatal crashes nearly double in Butler County and on the rise throughout the state. Duh. It's because of omni-present, never-ending, irresponsible road construction. I-75 has been torn up and extra dangerous between Dayton and Hamilton since I moved up here in 2003, and there's no end in sight. Roads all around here have been torn up and dangerous for years. The aristocrats plan these road construction jobs to last years or decades. They tear up the roads and leave them torn up for months or years at a time with nobody working on them so they can get double revenue from tickets. The result is more crashes and more deaths. It's no coincidence these numbers are up in the same year that Obama's stimulus boondoggle is tearing up roads all over the state. Government kills.


MISC:


Saturn's rings as a model for planet formation.

Google guy rips java and C++. Good for him. I completely agree with these criticisms.

Census bureau calling businesses and asking about numbers of employees. Huh?

Capitalism eliminated starvation. Government domination of our lives is bringing it back.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

News flash: Washington bureaucrats suck at running car companies. Duh. They suck at running a post office too. They suck at everything but lying, telling the aristocrats what they want to hear and using violence against the people to enrich themselves and their aristocrat masters. The founding fathers understood this, and that's why the Constitution forbids government from doing anything outside of a few limited powers.

ECONOMY:

This unemployment graph will blow you away.

If you pay people to not work, they won't work. More evidence?
"But then I read statistics like this in the Wall Street Journal and it makes me think that maybe my current compassionate stance is actually hurting these folks in the long run. "A March 2010 economic report by Michael Feroli of J.P. Morgan Chase examined several studies and concluded that 'lengthened availability of jobless benefits has raised the unemployment rate by 1.5% points.'""
This isn't rocket science.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's claims about the benefits of his stimulus boondoggles hurt his credibility. What credibility? Obama doesn't mention all the jobs killed by his policies.

How politicians use tax dollars for self-promotion.

Our spending problem is so huge, raising taxes can't solve it. Of course not. Raising taxes hurts the economy and reduces revenue.

National Review author reminds us that we can't trust Republicans when it comes to spending. Wow. That's a Republican organ.

Onerous tax laws are pressuring more and more people to renounce citizenship.

Illinois aristocrats are boosting government pensions despite their financial crisis. This is why I keep saying the aristocrats won't fix our problems. They won't wake up. They will continue looting us with more and more intensity until the country collapses. The only way we can fix our problems is to take away their power.

REGULATION:

Surprise, surprise. President Obama lied about the financial oppression law, saying taxpayers would never have to bail out Wall Street again when in fact the law institutionalizes those bailouts. Fortunately for us, that's unconstitutional, so all we have to do is elect a president who will obey the Constitution and nullify that law and 90 percent of other existing law, all of which is unconstitutional.


Hidden in Washington's Historic Finance Bill Are Major New Rules Affecting Nearly Every Corner of the Investing World.  Duh. If you thought this oppression was about reining in Wall Street, you're a fool. Welcome to regulation hell.



HEALTH CARE:

Now the mainstream media admits that the Obamacare mandate is a tax. This is more insidious than it might seem at first glance. This is seeding the field to make the argument the mandate is constitutional.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

US Forest Service dives into the global warming fraud.

Great Britain to suffer years of blackouts and soaring electricity bill because politicians succeeded in pushing the global warming fraud.

Thousands of people put out of work by Obama's drilling ban rally against the policy.

Now that the Gulf oil leak is temporarily stopped, we can finally get some info on how this disaster happened.

Instead of responding to FOIA requests about the global warming fraud, so-called homeland security investigated the requesters.

Harry Reid to push a more limited, bipartisan energy regulation bill without tax and trade in wake of Gulf oil spill. No thank you.

WAR:

For years I've been explaining that our wars overseas and the war on terror were useless because we were broke. Not only can't you fight wars when you are broke, you can't even afford to defend yourself. So far my warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Maybe this will change things: British Defense Secretary reports that the British government can no longer afford to defend its people against all threats. If you can't pay and feed troops and security personnel, you're screwed. That's where Britain and the US are today. Unfortunately most people don't realize it.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

It is funny how Obama sues Arizona for supporting federal immigration laws and ignores sanctuary cities which refuse to enforce them. I think Bush would have done the same thing.

POLITICS:

No. I didn't know about this law. Since when does a station have to run a campaign ad it doesn't like? I remember not too long ago when stations rejected ads. Did that change?

Boortz reports, "Slowly but surely we are learning that 42 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives got more than 173 sweetheart deal loans from Countrywide Financial Corporation." Government is corruption, and Chris Dodd and Barney Frank are the kings of corruption in Congress.

This is a good point. The only thing Americans hate more than big government is smaller government. This is the divide and conquer thing in action again. Conservatives love their government programs. They just want to get rid of the liberal programs. And liberals love their government programs. They just want to get rid of the conservative programs. What neither side sees is that Democrats and Republicans are working this scam against them to make us all broke and powerless while they and their cronies end up with all the money and power. Remember, most of this bureaucracy was created while Bush and Republicans were in power.

This shows how willingly blind people are: when people in a small California town discovered that their city manager made $800,000 a year, they got angry. Why didn't they already know this? Why did they allow it to happen. Government is like the mafia. Why do people ignore it instead of fight it? Because they were forced to attend government schools.

Obama's approval rating 85 percent in Washington D.C. Of course. The recipients of the loot love Obama. And you wonder how the politicians get so out of touch. This is another powerful reason why we need to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government so aristocrats have to spend more time with their constituents than they do in Washington.

Here's the formula aristocrats have used over and over to expand the welfare state.

The Obama bumper sticker removal kit. I prefer the crooks, cheats and fools who voted for Obama advertise it so the rest of us know who to blame.

After 18 months, Charlie Rangel's House ethics investigation finally brings phony House charges. What a joke. This is like a show trial where mafia dons scold one of their own and act like it's a meaningful exercise.

MEDIA:

Some media dufus is wondering who Barack Obama is 21 months after the election. It's bad enough he waited 21 months to ask the question, but what person with half a brain who's paying attention doesn't know who Obama is by now?

Note to Boortz: "Rep. Paul Ryan's "A Roadmap for America's Future" doesn't do away with the social safety net, yet it stays true to the libertarian notion that the best government is that which governs least." That sentence is an oxymoron. Using word the word libertarian and libertarian catchphrases doesn't make a policy or a person a libertarian. Just like Ryan's vote for TARP is inconsistent with smaller government.

MISC:

Google offers a free GPS navigation service for android devices that outperforms TomTom.

Onion opinion: We'll never be united as a nation as long as there are other people besides myself.

Chinese couple busted for industrial espionage.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Oliver Stone calls for nationalization of the film industry. Oops, I mean the oil industry.

REGULATION:

Here comes regulations against looks discrimination. I'm looking forward to Hollywood implementing that, but why stop there? Why not height discrimination? Or hair color discrimination?

Government increase regulation of baby products to "protect the children." Government regulations don't protect anybody but irresponsible manufacturers, retailers, bureaucrats and politicians. It would nice and effective if manufacturers and retailers took responsibility for their own products and third party, private sector regulatory agencies provided a watchdog. That's how you do effective regulation.

The King Hates Gold. Quoted in its entirety.
"The late Burt Blumert, coin dealer, libertarian intellectual and activist, and my best friend, used to say, “The king hates gold.” He meant that all governments fear and despise independence on the part of the tax victims, and demand that we use only their funny money. Financial privacy is despised as well. As the state enlarges its security apparatus, and secret classifications for itself, it seeks to strip us naked, with its scanners at the airports and secret edicts buried in 2,000-page bills. It turns out that gold dealers and customers are specificallytargeted by a provision of the health-care legislation, along with all small businesses. The fascist state–including our social democratic variant–can’t stand small, independent business people, a prejudice shared by the corporate oligarchy. Making every economic entity–business, charity, etc.–file a 1099 on every entity it does more than $600 in business with, is an incomprehensible burden. But in the case of small gold dealers especially, this is death dealing. Not only in the paper work, but in the verification. Even jail beckons for a tricked dealer. The result will be increased concentration, less competition, less freedom, and fewer people owning precious metals. But then, the plebs shouldn’t own gold anyway. That is for our betters. Forget your declining living standard. Focus on the nation and its eternal greatness. One people, one empire, one president, hail victory!"
I hadn't thought about this. Gold is $1,191 an ounce today. So every time a gold coin collector flips a coin, he has to send a 1099.
""Coin dealers not only buy for their inventory from other dealers, but also with great frequency from the public," Piret said. "Most other types of businesses will have a limited number of suppliers from which they buy their goods and products for resale.""
"With spot market prices for gold at nearly $1,200 an ounce, Heller estimates that he'll be filling out between 10,000 and 20,000 tax forms per year after the new law takes effect."
Ouch. This does hit gold dealers especially hard. They are required to take the name and info including tax ID from all these customers. That means many people won't bother selling the gold because they don't want to give it up. This will put many out of business.
""Large corporations have whole divisions to handle such transaction paperwork but for a small business, which doesn't have the manpower, this is yet another brick on their back," Lungren said in a statement e-mailed to ABCNews.com. "Everyone agrees that small businesses are job creators and the engine which drives the American economy. I am dumfounded that this Administration is doing all it can to make it more difficult for businesses to succeed rather than doing all it can to help them grow.""
Stop being dumbfounded and figure it out: they're intentionally trying to destroy our country.

I've often claimed that Republicans don't really want to get rid of Obamacare, they just want to share in the looting. John Boehner doesn't exactly admit that, but he tells us exactly what's going to happen if Republicans take back the House:
"“I guarantee there will be a bill on the floor that will repeal the healthcare bill and replace it with common sense reforms,” Boehner promised, if they indeed take back the House.










But wait, said Roger in Hamilton, Republicans will be able to accomplish little while Barack Obama is still president. “No matter what you guys pass, Obama will veto it, right?” he said.

Not necessarily, Boehner responded. He said there is bipartisan support to repeal cuts to Medicare, and if they can’t do away with healthcare reforms, they can cut the funding to hire people to run it."
They can't win the fund-cutting battle politically, but they'll increase the money for Medicare to share in the looting. I'm sure Republicans will resist some of Obama's agenda, but overall we're going to get bipartisan big-government. Lovely.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

I recently linked an article reporting that the Dept. of Energy had suspended funds to CRU in the wake (over six month later) of climategate. That article reported that the DOE paid about $200,000 a year to CRU. Investigation of the climategate emails reveal that the DOE in fact paid significantly more money to CRU than that. Another government lie exposed.

The Senate climate bill is once again on hold, but don't believe for a second that it's dead. I bet Democrats decided to try and pass it in the dark of night during the lame duck session after the election. Don't count on anything being dead until this Congress is finally gone, and not even then.

Map of the cold spell in South America. Wow. Good luck finding out about this record cold in the news.

Satellite data clearly shows that so far 2010 is not as warm as 1998, so don't fall for the baloney about this being the warmest year on record so far.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Small pot growers in Oakland try to use government to stop large scale pot farms from competing. It's seductive to think people who claim to want freedom want freedom for all, but that's not the case. As long as government has the power to protect some businesses from competition, business owners will try and capture that power to promote their interests, and the interest with the biggest money will almost always win. In a year or two, Oakland will create some regulations that burden the small pot growers and help the big pot farms.

WAR:

British minority party coalition leader puts British PM Cameron on the spot by claiming the Iraq war was illegal.

POLITICS:

Black USDA supervisor caught on tape speaking at NAACP event reporting she did not want to help an struggling farmer because he was white so she turned him over to a lawyer of his own kind (white) forced to resign.
"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn't give him the full force of what I could do.
I did enough so that when — so I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had attended some of the trainings that we had provided because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer.
So I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him. That's when it was revealed to me that the job is about poor, versus those who have. And not so much about white — it is about white and black, but it's not — you know, it opened my eyes. Because I took him to one of his own."
Good for Obama. Bigots like her should suffer the consequences of their bigotry. It's tempting to think she learned her lesson, but this speech and the words she chose make it clear she did not. The backlash from the left must have been powerful because now the administration has apologized for firing her.

I always enjoy how well Republicans pretend to support limited government when they're in the minority. It gives me a good belly laugh.

MEDIA:

Vast left-wing media conspiracy exposed. I know that sounds like hyperbole and a rip-off of Hillary Clinton, but it's neither. Apparently Andrew Breitbart got a hold of the Journolist files, and this article uncovers one issue, the issue of how the media intentionally covered up Barack Obama's relationship with virulent black supremacist Rev. Wright.
"According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage."
We always knew this was the case, but now we've got it documented.

The Washington Post's Top Secret expose exposes how much wealth is confiscated and transfered to top secret bureaucrats. I like it when government organs go after each other.

MISC:

The non-violent black market in information can only happen because information - online movies, music, etc. - is not a scarce resource. Unlike lumber, salt and cars, everybody can use online information at the same time. The government's attempts to create artificial scarcity of information through patents and copyright are doomed to fail.

High praise for new book Libertarianism Today.

Scientists discover largest known star with a mass 265 times more than the sun. That's going to make for one huge explosion when it burns out.

Interesting tidbit in essay calling Thoreau the first American libertarian:
"At any rate, young David Henry Thorough or Thor′-o went off to Harvard in 1833 at the age of 16. He graduated four years later, in 1837, at the age of 20, having taken a year off to teach grammar school in the small town of Canton, Massachusetts, around 15 miles southwest of Boston, probably to earn some money to help ease the burden on his parents, who were paying for his matriculation at Harvard."
If not for government's monopoly on our schools, this would be the norm today. None if the dumbing down or infantilization of the people, but teens working hard and getting a far superior education at a far younger age. Thoreau understood the nature of government:
""This American government," he wrote, "never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.… Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.""
A statement of fact.

Overuse of disinfectants creating super-duper-bugs.

40 ton whale breaches, lands on sailboat and breaks mast. Yikes.

How can lithium in one cloud be composed of bosons while lithium in the other cloud is composed of fermions? Something is wrong with this description.

An astronomy book written in a language nobody knows or can decipher? It might be a centuries old hoax. Or it might have been coded to keep the author from being excommunicated.

Marijuana may prevent Alzheimer's. I thought marijuana caused memory loss.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Free kibbles

REGULATION:

This is how government rolls:
"One of the most important differences between the political process and the market process is that they provide totally different feedback mechanisms. Had the politicians largely responsible for the housing crisis done their dirty deeds while working for private firms, they would have been fired, likely prosecuted, and memorialized in cautionary tales in business ethics casebooks from here until eternity. Instead, they’re busy crafting 2,319 page pieces of legislation aimed at increasing their power over the marketplace."
Yep. Every time the politicians screw us and create a crisis, they seize more power ostensibly to prevent the crisis they caused from ever happening again. Then we keep re-electing them 94 percent of the time. We're the stupidest people in the world.

ENERGY:

Florida House Republicans block attempt to put a oil drilling ban constitutional amendment on the ballot. Good for them. No government, including a majority,  has the legitimate power to tell citizens what they can and cannot do with land, even land under the sea.

WAR:

Former MI5 chief testifies that Iraq war increased the terrorist threat against Britain.
"She told the inquiry: "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam…
“Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.”"
Same with the US.

US general testifies, "It's good fun to shoot people." If you ever wondered how corrupting government is, this should make it clear.

Gordon Brown admits aristocrats overthrew Saddam Hussein because he would not bow to the new world order, and its credibility was at risk. Wow. Apparently that's a good enough reason for aristocrats to kill 10s of thousands of people. You know those aristocrats hate when the truth accidentally escapes their lips.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Fantastic cartoon about our misplaced priorities.

POLITICS:

Our government problems aren't just federal, they're at the state and local levels too.
"One reason why state and local governments all over the U.S. are bankrupt is that there are bureaucrats like this “city manager” in a small town of 38,000 in Califorinia who makes $800,000/year plus benefits.  The police chief in this town of Bell, California, makes almost half a million a year (the per capita personal income there  is $24,800).  To fund this and other extravagances, the per capita debt of the city government of Bell has more than tripled in the past six years"

LOCAL:

Unemployment rate jumps in Dayton and Montgomery County.

MISC:

E-book sales surpass hardcover.

The Hoover dam may turn out to be the biggest single malinvestment in history.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Free kibbles

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The frauds have decided to re-frame the global warming fraud message as a health issue. I'm telling you, these leftist frauds are more dangerous and scary than any horror movie monster. No matter how many times facts, reason and debate kill them, they keep coming back to life in different forms to attack again.

Corrupt Phil Jones, the head of CRU and the central figure in climategate, decided what evidence was and was not examined by the climategate investigators. If you allowed Ted Bundy to pick the evidence against him that was shown at trial, he's be considered not guilty too. It's hard to imagine a bigger fraud than this.

This story doesn't make any sense to me. It says the government is allowing BP to keep the oil well sealed despite a small amount of oozing gas and oil around the leak. What else would it do? Order BP to remove the cap and allow oil to flow freely into the Gulf again? Something else is going on here. Maybe what they aren't telling us is Obama wanted the cap removed, but his aids convinced him to do the right thing for political reasons.

POLICE STATE:

So when you take your teenage children flying, do you want to have the perverts in the TSA pat them down or drool over their nude photos? It's your choice. That's what passes for freedom in the US. If you think the TSA isn't populated by perverts, you don't understand the nature of government. Where else can a pervert legally get those kind of kicks? Government jobs, lording perverse power over others at the point of gun that would be criminal in the private sector, attract the most evil and perverted people in the world to those jobs.

A personal experience with the TSA illustrates how they pressure people to walk through the nude scanners. Of course they do. It's less work for them, and they get to enjoy pics of everybody nude. Men should pay homage to the old Jim Belushi Saturday Night Live skit by stuffing their pants with 10' of toilet paper. Let the perverts pull it out.

British study discovers that only one in ten cops are available to fight crime.
"In some parts of the country, as few as one in 16 officers is available to see the public or pick up the phone when a victim of crime calls."
We hear every day about how police forces need more cops. Baloney. Never trust the government. Power corrupts. Absolute power, the power held by government agents and only government agents, corrupts absolutely. The people who rise to the top of government are the best at lying without conscience and most corrupt. The scariest part is that the people of Great Britain and coming to realize the nature of government, but the citizens of the US are far behind.

WAR:

US Navy uses lasers to shoot down drone aircraft and will deploy them system for defense of ships.

POLITICS:

Pretend budget hawks "John Cornyn, Jeff Sessions, and Mike Pence refuse to say what they would cut from the federal budget." Of course not. What part of the word pretend don't people understand?

MEDIA:

Washington Post unveils new website documenting top secret work of companies. I guess they're not that secret after all.

MISC:

Bosnian man's home hit by six meteorites since 2007. God must be warning him about something.


Pictures are easy.