Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

List of companies who wrote letter to politicians supporting internet censorship.

ECONOMY:

China in a skyscraper building boom. According to the skyscraper index, this doesn't bode well.

TAX AND SPEND:

I agree with Lew Rockwell about Republicans selling out on raising the debt ceiling.

"No one should be fooled. Any Republican representative or senator who votes to raise the debt ceiling is voting to continue business as usual, to expand warfare, welfare, foreign aid, bank bailouts, and all the other criminal enterprises. Forget talk of the Tea Party, fiscal conservatism, some face-saving agreement with the Democrats. It is a sell-out, a pledging of allegiance to the Pentagon-CIA-Fed-bank-Wall Street regime that runs this country. Shame."

Republicans don't want to surrender their ruling-class power to the people any more than Democrats.

All government money is tainted with corruption.

"In an anti-fraud and investigative training program last August, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) listed multiple abuses in the federal purchase card program used by federal employees. These abuses included a $13,000 taxpayer-funded steak house dinner, use of Internet dating services, purchase of erotica products, Girls Gone Wild Videos, and five season tickets to the New Orleans Saints."

All of it.

REGULATION:

Fear of regulation, not regulation itself, killed the Goldman-Facebook deal. Not only are regulations damaging. Fear of them is damaging.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

I'm a little confused by this. The Irish central bank is printing money. But Ireland is part of the eurozone. It doesn't have its own currency. How does this work and why?

These aristocrats are so transparent. Here's evidence for my contention that the aristocrats know they're destroying our country. They're just doing it to loot us. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, architect of the incredible inflation we've suffered since Reagan appointed him until he retired right before the bubble he created burst, suddenly supports a gold standard. He managed to loot all he can loot and head out the door so he didn't have to take responsibility for his bubble, so now he wants to use the gold standard to limit the looting. These people aren't misguided. They're evil.

Western inflation is infecting third world countries. When the US inflates, because the dollar is the world's reserve currency, it inflates everybody.

EDUCATION:

How do you think the government funding of college is working out for students?

"Nearly half of the nation's undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don't make academics a priority, a new report shows.

Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. "

I bet you can get an engineering degree online at a fraction of the cost by now.

HEALTH CARE:

Criticism of study claiming to link fat in the western diet to an increase in breast cancer. The problem is they fed half the mice a decent diet and the other half a bunch of sugar and chemicals, not food.

"It’s a marvel the Western diet got labeled “high fat and cholesterol” when it’s only 21 percent fat and nearly a third pure table sugar. It’s also a marvel that the researchers pegged the tumor-enhancing effects of the Western diet on its cholesterol content rather than on any of the other differences it had with the chow diet (for example: everything). In fact, the protein source alone might play a role in spurring the big, speedy tumors found in the Western diet rats, since so much of their diet was casein. Dare I reference my old pal T. Colin Campbell, whose research showed isolated casein tends to boost tumor growth in rodents when it exceeds 5 percent of their diet? I dare. There may be something uniquely cancer-promoting about isolated complete proteins (like casein) in a purified diet, probably due to the fact that they promote growth in general but lack the matrix of protective substances found in whole foods."

So once again a study funded by government either directly or indirectly turns out to be completely bogus in order to promote the unhealthy status quo. This is the new normal because of government funding of science.

Patent on drugs literally killing people because the sole manufacturer cannot produce enough. Another example of how government kills.

House Republicans keep promise and vote to repeal Obamacare knowing full well it can never become the law. It's easy to do the right thing when they know it doesn't matter. This is just a scam to make voters think they really care about limited government. They're having a good laugh at our expense right now.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Latest pseudo-scientific paper published by frauds is so outrageous, it's been withdrawn.

"A study warning that the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020, creating deadly consequences for the global food supply, is being debunked as false and impossible.

The study came from a little-known, non-profit group based in Argentina, called the Universal Ecological Fund. An embargoed copy of the study appeared on Eurekalert!, a news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that’s followed by many journalists."

Non-profit is code for government-funded. The name of the place screams fraud.

Organization files FOIA on NASAs leading global warming fraud James Hansen to see if he's committed similar ethics violations to one of his partners in crime, another taxpayer funded fraud.

"This request seeks records of longtime, taxpayer-funded activist Hansen, in the knowledge that FOIA-released records and other documents show his GISS colleague, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, has edited the activist blog RealClimate on regular business hours when he is nominally working for the taxpayer. In fact, FOIA-released records indicate this third-party activism was considered part of Schmidt’s job, seeking to rehabilitate the discredited ‘hockey stick’ and otherwise promoting GISS’s activist line."

It's nice to see the frauds on the defensive after two decades of offense against science and the people.

Blast from the past: 1982 article predicting ecological devastation from man's destruction of the environment.

POLICE STATE:

Report that TSA is forcing everybody at the Tulsa airport into nude-scanners or gropings.

Court summons cat for jury duty. That's bad enough, but the court rejected a request to disqualify the cat. This sounds like April Fools, but it wouldn't surprise me.

POLITICS:

Where do Obama administration officials get jobs when they quit? They stay in the corrupt political economy, either on K Street or Wall Street.

MISC:

The truth about the process of innovation.

"Johnson doesn't see breakthroughs coming from the single isolated mad scientist tinkering in his or her laboratory or the equivalent.

"If there is a single maxim that runs through this book's arguments," writes Johnson early on, "it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them." The author understands that "environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments."

Instead of the intellectual-monopoly world of guarding ideas with the goal of exploiting them for material gain, Johnson writes that ideas must "connect, fuse, recombine." Indeed they do."

Which makes perfect sense. I wonder if patents and copyrights aren't like traffic lights. Everybody thinks traffic lights make us safer, but in fact they make us less safe. This is logical if you think about it a minute. Traffic lights make intersections more complicated, and therefore more dangerous. There's never been a study showing traffic lights make us safer because it's not true. There are a number of studies that show this. I bet the same is true of patents. Even though conventional wisdom says patents encourage innovation, logic tells us this isn't so. Patents restrict nearly everybody in the world from improving on an invention. Same with copyright. A number of studies have shown this to be true, and I bet not one study exists concluding otherwise. I think just like traffic lights, patents and copyright were invented as a tool to loot the people, and that's the only reason they exist today.

Scientists identify specific amino acids, the building blocks of life, in meteorites.

Study shows that customers want service, and they get it in competitive markets. Unfortunately, most markets are so heavily regulated that service sucks in them.