Free kibbles

STATES RIGHTS:

It's always fun to watch government aristocrats fight each other, in this case North Carolina government suing the FTC, but the fix is built into the system. The suit is in federal court, which with few exceptions, always sides with the federal government. The idea that the federal courts would protect states from the federal government is absurd. This was always a guaranteed path to federal supremacy.

SOCIALISM:

Former Marxist recommends four books to explain and destroy the myths of socialism.

"Socialism thus survives because of the free market, which constantly tries to repair the damage socialism causes through its taxations, regulations, and debt-fed inflations. The free market self-repairs, reconnects, and reorganizes itself — spontaneously — like a river in flow coping with the damming of malcontented beavers. The final triumph of socialism can thus be seen as the complete damming of the river and the obliteration of humanity, and the final triumph of the free market will be when this evil dam is finally dissolved, destroyed, and eradicated, and the river can flow freely again without obstruction."

A system of voluntary exchange is the most powerful system for allocating scarce resources so people can solve their problems and improve their lives, and to the extent voluntary exchange flourishes in a mixed economy, it empowers people to overcome the damage done by socialist policies all of which are restrictions on voluntary exchange.

"Thus, the more socialism we have, the quicker it kills itself, destroying that which it parasitizes, as with full-blooded national socialism and soviet communism; the more anemic versions of socialism allow a more bloodless monster to survive longer, as with social democracy in the Western world."

Even the Soviets benefited from trade and voluntary aid from the west as well as examining the structure of production of the west and copying it to the extent they could. Of course secret police and tanks pointed at the people also extend the life of a socialist government.

ECONOMY:

The economy is correcting for wage inflation created by government's bubble by destroying high-paying, bubble jobs and replacing them with lower-paying, sustainable jobs. This also shows that our government schools are failing to produce productive young men and women.

TAX AND SPEND:

Eulogy for America because our government has turned our country upside down from its founding values.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -Declaration of Independence"

Our government forces the opposite on us at the point of a gun.

HEALTH CARE:

Second judge rules Obamacare's mandate unconstitutional and claims that invalidates the entire law. I don't know how he got from point A all the way to point Z. Maybe that's the part they're calling judicial activism.

Organic super-foods.

FOREIGN POLICY:

More on the comparison between the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of US government supported dictators in the Middle East.

"The United States is in much the same situation today as the Soviet Union was in 1989, as a series of socialist dominoes toppled. Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia all experienced dramatic meltdowns, while the Soviet regime, supportive of these systems since the end of the Second World War, sat by helplessly and watched. Leaders made vague statements about the need for peaceful transitions and elections, while the people on the ground completely ignored them."

Nobody knows the consequences as yet, but it's joyful to see people throwing off the yoke of oppression.

"Meanwhile, official government voices in the United States have been pathetically behind the times. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton have been refusing to describe Mubarak as a dictator and lamely urging a transition to an election — run and ruled over by the Mubarak regime. The protest leadership immediately saw that line for what it was and rejected it outright. It is unbearably obvious that the United States is nearly alone in more-or-less supporting Mubarak, but that is exactly what you would expect of the imperial backer of the despot."

It was easy to see our government as the good guy when the Soviets so thoroughly played the bad guy, but that was only relative. Since then, it's become more and more obvious that our government is also a bad guy and getting worse. It seems to me that our government really accelerated getting worse once the Soviet Union collapsed, but maybe that says more about my evolution than the government's. Of course, when you look at objective statistics like graphs of inflation and government debt, they really skyrocketed around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Pat Buchanan exposes the claim that Arab Muslims hate us for our freedom as an obvious lie.

"But why do they hate us? Is it because of who we are?

Surely, it is not our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly or free elections for which we are hated. For this is what the demonstrators are clamoring for. Indeed, it is in the name of these freedoms that the Egyptian people are demanding that we cease standing behind Mubarak and stand with them.

No, the United States is not hated across the region because of the freedoms we enjoy or even because of the lectures on democracy we do not cease to deliver. We are hated because we are perceived as hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

The Arabs say we support despots who deny them the rights we cherish. They say we preach endlessly of human rights but imposed savage sanctions on Iraq for a dozen years before 2003 that brought premature death to half a million children. They say we use our power to invade countries that never attacked us."

And they're right. Our government oppresses them even worse than it oppresses us.

"They say we have provided Israel with the weapons to crush the Palestinians and steal their land, and that we practice a moral double standard. We condemn attacks on Israelis, but sit silent as Israel bombs Lebanon for five weeks and conducts a war on Gaza, killing 1,400 and wounding thousands, most of them civilians."

I still have a problem with this criticism. Israelis suffer rocket attacks from Gaza every day. If anything, the Israeli government has been remiss at stopping them. As bad as the Israeli government no doubt is, Hamas is the aggressor today, and has been for years. Israel didn't blockade a peaceful Gaza. It blockaded it in response to aggression. Israel didn't seize the occupied territories in an act of aggression. It seized them in response to aggression from them.

"As for America, if we are about to be thrown out of the Middle East, it would be neither undeserved nor an unmitigated disaster."

But that won't stop the ruling class and their media propagandists from trying to scare us.

Here's a concise description of how western hypocrisy caused these revolutions.

"Not only is the Fatah regime in Ramallah and the Hamas regime in Gaza destined to fall, but perhaps also, one day, the Israeli occupation, which certainly meets all the criteria of criminal tyranny and an evil regime. It too relies only on guns. It too is hated by all levels of the ruled people, even if they stands helpless, unorganized and unequipped, facing a big army. The first conclusion: Better to end it well, with agreements based on justice and not on power, a moment before the masses have their say and succeed in banishing the darkness."

True, but neither Hamas nor the Israeli government want that. They both profit from the conflict. That's why I suggest that concerned citizens, completely unaffiliated with government, get together and negotiate a settlement. Negotiate on camera and stream it to the internet. Allow the people to comment in real time, and create a deal supported by most of the people on both sides and pressure the governments to adopt it.

How Mubarak is a product of the US government.

"The revolution in Egypt is the result of a tyrannical dictator, who has oppressed, kidnapped, tortured, murdered and pretty much done everything a regime can do to repress and terrorize a people, for almost 30 years. 20 of those years have been under "Emergency Law," a law giving the Egyptian government the "authority" to dehumanize its people and flimsy cover at best. Hosni Mubarak is the longest serving president of Egypt, which begs the questions, how has he remained in power for so long? The answers are complex, but they center on the Sphinx in the room that no one will discuss in the mainstream media: U.S. foreign aid and influence."

And we wonder why they hate us.

Another piece of evidence that shadowy central planners are not controlling events in the Middle East is that the Council on Foreign Relations, generally considered an important organ of the shadowy central planners, is not happy with events.

"And it's why it's good to be opposed to "democracy" in the Arab world today, as opposed to a few years ago when George W. Bush was invading Iraq to liberate it and let 1,000 Arab flowers bloom. And anyone who was opposed was not properly humanitarian or worse, a racist who did not believe in Arab democracy. Which is, after all, God’s gift to humanity through his chosen people, the United States of America."

That brings up a good point I hadn't thought of. If Bush really wanted to create a democracy in an ancient, powerful middle eastern country, he could have just cut off aid to Egypt. It would have saved us money, won us allies on the Muslim street and required no war. That tells us Bush had other motives.

"(As regards Iran, it is interesting to note that when Ahmadinejad steals one election, it's out he should go for the DC crowd, but when Hosni Mubarak steals half-a-dozen, well, he should in good faith reform how he does business, and hold a freer election.)"

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning. And we wonder why they hate us.

"Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Thawahiri are in no position to direct a revolution, wherever they may be (Northwest Frontier Province? Karachi? Dubai?). And there isn't anyone who would listen to them anyway. The Brotherhood may be involved on some level, but I rather doubt it – Islamists wear their identities on their sleeves, they do not hide them. These protests are the protests of middle-class and lower-middle class young and educated people, the Egyptians most likely to believe the promises of secular democracy – of the Enlightenment – and then demand them."

More evidence we should not fall for the fear-mongering accompanying this event.

POLITICS:

FAA bans air traffic over Koch meeting after embarrassing flyover. This reminds me how Mike Brown got an airport shutdown by Bengals training camp after an embarrassing flyover. This shows how the government exists for the benefit of the rich and powerful at our expense.

The RNC is $23 million in debt. These are the same Republicans who pretend to support fiscal responsibility.

Do you think if hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated against Obama he would resign? Of course not. What's more important: the power to elect which criminal controls government's looting apparatus or the power to remove the criminal? I'd say the latter, and that Egyptians have shown they have more political freedom than Americans.


Elections do not equal freedom, and the level of oppression of a government has nothing to do with whether the tyrant was elected or not.

"Democratic leaders worldwide claim that they cannot do simply anything with their powers, even as they do just about anything. They claim that they are constrained by constitutions, by the invisible wires of consent, and sometimes by the internal checks and balances of their own governments. Such constraints as exist don’t prevent governments from becoming half or more of their economies.

The conventional wisdom is that if we combine free elections with these constitutional constraints, we obtain liberty. Be happy, then, citizens! You are free!

This notion of liberty is as sadly deficient and defective as it is false. What difference does it make to be told one must buy health insurance or be searched at an airport or pay taxes to support invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan or pay taxes to support the production of ethanol if the power behind these commands is a dictator, an elected premier, a parliament, or a legislature? Coercion is coercion, whatever its source. If one person or a majority of your neighbors or their representatives coerce you, does the source of this coercion determine whether or not you have your liberty? Do elections and your capacity to cast a vote eliminate the coercion?"

All governments are criminal because they loot and otherwise aggress against the people at the point of the government's gun, but all governments should be judged by how much they aggress against the people,not whether or not the aggressors were elected.


I've always said the first and most important thing a politician has to do is lie so well to get away with it. A politician has to lie to individual voters and tell them he or she will represent them, even though that's impossible. Since every person is unique, a politician can only represent one person, not multiple people, and since a politician can't know the minds of anybody but himself and since the politician is human like everybody else, he naturally represents his own interest and promotes his own career. I think this is the same basic lie as public service is a noble calling. There's nothing noble about looting others and ordering them around at the point of gun.


Following in her parents' footsteps, Chelsea Clinton and her husband decide not to live together because he wants to be a ski bum. Another marriage of convenience.

MISC:

Microsoft Bing busted for copying Google. This is a smart idea for a crappy company. I don't think Microsoft has ever produced an original idea or a decent product. They only produce subpar copies of others. They only reason they still exist is their patent portfolio - the monopolies granted to them by government and enforced at the point of the government's gun.

Category five cyclone targets Australia.

Analysis of the role a new tariff played in sparking the Civil War.

US government continues to seize domains under the guise of protecting copyrights.

Chrome tops 10 percent market share, stealing from IE.