Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Twelve indicators that housing Armageddon has yet to finish. This one shows that the entire last decade, more actually, of seeming economic growth was actually a Fed inflationary monetary policy fueled illusion that in fact destroyed wealth:

"The rate of home ownership in the United States has dropped like a rock. At this point it has fallen all the way back to 1998 levels."

More evidence:

"Over the past two years, U.S. consumers have withdrawn $311 billion more from savings and investment accounts than they have put into them."

Thanks, Greenspan.

"Deutsche Bank is projecting that 48 percent of all U.S. mortgages could have negative equity by the end of 2011."

Ouch.

"Some formerly great industrial cities are rapidly turning into ghost towns. For example, in Dayton, Ohio today 18.9 percent of all houses are now standing empty. 21.5 percent of all houses in New Orleans, Louisiana are standing vacant."

That isn't how I want to see Dayton stand out.

Advice on preparing an escape plan.

TAX AND SPEND:

Hypocrite Paul Ryan's big-spending voting record.

REGULATION:

In testimony before the Senate, Harvard law professor claims government can force Americans to buy broccoli. Have I mentioned that the Ivy League is the world's leading brainwasher of smart people with stupid ideas?

FEDERAL RESERVE:

This from an interview of Ron Paul about his strategy for dealing with the Fed:

"The first revelation that they released rather recently is how big it is. I mean we estimate now that it could have been $15 or $16 trillion worth of transitions and a third of it went to foreign banks. It's that kind of information that really gets the attention of the American people."

Wow. It got my attention. The last I heard, the Fed spent between $3 and $4 trillion, not $15 or $16. That's three to four times the annual federal budget. Wow. TARP's $700 billion was just a distraction. What's the Fed doing to fight back?

"But the Federal Reserve will not give up easily. They've hired a lobbyist and they have PR and they're writing a lot of editorials and they're working very hard."

They're printing money, defrauding us in the process, and using it to hire lobbyists to lobby the government to allow them to continue printing money and defrauding us.

Bernanke denies the Fed's inflationary monetary policy is responsible for record food prices.

"Referring to the rise in commodity prices, the Fed chief said it was "entirely unfair to attribute excess demand in emerging markets to U.S. monetary policy." He said countries like China can use their own monetary policy and adjust exchange rates to deal with their inflation problems. "It's really up to emerging markets to find appropriate tools to balance their own growth.""

In other words, it's the responsibility of other central planners to offset the inflation Bernanke is creating around the world. This guy is a nightmare. From CNN commodities: Corn is up 87 percent; soybeans are up 58 percent; wheat is up 81 percent. This is because Bernanke's dramatic increase in the monetary base in 2008 is finally leaking into the markets. This has nothing to do with the $600 billion he's creating in QEII. That inflation will come later. Larry Kudlow puts wheat up 114 percent.

HEALTH CARE:

Another catastrophe created by government regulation is the shortages of drugs, causing patients to die.

More scientists discover a link between vaccines and autism despite the establishment's witchhunts to destroy scientists who do so. Vaccinating newborns sounds insane to me.

The strategy to end Obamacare depends on many states rejecting it.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

This isn't the first time US cities have been buried in snow, and it won't be the last.

Did wind power fail in Texas, leading to rolling blackouts in this cold?

Federal judge finds Obama administration in contempt of court over drilling moratorium. Do you think he'll throw Obama in jail? How funny.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Nice memories of the peaceful, prosperous society we used to have before drugs were made illegal, prompting incredible violence.

"For most of U.S. history, all drugs were legal. How legal? As libertarian writer Harry Browne put it, "Few people are aware that before World War I, a 9-year-old girl could walk into a drug store and buy heroin." In fact, before Bayer sold aspirin, it sold Heroin™ as a "sedative for coughs." (As a German company, Bayer was forced to give up the trademark after World War I under the Treaty of Versailles.) One heroin-laced cough syrup promised in its mail-order catalog: "It will suit the palate of the most exacting adult or the most capricious child." Cocaine, first manufactured by Merck, was popular, too. Parke-Davis (which is now a subsidiary of Pfizer) advertised a "cocaine kit" that it promised could "supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and . . . render the sufferer insensitive to pain." Late-nineteenth century advertisements for "Cocaine Toothache Drops" promised users (including children such as those depicted in the ads) an "instantaneous cure." Another popular product, "Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup," contained one grain (65 mg) of morphine per ounce, and was marketed to mothers to quiet restless infants and children. McCormick (the spice company) and others sold "paregoric," a mixture of highly concentrated alcohol with opium, as a treatment for diarrhea, coughs, and pain, with instructions on the bottle for infants, children, and adults. Another medication called laudanum was similar, but with 25 times the opium.  Heroin and opium were both marketed as asthma treatments, too. And, of course, cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola from 1886 until 1900."

This is back when Americans were truly productive. The freedom Americans had at that time enabled Americans to create the greatest country ever known. But the next era, the progressive era, was the beginning of the end we're suffering today.

"Opium addiction rose in the decades after the Civil War, but soon so did education and understanding about drugs and their addictive, dangerous nature among both physicians and the public. The rise of mass media helped; for example, the Ladies’ Home Journal published numerous exposes on narcotic-laced patent medications. Meanwhile, the market produced safer medicines, such as aspirin. As a result of these factors, addiction peaked near the end of the nineteenth century and then began a long decline without any need for a government "war."

And although America did have addicts in the nineteenth century (perhaps as much as 0.5 percent of the population), there are some things it notably did not have. Most important, there was virtually none of the violence, death, and crime we associate with the present-day drug problem. Most drug users were not street criminals; instead, the typical addict was, as author Mike Gray put it, "a middle-aged southern white woman strung out on laudanum." Many or most opium addicts led more or less normal lives and managed to keep their addiction hidden."

Our society would be dramatically superior if we would end the war on drugs.

POLICE STATE:

Predator drones monitor Canadian and Mexican borders.

In typical government fashion, it takes the Senate over a year to discover that the Fort Hood massacre could have been prevented. This article fails to mention how US policy motivated the shooter to become radicalized, and I bet the report does the same.

Jessy Ventura sues TSA and its commissars for groping him without a warrant. Good for him.

An example of police corruption creating crime, and reducing the size of the force reducing crime. As cynical as I am, I hope this force was exceptionally corrupt. But I'm always convinced that reducing police forces reduces crime because it reduces the burden of government on the people and improves the economy.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Woman who helped spark the Egyptian protests with her vlog. Libertarian party VP supports Mubarak. Huh? Mubarak claims he wants to step down, but he's afraid. I'm skeptical. There wasn't any chaos until he sent his thugs to create chaos. The original protests were impressively peaceful. Mubarak also blames the Muslim Brotherhood for the violence even though the violence was initiated by his supporters, not the Muslim Brotherhood. He also says if he steps down, chaos will follow. Maybe he hasn't noticed that chaos is happening because he won't step down. Paid Egyptian government agents shut down all cameras and beats journalists.

Egyptian Christians and Muslims unite for protection from the state. That won't stop the talking heads from trying to scare us into believing these protests are all about Muslim extremism.

The talking heads want us to believe that these protests in the Muslim world appeared in a vacuum. They did not. They are in response to decades of oppression producing unemployment culminating in a Fed-created bought of inflation that has left many having trouble feeding their families. These economic problems aren't limited to the Arab world. They're occurring in Europe too, and thus this prediction that similar protests will spread to Europe. The same economic problems are coming to America too. This all started with a Tunisian man arrested for selling fruit and vegetables without a license who responded by setting himself on fire.

This viewpoint is a false choice:

"The June 2009 address was in part intended to show a clean break from a George W. Bush-era "freedom agenda" of promoting electoral democracies across the region. Yet Obama now finds himself forced to move much closer to that world view as he escalates pressure on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to make immediate changes.

Obama has shifted in that direction cautiously over the past week and a half, balancing between urging wider freedom and maintaining his position that the events are for Egyptians, not Americans, to decide."

The American president should always be a champion of freedom at home and abroad, and they can be champions without interfering in foreign countries. Unfortunately, American presidents are never champions of freedom, and they always interfere in foreign countries.

Comparison shows China is not a threat to the US, and if our government stops its aggression, it will never be a threat to the US.

MISC:

Death by GPS. Dummies are heading into the wilderness trusting their GPS with no other idea where they're going, then dying.

Spinach good for muscles, just like Popeye showed us.

Verizon to throttle high bandwidth users. I don't get this. It seems like fraud to offer unlimited data plans then to throttle back bandwidth, effectively limiting it. Why not just charge more for more bandwidth usage and never give an unlimited option.