Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Because the internet is based on a backbone, it's easy for governments to shut it down. Thinkers are reconsidering a distributed architecture.

ECONOMY:

Gold is an asset, something people purchase for its value and hold, not a commodity, something people purchase to consume.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Paul Ryan schedules hearings with Fed officials at the exact same time Ron Paul had scheduled hearings to expose the Fed as a source of unemployment to distract Americans from the culpability of the Fed. He's in the Fed's pocket. This is another example of why I think Ryan is arguably the most dangerous aristocrat in Congress.

A century of wealth destruction by the Fed.

"The greenback’s value dropped only 50% during the first 33 years of the Fed’s stewardship – i.e. between 1913 and 1946. But the 1946 dollar would lose half its value in just 24 years, while the 1970 dollar would lose half its value in just nine years. The rate of decay slowed somewhat during the Volcker years, as the 1979 dollar did not lose half its value until 14 years later.

Nevertheless, the dollar’s progression toward zero since 1913 feels more geometric than arithmetic."

Like compounding interest and debt, compounding inflation is exponential.

HEALTH CARE:

Link between ultra-cleanliness of children and chronic illness later in life.

New US government diet guidelines will lead to worse health. You can't just tell people to eat smaller portions. People eat big portions because they're malnourished. They eat empty calories of processed food, grains, potatoes, and they don't get enough meat and fat. Their brains won't let them eat less. If people put less real food on their plates during meals, their brains will make them eat more snacks, and those will be even less healthy for them.

"But many Americans already eat more calories each day than they are supposed to eat by ignoring the dietary guidance."

Ignoring the guidelines is not the problem. Malnutrition from the pseudo-foods promoted by the government is.

"The two overarching themes of the report are: maintain calorie balance over time to achieve and sustain a healthy weight, and focus on consuming nutrient-dense foods and beverages."

This is not true. Whole grains are pseudo-foods full of anti-nutrients and sugar, not nutrient-dense foods.

The black market in raw milk.

"In 2008 a police raid was commenced on the Manna Storehouse, a Mennonite-run co-op in Lorain County, Ohio. According to reports, the family was held at gunpoint while agents searched the premises for unpasteurized dairy products. Yet, as all wars on supply reveal, the price adjusts and a black market thrives."

Government can no more repeal the laws of economics than it can repeal the law of gravity.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

I didn't realize that the global warming frauds had shut down a bunch of Siberian temperature stations in 1990 which erased a bunch of cold temperature reports, leading to the appearance of higher global temperatures.

Federal regulations keep high mileage diesel cars from being sold in the US.

Diesel users to pass on costs to consumers. Duh. Why should it be any other way? Highway costs should also be passed on to consumers, not socialized.

POLICE STATE:

George Bush cancels trip to Switzerland out of fear he might be arrested and prosecuted for torture. With what evidence? If they have some secret US government memos signed by Bush ordering torture, release them for everybody to see.

"Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on Feb. 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country."

This is nothing but a political witchhunt. They have no evidence because they haven't done an investigation. They want to shoot first and ask questions later. This is disgusting.

"But groups including the New York-based Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) said the cancellation was linked to growing moves to hold Bush accountable for torture, including waterboarding. He has admitted in his memoirs and television interviews to ordering use of the interrogation technique that simulates drowning."

The Bush haters want waterboarding to be torture so bad, they think they can make it so just by saying so. It's not. It doesn't harm anybody. Interrogators reportedly waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammad over 200 times, and he's fine. If they had tortured him - beaten, cut, electrocuted, burn, etc. - 200 times, he'd be dead. Waterboarding is scary and uncomfortable, but it's not torture.

"Bush, in his "Decision Points" memoirs on his 2001-2009 presidency, strongly defends the use of waterboarding as key to preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Most human rights experts consider the practice a form of torture, banned by the Convention on Torture, an international pact prohibiting torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment. Switzerland and the United States are among 147 countries to have ratified the 1987 treaty."

This is written to make it sound like the Convention on Torture specifically outlaws waterboarding. It does not. It does not mention waterboarding. This article is intentionally misleading.

While I agree with this sentiment, I don't understand this specific example. If protesters are throwing Molotov cocktails at police, the police are allowed to defend themselves like everybody else.

The scale of oppression in America.

"However, you can find plenty of examples of police brutality on YouTube, more than you can watch in a lifetime. I have just searched Google for "youtube police brutality" and the result is: "497,000 results." There’s everything from police shooting a guy in a wheelchair to body slamming a befuddled 89-year-old great grandmother to tasering kids and mothers with small children."

But the vast majority of police brutality isn't on video.

"Why are the police so aggressive toward the public?

In part because their ranks attract bullies, sociopaths and psychopaths. Even normal cops are proud of their authority and expect deference. Even cops who are not primed to be set off can turn nasty in a heartbeat.

In part because police are not accountable. The effort decades ago to have civilian police review boards was beat back by "law and order" conservatives.

In part because the police have been militarized by the federal government, equipped with military weapons, and trained to view the public as the enemy.

In part because the Bush/Cheney/Obama regimes have made every American a suspect. The only civil liberty that has any force in the U.S. today is the law against racial discrimination. This law requires that every American citizen be treated as if he were a Muslim terrorist."

All good points.

Data in response to FOIA request shows the FBI has systematically and flagrantly violated the rights of US citizens to far greater extent than previously reported.

"Officially less than 800 violations were reported. In 2007, a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit of only 10% of national security investigations found around 3,000, most never reported. A 2008 OIG audit discovered massive underreporting. EFF's analysis confirmed "as many as 40,000 violations" from 9/11 through 2008."

Those aren't bad apples either. That's a system failure.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Are events in Egypt moderating the Muslim Brotherhood? Getting a seat at the political table will do that.

MISC:

This criticism of Reagan is devastating.

"When the Premier of Israel visited Reagan at the White House, the President went on and on for three quarters of an hour explaining why he was pro-Jewish: it was because, being in the Signal Corps in World War II, he visited Buchenwald shortly after the Nazi defeat and helped to take films of that camp. Reagan repeated this story the following day to an Israeli ambassador. But the truth was 180-degrees different; Reagan was not in Europe; he never saw a concentration camp; he spent the entire war in the safety of Hollywood, making films for the armed forces."

I crucified John Kerry for telling a smaller lie than this, but this is the first time I've heard this story.

"At first, the only "cut" was in Carter’s last-minute loony-tunes estimates for the future. But in a few short years, Reagan’s spending surpassed even Carter’s irresponsible estimates. Instead, Reagan not only increased government spending by an enormous amount – so enormous that it would take a 40 percent cut to bring us back to Carter’s wild spending totals of 1980 – he even substantially increased the percentage of government spending to GNP. That’s a "revolution"?"

The people were mesmerized by Reagan's message of reducing the burden of government. I had no idea at the time he was governing exactly opposite of that message. It wasn't until the late 1980s that I realized government was getting bigger, and even then I blamed Congress, Reagan's staff and Bush, not Reagan. Still, that's what prompted me to discover that I was a libertarian, a word I never heard until that time.

"Income tax rates in the upper brackets have come down. But the odious bipartisan "loophole closing" of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 – an act engineered by our Jacobin egalitarian "free market" economists in the name of "fairness" – raised instead of lowered the income tax paid by most upper-income people. Again: what one hand of government giveth, the other taketh away, and then some. Thus, President-elect Bush has just abandoned his worthy plan to cut the capital gains tax in half, because it would violate the beloved tax fairness instituted by the bipartisan Reganite 1986 "reform.""

But there is a clearly a psychological effect to lowering the marginal tax rates.

"How about deregulation? Didn’t Ronnie at least deregulate the regulation-ridden economy inherited from the evil Carter? Just the opposite. The outstanding measures of deregulation were all passed by the Carter Administration, and, as is typical of that luckless President, the deregulation was phased in to take effect during the early Reagan years, so that the Gipper could claim the credit. Such was the story with oil and gas deregulation (which the Gipper did advance from September to January of 1981); airline deregulation and the actual abolition of the Civil Aeronautics Board, and deregulation of trucking. That was it.

The Gipper deregulated nothing, abolished nothing. Instead of keeping his pledge to abolish the Departments of Energy and Education, he strengthened them, and even wound up his years in office adding a new Cabinet post, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Overall, the quantity and degree of government regulation of the economy was greatly increased and intensified during the Reagan years. The hated OSHA, the scourge of small business and at the time the second most-hated agency of federal government (surely you need not ask which is the first most-hated), was not only not abolished; it too was strengthened and reinforced. Environmentalist restrictions were greatly accelerated, especially after the heady early years when selling off some public lands was briefly mentioned, and the proponents of actually using and developing locked-up government resources (James Watt, Anne Burford, Rita Lavelle) were disgraced and sent packing as a warning to any future "anti-environmentalists."

The Reagan Administration, supposedly the champion of free trade, has been the most protectionist in American history, raising tariffs, imposing import quotas, and – as another neat bit of creative semantics – twisting the arms of the Japanese to impose "voluntary" export quotas on automobiles and microchips. It has made the farm program the most abysmal of this century: boosting price supports and production quotas, and paying many more billions of taxpayer money to farmers so that they can produce less and raise prices to consumers."

Devastating.

"The Reagan Administration’s continued aid and support to Pol Pot in Cambodia, the most genocidal butcher of our time, is more reprehensible but less visible to most Americans. As a result, Pol Pot’s thugs are mobilizing at this very moment on the Thai border to return and take over Cambodia as soon as the Vietnamese pull out, presumably to renew their bizarre mass murders. But you see, that’s okay with the Reaganites because the Cambodian Commies are guerrilla fighters against the Vietnamese (pro-Soviet) Commies, who by definition are evil. Pol Pot’s butchers as "freedom fighters" show us that, in the arsenal of the Reaganite Right, "freedom," like "taxes" and many other crucial words, means, as in the case of Humpty Dumpty, whatever they choose it to."

I knew nothing of that either.

"I am convinced that the historic function of Ronald Reagan was to co-opt, eviscerate and ultimately destroy the substantial wave of anti-governmental, and quasi-libertarian, sentiment that erupted in the U.S. during the 1970s. Did he perform this task consciously? Surely too difficult a feat for a man barely compos. No, Reagan was wheeled into performing this task by his Establishment handlers.

The task of co-optation needed to be done because the 1970s, particularly 1973–75, were marked by an unusual and striking conjunction of crisis – crises that fed on each other to lead to a sudden and cumulative disillusionment with the federal government. It was this symbiosis of anti-government reaction that led me to develop my "case for libertarian optimism" during the mid-1970’s, in the expectation of a rapid escalation of libertarian influence in America."

Sounds familiar. In others words, we should do a better job of watching the actions of the next pro-freedom president, and I assume the 2012 victor will pretend to be pro-freedom, than I did in the 80s.