Free kibbles

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Swiss voters tell gun grabbers to pound sand. Nice.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

One lonely voice on the Fed realizes that monetary policy can't fix what ails our economy.

Bernanke's inflationary monetary policy is feeding price inflation in the US, but worse price inflation around the globe, leading to protests and riots.

"World food and commodity prices are up 28 percent over the last 6 months. The MIT "Billion Prices Project" confirms that prices have been surging higher than indicated by theconsumer price index. Entrepreneurs tell me that big price increases are already planned for everything from vegetables to blue jeans.Higher food prices set off the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and the mass protests in countries like Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran. People in these countries buy more unprocessed foods and spend a much higher percentage of their income on food, so they have been severely impoverished by Bernanke's QE2."

Everybody in Egypt didn't wake up one day with everything the same as before and decide to kick Mubarak out of office. Prices changed, they couldn't afford food, and that prompted them to kick Mubarak out of office.

"Bernanke claims that monetary policy cannot change the quantity of wheat by one bushel and that higher food prices are the result of bad weather conditions in Russia and Australia. However, bad weather does not explain why the prices of virtually all food and nonfood commodities have increased substantially in recent recessionary times. This is clearly a case of too much money chasing too few goods."

Bernanke is right: printing money can't increase production. I.e., it can't stimulate the economy. Yet he claims he's inflating to stimulate the economy. His position is inconsistent. I stand by my belief he's evil, not stupid.

How government abjectly failed to fix the economy.

"Loose fiscal policy has failed to create jobs also. Consider that we had a $700 billion TARP program, nearly $1 trillion in stimulus spending, a government takeover of General Motors, and hundreds of billions of dollars of guarantees to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, FDIC, etc. On top of those programs the Federal Reserve has provided over $4 trillion worth of assistance over the past few years through its credit facilities, purchases of mortgage-backed securities, and now its second round of quantitative easing. Yet even after all these trillions of dollars of spending and bailouts, total nonfarm payroll employment is still seven million jobs lower than it was before this crisis began.
In this same period of time, the total U.S. population has increased by nine million people. We would expect that roughly four million of these people should have been employed, so we are really dealing with eleven million fewer employed people than would otherwise be expected."

Ouch.

EDUCATION:

How zero tolerance policies lead to inhumane treatment of students. Who would have ever thought otherwise? Zero tolerance is brain dead. It's draconian. It removes all human judgment. That's stupid and counterproductive.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Wind farm shut down because turbines are frozen solid.

POLICE STATE:

Author claims to have warned about a hijacking attack on the World Trade Center in August 2001, only to have been arrested and persecuted under the Patriot Act for it later.

"In August 2001, at the urging of my CIA handler, I phoned Attorney General John Ashcroft's private staff and the Office of Counter-Terrorism to ask for an "emergency broadcast alert" across all federal agencies, seeking any fragment of intelligence on airplane hijackings. My warning cited the World Trade Center as the identified target. Highly credible independent sources have confirmed that in August, 2001 I described the strike on the World Trade Center as "imminent," with the potential for "mass casualties, possibly using a miniature thermonuclear device.""
"Republican leaders invoked the Patriot Act to take me down 30 days after I approached the offices of Senator John McCain and Trent Lott, requesting to testify about Iraq's cooperation with the 9/11 investigation and a comprehensive peace framework that would have achieved every U.S. and British objective without firing a shot. Ironically, because of the Patriot Act, my conversations with Senator Trent Lott's staff got captured on wire taps, proving my story."
"I cannot forget how I was subjected to secret charges, secret evidence and secret grand jury testimony that denied my right to face my accusers or their accusations in open court, throughout five years of indictment. I cannot forget my imprisonment on a Texas military base for a year without a trial or evidentiary hearing."

I've never heard this story before.

Security attacks, bloodies and arrests protester at Clinton speech championing the freedom of people to protest. The protester made no commotion. He just stood silently with his back turned to her. The hypocrisy of the US government is becoming more obvious every day.

MISC:

Scientists suspect they may have discovered a ninth planet in the Oort cloud with four times the mass of Jupiter. I'm skeptical.