Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

I've been using the internet since it was created, and I've never had a problem other than a slow download. Businesses are amazingly adept at protecting themselves from threats. All the tools we need to protect our personal computers are available for free. Yet authoritarians like this guy keep calling for internet passports and IDs. This is a charade. It's about controlling speech, not protecting anybody from crime.

SOCIALISM:

GM, which is now owned by the US government and unions, socialist institutions both, sponsored a documentary celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party with our tax dollars.

"Presently, GM's business in China is selling more autos in the Asian country than in the United States. The Washington Post noted last week that China was GM's solution to help the car-maker recover from bankruptcy, so the company "is only expected to widen as an increasing number of Chinese grow rich enough to purchase their first car.”"

Peas in a pod.

TAX AND SPEND:

One way of looking at Geithner's plan to stop paying into the pension plans of government employees is that the government is seizing those pension plans. Another way of looking at is is government cut spending, and that's the way I prefer.

"Like I said, there are certain times in life where a person’s true nature comes shining through. The government is telling us here that, even when faced with insolvency, it will happily confiscate any source of capital it can, and then continue squandering it all on useless folly.It really leaves me wondering when people are going to wake up and say to themselves, “Enough is enough!”"

Not soon enough to avoid collapse.

REGULATION:

Australian town bans bottled water. Coming soon to a town near you.

"The tiny town, two hours south of Sydney, voted in July to ban bottled water after a drinks company moved to tap into a local aquifer for its bottled water business.
"In the process of the campaign against that the local people became educated about the environmental impact of bottled water," said Dee."

If they became so educated, why didn't people stop drinking bottled water voluntarily? This is a bunch of crap being pushed by petty tyrants.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Strong growth in the True (Austrian) Money Supply, and that means strong inflation.

"The U.S. money supply aggregates based on the Austrian definition of the money supply, what Austrians call the True Money Supply or TMS, saw robust growth in April, with narrow TMS1 posting an annualized rate of increase of 10.7% and broad TMS2 showing an annualized rate of increases of 16.5%.  That brought the annualized three-month rate of growth on TMS1 and TMS2 to 8.0% and 13.7% respectively, up 270 and 390 basis points from the growth rates seen in March."

Worse,

"Second, and far more important, the private banking system will by June’s end be sitting on somewhere between $1.6 and $1.7 trillion in excess reserves, meaning the fuel for the banking system to expand the money supply is in a word explosive.  Indeed, at a reserve requirement ratio of 10% (the most restrictive reserve requirement ratio currently imposed by the Federal Reserve on private banks) the private banking system – if it be willing to lend, or if it can’t find willing/able borrowers at the very least be willing to buy existing securities – is in a position to expand the money supply by a massive $17 trillion.  On a TMS2 metric that as of April 2011 stood at $7.6 trillion, we are theoretically looking at a money supply some 3.2 times higher than today."

This is going to hurt.

HEALTH CARE:

Claim that drug companies are ignoring a potential cancer-fighting drug because it can't be patented.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

New light bulbs designed to replace incandescents to cost $50 per bulb. Will banning the light bulb be the straw that broke the camel's back?

IPCC agrees to disclose conflicts of interest. So what? That doesn't get rid of them.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Supreme Court allows police to search homes for drugs without a warrant. All they have to do is claim they heard something. What this means is practice is police will enter any home they want without a warrant on the pretext they heard somebody destroying drug evidence. In court, judges will rubber stamp whatever the cops say the same way they always do regardless of how absurd it is. The Fourth Amendment is dead, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

POLICE STATE:

Accusations the government jury-rigged its experimental set-up for the nude scanners to produce phony data making them appear safe. The government lie and cover it up? Say it isn't so.

Everything we do is a crime.

"Raising prices is “gouging”.Lowering prices is “predation”.
Keeping them the same is “collusion”."

We can't win.

WAR:

US government preserving smallpox just in case it needs it for biological warfare.

Congressman attempts to make the war on terror legal by authorizing the president to attack anybody in the world he deems a terrorist forever. No thanks.

Pakistani forces and a US helicopter exchange fire in western Pakistan. Another cold war is turning hot. Funny how this isn't huge news.

Fears that the Chinese might reverse engineer stealth technology from the helicopter which crashed in bin Laden's compound.

POLITICS:

Newt is still apologizing for his stupid remarks immediately after announcing his candidacy. He ended his run before it even began. What a moron.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is "waiting to be summoned into the race". I just kind of threw up in my mouth a little. This is what passes for a down to earth guy in the ruling class.

MISC:

Robots invent language.

The atmosphere heated right before the Japanese earthquake. But it happened under water.

Calls for major changes in flood control.

"With millions of acres of land underwater, the groups say the flood of 2011 illustrates the limitations and possible harm of the government's decades-long effort to control the largest river system in North America. They say the rivers should be allowed to run more freely."

You mean the government should stop playing god and allow individuals to deal with nature in a way that suits their personal interests and the interests of their families instead of government agents destroying their lives and livelihoods and pretending it's an agonizing decision? What a novel concept. There should be a word for that. Freedom? Liberty? I guess in today's world, those words don't mean much. As long as we vote for people to solve our problems, the government is going to be controlled by little people with god complexes, and they'll keep destroying our country and our lives.

Interesting take on the wisdom of crowds as applied to people.

"Social influence 'diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error.' In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is hidden."

Free markets are the expression of the wisdom of crowds in human society.

These people don't want vehicle to vehicle communication to make us safer. They want it to track and control our vehicles.

Social networking enables people to charter flights like a rich person at the price of commercial. This is genius. You know the government will stop this. Government left general aviation alone when it was for only upper middle class and rich people.

This chart shows why artists love releasing music on the web and why record companies don't.