Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

US home prices are in a double-dip recession, and so is the rest of the economy.

TAX AND SPEND:

The myth of efficient government service. Does anybody believe in efficient government services? Maybe stuff like police and roads.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Scientists discover natural climate variations in Greenland over the last 5,600 years. Climate changes naturally. Imagine that.

POLICE STATE:

I'm not impressed with Obama's supposed crackdown on abuses by local law enforcement.

WAR:

NATO calls for more money to stay in Afghanistan longer. I have a better idea. Let's get out of Afghanistan and abolish NATO.

Claims that the US Navy cluster-bombed Misrata then blamed Qaddafi. News crew films western forces on the ground in Libya.

"The westerners were seen by al-Jazeera on rebel lines late last week, days before British and French attack helicopters are due to join the Nato campaign. They are likely to be deployed on the outskirts of Misrata, from where pro-Gaddafi forces continue to shell rebel positions to the east.There have been numerous reports in the British press that SAS soldiers are acting as spotters in Libya to help Nato warplanes target pro-Gaddafi forces. In March, six special forces soldiers and two MI6 officers were detained by rebel fighters when they landed on an abortive mission to meet rebel leaders in Benghazi, in an embarrassing episode for the SAS.
The group was withdrawn soon afterwards and a new "liaison team" sent in its place. Asked for comment on Monday, a Ministry of Defence spokeswoman said: "We don't have any forces out there.""

Oops. Somebody, or should I say everybody in the governments involved, got caught in a lie.

POLITICS:

Now police arrest an Egyptian banker for groping a hotel maid in New York. This is another sign of the horrific corruption of government because banks are basically owned by the government, and the most corrupt rise to the top because of it.

Rick Perry's Bilderberg connections.

MISC:

Senior citizens willing to risk cancer to clean up Fukushima power plant. I'm riveted by the stories of the Fukushima heroes.

""At this moment I can say that I am talking with many key government and Tepco people. But I am sorry I can't say any more at this moment. It is on the way but it is a very, very sensitive issue politically.""

There we go again. A clear solution to a problem: let these volunteers clean up the plant and pay them very well to insure the rest of their life is fantastic. But government is the obstacle because of politics.

Regarding WWII:

"Yet in “No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945” (2007), the British historian Norman Davies begins from the premise that “the war effort of the Western powers” was “something of a sideshow.” America lost 143,000 soldiers in the fight against Germany, Davies points out, while the Soviet Union lost 11 million.And if the main show was a war between Hitler and Stalin, he wonders, wasn’t World War II a clash of nearly equivalent evils? “Anyone genuinely committed to freedom, justice and democracy is duty-bound to condemn both of the great totalitarian systems without fear or favor,” he concludes. As a historian of Poland, Davies is especially aware of what few Americans remember: that World War II began with a joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of that country. For the first two years of the war, Hitler and Stalin were allies; the fact that they then turned against each other, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, doesn’t change the moral equation. “If one finds two gangsters fighting each other, it is no valid approach at all to round on one and to lay off the other. The only valid test is whether or not they deserve the label of gangsters.”"

It's a mistake to look at war as just a numbers game. The people who died when the Nazis invaded France and in the Battle of Britain aren't inconsequential compared to the people who died in the Soviet Union and Poland.


Here's an example of economic illiteracy applied to futurism.

"First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary."

The presumption that no human effort will be necessary is wrong. Creating machine intelligence greater than our own won't get rid of scarcity. It might greatly increase production, but people will always want more, and therefore there will always be work to do and wealth to create. Maybe everybody will want luxury yachts. Space yachts. That travel to the stars. Or other galaxies. People will always want more.