Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Taxpayer money is used to lobby government for more taxpayer money.

It's sad that most people don't understand the reason government exists is to loot us. Here's an example.

"I was reminded of this once again this morning when I glanced at the front page of USA Today and read an article on property taxes that included this sentence:

"Cities, counties and school districts today collect about 20% more in property taxes than they did in 2006, when home values were one-third higher than now . . ."

The rest of the article was a bunch of whining and hand-wringing by the leftists at USA Today about how the rate of increase in property tax revenue might possibly be slowing down.

I wonder if there will be congressional hearings on "price gouging" by local governments to go along with the upcoming hearings on gasoline pricing?"

No hearings will follow.

REGULATION:

Hobbit bar threatened.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The Fed is quietly inflating a new bubble economy, and that means your dollar is buying less.

"If it were to speak the name of this growing threat, it might be called on to stop it. But Chairman Bernanke knows that any policy designed to restrain inflation will also derail the phony recovery that the Fed has labored so hard to engineer. The higher rates needed to bring inflation under control, and knock down the price of oil for instance, would trigger a greater financial crisis than the one seen in 2008."

How are those gas prices working out for you? This is a product of the Obama re-election effort.

EDUCATION:

School choice increases student safety.

Thomas Sowell calls out Obama, Holder and Education Secretary Duncan for pandering to blacks in an election year. Obama is doing a great job of exploiting divisive issues to distract Americans from the economy in November. But I don't think it will work. If the American people think the economy is still bad, he'll lose. If they think it's getting better, he'll win.

HEALTH CARE:

Great analysis exposes the myth that the US has a free market health care system. Government in the US spends more per person than any western country other than Norway.

"The thing to remember in America is that we have single-payer health care for the elderly and for the poor: the two costliest groups. In addition, the relatively healthy middle class has heavily-subsidized private health insurance, in which few individuals have the freedom to choose the insurance plan they receive. Neither of these facts commend the American health-care system to devotees of the free market."

These are problems with the system that should be fixed.

How the FDA infringes on freedom of speech by restricting what supplement manufacturers can say about their products in order to boost Big Pharma.

In another example showing the bogusness of patents, the Indian government forces a drug company to license a cancer drug, reducing the price by 97 percent. That's how much money government steal from consumers and transfer to the recipients of patents.

God bless Walter Williams for explaining how the propaganda and regulation against tobacco helped propagate the police state.

"Last month, at a Raeford, N.C., elementary school, a teacher confiscated the lunch of a 5-year-old girl because it didn't meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines and therefore was deemed nonnutritious. She replaced it with school cafeteria chicken nuggets. The girl's home-prepared lunch was nutritious; it consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, potato chips, a banana and apple juice. But whether her lunch was nutritious or not is not the issue. The issue is governmental usurpation of parental authority."

That paragraph makes me weep for the death of liberty. I'm going to smoke a cigar... That cigar was awesome. Thanks to Williams for pointing out the widespread tyranny government is waging under the pretense of keeping us healthy.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Some loon suggests genetically engineering humans to reduce our impact on climate.

Obama's restrictions on off-shore drilling hurt businesses.

POLICE STATE:

Speed camera company astroturfing in support of speed cameras.

Here's the business opportunity of a lifetime: set up general aviation routes that parallel government oppression airline routes.

WAR:

I hadn't heard that the alleged mass murderer in Afghanistan was US special ops. I know it shouldn't matter, but those guys go through fantastic training to make sure they don't do this stuff. If this guy was special ops, it calls into question the training of every special ops fighter in the military. As bad as war sucks, for Americans and the people they kill overseas, this is a new level of bad. This sucks.

"In the early morning hours of March 11, a US soldier assigned to “special ops” in Afghanistan, stationed near Kandahar, went into a local village and gunned down 16 people – including nine women and three children. At least three others were wounded. He went from house to house, in the predawn darkness, systematically murdering people while they slept in their beds: he then doused them with a flammable liquid and set them ablaze."

Call me naive, but I'm going hold on to the phrase, " assigned to “special ops” ". This sounds like a loaded phrase. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I want to believe that the people our military has trained for special ops are more stable than this. If they're not, then how can we ever trust another soldier to go kill in our names, ever? I'm against the wars. I want our troops to come home. But I understand that sometimes we must send troops to defend us. But if we can't count on the most elite troops in the military to act with discipline in our defense, who can we count on? This is the exact wrong lesson to learn from this event:

"What it tells me is that America is a depraved nation, a country where the very worst-of-the-worst flock to join the military, free to kill and maim and rape to their heart’s content."

That's a crock. The American people believe they are under siege. True or not, that's what they believe because that's what the government and its propaganda machine have told them. There's nothing depraved about fighting back when you believe you are besieged, and peace lovers don't get anywhere by attacking the American people for this. We are not under siege. Our government is besieging people all over the world. Our government is the aggressor. But we can't make that case while calling the American people depraved. As great a reporter as Raimondo is - he's provided information I've never seen anywhere else - he goes completely overboard in this commentary:

"To begin with, American culture is more violent and sadistic than ever. When it comes to mass entertainment and the level of acceptable violence, there appears to be no limit: how else could a movie like Kill Bill or Natural Born Killers even get made, let alone generate millions in profits? In a healthy society, such films would be marginal: in America, they are hailed as great “art” and go on to become box office hits. Rome had its gladiatorial contests; we have Hollywood to excite our bloodlust."

Go tell it to the Hong Kong kung fu movie makers. As if nobody makes ultra-violent movies but Americans and as if ultra-violent movies are some sort of cultural barometer in a America in a different way than they are anywhere else. That's another complete crock. Raimondo is trying to attribute the evils of the US government to the American people, and he's wrong. The American people are the victims of their government. Terrorists aren't trying to kill me or my family. They're trying to stop the aggression and violence our government is inflicting on them and their neighbors. Our government has been the aggressor for 70 years or more. Our government is the problem, but the politicians and they propagandists in the press have been hiding that info from them forever.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Here's a case where libertarians differ. Should government be forced to provide documents in the language of everybody who comes here? The author says yes. I say no. Forcing government, or anybody else, to provide documents in any language is an act of coercion. It should not be allowed. Since our government is an English language government, and our society is an English language society, nobody should be able to force others to provide documents in any language but English. Private operators should provide documents in whatever language or languages that benefit them.

POLITICS:

All kinds of things about Obama that the mainstream press won't tell you.

When asked about his big government voting record, Rich Santorum tells a critic he should support Ron Paul. I accept.

Santorum wins Mississippi and Alabama. How can an uber-establishment white guy win those states? I guess because the only significant alternative is an even more uber-establishment and even more white guy. Is abortion the only issue that matters in the south? I doubt it. My guess is the vast majority of Republicans in the south are as disgusted with all the candidates as I am. This guy thinks everybody in the south is pro-war. I find that hard to believe. Let's hope Gingrich bows out, but I don't expect anything graceful from Gingrich.

Republican establishment releases a highly edited video of a local meeting in which Ron Paul supporters are loud. I've seen the entire video, and this is not representative. The Paul supporters simply want to exercise their privileges under the rules, but the establishment is trying to prevent that.

LOCAL:

Postal worker rally to save jobs. If you were under the impression that government worked to advance the interests of people, this illustrates how wrong you were. People outside of government advance civilization. Government is at best a socialist jobs program for the past.

I'm skeptical of an aquatic center in Huber Heights, especially since government is involved. If Kroger was doing it themselves, it might be profitable, but since government is in charge, it will undoubtedly be inefficient, over-prices and low quality. That means Kroger will lose its investment.

MISC:

Scientists have suddenly discovered that most congealed masses in the universe are probably smaller than stars. Sometimes my mind is boggled at the ignorance of so-called experts. Let's suppose you had a relatively homogeneous universe. Let's supposed you had a lower bound of density that would produce start. Lower than that, you would have a nearly infinite supply of brown dwarfs. This isn't rocket science. It's obvious on its face. Show me why most gaseous masses produces stars instead of brown dwarfs? You cant. Further, show me why brown dwarfs can't also have planets. You can't. Get off your high horses and embrace reality.

"There may be the possibility that these sub-stellar objects may even become more desirable targets for interstellar travellers. After all, there may be dozens of these invisible objects between here and Proxima just waiting to be uncovered by the sophisticated infrared telescopes of the future; they'd certainly make for more accessible scientific curiosities.'""

What a crock of ****. It's expensive to leave Earth gravity. Imagine how expensive it would be enter and leave Jupiter gravity. Imagine how expense it would be to enter and leave the gravity of brown dwarves bigger than Jupiter. This entire article is a farce. If you wanted to mine material around a star, brown dwarf or a planet, you would do by mining the material that didn't suck you into the gravity well.

Wikipedia kills Encyclopedia Britannica.

Pictures of Hitler practicing in front of a mirror. My skin is crawling.