Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Facebook tries to trademark the world 'book'.

TAX AND SPEND:

Analysis shows that money from Obama's stimulus boondoogle went to states in proportion to Democrat representation in those states. Once again, science has uncovered the obvious. Of course he favored Democrats. The alternative was to boost Republicans. Nobody is stupid enough to think he would do that. I always get a kick out of how stupid Washington creeps think the American people are. This is like reporting that sharks eat more fish than cows.

Here's a crazy graph, compressed to make it look like Paul Ryan's budget is significantly different that Obama's. What a joke. According to the graph, the Ryan budget will go to zero sometime after 2050. No kidding. Government will not spend a dime after that. And pigs will fly. We'll all keep unicorns in our house because they don't eat or poop. Hooray! I'd rather read science fiction. Ryan talks about allowing Medicare competition in 2023. Maybe he didn't realize that was ten years and five Congresses from now. I'm surprised anybody had the guts to post this budget and graph as if it was serious.

EDUCATION:

If anybody thought that tagging students with ID chips would never happen, it's happened in Brazil. US schools are just better at keeping such atrocities quiet.

Bureaucrats found cheating on student test scores in Ohio. Imagine that. It's like thieves have no honor or something.

Ohio schools busted for cheating, but the press doesn't want to admit it.

"The analysis does not prove cheating has occurred in Ohio. But interviews and documents show that state officials do not employ vigorous statistical analyses to catch possible cheating, discipline only about a dozen teachers a year and direct Ohio’s test vendor to spend just $17,540 on analyzing suspicious scores out of its $39 million annual testing contract."

I guess that means no cheating occurred. And I have some land in Florida to sell the paper...

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Here's what Robert Murphy learned from Fakegate:

"The Heartland affair has shown not merely that some climate alarmists (namely Gleick) will stoop to outright deception, and most of his peers will close ranks to defend him in a sort of Green Wall of Silence. Perhaps more disturbing, it reveals that these people really have no idea how their opponents on the climate issue actually view the world. So when they dismiss skeptics as having no legitimate arguments, it should make outsiders take pause.

Without being a trained climate scientist, I can read the various blogs and try to parse the academic papers, but ultimately I have to rely a lot on the good faith and judgment of the scientists themselves. The Heartland affair has reassured my earlier conviction that the case for climate alarmism is far weaker than the alarmists have been telling us."

I think most Americans realized that before Fakegate. That's why it's always at the bottom of every list of concerns of the American people. Fakegate illustrates how desperate the frauds are because the science is not in their favor.

Record cold and snow in the Pacific northwest. We just set a series of record highs here that had stood for nearly a century. What that tells us is it was hot around here nearly a century ago. Today's a typical spring day though.

More evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was global.

What a great example of how foolish and fickle voters are:

"In 2006, 73 percent of Democrats believed the Bush administration could reduce gas prices. Today, just 33 percent of Democrats believe there is anything President Obama can do about them."

You can't make this stuff up.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Pope decries evil behind drug violence. That evil is government which declared war on peaceful drug users, sellers and producers, creating an avalanche of violence.

Have you ever wondered about the real reason government wages a war on some drugs?

POLICE STATE:

Japanese big brother camera can scan 36 million faces per second. Complaining about this technology is useless. By the time you wake people up, the cameras will can billions of faces. The only way to address these threats to privacy in on principle, never on technology.

From a criminal point of view, it doesn't matter whether the neighborhood watch killer was sanctioned by the neighborhood or not. The only question that matters is who initiated the confrontation. If it was Zimmerman, he should be arrested for murder. If it was Martin, Zimmerman should be absolved. But from all the evidence I've seen in the public domain, and public is the key, Zimmerman should be suspected of murder, and an investigation should be conducted from that point of view. If there is other evidence to the contrary, that should be released into the public domain. All the discussion I've heard about this misses the point. If I saw somebody I feared was going to rob my neighbor, I would follow him. But if I intercepted him, started a confrontation, and subsequently killed him, my suspicion wouldn't matter. Whether or not I was freelancer, a neighborhood watch guy, a cop, or the head of FBI wouldn't matter. Actions matter, not uniforms or titles. Boortz thinks the Grand Jury will take care of it. Let's hope so, but that's no excuse for the cops allowing this guy, given all the public, and I repeat public, evidence.

WAR:

US trained forces stage a coup in Mali over the democratically elected government. US forces had trained the foreign fighters to help topple Qaddafi. Everything the government tells us is a lie.

I didn't realize the accused Afghan mass murderer was from Ohio. Why is it always Ohio?

"Speculation has focused on Bales’ prior traumatic brain injury (TBI), reportedly suffered during a previous deployment in Iraq."

This whole thing still stinks to me. I bet he gets off. There's more to this than the press is telling us.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Boy, this article misses the point. The Australian government banned this Chinese company because it isn't part of the western ruling class, not for any privacy reasons. Governments never care about obeying the law.

Neal Boortz wants you to stop voting for Santorum so Romney can win a clear victory. I hope you vote for Ron Paul against Romney until all states are done. If you can't bring yourself to vote for Ron Paul, please vote for Santorum. The best thing you can do for our country at this time is help produce a brokered convention in Tampa. If we manage to produce a brokered convention, Ron Paul will have tremendous power to advance his dramatic cuts in government spending and foreign aggression. As a result, no matter who win the White House, we will all suffer less pain when our economy collapses under the burden of government.

POLITICS:

Santorum wins Louisiana, flexing southern and all other kinds of flab. How pathetic does Reuters have to be to pretend Santorum is muscular? I know it was meant metaphically, but it was still stupid.

Why are people spending outside money to defeat Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown? He's toast. He's one of the most liberal senators in Washington. He was only elected because of the Taft corruption six years ago. He was a major backer of Obamacare. He has no hope this year.

MEDIA:

After Devin and I watched Hunger Games, she finally realized we live in tyranny. She's edited my essays for years, but she refused to acknowledge that truth. But the Hunger Games movie made it clear for her. If you have not seen the Hunger Games already, please do so. It's not an action flick, but it has lots of action. It's not a political flick, but it exposes more about the corruption of politics than any movie I've seen. The subtle and not so subtle touches in this movie sting like arrows from government archers. From a recent article:

"Yet everyone should know one thing: “Games” is not just another slasher/horror scream flick--but rather a furious critique of our political system, in which the central government grows rich from the toil of the masses, even as that same political elite finds entertainment in the contrived and manipulated death of its subjects. "

If you don't recognize that that's what's happening in the US, you're willingly blind. Please watch the Hunger Games, and please teach your children about the predatory nature of the state. From Devin's lips to God's ears. Let's end this tyranny. I put this post under media because movies are media, but the article I quoted gets it right, not just in representation of the movie, but in reality:

"So yes, the film has some of the conventional elements of a love-triangle. But what’s truly startling about the movie, then, is its implicit politics: Ordinary folks are good, government is bad--really bad. There are no evil corporations in this movie; the bad guys are bureaucrats and TV hosts."

Exactly. Blaming corporations instead of government for actions in our society is like blaming hands instead of brains for the actions of people.

"Taken literally, Hunger Games is a black-helicopter-ish portrayal of state power. But taken figuratively, the film is an Anthem (novella) for our time, a well-crafted cry from the heart against top-down injustice and oppression. Nobody has made a rallying-cry of a movie that’s this effective in a long, long time."

Amen. This is a wonderful, libertarian movie. We've needed a movie like this for decades. Thank goodness for the Hunger Games, and let's hope people figure it out like my girlfriend.

Reason quotes Mises. With picture. This may be nothing, but it may be something interesting. I wonder if Cato is trying to drag Mises Institute scholars into their internal problems.

MISC:

This story about the top 100 Tebow distractions cracks me up. Could the Jets ownership have made a stupider move? Fine. They probably could have. They hired Rex Ryan after all, the guy who's dragging that team into quicksand. I guess a mongoose could lay down and be bitten by snakes. But both are beyond belief.