Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Here's a good reminder that giant corporations are effectively government bureaucracies and therefore completely corrupt.

"U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized a hip-hop website based on RIAA claims of copyright infringement for prerelease music tracks. They held it for a year before giving it back due to lack of evidence. Unsealed court records (PDF) show that the government was repeatedly given time extensions to build a case against Dajaz1.com, but the RIAA's evidence never came. The RIAA has declined to comment."

Americans live in a constant state of fear from government.

SOCIALISM:

All government money is used for political purposes, so why is anybody surprised unions are using Obama stimulus boondoggle money to recall Scott Walker? This is one of the fantastic advantages of being the king.

ECONOMY:

The bubble is back in the art world.

The Washington Post wants us to believe that falling unemployment claims is a good thing, but this report tells the truth.

"The government only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for work. In April, the percentage of adults working or looking for work fell to the lowest level in more than 30 years."

What this tells us is a huge number of people got so discouraged they dropped out of the work force. This is terrible news. That's why:

"Stock futures dipped after the report was released."

Don't fall for Obama's and his media's lie campaign. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the number of jobs created was less than the pseudo-experts predicted.

Walter Williams calls out leftists for complaining about wealth inequality and calling for more government to change that when the reality is the richest counties in America surround Washington D.C.

Boortz reports new levels of government corruption in statistics.

"For 59 out of the last 60 weeks, the weekly jobless numbers have been revised, after the fact, always in the same direction: higher. That's unheard of."

Lying liars lie larger. Dog bites man. Yawn.

TAX AND SPEND:

Excellent Onion parody of bureaucratic NASA sending a man on a bus to Cleveland.

This article claims people are moving from blue states to red states, but that's political interpretation. People are moving from high tax states to low tax states. Needless to day, blue states tend to be higher states in general.

Amid the evidence of the non-stop orgy of government agents spending our tax dollars on sex and booze, nobody should be surprised that welfare recipients spend our tax dollars on sex and booze too. The mafia is more responsible with the money it steals.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bankers in Ohio managed to shut down payday loan services because they provided a valuable product. They hoped this would bring more people into the banking system, but instead those people are now using prepaid debit cards much the anger of bankers who want to use government to force these people to give them their money.

The role currency debasement played in the collapse of the Roman Empire.

"What brought about the decline of the empire and the decay of its civilization was the disintegration of this economic interconnectedness, not the barbarian invasions. The alien aggressors merely took advantage of an opportunity which the internal weakness of the empire offered to them. From a military point of view the tribes which invaded the empire in the 4th and 5th centuries were not more formidable than the armies which the legions had easily defeated in earlier times. But the empire had changed. Its economic and social structure was already medieval."

In other words, most of the wealth had been looted into the hands of a few by taxes and currency debasement, so the poor had to aggregate around the wealthy - creating feudalism - to protect them from the barbarians.

"The showdown came when in the political troubles of the 3rd and 4th centuries the emperors resorted to currency debasement. With the system of maximum prices, the practice of debasement completely paralyzed both the production and the marketing of the vital foodstuffs and disintegrated society's economic organization. The more eagerness the authorities displayed in enforcing the maximum prices, the more desperate became the conditions of the urban masses dependent on the purchase of food."

So the Roman government implemented price fixing along with currency debasement.

"To avoid starving, people deserted the cities, settled on the countryside, and tried to grow grain, oil, wine, and other necessities for themselves. On the other hand, the owners of the big estates restricted their excess production of cereals and began to produce in their farmhouses — the villae — the products of handicraft which they needed. For their big-scale farming, which was already seriously jeopardized because of the inefficiency of slave labor, lost its rationality completely when the opportunity to sell at remunerative prices disappeared.

As the owner of the estate could no longer sell in the cities, he could no longer patronize the urban artisans either. He was forced to look for a substitute to meet his needs by employing handicraftsmen on his own account in his villa. He discontinued big-scale farming and became a landlord receiving rents from tenants or sharecroppers. These coloni were either freed slaves or urban proletarians who settled in the villages and turned to tilling the soil.

A tendency toward the establishment of autarky of each landlord's estate emerged. The economic function of the cities, of commerce, trade, and urban handicrafts, shrank. Italy and the provinces of the empire returned to a less advanced state of the social division of labor. The highly developed economic structure of ancient civilization retrograded to what is now known as the manorial organization of the Middle Ages."

This is feudalism. For years I've been saying that we're seeing the beginnings of this same process in the US. Eventually people will be forced to trade whatever wealth they can carry to feudal lords for food and protection.

HEALTH CARE:

Captivating headline:

"The Lone Path to Cheap Healthcare Is Expensive Healthcare"

It's not accurate, but it's captivating and it gets across the point that in order for health care to be as high quality and low price as possible, the consumer must pay for it. Empowering the consumer will rapidly drive down the price of health care the way it drives down the price of everything else.

America's costliest disease: the standard American diet (SAD). Sorry, I misspelled obesity.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls climate change a national security issue.

"“The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security,” Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. “Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”"

The problem is, none of this is happening any faster than previously, so why is it suddenly a national security problem? Rhetorical question.

Obama spokesman lied about the impact of the socialist jobs program of funding electric cars. All this green jobs rhetoric is just another socialist jobs program. In a related story:

"Remember when Obama, in 2008 promised the green economy would create 5 million jobs?"

"Today, the energy industry has lost thousands of jobs and Solyndra, to which the Obama Administration loaned over half a billion dollars, is out of business"

That's socialist jobs programs for you. The worst part of this is how conservatives have adopted the jobs mantra. The nature of conservatism is to support the status quo. Every time the progressives move the status quo to the left, conservatives support a few days later. It happened on the income tax, Social Security, Medicare, I could name a million others. Now it's happened on the Marxist propaganda about jobs, jobs, jobs. We should be focusing on creating wealth. Jobs will follow.

POLICE STATE:

Rand Paul creates petition to abolish the TSA. Heck, yeah.

The FBI wants to force internet service providers to build in back doors to make it easy to wiretap their customers. No.

Remember the patsies the FBI busted for being foolish enough to allow an FBI agent provocateur to catch them on tape endorsing his plan to blow up a bridge? You probably didn't know they were Occupiers.

FOREIGN POLICY:

I recently wrote how the US government has its hands tied in the Chinese dissident situation because China owns so much US government debt. Here's a description of the relationship between foreign policy and foreign debt in general.

"As recently as 2000, the national debt held by foreigners was "only" $1 trillion. It is now $5 trillion. This credit is essential to the operation of the U.S. government and thus the U.S. economy, because the government is such a large portion of the American economy. The amount held by foreigners is about one-half of the official national debt. It means that the U.S. government must shape its foreign policy so as to retain its foreign sources of finance from Great Britain, China, Japan, and others. It means that the U.S. government has lost degrees of freedom in conducting foreign policy. Any misstep by which the Executive branch fails to make such accommodations risks a severe disturbance to U.S. government financing and the economy."

This is why we need to balance the budget.

POLITICS:

Even liberal NPR acknowledges the many similarities between Romney and Obama.

Obama chooses long-time communist slogan for his campaign slogan. "Forward." Is anybody surprised? Progressives, masters of censorship, successfully campaign to have page exposing "Forward" as a long-time communist slogan removed. Saul Alinsky would be proud. The Daily Caller also reported on this. In a related story, Wikipedia also caves to leftists and censors Obama's admission that he ate dog. But Wikipedia does mention the famous story of Romney putting the dog on top of his car.

Boortz calls Obama's Life of Julia message "comrade Julia". I absolutely love it. US debt for each of Julia's communist steps. The sad part about this is the same socialist programs will occur under Romney with minor changes to help enrich Republican cronies instead of Democrat cronies.

Obama's composite girlfriend (most likely created by Bill Ayers) and his story of eating dog expose him as a weirdo. As if he outrageous narcissism, remarkable ability to lie without conscience and his desire to use violence to control the lives of every American aren't enough. But Romney's a weirdo too, so this is just another one of those things that remind us it doesn't matter which one you vote for. Boy I hope Paul manages to get the nomination.

I love "hype and blame" as a parody of Obama's 2008 campaign.

MISC:

The law of comparative advantage is another argument for free trade.

"The law of comparative advantage tackles such hard cases, and is therefore indispensable to the case for free trade. It shows that even if, for example, Country A is more efficient than Country B at producing both commodities X and Y, it will pay the citizens of Country A to specialize in producing X, which it is most best at producing, and buy all of commodity Y from Country B, which it is better at producing but does not have as great a comparative advantage as in making commodity X. In other words, each country should produce not just what it has an absolute advantage in making, but what it is most best at, or even least worst at, i.e. what it has a comparative advantage in producing."

The economics behind the NFL draft.

I don't even know where to put this. Apparently we're all supposed to be scared that the number of Muslims in the US has doubled since 9/11. Sleep with one eye open. There might be a Muslim under your bed. I wonder why they mention Mormons right after Muslims. It seems like it has to do solely with the numbers, not with Obama having been raised as a Muslim and Romney indisputably being Mormon. But the link to politics should be obvious

"Christianity and Catholicism both saw a small decrease in membership, while the number of Americans who don't identify with any organized religion grew considerably, the report showed."

I bet hardcore Christian conservatives are going nuts about both these numbers. This is an important reminder that nature isn't about survival of the strongest or the majority. It's domination by those who successfully reproduce the most.