Free kibbles

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Another ATF screw-up leads to mass deaths.

"In late 2009, the ATF was alerted to suspicious buys at seven gun shops in the Phoenix area. Suspicious because the buyers paid cash, sometimes brought in paper bags. And they purchased classic “weapons of choice” used by Mexican drug traffickers — semi-automatic versions of military type rifles and pistols. According to news reports several gun shops wanted to stop the questionable sales, but the Bureau encouraged them to continue."

This shows you how the worst people rise to the top. No matter how good the intentions of government agents at the bottom, the system is rigged to do evil. Some day enough people will come to understand the nature of government that we'll be able to put an end to it.

"“ATF agents have shared chilling accounts of being ordered to stand down as criminals in Arizona walked away with guns headed for Mexican drug cartels,” said Rep. [Darrell] Issa [R-Calif.]. “With the clinical precision of a lab experiment, the Justice Department kept records of weapons they let walk and the crime scenes where they next appeared. To agents’ shock, preventing loss of life was not the primary concern.”"

Hopefully those agents realized the true nature of government and resigned to do honest work.

TAX AND SPEND:

Puerto Rican government shows how to cut government.

""Our taxes were as high as they could be, actually much higher than most of the country. So what we've done is the opposite." Fortuno reduced corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent. He reduced individual income taxes. He privatized entire government agencies."Bring in the private sector," Fortuno said. "They will do a better job. They will do it cheaper."
Fortuno's advice for leaders who want to shrink the state: "Do what you need to do quickly, swiftly, like when you take off a Band-Aid. Just do it. And move on to better things.""

I've been advising this for decades. You can't cut government a little at a time. The media and the opposition will destroy your plan. You have to cut it dramatically in one fell swoop. None of this holding spending flat or cutting all agencies by a little or letting attrition reduce the government. That's crap. You need to abolish entire bureaucracies to allow those resources and responsibility for those so-called services to return the productive private sector. Of course the people who lost their jobs were mad. They'll get over it, and the entire country will quickly reap the benefits so they'll support more dramatic spending cuts in the future. Canada did something similar in the 1990s.

"Canada fired government workers, but unemployment didn't increase. In fact, it fell from 12 percent to 6 percent. Canadian unemployment is still well below ours. And the Canadian dollar rose from just 72 American cents to $1.02 today."

By firing those workers, they returned them to the product private sector where they created wealth instead of destroying it. The result is prosperity.

"Canada also raised some taxes. But the spending cuts were much bigger, six to one: agriculture was cut 22 percent; fisheries, 27 percent; natural resources, almost 50 percent."

This is a reminder that spending is the root problem. Taxes and debt are secondary problems caused by government spending. The Canadians addressed the root problem, and the Canadian people benefited because of it.

HEALTH CARE:

Five million seniors took advantage of one of Obamacare's new Medicare "free" services this year. Who would have guessed that people will take advantage of services purchased with money stolen from others. Like this is a good thing.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Study concludes CO2 rise won't cause catastrophic climate change. The frauds are going to explode.

It's good to know that many in the green movement are against geo-engineering too.

In the Libyan civil war that would have been over months ago had NATO not intervened, Libyan government claims latest NATO attacks killed three children. Of course they know how to manipulate the western press. We'll never know for sure if this true or not, but we can be certain NATO bombs are killing Libyans. NATO confirms it killed civilians, but this story acts like this is the first it's happened. I find that hard to believe.

"When the UN approved action, he was in the process of overrunning Benghazi, the country's second-largest city. US, French, and other officials were convinced massive reprisals would have been carried out against the citizenry once Qaddafi had regained the town (a completely unprovable assertion at this point)."

I'm glad to see that parenthetical comment.

"But the fact that NATO acknowledged missing a target and causing civilian deaths yesterday, and may have killed civilians in what it insists was a Qaddafi command post today, changes nothing. The generals who planned and are running this operation knew that killing civilians was inevitable. They told the politicians who signed on for the mission this fact. And now the inevitable has come to pass."

This proves that protecting civilians is not the motivation for the war.

This illustrates the nature of government:

"An investigation by the Associated Press has found a pattern of safety regulations being relaxed in order to keep aging nuclear power plants running. According to their investigation, when reactor parts fail or systems fall out of compliance with the rules, studies are conducted by the industry and government. The studies conclude that existing standards are 'unnecessarily conservative.' Regulations are loosened, and the reactors are back in compliance."

Anybody surprised by this doesn't understand the nature of government. I'm not taking any stand on the specific regulations. Maybe they were too conservative. But that's neither here nor there. The government would do this whether they were or weren't. This is regulatory capture, and that's what enables businesses to have such disastrous accidents like the the financial system crash, mine failures and the Gulf oil spill. Events like those would almost never happen in a free society because businesses, their insurance companies and third party voluntary regulators would all work together to avoid financial loss. Additionally, in a free market, older facilities would be mothballed and replaced with newer, safer, more inexpensive, more productive facilities.

Michael Mann produces another hockey stick. I'm sure it's just as corrupt as the original.

POLICE STATE:

How the government's war on men drove one man to self-immolation.

"As Baskerville points out in his horrifying study Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, "it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of family courts, and virtually every issue they adjudicate – divorce, custody, child abuse, child-support enforcement, even adoption and juvenile crime – depend on one overriding principle: remove the father." When a family is broken up, each child "becomes a walking bundle of cash" – not for the custodial parent, but for a huge and expanding population of tax-fattened functionaries who "adopt as their mission in life the practice of interfering with other people's children.""

The government is the enemy of families and marriage because it demands higher allegiance.

"The sinews of this system are the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OSCE) and its state-level affiliates. Some idea of the scope of the Regime's war on fathers is found in this comparison: In 2007, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the spearhead of the "war on drugs," employed a total of 4,600 armed field agents; the OSCE at the time boasted more than 60,000 enforcement agents, all of whom are permitted to carry firearms under the "Deadbeat Parents Enforcement Act.""

Wow. Funny how I didn't see this in the regular news.

POLITICS:

After blurting out incendiary comments, politicians are raking in the dough. Dubbed the moneyblurt, it's become a campaign strategy. Forget issues. Forget records. Forget rationality. Just appeal to the lowest common denominator. This is an example of how the worst people rise to the top of government until we're ruled by demagogues and strongmen.

Quick look at Rick Perry.

"Despite the widely held view that Texas is in strong financial shape, the state has severe debt overhang. Since Perry took over as governor in 2000, blame for the current debt situation can be place at his feet.
While not raising the sales tax in Texas (Texas has no income tax). He raised just about every other fee and tax he could think of, including a surcharge on traffic violations. He also borrowed money for road bonds and borrowed from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund."

This growth in spending and debt is a real problem. Perry as the Bilderberg candidate.

"While spewing Tea Party-style rhetoric about secession, shooting coyotes and courting the favor of Christian evangelicals, behind closed doors Perry has been quietly selling out Texas to globalist interests,auctioning off highways to foreign companies to turn them into profit-driven toll roads."

Auctioning off roads is a plus, not a minus.

LOCAL:

This headline read:

"Farm aid protects farms from volatility."

If you substitute "adapting to market conditions" for volatility, the reality becomes clear. Why would we want farms, or anything else, to be protected from adapting to the demands of the market?

MISC:

Jupiter Fitness Trainer.

Contrast of the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics.