Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Rising rents in Washington D.C. and falling rents in New York City highlight the transfer of wealth and power from the rest of the country to the federal government.

Obama says he wants to create jobs but his policies do just the opposite.

Speculators are betting on a food shortage.

"[Jim Rogers] says: 'Food inventories worldwide are at the lowest in decades as the world continues to consume more than it produces. We even have a shortage of farmers now since agriculture has been such a terrible business for three decades. We should all hope prices go higher or there may soon be a time when there will be little or no food at any price.'"

Higher prices will lead to greater supply of food, so as much as we don't like paying them, it beats starving. We need to abolish the Dept. of Agriculture.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

John Taylor and Peter Schiff blast Ben Bernanke for continuing to blame everybody but the Fed for the housing boom and bust.

"In his presentation to the National Economic Club, Bernanke claimed that ultra-low interest rates in the early in the Bush years were appropriate given the conditions at the time, and that they therefore did not contribute to the housing bubble. Instead, he laid blame squarely at the feat of an "under-regulated" financial sector which had designed and sold unconventional and exotic mortgage products, such as adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages. According to Ben, it was these irresponsible lenders (who he now hopes to regulate), not low interest rates, that caused the housing bubble.

There are two huge flaws in this line of reasoning. First, if these mortgages were such a problem, why didn't the Fed do something to rein in their use? When given an opportunity to speak about the widespread use of ARMs in congressional testimony, former chairman Greenspan had nothing but praise for these products. He claimed these offerings allowed savvy homebuyers to save money and better manage their personal balance sheets. At the time that Greenspan made these statements, Bernanke was serving as a Fed governor. From neither that position nor his later role as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors did Bernanke ever utter a scornful phrase about the mortgages he now condemns in hindsight.

The biggest issuers and insurers of ARMs were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of these Government-Sponsored Entities (GSE's) had policies that allowed for borrowers to qualify based solely on their ability to meet the initial loan payments, not the higher payments that would eventually kick in. Why didn't the Fed advise Congress to force the GSE's to adopt more prudent standards? Either they did not recognize these mortgages as problematic, in which case they are incompetent, or they did and remained silent, which is worse. In either case, if they lacked the foresight or political will to prevent this crisis, how can we expect them to protect us from the next?"

Schiff quotes an op-ed of his from 2004 in which he not only identified that the Fed was inflating the housing bubble, he also predicted government's reaction when it popped.

"That so many are currently opting for ARMs reflects a level of real estate speculation unparalleled in American history. Homebuyers have been lured into this foolish choice by... a Fed chairman desperate to keep the real estate bubble inflating. Unfortunately, the longer the Fed remains "patient" with regard to raising short-term interest rates to appropriate levels, the more homeowners that will be lured into the ARM time bomb.

The real losers in this whole fiasco are likely to be those who did not even participate in the mania. As over-leveraged borrowers walk away from properties in which they have no equity, the Fed will most likely attempt to bail out both debtors and bank depositors (and the government-sponsored enterprises that insured the loans) with the most inflationary monetary policy ever undertaken in the history of central banking. The savings of an entire generation will be wiped out, as it will have been squandered to perpetuate the biggest real estate and consumer debt bubbles of all time."

You can't get any more accurate than that, but this isn't rocket science. People bought more house than they could afford because low interest rates made them seem affordable and because the CRA and Fannie and Freddie promoted a zero down payment policy. I can't help but wonder if Greenspan and Bernanke did this on purpose. But then again, the Ivy League is the world's greatest facility for brainwashing stupid beliefs into smart people, and Bernanke's from Princeton. But Greenspan was a Randian, so that makes no sense. I think this is getting through to the public. We need to elect people who understand economics like Schiff.

Inflation in Syracuse.

EDUCATION:

Getting and education without loans by living in a van. This is another sign of our devolution. Many mistakenly think of government loans for education, and everything else, as a step forward for civilization. They are not. They mask the reality this student illustrates - these are steps backward for civilization. Families should be able to afford higher education without loans or having to live like this. The same with everything else. Americans could afford it before government got involved. Government is what makes things so expensive and drags us back toward the dark ages.

Government school known as Heroin High. Here you have the tragic intersection of two failed government policies: the government monopoly on education and the war on drugs.

HEALTH CARE:

The lunacy of forcing insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions.

Health care oppression includes a marriage penalty.

Special interests including unions buying influence in the final health care oppression bill. That's what happens when we give our power to aristocrats to sell.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Obama dictates strict new smog regulations that will cost billions to meet. At 50,000 a job, every billion government costs us annually is 20,000 jobs. So much for Obama wanting to create jobs. This puts us one step close to the collapse of our economy.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Why is Interpol operating in the US anyway? Are we unable to police ourselves? The entire Special Report panel thinks it's OK that Interpol gets the same privileges and immunities as diplomats from foreign countries. Interpol is not a foreign country. It's a police organization. It has no business setting up an office in the US, let alone getting immunities for doing so.

Police and government security agencies attract perverts so they can use their government power to carry out their perversions. Another pervert cop.

Now you can go to jail just for writing checks over $9,000 but under $10,000 regardless of intent.

"In the case presented below, laws require banks to report transactions of $10,000 or more to the IRS. The IRS claims the alleged offenders attempted to skirt around this law by writing checks just under $10,000 so as to avoid detection by authorities and to evade taxation on income. In legal terms, this violation is called "structuring." It was initially defined in the context of drug dealers who would use many small bank transactions to evade detection. The IRS has elected to use this structuring law to prosecute anyone whom they can make it appear has attempted to evade government detection and therefore, taxation.

Now it is used against a Christian ministry that had no intent to defraud, and individual checks for $9500 and $9600 were cherry-picked over a 2-year period from among weekly checks written to make payroll. The employees were paid in cash and the checks were sometimes written for amounts as low as $2000 or as high as $12,000. Checks written for $6200 and $7800 were not considered "egregious enough.""

The power to tax is the power to steal and ultimately the power to destroy.

WAR:

The CIA, narcotics and the underworld.

Boortz is almost right, but in a terribly wrong way. We are waging war against Middle Eastern Muslims. He seems happy about that, and he shouldn't be. It's a stupid war. It's a war we can't win. But we're waging it anyway. Instead of focusing on stopping the few hundred or maybe few thousand terrorists who are trying to kill us, we're waging war on 10s of millions of Arab Muslims. Where we used to have a few thousand enemies, we now have millions. In what world does that make sense? We have to stop waging war against every country that an al Qaeda cell pops up in and focus on the limited terrorist threat.

Double-agent who killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan is a doctor from Jordan. We're creating enemies all over the Middle East, and this has nothing to do with poverty. It's the result of using tanks and bombs to remake the Middle East in our image.

TSA agents illustrate the natural consequence of government power.

"A TSA agent was arrested on January 3rd in Terminal One at LAX, a source told NBCLA. He had just gotten off duty and was behaving erratically, saying, "I am god, I’m in charge."

Meanwhile, a TSA Internal Affairs investigation turned up evidence of LAX TSA agents using drugs at an after-hours party."

We've given millions of people like this life and death power over us, and soon we'll give even more of them power over our health care.

Here's a simulated picture of how passengers really look on the nude image scanner. If the already pervert-ridden TSA applies these scanners indiscriminately to air travels, our so-called airport security will be overtaken by perverts who don't give a damn about security, only seeing naked pictures of whoever gets them excited. These are digital images captured on a computer, and no matter what software is on there to keep them from being saved, it will be hacked and these pictures will end up on the internet. And this gun would be detected by a metal detector.

How about naked minds in addition to naked bodies? Now government wants to employ mind-reading devices for airport security.

How much you want to bet this whole Heathrow security scare is a huge overreaction to next to nothing. This article even calls it a hoax. Terrorists don't make threats before planes take off. This will turn out to be another case of letting terrorists on planes but coming down with the heavy fist of government on ordinary citizens. Every rule made by government is made to overrule the human judgment that built civilization. This is another way government is the enemy of civilization.

Guantanamo detainees don't want to be moved from Gitmo because their treatment is so good.

POLITICS:

Because Americans won't stop voting for the two anti-American parties, Bush and Republicans pushed the voters to the Democrats, and now Obama and the Democrats are pushing voters back to Republicans.

"Gallup polls for 2009 show: conservatives (40%) outnumbered both moderates (36%) and liberals (21%) across the nation in 2009."

We're like a ping-pong ball getting smacked from both sides, and we're too stupid to get out of the way and embrace freedom. Boortz hopes for split control of government. Gridlock is the best we can hope for, but we won't get gridlock even with split control. The two parties will compromise in their battle against each other but they'll never stop taking power from us. The best we can hope for as long as the two parties are in power is a moderately slower pace down the road to serfdom.

Chris Dodd resigning hurts Peter Schiff in the polls. That's why the party pressured him to resign.

LOCAL:

Miller Lane Hooters waitress in Hooters calender. She must make a ton of money there to drive all the way from Trenton. Three other Ohio girls are in it. That's a high percentage.

MISC:

It could be said that the advance of civilization depends on rejecting the principle that might makes right. Yet government is the ultimate human extension of the principle that might makes right. We all know that theft is wrong, but because the government has the monopoly on force - it has the ultimate might - the government steals from us in the form of taxes and tells us it legitimately has that power. Liberals are trying to push the idea that health care is a right which implies that government has the legitimate power to force people to labor against their will on behalf of others. That's slavery. So by accepting this position that government might makes right, we're devolving into a primitive society with theft and slavery at its core.

Boortz is making fun of Atlanta for coming to standstill over 1/2 inch of snow. But it's not just Atlanta. We had about 4 inches in Dayton, and you'd think it was some kind of catastrophe. When I was a kid, we didn't blink at four inches of snow. If wasn't a freezing rain and sleet storm or 12 inches, we went to school. And you never knew if you were going to school or not until you woke up in the morning and listened to the radio. Now weathermen forecast a few inches and schools are closing the night before regardless of what shows up. One of the measures of the advance of civilization from the time man got fire is his ability to overcome the weather. Civilization is devolving as the weather takes more control over our lives.

Here's my proposed constitutional amendment of the day:

"In addition to individual states' power to nullify federal laws already inherent in this Constitution, if one-third of the states determine to repeal any federal law, that law is repealed."

Let's empower the states to tear down this leviathan we've created.

Snowed in Britons flock to web service providing illicit affairs.

Trademarked smiley faces sugar cookies? How many mothers will they sue?

How the CIA uses drug smugglers, mobsters and labor leaders for political ends using the French Connection as an example.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

All bans are stupid, but banning yellow ribbons for soldiers is super-stupid.

TAX AND SPEND:

Apparently the FairTax guys are pushing to get Charlie Rangel to hold hearings on the FairTax. I don't think the FairTax is going anywhere this session, but I am afraid Congress will empower that bogus, bi-partisan tax hike panel they're talking about. The FairTax probably won't go anywhere next session either. The Republican aristocrats don't want to give up power any more than the Democrats aristocrats. And conservatives are no going to vote out their crappy Republican representatives even though they desperately need to.

This article about Democrats giving the IRS more power over the people illustrates how unlikely it is the FairTax will go anywhere.

The Heritage Foundation explains why stimulus boondoggles never help the economy.

China's centrally planned, empty city.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

A non-Austrian points out how artificially low interest rates created the housing bubble/credit crisis, but stops short of blaming the Fed which controls those interest rates.

"...since most real estate is purchased with borrowed funds, [push] up the price of property in both the commercial and residential sectors. Rising prices, in turn, disguised any potential problems with the borrowers, because if they ran into cash-flow problems, they could always refinance, or sell. Everyone was getting bad signals from the market, and outlandish purchases looked almost rational."

It's that simple. We've become so accustomed to the Fed manipulating interest rates, we never stop to wonder if those rates are giving us bad information. Just like when Nixon put price controls on gas, people never stopped to think that the price was giving us wrong information. The result was gas shortages and gas lines. We've evolved in a system of economic freedom for a hundred thousand years or more. Our genes designed us to believe and act on price information. When prices are manipulated, we make bad decisions because of the bad information.

HEALTH CARE:

The Special Report panel wondered why Obama talked about the terrorist again today. It's because he's distracting us from the Congress's health care oppression meetings. Obama wants the American people talking about terrorism instead of beating up Congress. Don't pull a Special Report and fall for this tactic.

I don't understand this big deal about Obama promising to televise health care debates. The executive and legislative branches are a co-equal branches of government. The president has no power to force Congress to televise anything, and Obama knew it at time he made those promises. The press stupidly failed to point that out during the campaign, and they're stupidly failing to point it out now. His promises were bogus and intended to mislead, like every other promise he made. Anybody who thought the president had the power to make that happen is an idiot and should never vote again. Anybody who thought Obama wanted that to happen is an idiot and should never vote again.

Now Republicans are talking about cameras and transparency. Where was that when they controlled both houses and the presidency? Their complaints are as disingenuous as the Democrats' complaints were when Republicans were in power. They're all just playing political games for their personal gain.

This government run health care is the future for all Americans.

"Burrows said Medicaid insisted on spending $8,000 for a large medical device to do essentially the same task that the iPod and software can do for $375. Aside from the expense difference, the iPhone is much easier to use."

We can all look forward to bigger, bulkier, more expensive, less capable health care services that are rationed.

ENERGY:

Interior secretary makes it harder to drill for oil on "public" lands. What are public lands? How did I become a partial owner of some land. I sure didn't voluntary buy a piece of land. I wonder if somebody can point me to exactly which plot is mine. Is it an acre? Is it a square foot? This is government land, not public land. It's socialized land.

""We don't believe we ought to be drilling anywhere and everywhere," Salazar said at a news conference. "We believe we need a balanced approach and a thoughtful approach" that allows development of oil and gas leases on public lands while also protecting national parks, endangered species and municipal watersheds."

He's saying we need a centrally planned approach. Like that has worked so well anywhere else. It's not his decision. The federal government has no business owning land.

Man calls 911 after his home is broken into only to be arrested, tried and convicted because his wife owned firearms and he had been convicted of a felony as a teenager. That's not how I understand the law, but courts don't care about that. The burglar is still at large.

WAR:

Admiral Mullen says America won't bomb or invade Yemen but reports US special forces are already there training Yemeni forces. Sounds like Vietnam. Mullen and the military doesn't make these decisions. Civilians do.

The Obama administration is using CIA resources to track climate change.

"The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets -- including spy satellites and other classified sensors -- to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change ... [this project] has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends ..."

Wow and double wow. I guess the CIA agents were too busy tracking climate change to inform the FBI about the underwear bomber. If you ever doubted it's impossible to take the politics out of government bureaucracies and programs, this should settle it once and for all. Partisan politics poisons everything government touches. There's no such thing as good government. Counting on government for security is foolish. On the plus side, at least the CIA isn't spying on us with those resources.

Obama's counter-terrorism chief goes on ski vacation after underwear bomber incident. More proof that government agents, bureaucrats one and all, aren't working on our behalf. They're working on their own behalf like anybody else. But no security company in the private sector would have allowed this guy to go on vacation during the analysis after an attack pertaining to the company's business. It would be unthinkable.

An appeals court says that the government can hold prisoners of war in Guantanamo as long as the war is going on as long as the government can show that the prisoners are tied to al Qaeda. That's a reasonable sounding decision except that the Court has no Constitutional power to interfere in the waging of war. Can you imagine if every Nazi and Japanese prisoner of war we held in WWII had been able to go to court to challenge their imprisonment? Our criminal justice system would have collapsed. It would become a strategy enemies used against us. The Founding Fathers understood that so they gave the Court zero power to interfere with the waging of war, but that doesn't stop our aristocrats from grabbing power anyway.

Blackwater settles lawsuits over death of Iraqi civilians.

More prisoners of war released from Guantanamo rejoin the fight. Who would expect otherwise? What do you think Nazis and Japanese POWs would have done if we had released them from prisoner of war camps during WWII?

Newark TSA guard placed on administrative leave after allowing security breach. I guess that's a start. Perspective: this breach was not a security threat, yet the entire airport was shut down for hours.

Yemeni government warns US government that military action in Yemen would strengthen al Qaeda. Of course it would.

POLITICS:

I don't begrudge Joe Biden time to go visit his ailing mother, but there are 120 million American workers who don't have that opportunity. Politicians want us to believe they are doing the most important work in the world. They want us to believe that they're working on our behalf. They want us to believe they're sacrificing on our behalf. If that were true, Joe Biden would be at work like normal Americans. The problem isn't that Biden is visiting his ailing mother. The problem is we keep fooling ourselves into believing politicians are working our behalf, not their own.

MISC:

A grassroots driven contract from America. Apparently the FairTax leads the list of ideas.

2010 census asks if a person is "negro". I wonder if that was the case in 2000.

Rebellious Ivory coast city, freed from the burden of government, thrives.

"Soroland may not be a breakaway zone, but for seven years the inhabitants of this zone have got used to living without government taxes, customs charges and even water and electricity bills.

Reunification - already under way - will be a challenge to complete.

Hussein Doumbia is one of many local business leaders who have learnt to profit from this vast black market zone.

"Things are a lot cheaper than in the south - we see that people from the south often come here to stock up, above all the military who come for all their electronics - mobile phones, DVDs, televisions, everything," he says."

So they have plenty of services despite no taxes, and everything is much cheaper so commerce thrives. Duh.

"When civil servants fled south, volunteer teachers, like Ali Ouattara, stepped forward to try to keep things going.

"We didn't want the kids to become child soldiers, so we tried to give them something. This is how we became teachers," says Mr Ouattara, who lost his job at the university at the start of the crisis.

Most of the volunteer teachers had limited qualifications and no experience of teaching.

At first they had almost no resources as the schools had been ransacked and the lawlessness meant they were scared to discipline their pupils, who were sometimes armed.

Gradually with contributions from parents, the ad-hoc schools helped save a generation of children, and in some years the rebel zone got better results in national exams than the government zone."

So volunteer schools with untrained teachers do as well or better than government schools. Duh.

"UN observation points along the former ceasefire line have already been dismantled but the most delicate part of reunification - handing over guns and control of taxes - still seems a long way off.

And, seven years without traffic lights, taxes or utility bills develops habits that are hard to budge."

The got along just fine without traffic lights, and they don't want to pay taxes or give up their guns and freedom. Duh. Government is the enemy of human advancement. By definition, government restricts freedom and therefore human advancement and the advance of civilization. But it's important to note this is not no government. It's a tiny government. There's no such thing as no government - that's just code for a government of warlords or tribal chiefs or whatever you want to call them.

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Barney Frank considers unconstitutional Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be public policy instruments.

ECONOMY:

Between the financial crisis and global cooling, 2010 could bring a food crisis to the US as well as the rest of the world.

"Early in 2009, the supply and demand in agricultural markets went badly out of balance. The world experienced a catastrophic fall in food production as a result of the financial crisis (low commodity prices and lack of credit) and adverse weather on a global scale. Meanwhile, China and other Asian exporters, in an effort to preserve their economic growth, were unleashing domestic consumption long constrained by inflation fears, and demand for raw materials, especially food staples, exploded as Chinese consumers worked their way towards American-style overconsumption, prodded on by a flood of cheap credit and easy loans from the government.

Normally food prices should have already shot higher months ago, leading to lower food consumption and bringing the global food supply/demand situation back into balance. This never happened because the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), instead of adjusting production estimates down to reflect decreased production, adjusted estimates upwards to match increasing demand from china. In this way, the USDA has brought supply and demand back into balance (on paper) and temporarily delayed a rise in food prices by ensuring a catastrophe in 2010."

Look for Al Gore and his cronies to jump on this as the new reason to create one world government.

Global demand helps US companies profit.

TAX AND SPEND:

Baby boomers begin retiring this year. This just piles on our collapsing economy.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Since Bernanke failed to detect and avoid the housing bubble, why would we trust him to detect and prevent the next bubble (the bubble he's creating right now)?

EDUCATION:

Is the federal government covering up a study showing its Head Start program isn't working?

HEALTH CARE:

I couldn't help busting out laughing at loud when Nancy Pelosi said this health care bill is the most transparent piece of legislation anybody in Congress had ever been involved in. That might have been the most transparent lie anybody in Congress has ever told. It's just stunning to me that the American people continue to vote for these psychopaths year after year after year. Their only talent is the ability to lie to the American people and get away with it.

As I pointed out, Obamacare will stifle innovation. Fortunately, it seems unlikely the Senate will pass as oppressive a bill as the House passed, so this won't drag us into a dark ages of health care as I feared earlier in the process, but stifling innovation will make Americans and everybody else less healthy.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Climate change happens.

"Over time climates do change. As author Howard Bloom wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month, in the past two million years there have been 60 ice ages, and in the 120,000 years since the development of modern man, "we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings," and of course this was before--long before--"smokestacks and tail pipes."

In our earth's history there has been both global warming and global cooling. In Roman times, from 200 B.C. to A.D. 600, it was warm; from 600 to 900 came the cold Dark Ages; more warming from 900 to 1300; and another ice age from 1300 to 1850. Within the past century, the earth has warmed by 0.6 degree Celsius, but within this period we can see marked shifts: cooling (1900-10), warming (1910-40), cooling again (1940 to nearly 1980), and since then a little warming. The Hadley Climatic Research Unit global temperature record shows that from 1980 to 2009, the world warmed by 0.16 degree Celsius per decade."

But Al Gore's disciples won't let facts get in the way of their agenda.

Spain's attempt to force the people to adopt expensive green energy, supposedly creating green jobs, has backfired as unemployment among the young has skyrocketed from 17.5% to 42.9%.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

The double-standard given to cops who kill innocents versus innocents who kill cops in self-defense.

WAR:

I'm a little surprised to see Cato advocating a real war on terror. They're usually overly pacifist. But in this case, they're wrong. The war part of the war on terror should be ended. We uprooted the military level threat from al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2002. Now al Qaeda is just isolated groups of cells and not a military level threat. Intelligence estimates say there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan and at most a couple hundred in Yemen. That's not a military force. Because we're still legally at war with al Qaeda, the underwear bomber should be treated as an illegal enemy combatant, he should be waterboarded to obtain information from him. But because freedom cannot survive a state of perpetual, Orwellian war, we should end the war and treat future captured terrorists as criminals. By continuing to expand this war into country after country and killing more and more civilians, we're creating more enemies than we take out. We should use intelligence personnel and mercenaries to take out al Qaeda in an intelligence war, kind of like the Cold War intelligence war. If al Qaeda coalesces back into a military level threat, we should declare war on it again, destroy that threat with the military again, then end it again.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The Iranians don't want to talk to John Kerry, and neither does anybody else.

POLITICS:

Cato flunks Obama on his first year.

When the going gets tough, hyper-corrupt Chris Dodd retires. Typical bully. He can dish it out, but he can't take it. This man deserves the contempt of every American. I hope he has to live out the rest of his life under rock. And I hope his ultra-corrupt buddies like Barney Frank, John Murtha, Harry Reid, Ted Stevens, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel and Lord Geithner and all professional politicians have to join him before it's all over.

MEDIA:

Chris Mathews calls radical socialist Saul Alinsky "our hero".

MISC:

Are Barney Frank and the Democrats planning to force states to register everybody they can to vote? This might push the secessionist movement over the top. The process of registering to vote is there to insure that only people who are engaged in the political process vote. Voting is already too easy in America. If we want more people to vote, we need to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government because right now everybody feels powerless because they are virtually powerless.

Google pushes for net neutrality. This is the way it always is. The biggest players in the market push for regulations because those regulations protect them from competitors, enriching them at our expense. Regulations are a transfer of wealth from consumers to the big corporations.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

More than 40,000 new laws go into effect in 2010. That's 40,000 ways we lose freedom in just one year. Calling the US the land of the free is a joke.

John McLaughlin says freedom is overrated. I'm sure it is to people like McLaughlin. That's how our government became so oppressive, we're declining as a civilization and we're facing economic collapse.

Famous prognosticator Gerald Celente calls the Tea Party rallies last April 15th, the Forth of July and the August town halls the first three shots of the second American revolution.

"Though in its early stages, the “Second American Revolution” is underway. Yet, what we forecast will become the most profound political trend of the century – the trend that will change the world – is still invisible to the same experts, authorities and pundits who didn’t see the financial crisis coming until the bottom fell out of the economy.

Trend Forecast: Conditions will continue to deteriorate. The global economy is terminally ill. The recession is in a brief remission, not the early stages of recovery. Cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing brought on an economic crisis that cannot be cured by monetary and fiscal policies that promote more cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing.

Nevertheless, Washington will continue to intervene, tax and exert control. Protests will escalate and riots will follow."

It's amazing how badly the aristocrats are misreading the American people.

Maybe the real reason government is quashing check cashing places is they allow Americans to conduct financial transactions out of the view of government.

SOCIALISM:

Ron Paul tells it like it is.

"The tragic reality is that this fatally flawed, but widely accepted, economic school of thought called Keynesianism has made our country more socialist than capitalist. While the private sector in the last ten years has experienced a roller coaster of booms and busts and ended up, nominally, about where we started in 2000, government has been steadily growing, because Keynesians told politicians they could get away with a tax, spend and inflate policy. They even encouraged it! But we cannot survive much longer if government is our only growth industry."

This is why the aristocrats of both parties fear Ron Paul.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Muslims accused of insulting British soldiers refuse to stand in front of judge. So what? The story here is that these men were arrested for insulting British soldiers. The second story is the little Napoleon on the bench threatened to charge them with contempt of court for not standing.

France unveils new law forbidding couples from using insulting names during domestic disputes. Our civilization has gone insane. Al Qaeda doesn't have to attack us. Bin Laden should just sit back and laugh at us as we commit suicide.

ECONOMY:

It looks like the housing market is falling again.

TAX AND SPEND:

We should take the power to raise the debt ceiling from the federal government. We should demand government use best accounting practices from the private sector and require a vote of 2/3 of the states to ratify any increase in federal government spending.

Taxpayers will lose $400 billion on Fannie and Freddie bailouts while we pay their socialist CEOs $6 million.

So-called House financial reform bill authorizes $4 trillion to prop up failed banks in the future. That's $4 trillion taken from taxpayers by coercion (since it's the Fed, it's taken by stealth, not violence). That's not reform. That's oppression. We need to call this bill the financial oppression bill.

"Don’t worry, this time regulators will have better tools. Six months after being created, the council will report to Congress on “whether setting up an electronic database” would be a help. Maybe they’ll even get to use that Internet thingy. "

That's funny.

"Since Congress isn’t cutting jobs, why not add a few more. The bill calls for more than a dozen agencies to create a position called “Director of Minority and Women Inclusion.” People in these new posts will be presidential appointees. I thought too-big-to-fail banks were the pressing issue. Turns out it’s diversity, and patronage. "

That's twisted. I have a better idea. Completely extract government from our economy and empower the only effective regulatory regime ever implemented - fierce competition.

US government pensions face $2 trillion deficit. What's $2 trillion to a genius like Obama?

Government is making it a lot more expensive to die after this year by reinstating the death tax. Only government would punish people for dying.

Don't give Obama any ideas.

"British taxpayers are helping to fund basket-weaving and slapstick acting workshops for young people across Europe.

The projects, which include meetings about folk dancing and even a scheme to promote afternoon siestas, are part of an £800million EU programme to help people aged 13-30 'feel European'."

I'm sure Obama would love to spend our tax money making us feel more European. Or Asian. Or South American. Anything but American.

EDUCATION:

While there are good ideas here, I'm not so sure sitting back and allowing kids to progress at their own pace and test themselves is the best idea. You might end up with 18 year olds who are great at baseball but can't read. Not every kid will excel in a free form environment. There needs to be different schools with different approaches to the meet the needs of different children and their families so that as many kids as possible can excel. That can only be achieved in a free market for education.

Government schools produce Orwellian proles. Hey. I went to a government school.

HEALTH CARE:

The Mayo Clinic in Arizona stops accepting Medicare patients because the government pays so little. Coming soon to a hospital near you. Coming after that is a law mandating hospitals can't turn away Medicare patients followed by the bankrupting of hospitals and mass retirements of doctors. Our government will make our health care system as bad as Britian's NHS soon enough.

Obamacare will create shortages and rationing will be the result.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Wind chill map shows super-cold US.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Czech government allows citizens to grow up to five marijuana plants. Allows? Up to five? This isn't exactly liberty, but it's a step in the right direction. We're less free in America.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Another Washington DC cop pulls a gun at a snowball fight. We created these monsters by giving them way too much power.

WAR:

Mark Steyn calls Janet Napolitano, Janet Incompetano. I wish I had thought of that.

I don't blame Nigerians for being upset at special security screenings targeted at all Nigerians and travelers from other countries indiscriminately. Punishing everybody for the actions of a few doesn't work in elementary school or anywhere else. It breeds resentment against the punisher. The underwear bomber's behavior should have singled him out for a special security screening. Others exhibiting non-terrorist behavior should not be punished. This is the kind of stuff private sector security would intelligently implement. You can bet these oppressive new policies will influence more Muslims to attack Americans.

According to Victor Davis Hansen, one third of terrorist attacks on the US since 9/11 have happened since Obama took office. He wants us to believe that Obama is to blame, and he's probably right. Contradicting his own rhetoric, Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan even though we defeated al Qaeda there, he's escalated attacks on Pakistan, he's leaving US troops in Iraq even though we defeated al Qaeda there and the world is a more dangerous place because of it. I think it's funny how Hansen assumes the terrorist are attacking us because of Obama's conciliatory rhetoric instead of our policy of invading other countries, killing their people and propping up corrupt governments. Our policies have fomented the jihad movement against the US over the years, and that's why we're seeing more attacks. On the flip-side, putting terrorists into civilian court dramatically reduces the consequences for attacking Americans. Obama's harming us from both ends.

Is this a ticking time-bomb scenario? On the one hand, we've reserved waterboarding for the most knowledgeable terrorists. On the other hand, that's stupid. If we have good reason to think a terrorist has information that will help save American lives, we should waterboard that terrorist to get that information then try him for war crimes in a military tribunal. This isn't that difficult to understand. We'll never win and end this war if we keep confusing war criminals with civilian criminals.

"We wouldn't be faced with this problem had the President decided to label Abdulmutallab an enemy combatant, thus depriving him of most of the rights enumerated in the Constitution. But in March of last year, the Justice Department announced that it would do away with the term and its legal implications, all in its quest to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. By placing Abdulmutallab under the purview of our criminal justice system, we no longer treat him as an intelligence asset in a broader war against a declared enemy, but rather as a defendant presumed innocent, whose heretofore-unavailable "rights" to due process and a fair and speedy trial take precedence over all else.

We never gave these rights to Nazi saboteurs captured during World War II; after extracting what useful information they possessed, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered that they be tried by a military tribunal, and they were subsequently sent to the electric chair. It's difficult to see why today's enemy combatants are not treated the same way."

That might be the only thing Roosevelt got right.

TSA stops Joan Rivers from returning to America from Costa Rica. Another aspect of the damage done by government is it forces people to turn off their brains and follow rules instead. This may be another reason for the dumbing down of America.

Introduction to Yemen calls it the Afghanistan of Arabia. We're going to need to know a lot more about Yemen and fast.

"Thanks to the ineffective pyrotechnic device in his underpants, the wannabe Nigerian jihadist has and will inflict billions of dollars in security costs on the United States, and disrupt its vital air travel – all for a $2,000 economy airplane ticket."

This is another one of those poingant pieces of truth in an elegant package. Because our security forces are a socialist monopoly, the terrorists don't even have to kill any Americans to win. They can count on blundering socialists to do their work for them, wasting billions of dollars of our wealth punishing Americans in a knee-jerk response.

"Yemeni Shia and Sunnis are at scimitar’s drawn. The nation has deep tribal and clan divisions and rivalries. The south and north are at odds, with talk of secession by Aden. An assortment of anti-western militant groups has found a home in lawless Yemen. On top of all this, Shia Houthi tribesmen on Yemen’s undemarcated northern border are battling Saudi forces, backed by US air power. Yemen’s warlike tribes hate any outside authority, starting with their own government."

If the Yemenis hate outside authority, they'll hate al Qaeda, maybe worse than the Iraqi Sunnis. It sounds like al Qaeda in Yemen will have plenty of natural enemies that would hunt them down and kill them for the right price. It sounds like we've been engaged in a civil war in Yemen, propping up an unpopular dictator, and that's what prompted al Qaeda in Yemen to strike back at us. I imagine Yemen's wikipedia page is going to be updated. The first article calls the leader a military dictator. Wikipedia calls the ruler a president and the country a republic. It's hard to reconcile the reports that Yemen is a failed state with wikipedia's claims it's a fast growing democracy. I bet the latter is a formality and the former reality. There's a substantial community of Yemenis in Detroit.

Somebody should ask why terrorists are attacking the US and Europe but not China or Russia so much. There are independence movements of Muslims from China and Russia, but nothing like al Qaeda's attack on us. It's not our way of life. It's not our wealth. It's that we're pushing around Arab Muslims.

A week and a half after our security services allowed the underwear bomber on the plane, Obama strongly criticizes intelligence failures. A more cynical person might think this was timed to distract Americans from Democrats' final health care oppression negotiations.

FOREIGN POLICY:

How are Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad pushing us? I don't see the Russian navy threatening the US coast. I don't see Russian troops on our borders or Venezuelan or Iranian. But they all see US troops on their borders. The nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran is real and we should denuclearize the North Korean peninsula and stop Iran from obtaining nukes, but this idea that in addition to the nuclear threat from Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad, thugs are threating the US is a fantasy. We should not be the world's policeman. South Korea can take care of itself. Europe can take care of itself. Japan can take care of itself. Columbia can take care of itself. Blaming Obama's peacenik approach for the Fort Hood shooter is irresponsible too. The Fort Hood shooter was upset that we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, not that we weren't being forceful enough. Hansen sees the world through aggression-colored glasses. Apparently his world is only happy if the US is aggressively threatening the rest of the world.

POLITICS:

Recognizing futility, Democrats dropping out of races.

Democrats House member switches to Republican over Obamacare. Another reminder that all these aristocrats care about is their own power. Neither principle nor what's best for the people and the country play a role in our government.

I hope Obama and Democrats are driving the country to the right. I hope they're driving it towards freedom. Bush pushed the country left. Obama's pushing the country right. Another thing the two parties have in common is that the American people are always moving away from them, yet we continue to elect them every election.

"Nearly three-fourths of those surveyed prefer that Congress do nothing to reform health care rather than take final action on either the Senate or House versions of Obamacare."

This is a good point to make to our representatives.

Republicans heading home and taking credit for the economic impact of pork projects in Obama's stimulus boondoggle. These Republicans were elected by people claiming to support limited government.

Republicans mount serious primary challenge to Ron Paul. They hate him. He makes every other Republican look like the corrupt, government-loving statist they are.

MISC:

Tea Party activists planning national strike on Jan. 20. This is another way for Atlas to shrug. I hope this goes over big, but it doesn't sound like it will.

Washington's 10 most corrupt politicians. Naturally, they're the most powerful too. Nine Democrats and one Republican. Somebody is going to claim bias.

Limiting toilets to 1.6 gallons per flush is a de-evolution of society.

"The toilet manufacturers, meanwhile, are all touting their latest patented innovations as a reason for the reduced hysteria surrounding the toilet disaster. I suspect something different. We have all gotten used to a reduced standard of living — just as the people living in the Soviet Union became accustomed to cold apartments, long bread lines, and poor dental care. There is nothing about our standard of living that is intrinsic to our sense of how things ought to be. Let enough time pass and people forget things.
...
Indoor plumbing since the time of the ancient world has been a sign of prosperity and human well-being. Indoor toilets that flow into a sewer have been around since 1500 B.C., but every new settlement of people in a new area presents the problem anew. In rural America, indoor toilets weren't common until the 1930s. That today everyone assumes them to be part of life is a testament to the creative power of economic progress.
What we have in these regulations passed since the 1990s is therefore a step backwards from a central aspiration of mankind to dispose of human waste in the best possible way. We have here an instance of government having forced society into a lower stage of existence.
Government has reduced us as people to the point that we either have to enter the black market to get good sewage or come to terms with living amidst periodic spreading of human waste all over our domestic and commercial environment.
Again, this is wholly unnecessary. Capitalism achieved something spectacular in waste disposal. Government came along and took it away from us. That's the story in a nutshell.
...
[T]here was wisdom in those old designs. The environmentalists didn't account for the present reality in which people typically flush twice, three times, or even four times during a single toilet event. Whether or not this ends up using more or less in the long run is entirely an empirical question, but let us just suppose that the new microtanks do indeed save water. In the same way, letting people die of infections conserves antibiotics, not brushing teeth conserves toothpaste, and not using anesthesia during surgery conserves needles and syringes."

That's a fact. We are far too accommodating of the restrictions of freedom that are unraveling civilization forced on us by government.

Trends Research 2010 predictions are not pretty and include an economic crash, protectionism, a depression era return to elegance in fashion and art, increased terrorism in the US and survivalism goes mainstream.

Free kibbles

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

A friendly reminder that if an Interpol agent breaks into your house or robs you on the street, he or she has been given full immunity by Obama. Have a nice day.

WAR:

Yemeni forces kill two al Qaeda agents. The fragile government of Yemen doesn't want the US dropping bombs on their country, so they're trying to take out al Qaeda. That's a good thing. Saudi Arabia is bombing al Qaeda strongholds in Yemen.

Double agent working for al Qaeda kills seven CIA agents in suicide bomb attack.

This article from Ann Coulter about airport security is subpar, but it reminds me of a movie I dreamed about making last night. Somebody should make a farcical movie about Osama bin Laden flying to Miami on al Qaeda airlines and going through customs with a standard yuppie roll-behind bag marked with a nuclear warning label. He'd jump from flight to flight in airports all over the US getting through customs by warning guards against being racist, threatening Israel and using Jedi mind tricks. Normal Americans would scream that Osama bin Laden is trying to nuke America and try to stop him, but the guards would taser, beat and neck pinch them and high-five each other. American Muslims would try to stop him, but bin Laden would shoot them before getting on the next plane. Finally some mild-mannered house-wife would spot bin Laden right as he tried to set off his bomb in a New York airport, and she would beat him to death, turn his face into hamburger with blood and meat flying all over. It couldn't be too campy. In the end she would be arrested and convicted for murder and sentenced to life in prison. Feel free to take this idea and run with it. If you get rich, you might want to buy me a beer, set me up for life or something in between.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Chinese companies banned from doing business in the US for selling weapons to Iran continue to do business in the US. Corruption is king. Government edicts can't change human nature.

MISC:

Car dealers using intellectual property arguments to attack competing service centers. IP is spinning out of control, and it's likely to disappear because of it.

Kepler finds five new exoplanets and seems destined to find Earth like planets in the future.

Demand for android leaps ahead as demand for I-Phone falls. Maybe I'm getting the hang of predicting these things. Finally.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Another example of Atlas shrugging.

"Signs of why recovery will be slow and long time in coming: The Sunday Denver Post in article (p. 6K, 01/03/2010) on increasing foreclosures and declining prices in the luxury home market quotes Edie Marks, long one of the Denver areas most successful luxury market specialists, "The people that have money are sitting in kind of a cocoon - they're not making decisions because they're concerned about what's coming down in terms of taxation and vindictiveness against the wealthy.""

This fits right into Obama's plan. He's going to demonize the rich people for not spending their money, accuse them of hoarding, and use that as motive for taking more money from them by force. Obama is counting on the people behaving rationally and punishing them for it as part of his plan to collapse the US economy. We've already seen the start of this with his attacks on bankers for not making loans even though every policy he pushes incentivizes them to not make loans.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

I thought everybody who knew anything about the second amendment understood that the real goal of gun control is for government to gain power over citizens and additionally for federal gun control laws, for the federal government to gain power over the states.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Embattled Bernanke defends the low interest rates that created the recently burst economic bubble, blaming lack of regulations instead. When will people stop pretending this guy is a free market advocate? Bernanke is a classic, fatally flawed central planner. Like all of them, he can't admit his mistakes.

""We still have much to learn about how best to make monetary policy and to meet threats to financial stability in this new era," he said."

One of the identifying characteristics of a central planners is they always claim we have to learn something new in a new era. In the mean time, the private sector just seamlessly transitions through every human advance with hardly a hiccup. I have little confidence in his commitment to raise interest rates to combat bubbles since he never did it before and he's working to inflate another bubble now.

"The Fed has pushed overnight bank-lending rates to near zero and has said it expects to keep them there for at least several more months because the economy remains weak and inflation low. Some private economists and officials in Asia and Europe have warned this could plant the seeds for a new bubble, though Fed officials have argued that market gains in the U.S. haven't gotten out of hand."

What does "out of hand" mean? Like all central planners, Bernanke thinks he's a god who knows the "proper" way things should be regardless of what the people working in a system of voluntary exchange want.

HEALTH CARE:

The FDA is much like airport security - oppressing good drugs and allowing bad ones through - for the same reasons airport security oppresses normal passengers but allows would-be terrorists through. Monopolies are bad. Socialist institutions are bad. Socialist monopolies are the worst. Government is the common denominator among all our health care problems.

Cato lists several good reasons Republicans absolutely should not have compromised on a less damaging health care bill. If they had compromised, too many people would have acquiesced and considered this a fiat accompli. We don't need to slow down on the road to serfdom, we need to turn around and head back toward freedom, and we still have that opportunity on health care because Republicans unanimously rejected the Democrat bill. Contrary to what Cato suggests, their opposition was not principled, but it was the best tactic for them and for the country. Unfortunately, those two things rarely coincide.

"But Republicans never put forward an alternative health proposal."

I'm not putting any confidence in the original essay referenced here since that statement is an outright lie, and I don't imagine it has any purpose other than slandering Republicans. We have tons of reasons to despise Republicans. We don't need to make any up.

GLOBAL WARMING:

The global warming scam has turned into a religion, but I hadn't heard there was a green bible trying to infect Christianity. I'm not about to link it.

A study commissioned by Al Gore shows that the worst case scenario for sea level rise by the end of the century is a meter, nowhere near the 20 feet Gore claims. Unless something natural changes, it won't be near that much.

WAR:

Before Christmas, most Americans probably never heard of Yemen, let alone be able to identify it on a map. But after the underwear bomber, who was radicalized in the UK, many are ready to go to war with it over "several hundred" al Qaeda members. UK PM Gordon Brown and Obama are scapegoating Yemen. Al Qaeda in Yemen is no more a threat to our embassies today than they were two weeks ago. Help the locals find the al Qaeda people and help the locals deal with them. We don't need to make 20 million enemies by attacking Yemen because of several hundred al Qaeda.

Because government holds a socialist monopoly on airport security, it blunders around like a headless zombie trying to solve its airport security problems that it forces on the rest of us, ordering pat downs for all citizens from 14 high risk nations as if all citizens from those nations have been reported by their father as potential terrorists, have been added to a terrorist watch list, ask to avoid the normal passport check procedures, buy one-way tickets with cash and carry no luggage, and strap bombs in their underwear. Government always punishes citizens for its failures.

Great subheading on this article:"After $40 billion in spending, amateurs are still getting on planes with explosives."

POLITICS:

I agree that libertarians, especially the Libertarian Party, has done a terrible job convincing Americans to support freedom. Their approach has been wrong all along. It's one of the reasons I started this blog. Libertarianism is the most attractive political philosophy to the populists, and that's the way to sell it. Americans of all political persuasions are unhappy about how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and libertarianism is the only philosophy that can solve that problem because the only reason the rich can exploit the rest of us is government. Not only does liberty raise people out of poverty, it makes for a more egalitarian society. As long as we allow government to control our power, aristocrats will sell our power to the highest bidder because its the only thing of value they have and the buyers will use it against us. It doesn't matter who's in power. It can't be any other way. The only solution is to take our power back from government so the aristocrats can't sell it.

The author makes a good point about the perception of freedom. I think most Americans would agree that freedom means freedom from coercion, and I think most Americans would say they are free. A simple thought experiment explodes that misconception. Imagine you sent a letter to the IRS saying since you're a free person, you aren't going to make your voluntary tax payments. Imagine what would happen next. Is that freedom? Taxes are inconsistent with freedom. So is every other government mandate and regulation.

Republican and Democrat aristocrats are engaged in a contest to see who can seize more power from the people for themselves than the other party so they can advance their careers and the careers of their cronies. That's all American politics is. Everything else is a smokescreen. The only problem our aristocrats are trying to solve is how to advance their own careers over their adversaries.

MISC:

The internet is running out of IPv4 addresses. These addresses for the foundation of all internet traffic. If government controlled this protocol, users would experience problems for years because of this. But because government has little power over the internet as of right now, most users will never see a problem. IPv6 is already in place for the transition.

Avatar creators are rolling in dough. They should track movies by movie-goers as well as money. I wonder what the most watched movie at the theater was. You could adjust those numbers for population and determine what the most popular movies were. Of course there's a lot more competition for our entertainment dollars today than 70 years ago.

Mike Brown better not let Mike Zimmer go. I'd be surprised if he wanted a head coaching job right now. My biggest concern would be that he wanted to leave the place where his wife died.

Saudi Arabia to execute Lebanese TV host for sorcery. And we sold these guys F-16s.

Government is crushing our freedom to assemble and protest.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Government employees think the economy is just fine. Duh. Government is taking unprecedented amounts of money from us by force and giving raises to government employees. Yes, John Edwards, there really is two Americas.

Expect government to come after Roth IRAs.

ENERGY:

Will thorium replace uranium as nuclear fuel?

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Now government is waging war on distracted driving as another excuse to take power from us by force.

WAR:

Terrorists kill 95 at Pakistan volleyball game. It's hard to imagine these terrorists have any sympathy from anybody. The Sunnis in Iraq turned on them because of these kinds of attacks. The same will happen in Pakistan and Afghanistan if we stop creating terrorists by our presence there.

Obama acknowledges we're fighting a war against al Qaeda, maybe Congress's declaration of war gave it away, but he still plans to try al Qaeda's underwear bomber and others in civilian court. How does that make sense?

"“The reality is there are Islamists who are bent on the destruction of the United States and the western world,” says Mr. Clizbe. “Whether the face we show on the evening news is George W. Bush, Bill Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama makes absolutely no difference to them. They care not a wit who is the head of the United States.”"

The reality is Islamic extremists cannot possibly destroy America or the western world. Only our own governments have that power, and our governments are rapidly destroying our country and the western world.

We're already waging war all across the globe. We may be fighting WWIII, but because no force in the world can mount tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers to challenge us directly, we don't recognize this new level of war for what it is. But these terrorist groups can't conquer us. They can kill some Americans here and there, and we must make sure they don't get that opportunity, but invading and bombing the crap out of foreign countries isn't working. We have to take out the terrorists, not entire countries.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner escalating war in Afghanistan is reminiscent of 1984.

Whole body imaging may not be safe.

TSA bans snow globes in carry-on luggage. If men are from Mars and women from Venus, government agents are from another galaxy.

MISC:

Another sign of the decline of America is our leadership is science is slipping away. As the beacon of liberty, we were the happy adopted home of many of the world's greatest scientists chased away by fascists and communists. Today, we're not that beacon of freedom. While our government has become significantly larger and more oppressive, other governments around the world have become significantly freer.

Google Chrome passes Safari to take third place in the browser wars.

Cutting the CIA in two is too little change, imo. I agree that

"Covert action and analysis do not belong together in the same agency – never have, never will. That these two very different tasks were thrown together is an accident of history, one that it is high time to acknowledge and to fix.",

but we should redesign our intelligence services from scratch to meet our current needs. And the next generation should do the same.

The twelve best libertarian books of the decade according to David Gordon. He reads and reviews books like crazy for mises.org.

Libertarian doormat.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Ireland passes blasphemy law. That's stupid. I doubt I'll visit Ireland now. I don't want to get punished for something I might say.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Chart shows the change is price for numerous products between 1999 and 2009. Almost all of them have gone up, and that's even after the recent fall in prices, but the range of price increases is huge showing how silly it is to talk about one value for inflation.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

This is exactly right:

"By empowering police and prosecutors and providing them with immunity from their wrongdoing, the government is encouraging investigators to be sloppy and incompetent."

We have to hold government agents, people we entrust with power over our lives, to a higher standard than we hold regular citizens, not the lower standard we use today.

WAR:

Dutch government denies reports that the underwear bomber had no passport. Passenger claims Dutch government admits it allows the wannabe terrorist to skirt normal passport procedures. I can't verify that claim.

Not too long ago I wrote that terrorists would soon surgically implant bombs in their bodies. Looks like one already carried a bomb up his rectum. Ouch.

I have no problem with taking out the al Qaeda agents in Yemen who planned this attack. I have no problem with taking out any al Qaeda agent anywhere who's a threat to kill Americans. Even if you believe that our policies led to al Qaeda attacking us, we still have to defend ourselves. We don't have some duty to sit back and let them kill us. But how we take them out matters. Dropping bombs on whole neighborhoods should be the method of last resort. It makes more enemies. I'd much rather use their natural enemies to kill them.

Afghans accuse Americans of executing ten civilians including children. Americans say all the casualties were members of a terrorist cell. Both are probably right. We have nothing to gain by killing Afghans. We should pull out and refocus on taking out al Qaeda leadership and cells.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iran's opposition leader says he has no fear of becoming a martyr. It's kind of funny because this guy isn't in charge of the protesters. He's provides a symbol of the corruption of the regime, but these protesters seem more radical than he is.

MEDIA:

Free TV may go the way of the dinosaur because of competitive pressure from cable and the internet.

MISC:

Government is the enemy of civilization.

"Victims are entitled to defend themselves against the individual aggressor and prepare themselves for the calamities of the occasional act of God. Resources will be reallocated to defend one against potential robbers, and provisions will be made for potential natural disasters.

However, when government aggresses, it is considered legitimate and "a victim may not legitimately defend himself against such violations." Democracy legitimizes this government aggression because the violence is sanctioned by a majority of voters."

Every advance of man other than in weapons has been made in spite of government. Anybody selling gold right now is making a mistake.

If David Stern is such a genius, how come he's transformed the league into a place where teammates draw guns on each other? This is the inevitable result of the corruption of the NBA that starts with the league having officials favor stars, big market teams and home teams instead of refereeing fairly. Corruption flows downhill.