Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

People with poor math skills are three times more likely to suffer foreclosure. And you thought that math education was worthless.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's new $50 billion bailout program is to bailout state and local governments - a bailout of politicians who don't want to balance their own budgets. Of course this is what he wants. His goal is to collapse the US economy under the burden of government. If state and local government cuts spending,  it'll be harder to destroy America, so Obama wants to increase the federal burden so the states and local governments can maintain or grow their burdens.

"Obama is calling for a taxpayer rescue of the political class to which he belongs, to spare it the painful duty tens of thousands of business executives have had to perform. Private employees – 25 million of whom are out of work, underemployed or have given up looking for jobs – may be expendable, but government workers are not."

This is naive. He's not doing it out of altruism for his political bedfellows. He's doing it to destroy America.

"Obama is thus asking Congress to deepen America's fiscal crisis and put the next generation on the hook for another $50 billion so today's mayors and governors can get an exemption from their political duty.

Where is the justice here?"

It's not about justice. It's about destruction of America as we know it.

"Obama's proposal is thus about taking care of his own and the Democratic Party's political base.

Consider. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Transport Workers Union of America and other government unions in the AFL-CIO are all powerhouses of the Democratic Party.

Obama is proposing a $50 billion payoff for his own voters."

This is true, and it happens to dovetail with his ultimate agenda which apparently Buchanan is not ready to admit.

REGULATION:

Cato jumps on the bandwagon I started by linking the financial crisis and the Gulf oil spill to the failure of government regulation. The regulations enabled these crises to happen. These corporations wouldn't have taken the risks they took in a free market.

Government problems aren't restricted to the federal government. The Dayton airport has to get permission from state government to chase coyotes off runways.

Regulating cave-man technology - the burning of yard waste. This highlights another fallacy of government-lovers - the absence of government regulations, people can do anything they want. On the contrary, in a free society people are not allowed to harm others, so in many cases more restrictions apply, and people are free to settle them through a system of voluntary exchange that enriches both parties.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Greenspan exposed.

"Frederick Sheehan's Panderer to Power documents Greenspan's rise to power, his skill at playing the political game, and his ability to convince virtually all the world that he was perhaps the greatest economist of the age. He accomplished all of this, Sheehan notes, in spite of a record as one of worst forecasters of economic trends at every stage of his career."

Bernanke is following in Greenspan's path. Bernanke's is most noted for supporting even looser monetary policy than Greenspan, and he's been wrong at everything he forcasts.

"Panderer to Power is the story of an economist whose primary skill was self-promotion, and who in the end became increasingly divorced from economic reality."

Sounds like Bernanke again.

"Sheehan excellently catalogs Greenspan's rise to power as an affable technocratic politician who played the part of an economist with a knack for numbers and for justifying inflationary policies that made Presidents and Congressmen happy. Greenspan always told everyone what they wanted to hear. The rich and famous basked in his perceived genius."

The key to success in Washington is telling politicians what they want to hear. That's how all those economists who are always wrong keep their jobs. Sharp criticism of Greenspan.

Robert Murphy offers a simple example showing how fractional reserve banking enables banks, not just the Fed, to create money out of thin air.

EDUCATION:

If all government education bureaucracies were abolished, it would save Americans $600 billion a year and enable every parent to get their school children a high quality education at a tremendously lower price.

"Local governments, state governments, and even the Federal government use tax money and the threat of violence against any parent who does not agree that the state has the right to shape the content of his children's education. This has been going on for so long that most Americans accept this regime as somehow established by natural law."

And we're suffering for it.

"If it were my decision, I would shut off the funding by the state for every school in the United States, including the military academies. This would add something in the range of $600 billion to the private sector. Governments would not be able to persuade parents and others to hand over their money at the point of a gun from one person in order to subsidize the education of another person."

 A man after my own heart, but he should have used the word coerce instead of persuade.

"One of the oddities about life is that a statement regarding a widely believed moral imperative in one area is regarded as morally unsustainable when virtually the same statement is applied to another area. What virtually everybody accepts as self-evident truth in one area is regarded as self-evident error in another area."

This a fallacy. When Einstein developed the theory of relativity, he started with the assumption that the laws of physics were the same everywhere. Space here is subject to the same principles as space everywhere. The same is true of morals. Theft at the point of a gun is always immoral. Being a government agent doesn't make it moral. Powerful comparison to government funding of churches follows.

Tale of two buses - a school bus and a prison bus. Try explaining the difference to a nine year old. This guy doesn't do a very good job. The difference is the people on the prison bus are being removed from society because they're a threat to the safety or property of others. The kids on the school bus are being arbitrarily abused. Of course any individual convicted of a victimless so-called crime is being arbitrarily abused too.

Thomas Sowell makes another fantastic point:

"People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities."

Government schools make people stupid by brainwashing them into believing things that aren't true. The Ivy League is the world's leader at this. We just saw how liberals have been made stupid by being taught economic fallacies.

ENERGY:

Reason, along with many others, thinks BP will go bankrupt and taxpayers will be saddled with the clean-up bill. I think this is Obama's plan. He's doing everything in his power to bankrupt BP because it suits his goal of collapsing the US economy. With BP gone, it will take time for the oil industry to reorganize, so oil and gasoline prices will rise, further burdening the people. Obama will also stick taxpayers with the tab for clean-up, further burdening the people. This will accelerate the collapse of the US. I will be very surprised of BP survives Obama.

Obama shamelessly uses Gulf oil spill to advance his tax and trade agenda.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Foxnews presented this story as an illegal immigration story, but that's misinformation. This is a war on drugs story. The Arizona government is warning Americans not to travel in certain areas near the border because they are controlled by drug smugglers, not the US.

"Signs went up a couple weeks ago along the southern side of I-8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend Arizona. The region is about 80 miles north of the Mexican border and it warns American citizens of the dangers of hiking in the area.

Mexican drug cartels appear to control large areas of Southern Arizona, according to the Pinal County Sheriff. 

According to Borderland Beat, the Pinal County Sherriff says, "We do not have control of this area.""

We hear about lawless areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and other countries, but that's been unheard of in America since the end of the Indian wars nearly a century and a half ago. But we losing the war on drugs so badly that drug dealers have taken over US territory.

"Recently law enforcement in the southern Arizona region photographed, using night vision cameras, cartel members with military arms delivering drugs to vehicles along Highway 8.

“We are three counties deep. How is it that you see pictures like these, not American with semi and fully automatic rifles? How is that okay?" the Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu asked.

"We are outgunned, we are out manned and we don't have the resources here locally to fight this," the Sheriff said at a news conference."

We cannot win this war because it's a war on ourselves. The laws of economics are as constant as the law of gravity. If you fear crime, you must advocate ending the war on drugs.

Review of Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Lessons we have failed to learn.

POLICE STATE:

British cop asks woman for sex in exchange for dismissing tickets. I'm sure he and his buddies have done this so often and gotten away with it, he was sure he'd get away with it again.

WAR:

American arrested in Pakistan for hunting bin Laden with a pistol, sword, night vision goggles and Christian literature. The Christian literature is probably what got him in trouble.

Report just published concludes that the 13 Irish civil rights protesters massacred by British paratroopers in 1972 were all innocent. Nothing like waiting 38 years to publish the report. I bet the Irish have known this all along.

Because of the US invasion of Iraq, Iraq is defenseless against its neighbors.

"Iran launched punitive assaults in May and June of this year against another Kurdish group that is waging an insurgency against the Tehran regime. Not only have Iranian forces entered Iraqi territory and killed rebel fighters there, but Iran has now reportedly established a fort on Iraq's side of the border. That step suggests that those troops plan to stay a while. As in the case of Turkey's earlier incursion, Baghdad could do little except issue a mewling diplomatic protest."

Uh oh.

"The reality is that Iraq is a weak player surrounded by neighbors who do not especially wish it well. Quantitative measures alone underscore the extent of the power disparity. According to the latest edition of the International Institute of Strategic Studies' Military Balance, there are 578,269 personnel in Iraq's security forces. But more than 366,000 are Ministry of Interior personnel, trained and equipped to deal with internal-security problems, not foreign military threats. Iraq's bona fide military consists of a fledgling army of 187,000, a navy of 2,000 and an air force of 3,000.

By contrast, Iran deploys nearly 350,000 active-duty army troops, 125,000 naval personnel, and 18,000 air force personnel. They are backed by 125,000 troops in the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and 350,000 reservists who could be called up on short notice. Turkey fields some 511,000 active-duty forces, including a 402,000-strong army. Those fighters are backed by nearly 379,000 trained reserves. Syria and even Saudi Arabia are also able to deploy more numerous and substantially stronger military forces than Iraq."

This is crazy. This shows once again how central planning is doomed to fail in all things.

And to drive the point home, more on our failure in Afghanistan:

"This week, top U.S. and NATO commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said the campaign to secure Kandahar, a key Taliban stronghold, will require more time than originally planned. The most astonishing part of Gen. McChrystal's admission was that it took him so long to reach it. There is good reason to be skeptical that the U.S.-led coalition can reduce violence, eradicate corruption, and build a capable Afghan government that can take over the fight before U.S. troops draw down next summer."

After nearly 10 years in Afghanistan, the head general still doesn't have a grasp of the situation.

POLITICS:

Harry Reid to make Social Security a central issue in campaign.

Can Slovakians reverse course and stop falling back into communism and destitution?

Here's one of the great misconceptions that government-lovers have of libertarians.

"[A]ccording to Lilla, this new populist rhetoric of the libertarian mob is "all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone." This rhetoric, Lilla tells us, "appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that.""

Wrong. Libertarians want to work with others in a system of voluntary exchange to solve each other's problems and by doing so solve our common problems. People can't work together in a government dominated society. Government is a gun pointed at everybody's head. Do what government says and don't do what government prohibits or heavily armed men will bust down your door, wrestle you and your loved ones to the ground, and if they don't you, they will lock in irons and drag you into a tiny cage. People can't work together in an environment like that. Every action of government divides people into winners - those who agree with or superficially benefit from the action - and losers - those who disagree with the action or harmed by it. That divisiveness makes it harder for people to work together. Government actions spur anger, hatred and violence. But in a system of voluntary exchange, where each party is enriched by cooperation with others, people can work together to perform seeming miracles. A system of voluntary exchange spurs cooperation, tolerance, happiness and peace. That's what libertarians want.

"Over the past half-century, according to Lilla, a great many of these people have begun "disinvesting in our political institutions and learning to work around them, as individuals." The principal example he gives — and a very good one it is — is the homeschooling movement. "A million and a half students in the United States," he writes, "are now being taught by their parents at home, nearly double the number a decade ago, and representing about fifteen students for every public school in the country.… What's remarkable [about this] is American parents' confidence that they can do better themselves. Many of the more-educated ones probably do, though they are hardly going it alone; they rely on a national but voluntary virtual school system connecting them online, where they circulate curricula, materials, and research." More important, "they are [now] a powerful political lobby, having redirected their energy from local school systems to Washington and state capitals.… They are the only successful libertarian party," Lilla writes, "in the United States.""

That's a perfect example of the kind of cooperation I'm talking about. Those individuals aren't going it alone. By going around the government, these people have managed to work together for education to an extent that is impossible to do under the government school monopoly.

"The only sense in which the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, the majority of the tea partiers, and the best known and most representative figures on Fox News may be said to represent the growing libertarian impulse or spirit in the land is this: their employment of a lot of libertarian rhetoric that doesn't at all match the policies they endorse and proselytize for is in itself a kind of indirect symptom of the growth of the libertarian spirit. Conservatives have been using libertarian rhetoric for many decades now, but they've increased this tactic recently in response to the very phenomenon Lilla is writing about — the growing spread of the libertarian spirit through the land. Libertarian ideas have come to exercise enough influence among the general public that at least certain major party politicians and major media feel compelled to pretend to espouse them themselves and do all they can to co-opt them."

True. Inn case you think I'm exaggerating about the miracle party, here's an essay on what's commonly called the German Miracle.

MISC:

NASA, which predicted solar cycle 24 would be a powerful cycle and refused to change prediction for quite a while after it was clear solar cycle 24 was a no-show, predicts power solar storms in 2013. I'm skeptical.

Review of the Primal Blueprint.

"The end of the intro is particularly cool when Mark takes a stance against the lazy scape goat of “genetics” for health problems, rather than the individual taking responsibility for their own well being."

That's what kicked me to learn about paleo. I was tired of my doctor saying I had a genetic problem that could only be masked by taking medicine all my life. I didn't believe him.

Can somebody really get fit working out 12 minutes a week? That's gotta be some workout. Body by Science.

Self-serve doggie fountain.

The failure of central planning to control pollution in China is a reminder that property rights, not socialized air, form the basis for a clean environment.

On Thomas Paine.

Is Hillary Clinton ignorant of economics or just lying? Flip a coin.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Top ten countries for millionaires. Needless to say, the top two are the most economically free places in the world, Singapore and Hong Kong. The most stable nation on earth with sound banking law, Switzerland is third. The US is way down at 7th. We can thank government for making us that low.

Despite fears of deflation (which we should embrace, not fear, since that's the only way to heal the damage government has done to our economy) inflation is still in force. Check out these numbers:

"The level of excess reserves held by commercial banks has climbed to $1.05 trillion in early June from $1.4 billion in January 2008 while lending remains in free fall."

That's nearly a thousand-fold increase. Bernanke hasn't just taken us into uncharted irresponsible territory, he's taken us into a new universe of irresponsibility.

"However, we are of the view that, on account of the fall in the growth momentum of money supply between November 2008 and November 2009, US economic activity could come under pressure in a few months time. As a result, the Fed may embark on strong monetary pumping. We suggest this could lead to severe stagflation."

Stagflation was so much fun in the '70s that Bernanke wanted to do it again on an unprecedented scale.

TAX AND SPEND:

New York aristocrats vow not to shut down government because of debt. Too bad for New York taxpayers. They would be way better off if the government was shut down.

REGULATION:

Making good of regulations as a weapon, government targets Apple because it doesn't pay enough tribute to government. Government can't allow a company to make superior products, satisfy its customers and gain marketshare without looting it even more. More.

"Compared with other tech giants, Apple’s lobbying expenditures are small. In 2009, Apple spent only $1.5 million to lobby the federal government, less than Amazon, Yahoo and IBM. In 2009, Google, for example, spent $4 million, Microsoft $7 million and AT&T $15 million.

In the first quarter of this year, Apple spent $560,000 on lobbying, according to disclosure reports. During the same period, Google spent $1.4 million and Microsoft spent $1.7 million."

This shows what I've been saying - government is god to corporations. Government can strike them dead with a pen and raise them from the dead into zombie companies the same way. But like all gods, government demands tribute. If corporations don't pay tribute, god gets angry and punishes them.

How regulations make us less safe.

"But our system also fosters other dangerous, unintentional risks. Think of the recent mining accident in West Virginia, the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, or the so-called fruit-of-kaboom bomber. The commonality in all cases is that the safety of employees and consumers was in the hands of a preestablished government agency that was supposedly ensuring safety."

Surrendering responsibility for safety to bureaucrats can only make us less safe. It also removes a point of competition - why spend more on safety than required? - so products are less safe than they would be in a free market, adding to the risk.

"Another unintended consequence of state codification of safety are the resulting disincentives to innovate. Instead of putting efforts toward the risky endeavor of product innovation, a business is forced to put its effort towards finding a way to meet or overcome the code."

I just said that.

HEALTH CARE:

Obama seizes more control of our lives under the guise of health care. This man is truly dangerous.

GLOBAL WARMING:

IPCC insider reports that the IPCC invented phony claims about consensus on man-made global warming to advance its political agenda.

"The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”"

Fraud piled on fraud piled on fraud. Their house of frauds is crashing down.

Steve McIntyre continues his heroic efforts to expose the global warming frauds by explaining the nature of the 'tricks' they use. These tricks are arbitrary manipulations of data to the climate appear warmer now than it actually is or to hide warmer periods in the past.

The global warming frauds at NOAA claim that accurate temperature measurements don't matter. They say that because most of their measuring stations, the ones they've been promoting as evidence of climate change, have been placed outside of the specifications near local heat sources like air conditioners and blacktop. The only reasonable conclusion is these stations were intentionally placed near heat sources to promote the global warming fraud.

"The NOAA climate measuring network is so broken there is literally no way to fix it. "

So they bury the problem with the stroke of a pen.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, who until about a month ago was global warming true believer, does a 180 and says:

"I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question…"

I guess he realized his political fortunes were best served by siding with skeptics than frauds. Naturally a Republican is promoting a bill that increase government regulation of fuel emissions. With phony-small government supporters like these, who needs enemies?

After solar cycle 24 showed a few signs of life, its activity has again fallen. This is very bad news. We're reaching 1913 levels of solar inactivity, the year of the great Great Miami flood. We've also seen tremendous rain this year. I can't help but wonder if there's a relationship. Oklahoma City flooding. Maybe I'm wrong, but flooding seems much higher than normal this year. There was the Nashville flood. The Arkansas flood. Now an Oklahoma flood. The Ohio was threatening cars this weekend and the Great Miami is rising. I can't help but wonder if this flooding is the result of this low solar activity.

Gore's alarmist lies are becoming more shill has his hopes for a government takeover of our energy sector fade. I wish some prosecutor would investigate this guy for fraud. Hypocrisy from Gore? Say it ain't so.

ENERGY:

Windfarms are bad at capturing energy but good at sucking up taxpayer money.

Naturally Obama followed in the IPCC's footsteps and twisted the reports of scientists on drilling to meet his political agenda.

Gas prices up 20 percent since the beginning of June.

The way Obama has treated BP, with intimidation and lawlessness, is more like Chavez or Putin treats companies, not America before we turned into a banana republic.

"BP has more than 600 claims personnel working to pay fishermen and others that have suffered economic damage. It has vowed to pay all "legitimate" claims and has worked through 20,000 of 42,000 submitted so far, at a cost of $53 million. BP has also promised it will not limit its payments to the Oil Pollution Act's $75 million cap on these damages, and last month it announced it would hire an independent mediator to review claims. Any claimant denied payment has the right to sue for redress under the law, which means BP has an incentive to get these payouts right.

By contrast, a government-administered fund more or less guarantees a more politicized payment process. The escrow administrator will be chosen by the White House, and as such would be influenced by the Administration's political goals. Those goals would include payments to those harmed by the Administration's own six-month deep water drilling ban. That reckless policy will soon put thousands of Gulf Coast residents out of work, but the White House knows that BP isn't liable under current law for those claims. The escrow account is an attempt to tap BP's funds by other means to pay the costs of Mr. Obama's own policy blunder."

The scariest is that people on the left don't think Obama is lawless enough, and people on the right think he's failed to use enough power too.

"BP is financially responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher, and the White House should want the company to stay healthy enough to honor those obligations. Instead, the Administration's denunciations and legally dubious demands are compounding the damage."

Every Obama policy compounds the damage government does to our livelihoods.

"We hope BP resists Mr. Obama's demands to put a political actor in control of its Gulf payments—both for the sake of legitimate Gulf claims, and to vindicate the U.S. as a nation that doesn't discard the law for the sake of political retribution."

Did this guy miss the government takeover of GM?

WAR:

This sounds suspicious. Why was the Pentagon sponsoring geologists to look for riches in Afghanistan? The US found over $1 trillion in natural resources in Afghanistan. But naturally the incompetent Afghans can't be trusted to utilize the resources correctly. This is another convenient excuse to wage war in Afghanistan - so Americans can manage the resources for the good of the Afghans who can't take care of themselves, of course. I bet US interests suspected this all along, and it's one of the reasons, along with the oil pipeline US interests want to see built, we're still there.

"The value of the minerals - including lithium, iron, gold, niobium and cobalt - is estimated at nearly $US1 trillion, according to the study.

US Colonel Dave Lapan says that is a conservative estimate."

This is the kind of wealth that can jump-start a real economy.

"Colonel Lapan says the studies were part of a US government effort designed to assist Afghanistan build up viable industries, and advisers were working with the Kabul government to attract "world-class" mining companies."

World-class American mining companies.

"but there are doubts as to how the war-torn and graft-prone country can manage the windfall."

And you know who will be there to manage it on their behalf, and the government will keep American troops there in return. Because we're so generous. And the aristocrats are looters.

The minerals just happen to be in Taliban controlled areas. What luck for the war-lovers. This article claims these minerals make Afghanistan as natural resource rich as Saudi Arabia. The hype around this is overflowing, and I can't help but think this is designed to gin up public opinion for the war in Afghanistan. I already heard Lawrence Kudlow saying we have to keep China out because Afghanistan owes us control of those minerals. Want to take any bets we hear something similar about rich resources in western Pakistan soon? Assuming all this is true, and that's a big assumption - I wouldn't be surprised if, after we spend five more years there and lose another 5,000 soldiers, the press starts reporting this was way exaggerated - this would be a great opportunity to get our troops out and start negotiating free trade.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The Israeli government's investigation of itself over the Gaza aid ship raid is biased. Who'd have guessed?

POLITICS:

Ron Paul puts his money where his mouth is: he buys gold and gold mining company stocks. Naturally this is considered a bad thing by many who prefer liars and hypocrites to honest men.

MISC:

NASA stops project to return Americans to the moon, but you know Obama won't free Americans to go on their own.

Obama compares Gulf oil spill to 9/11, implying that BP is like Osama bin Laden. Obama's a monster who will use any tragedy to advance his violent control over our lives. Reason makes an excellent point:

"Not long ago, Barack Obama was pilloried for being too activist, too meddlesome, and too inclined to see himself as the messiah. He was forcing health care reform down our throats, running General Motors, wrecking the financial system and promising to make the oceans recede.

But that was a different guy, from a parallel universe. The President Obama we all know is a passive, detached do-nothing. Or so we have been hearing since the British Petroleum oil spill gained our attention.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican who once denounced Democrats for scheming to "increase dependence on government," now demands that Washington do more for his state."

You know Obama is seething because he can't seize BP since it's a British company. Exxon better watch out. If Deepwater Horizon had been Exxon's rig, Obama would have seized Exxon already.

Scientists reboot Voyager 2 which fixes a data transmission problem. It's amazing these spacecraft are still sending back scientific data.

Astronomers observe solar system formation "like a raindrop forming in a cloud".

Radar images of Antarctic mountains buried under ice.

The US is losing scientific superiority to other nations.

"This article attempts to explain why the US is struggling in its competition with other countries in the realm of scientific advancement. 'It's not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It's a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.' I can hardly believe that somebody actually understands the present situation. It continues, 'The current approach — trying to improve the students or schools — will not produce the desired result, the experts predict, because the forces driving bright young Americans away from technical careers arise elsewhere, in the very structure of the US research establishment. For generations, that establishment served as the world’s nimblest and most productive source of great science and outstanding young scientists. Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.'"

The problem isn't complex. The problem is government has pushed out private interests, so our scientific community has been poisoned by politics. The solution is simple - get the government money out of science.

In the quantum world, inertial mass is not necessarily equivalent to gravitational mass.

There might be much more water locked in moon rocks than previously thought.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Australia is experiencing a housing bubble.

TAX AND SPEND:

US to have one of the highest dividend tax rates in the world if Bush tax cuts expire. That's another reason we have such paltry savings.

US debt projected to reach $19.6 trillion by 2015. That's a government estimate, so you know it's way low.

Obama wants to steal another $50 billion from us for yet another stimulus boondoggle since none of his previous boondoggles have worked. Are we up to six, seven or more stimulus boondoggles so far?

REGULATION:

Obama's ban on drilling puts people out of work. All government regulations put people out of work.

Now a liberal wants to use the government's gun to outlaw the beauty bias. I'm surprised it took so long. Stupidity knows no bounds.

How government codes hold back innovation.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Mark this date - Ben Bernanke predicts the US will continue economic growth:

"Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress recently, “The economy … appears to be on track to continue to expand through this year and next.”"

The first question is: what economic growth? GDP numbers artificially inflated by government spending and the Fed inflating are not economic growth. Second, when we fall into the second dip of the recession, we'll want to go back and remember that Bernanke was wrong again. He's always wrong. Dictionary.com defines expert as: "a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particularfield; specialist". A person who is always wrong is not an expert.

Bernanke doesn't understand why gold is so high. That's the guy who's running our economy. Don't you feel better now?

EDUCATION:

Liberals fail econ 101 in a big way.

"Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: "Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable." People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.

Basic economics acknowledges that whatever redeeming features a restriction may have, it increases the cost of production and exchange, making goods and services less affordable. There may be exceptions to the general case, but they would be atypical.

Therefore, we counted as incorrect responses of "somewhat disagree" and "strongly disagree." This treatment gives leeway for those who think the question is ambiguous or half right and half wrong. They would likely answer "not sure," which we do not count as incorrect.

In this case, percentage of conservatives answering incorrectly was 22.3%, very conservatives 17.6% and libertarians 15.7%. But the percentage of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly was 67.6% and liberals 60.1%. The pattern was not an anomaly."

That's an astounding difference.

"How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics."

...

"The survey also asked about party affiliation. Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect."

Those are astounding differences. On my message board, I had serious trouble with liberals presenting opinions as facts. I kept making the point that everybody is welcome to their own opinions, but the facts are the same for everybody. I figured it was just some individuals on my board who were ideologically motivated to disagree with the facts of economics. It looks like a much worse problem - liberals really are blind to fundamental economic principles. The board finally disintegrated, and this is why. This is provides more evidence that conservatives are the natural allies of libertarians. They can be persuaded by reason. This is a failure of government schools and parents who were most educated in government schools too.

The sorry state of financial economic teaching.

The more economics people study, the more likely they are to be Republican. Not because Republicans are good on the economy, but because Democrats are so much worse.

HEALTH CARE:

Before Obamacare became law, many reported that Obama was lying about people keeping their insurance plans. This fall, Obamacare will make the plans of over a million Americans illegal. Nobody can claim this is a surprise.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The US has a base in Kyrgyzstan, suffering ethnic violence right now, for resupplying troops in Afghanistan.

POLITICS:

Pat Buchanan looks at Sarah Palin's endorsements and concludes she's not a conservative ideologue but a savvy politician preparing for 2012 presidential run.

LOCAL:

Here's a way better solution than seizing money from taxpayers to destroy "blighted" houses - volunteers from Habitat from Humanity want to fix them up. See how the private sector comes up with solutions that work for everybody?

MISC:

Minorities are about to become the majority in the US. In a sane world, this wouldn't matter, but it our world, where minorities have special privileges to loot the majority, it's a serious problem.

Using grocery cards to track food-borne illnesses. I have no problem with this as long as the government doesn't get involved, but of course it is getting involved.

There's always some gems in Thomas Sowell's random thoughts:

"After North Korea torpedoed a South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors, was there even one-tenth the outrage that is ringing out loudly around the world because of nine deaths that resulted from Israeli commandos intercepting a ship headed for the Gaza strip?"

The South Korean ship was a military ship. The Gaza ship was an aid ship. While that shouldn't matter, all lives are precious, it unfortunately does to the accomplice press.

"Just as the American Left has adopted blacks as mascots, so the international Left has adopted Palestinians as mascots. In both cases, the actual well-being of the mascots is not the point."

God bless Thomas Sowell.

Mises scholar is optimistic. This shows that every individual, regardless of ideology, is tempted to miss the forest for the trees. Politicians and the accomplice press surround themselves with sycophants, so they're disconnected from America. Mises scholars are surrounded by freedom-lovers, so they think the freedom movement is stronger than it is. We're in for tremendous pain. I think that freedom will win out as a way to end the pain - Americans with traditional American values are going to overwhelm Obama's Marxist revolutionaries - but I don't think it's going to happen before the tremendous pain. I can't feel optimistic about that.

Free kibbles

ECONOMICS:

Henry Hazlitt predicted today's currency crisis nearly 70 years ago based on the Bretton Woods conference.

"[A]s Hazlitt wrote, "it would be difficult to think of a more serious threat to world stability and full production than the continual prospect of a uniform world inflation to which the politicians of every country would be so easily tempted.""

They were, and here we are.

"In the midst of the Bretton Woods proceedings, Hazlitt hit the American delegates with another punch in the nose. He made fun of how the Americans in particular are under the impression that they can solve any problems in the world by setting up machinery in the form of an organization. It could be an organization to make water run uphill or to keep rocks from falling but the Americans are under the belief that if the president is behind anything, anything can be accomplished."

I think every presidential candidate in my lifetime has played on this fallacy, but none worse than Obama.

"Hilariously, Hazlitt sums up the plan for the World Bank with this general observation: "world economic revival will not necessarily flow from a plan under which taxpayers are saddled by their own governments with losses from huge foreign loans made regardless of their soundness.""

Sure enough, US taxpayers are helping bail out Europe through the IMF.

"That Bretton Woods was called a gold standard was an exercise in obfuscation. It happened for the same reason that NAFTA was called free trade or the FTC is said to protect competition. The state has long used the language of liberalism and the market economy as a plow to push through its opposite. The gold standard was an early victim in this war over words."

Orwell didn't invent double-think. He recognized it being used by governments of his time and realized it would only increase.

"The stakes are impossible to overstate. Fiat paper money is destroying civilization right now. It has fueled the predator state. It has destabilized markets. It has wrecked balance sheets and distorted financial markets. It has wrecked the culture by leading the whole world to believe that prosperity can come as if by magic, that stones can be turned into bread. It might yet unleash a ravaging inflation that will be welcomed by dictators, despots, and cruel tyrants.

How important is sound money? The whole of civilization depends on it."

The whole of western civilization is collapsing without it.

Foxnews is interviewing an economist, and he just said the information about falling consumer spending informs economists things weren't as good as they thought they were. Only delusional people thought things were better than they are.

EDUCATION:

Average yearly textbook costs for students jump to $1,370. That's what happens in government monopolies. It's the same economic forces that led to $500 hammer for the defense department.

HEALTH CARE:

Remember when Democrats pretended they didn't have to pay for the doc fix for Medicare when they rammed Obamacare down our throats? Now Obama is demanding money for the doc fix and trying to make Republicans look like bad guys. I think he has the advantage on this. It'll be a lot simpler for him to paint Republicans as bad guys for opposing the doc fix than it will be for Republicans to explain that they wanted the doc fix included in the costs of Obamacare and Obama and Democrats were hiding the expense.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Kyrgyz government asks Russian troops to come into Kyrgyz city to restore order. That's crazy. Nobody asks outside troops to enter their country. Russia declines. There's something fishy about this.

Saudi Arabia, having a legitimate fear of a nuclear armed Iran, opens up skies to Israeli jets to knock out Iranian nuclear facilities. As I predicted, regional forces would solve this problem. Having Saudi Arabia involved also takes away the clash of civilization problem. But you can bet there will be backlash in Saudi Arabia if this plays out.

"“The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way,” said a US defence source in the area. “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department.”"

The US should have stayed out of it.

"Despite the tension between the two governments, they share a mutual loathing of the regime in Tehran and a common fear of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing,” said one."

All the hyperventilating was for nothing. I'm sure neocons will be shocked that other countries can deal with threats. This is really about control. The neocons, like all Democrats and many conservatives, are control freaks. They want to run everybody's lives through violence. This analysis doesn't mention that Israili jets can fly over Syrian unmolested, which they did a year a two ago to destroy a Syrian nuclear facility. They probably can't refuel on that path though.

"In 2007 Israel was reported to have used Turkish air space to attack a suspected nuclear reactor being built by Iran’s main regional ally, Syria. Although Turkey publicly protested against the “violation” of its air space, it is thought to have turned a blind eye in what many saw as a dry run for a strike on Iran’s far more substantial — and better-defended — nuclear sites."

So Turkey may facilitate too.

Hints of unrest in Iran on the anniversary of the presidential election widely believe to have been stolen by Ahmadinejad.

POLITICS:

Obama tells Britons no hard feelings over spill as if he speaks for all Americans. As if his opinion matters more than any other individual American's. Plenty of Americans have hard feelings.

MEDIA:

Biden's beach party is a humorous reminder than the accomplice press is in bed with the government aristocrats who feed them.

MISC:

Selfish US teen wants to try sailing around the world solo again despite having to be rescued. It's all about her. What does she care that pilots and ships had to all stop working to feed their families to rescue her spoiled butt. Self-gratification is all that matters to her, and we can all thank her parents for that. This is the true definition of greed -wanting something for nothing. Unless would-be rescuers charge her family for the time and resources they burned working on her rescue, her parents will fund her selfish stupidity again. Please inject some economic reality into these people's selfish lives by charging them for the millions of dollars spent on the rescue.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Retail sales drop 1.2 percent in May. That means people are getting smart and saving more money. This is a good thing, but the side-effect will be a short-term drop in economy. Saving money creates the jobs we need for growth. Spending does not.

"The Commerce Department said retail sales declined 1.2% in May, with auto sales down 1.7%, a sign that consumers are still struggling to make ends meet and are less willing to open their wallets and go shopping. Economists had expected the figure to edge up 0.2%."

Here we go again. Once again the so-called experts got it wrong. That's because they aren't experts. They're political hacks paid to tell the politicians and the American people what the politicians want to hear. Case in point:

"Excluding auto sales, building materials and gasoline receipts, Wall Street Strategies equity research analyst Brian S. Sozzi says the retail sales figure was essentially flat in May. "Considering the Memorial Day holiday shift, these are numbers that we think were better than many were expecting,""

That's some pretty impressive spin to make this sound like good news. If it was better than many were expecting, why were they expecting growth, not contraction?

I'm not the only person who thinks Americans should move their money to Switzerland.

"The real challenge for the Swiss National Bank is to limit the franc's appreciation when billions of investor euros are flooding into Switzerland and bidding for the local currency. Contrary to what you'll read in the American financial press, the smart money is moving into Switzerland in big volume."

There's your real safe haven - a country that's been stable for 500 years, and one of the big reasons is banking freedom.

Many college grads leave college deeply in debt with no job prospects because government has driven up the price of college, lowered the quality of the eduction, taken over the loan process and crashed the economy. But naturally government wants to take more money from us by force so it can make things worse.

TAX AND SPEND:

Japan's new Prime Minister may be the first honest world leader for saying:

"Our country's outstanding public debt is huge... our public finances have become the worst of any developed country.

...

There is a risk of collapse if we leave the increase of the public debt untouched and then lose the trust of the bond markets."

That's what 20 years of Keynesian policy has wrought in Japan, and we're following that same path. I wonder what Paul Krugman will say.

"Over the weekend, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called on surplus countries - like Japan, Germany and China - to do more to increase spending."

Lord Geithner wants to make sure everybody in the world suffers the same collapse Obama is orchestrating in America. Geithner knows exactly what the consequences of his actions will be. He's evil.

POLICE STATE:

Hero arrested because he rescued a 13 year old girl, making cops look bad.

"Ryan Daniel Snodgrass, a 28-year-old guide with Arkansas Valley Adventures rafting company, was charged with "obstructing government operations," said Clear Creek Sheriff Don Krueger.

"He was told not to go in the water, and he jumped in and swam over to the victim and jeopardized the rescue operation," said Krueger, noting that his office was deciding whether to file similar charges against another guide who was at the scene just downstream of Kermitts Roadhouse on U.S. 6.

Duke Bradford, owner of Arkansas Valley Adventures, said Snodgrass did the right thing by contacting the 13-year-old Texas girl immediately and not waiting for the county's search and rescue team to assemble ropes, rafts and rescuers.

"When you have someone in sight who has taken a long swim, you need to make contact immediately," said Bradford, a 15-year rafting guide and ski patroller from Summit County. "This is just silly. Ryan Snodgrass acted entirely appropriately. These guys came to the scene late and there was a rescue in progress. They came in and took over an existing rescue. To leave a patient on the side of a river while you get your gear out of the car and set up a rescue system you read about in a book is simply not good policy.""

Slap! Bradford insulted them, so the cops want to arrest him too. What have we done to ourselves and our country?

WAR:

It's probably politically unfeasible to cut the military budget, but not to freeze it. At least freeze it already. Al Qaeda isn't invading us with tanks and aircraft carriers.

POLITICS:

Obama's approval rating down to 44. Who in the world are those people? Everything Obama has done has harmed Americans and made our problems worse. It isn't like he's doing a few things right. Everything he's done is wrong, and everything he plans to do is wrong. How come this rating isn't zero? That 44 percent of Americans approve of Obama's job is far scarier than Obama himself.

Remembering when Americans treated presidents like the normal people they are, not gods.

LOCAL:

Dayton aristocrats have been taking money from people by force and using it to destroy wealth by bulldozing 'blighted' homes, but they seem shocked that the consequences of their actions is ever more blighted homes that need to be bulldozed.

"The city of Dayton has been aggressively tearing down blighted and abandoned homes, but its list of nuisance properties is growing faster than the number of homes being demolished."

Naturally federal stimulus money is involved in this destruction of wealth.

"The growth of the nuisance list — which contains buildings that city inspectors have determined are structurally unsafe — has been spurred in part by an influx of close to $26 million federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program money. The city will use $9.2 million of that to demolish about 1,300 units, said Aaron Sorrell, housing and neighborhood development manager."

You can't make this stuff up.

"But Dayton has an estimated 15,000 vacant housing units and a vacancy rate of 20 percent, he said — about twice what is considered a healthy for a housing market. So the city either needs to grow households or tear down houses. Given the populations trends for the city and state, Sorrell said, the reality is more homes have to come down.

“It’s expensive and time-consuming,” Sorrell said. “I think we’re making a good dent in that vacancy rate. But, clearly, there’s still work to be done.”

Meanwhile, the nuisance structures are a drain on the city’s fire and police departments, said City Manager Tim Riordan. It costs $400,000 just to mow lawns of the 4,000 vacant lots once a year, he said."

I suppose it never occurred to them to stop mowing the lawns of private properties. If they've seized the property, which they shouldn't do, maybe they should sell it at market price. One person's blighted home is another's low income housing. But no. The only thing government knows how to do is destroy wealth. Maybe after the politicians destroy every last house in Dayton, we'll all be richer for it. This program is even stupider than cash for clunkers.

MISC:

Abby Sunderland, a 16 year old girl trying to sail around the world alone, found in Indian ocean. That's great news. I hope everybody involved in the rescue charges her parents for their expenses - equipment, man-hours and opportunity costs - and I hope it totals millions of dollars and bankrupts them so people will quit doing these stupid stunts - especially teens. People take these kinds of risks when they are insulated from the economic consequences of failure and taxpayers subsidize this irresponsible behavior. In order to make our world sane again, we have to allow market discipline to work so people will incur the costs as well as the reward of their decisions.

It is funny to see all the people who worship government like God, liberals and conservatives both, flounder with the Gulf oil spill. They blame it on Obama's incompetence, like if we had a competent president he would swim a mile under the sea and stop the flow of oil then come up and crush the already leaked oil into diamonds with his bare hands. It doesn't matter who the president is. Government has no ability to deal with this leak, and if the aristocrats created an oil leak bureaucracy like they probably will in the wake of this debacle, it will still have no ability to deal with this leak. It would be instantly obsolete. It would just hinder solving the problem even more than it's hindering it now.

"People sometimes say if only a Jack Welch, the legendary GE chairman, were put in charge, he'd get government to hum. That's a fantasy. Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs: They'd all fail. After James Carville went off on the president, David Axelrod bemusedly replied, "What I haven't heard is exactly what he thinks we should do." Professional politicians must be amazed, and thankful, at this credulousness."

Human beings are not gods, and all would fail to meet godlike expectations.

"Now government's inefficiency has become indefensible and its fantastic costs, its oceanic spending, a clear and present danger."

The biggest danger we face.

Minnesota state government has ended that heinous ritual of discrimination that was destroying the country - lady's night.

Now the feds want to ban peanuts on airplanes.

Free kibbles

COMMUNISM:

New mass grave discovered in Stalin-era Russia.

ECONOMY:

Investor advises Americans to buy land, barbed wire and guns. Prediction that silver is under-priced.

TAX AND SPEND:

Art Laffer warns that higher tax rates in 2011 may spark an economic collapse by incentivizing producers to maximize production this year then reduce it next year.

EDUCATION:

Fantastic graphs show that while our spending on government schools has rapidly increased since 1970, student performance remains virtually unchanged.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Senate fails to block EPA from classifying CO2 as a pollutant.

WAR ON DRUGS:

US drug warriors arrest 400 people associated with Mexican drug cartels in 14 states as part of a joint operation with somebody, presumably Mexico, that arrested 2,200 total. This raid is presented as a success, but that's ridiculous. We've been fighting the war on drugs for nearly a century. We've been fighting it in earnest since Nixon. Reagan stepped it up. Every president since has stepped it up. And here's what has happened as a result:

"A recent report by the US justice department suggested Mexican criminal groups had expanded their activities in the US with heroin production doubling in 2008.

In its National Drug Threat Assessment, the justice department said trade in marijuana, ecstasy and methamphetamine had also grown.

The report found that Mexican groups were active in every region of the US."

How insane or evil do you have to be to consider this a success? This is indisputable evidence that the drug cartels are winning over the drug warriors as easily as the New York Yankees over a little league team. Calling this raid a success is like calling a killing one roach a success even though 10,000 others have entered your home.

"More than 22,000 people have been killed in Mexico since Mr Calderon came to power, most of them in drug-related gun battles."

Not to mention, and the article doesn't mention, all the murders in the US and elsewhere in the world because of the war on drugs. Only an insane or evil person could justify this carnage.

"[Mexican President Calderon] said that he was confident his country would win its fight against drug gangs with US cooperation."

What a joke. That's like Saddam Hussein saying he was going to defeat the US military while tanks were driving down the streets of Baghdad. All this raid will do is reduce the supply of drugs causing the price to rise, further enriching and empowering the drug cartels so they can further invade and corrupt every country in the world - especially the US. The laws of economics are laws of nature like any other, and governments can't change them. But they sure kill a lot of people pretending they can.

WAR:

NATO troops discover that clearing Kandahar of militants is harder than expected.

In a sad reminder that government can't do anything right, the Army reports it has lost or mis-marked hundreds of remains and graves in Arlington cemetery. At least somebody got fired. That's almost unheard of in government. In the hour since I wrote this, the number of mistakes exploded from 200 to thousands. It's sad. It's sick. It's the nature of government.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Illegal immigrants reportedly leaving Arizona before the new law takes effect. And Nazis made the trains run on time. Police state tactics work. No doubt about it. But this law is still a bad law. I have no problems with the state of Arizona enforcing illegal immigration laws; the problem is with the reasonable suspicion standard. In practice, in a courtroom, that standard is no standard at all. It means a cop can accost anybody for any reason, shake them down and get away with it by claiming he suspected the individual was in America illegally.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Hamas, which is waging war against Israel, will try to sue Israel. Israel isn't stupid like the US. That would work against the US, but not Israel.

It cracks me up that conservatives who realize the US government can't run a bingo game in America think it can run foreign countries. The disconnect is stunning.

POLITICS:

More examples of how all politicians lie without conscience. Some are just better at it than others.

Isn't funny, I mean sick, how the left doesn't care about Americans dying in war when a Democrat is in charge. This is the ultimate hypocrisy.

Chris Matthews is afraid tea partiers will enforce their view of the Constitution with guns. But apparently it's OK with him that the government enforces its view of the Constitution with guns. I'm sure he'd say we elect leaders to use the guns, but that's like a choosing between Don Corleon and Tony Soprano. Either one you choose, the government robs you and your life is under constant threat, but unlike the mafia, government makes it all legal.

LOCAL:

Only government could take a year to widen this major intersection.

MISC:

It looks like market discipline will win out despite all the regulations and government interference that reduces it as BP is in danger of going bankrupt. No other oil company will cut corners like BP did in a similar situation. Regulations can never make that happen. Only market discipline can.

The Road to Serfdom leaps to number one on Amazon. How come that never happened when I mentioned it?

What kind of parents allow their 16 year old daughter to sail around the world alone? I'm one of the strongest proponents of empowering teenagers. I think they should graduate at 16 or 14. Top students should have (real, not today's dumbed down...) college degrees by the time they're 18. Parents coddle and infantize their children way too much to their detriment and the detriment of everybody. But nobody should sail around the world by themselves. It's stupid, and it's especially stupid for a 16 year old. Parents should know better. Whoever keeps these child records should stop. They prompt teens to take risks they aren't prepared for, risks that not even the most experienced people in the world should take, and some of them are going to die for no good reason. I hope somebody finds this girl and takes her home.

In praise of the movie Brazil. This movie was hard to watch when it first came out. I think I'll rewatch it too.

A man who lost 100 lbs on a paleo-inspired diet. It's interesting to note that different people tune the diet to their own tastes and still enjoy the benefits.

The vital role of the speculator.

"The oft-quoted objection remains that the speculator causes food prices to rise. If his activity is carefully studied, however, it will be seen that the total effect is rather the stabilization of prices.

In times of plenty, when food prices are unusually low, the speculator buys. He takes some of the food off the market, thus causing prices to rise. In the lean years that follow, this stored food goes on the market, thus causing prices to fall."

The speculator also acts as the canary in the coal mine. For example, because demand for oil is growing faster than supply, speculators tend to bet that the price of oil will rise in the future. Therefore they buy oil now, driving up the price and prompting producers to produce more oil, bringing supply and demand back into equilibrium. As oil becomes more scarce, speculators will bid up the price prompting entrepreneurs to develop more cost efficient, alternative energy sources.

Ten benefits of expatriation. As government gets more oppressive, these benefits will grow.

"The biggest guaranteed return on your capital that you’ll ever have is investing your money free of taxes."

There's no doubt about that.

Aggressively enforcing government IP laws is killing the record industry. They're flying in the face of economic reality. Once a song is created, there are no additional costs. Distributing this work to every individual is free. Trying to artificially limit supply by charging for it is doomed to fail.

Claim that the threat from mercury in tuna is overblown. I thought this was the case.

Japanese spacecraft successfully deploys first solar sail.

In praise of Milton Friedman's series Free to Choose.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Finland enters second dip of recession.

Why we haven't suffered worse consequences of government malfeasance yet:

"One reason that we have thus far been spared the full wrath of Washington's poor decisions is that we are still benefiting from problems abroad, particularly in the eurozone. As sovereign debt issues have temporarily caused a flight to the dollar, our economy has benefited from lower interest rates and restrained consumer prices."

"Our last remaining leg of support has been the activity of Asian central banks, who have continued in their herculean efforts to prop up the dollar and bail out Americans with low interest rates and cheap imports. However, when sovereign credit risk eventually rears its head in America, look for Asian policymakers to finally wise up. Once that prop is removed, there will be no questions about the gravity of our situation – and little dispute that it amounts to a depression."

We're in a world of hurt.

"Cameron went on to say, "Greece stands as a warning of what happens to countries that lose their credibility, or whose governments pretend that difficult decisions can somehow be avoided." This type of realistic sentiment is completely absent in our current leadership in Washington, even though the US deficit is 9.9 percent of GDP and mounting. Meanwhile, the tough decisions being made by European governments will start to rebuild investor confidence in the euro."

We're the stupidest people in the world.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Reminding us that Bernanke is just another aristocrat, he defends today's deficits but warns they will become dangerous tomorrow. That's what politicians always say. We can run up all the debt we want today, it's good for us, but tomorrow somebody else will have to do something about it. It's good to be the king.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Another study has found out what we already know - global warming frauds aren't interested in science, they're pushing policy.

"A cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics has concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fail to stand up to scrutiny.

He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”

The cross-examination, carried out by Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”"

More and more people are realizing these frauds are political hacks posing as scientists, not real scientists.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iran to continue enriching uranium despite new sanctions, just like we knew they would. Sanctions are worse than useless. They never have their targeted effect, but they always make the target more defiant and less willing to work with others while impoverishing the population.

WAR:

Reason is uncomfortable with the idea of target killings.

"Last week U.N. investigator Philip Alston delivered a report on "targeted killings" in which the U.S. government plays a starring role. Under a policy secretly initiated by George W. Bush and expanded by Obama, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command track and kill people, including U.S. citizens, based on their alleged ties to Al Qaeda or its allies. The killings, typically carried out by missiles fired from drone aircraft, dangerously blur the line between warfare and summary execution."

Everybody should be uncomfortable with targeted killings especially in the hands of the most corrupt people in the country. Obviously, since we're at not at war, it would be best if the governments of countries where terrorists reside would arrest them and prosecute them as criminals for carrying out terrorist attacks. But that's not going to happen in Somalia or large areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. It's not going to happen other places. If we don't kill them, they will continue to launch terrorist attacks on US citizens. The long term solution should be to engage the people around them in a system of voluntary exchange, earn their trust and develop ties so those people will want to stop the terrorists out of self-interest, but in the mean time we can't sit idly by and let them kill Americans. I don't like the bombs, I would prefer snipers because it would limit other casualties, but in some cases, it appears that our government either kills or US citizens be killed. We shouldn't kill anybody unless we know he or she has launched an attack against the US previously or he is implementing an attack against the US. Being associated with al Qaeda or talking about attacking is not enough.

POLITICS:

California Republicans sent a strong message that they look to the private sector for solutions to their problems when they nominated Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, and Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, to run for governor and US senator, respectively, in huge victories. Neither have been corrupted by being in politics previously.

Lincoln eeks out a surprise win in Arkansas. Too bad. I'd love to have seen another incumbent ousted. Tea Partier defeats establishment Republican to run against Harry Reid in Nevada. Women won big on the Republican side. They should make a lot of noise about that. The Washington Post seems surprised these women didn't make gender an issue. Why could that be? Maybe because they weren't Democrats?

MEDIA:

Reason wonders why it took so long for Hearst to get rid of Helen Thomas. So do I.

MISC:

Science discovers what we all knew despite what power-hungry politicians keep telling us, only a few bad apples are affected by video-game violence. These are the people who were going to be bad anyway.

Congressman wants to know why so many key technical people were not on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig the day it blew. This could be interesting. Government acts like it's in charge by ordering BP to bring more ships to the Gulf to capture oil. Of course BP was already doing that because capturing the oil increases its revenues and decreases its liability.

I have no doubt the officials are favoring the Lakers. They always favor the Lakers.

Swiss lawmakers reject treaty with US that would compromise Switzerland's banking secrecy. Put your money is Swiss banks before the feds take it all.

The libertarian-paleo connection: never trust the government.

"Paleos generally reserve a special hatred for the state. After all, the state and its allies in academia and industry are spreading deadly health advice that is responsible for the bulk of disease and obesity, and it continues to do so in the face of a growing mountain of evidence contradicting it. It should have been obvious from the start that the conventional wisdom was bogus – it totally contradicts evolutionary biology. The conventional recommendation to avoid red meat and animal fat, for example, flies in the face of over 2 million years of evolutionary adaptation to eating animals (the whole animal, including all of the fat). The recommendations to eat grains and vegetable oils are also suspect – grains were only introduced into the human diet about 10,000 years ago, and vegetable oils haven't evenexisted for more than a century. The state's health advice is not only wrong, but directly harmful to health. That makes the state responsible for an unfathomable amount of misery and death. For paleos, this elicits a deep mistrust in the state – how can they trust that the state doesn't screw up this badly in anything else it does?"

It doesn't get much more libertarian than that.

Free kibbles

POLICE STATE:

Justice Scalia stayed an execution in Texas 47 minutes before it was to happen because the prosecution hadn't tested DNA evidence from the crime scene, and they kept this evidence from the defense. Now the entire Supreme Court will hear the case. Why do we let prosecutors get away with this?

POLITICS:

Pat Buchanan doesn't believe Obama's report about the Sestak job. Obama lies about everything. He's surely lying about this too. But I don't think it will go anywhere. The press doesn't want to bring Obama down. If Sestak loses in November, Republicans can hold hearings, but those things are generally only for grandstanding.

MISC:

Brits fed up with Obama bashing BP. I'm fed up with Obama, period. James Cameron has given BP his seal of approval for their efforts to cap the leak. We can sleep easier now. Like we didn't already know BP was trying everything it could to stop the leak despite being limited by the government's boot on its neck. Like BP enjoys suffering more liability. Like BP workers on the Gulf enjoy flooding their backyards with oil. What a joke.

Fingernail sized robot flies in a magnetic field and operates a gripper by shooting it with a laser.

If talking is a such a good cure for the tragedy of the commons, where are the buffalo and passenger pigeons?