Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Japan has suffered two lost decades, but the dollar just hit an eight month low compared to the yen.

The case for legalizing capitalism. It's never been tried before, but when it's been approximated, it's worked wonders.

"Consider this remarkable irony: most citizens put their faith in government — the entity that steals from us, causes wars, imprisons and starves innocent citizens, and is an absolute monopoly — to provide for us and keep us safe.

At the same time, they see businesses — which have eradicated diseases and starvation, engaged in peaceful exchanges instead of war, produced virtually everything we currently own and enjoy, paid us our wages and provided capital for us to improve our productivity, all the while being fully restrained by hungry competitors (in free markets) — as our enemies from whom we need protection. These commonly held but irrational prejudices for government and against businesses form the very foundation of the political arguments espoused by professional anticapitalist "thinkers.""

I love this point.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama says tax hikes necessary to make the rich pay their fair share. How will we know when they're finally paying their fair share? They won't be rich any more. That's not a joke. That's Obama's goal.

Obama's stimulus money helping train foreign workers overseas.

EDUCATION:

Feds blocks schools from putting textbook on Kindle.

HEALTH CARE:

70 percent of Missouri voters vote to nullify the health care mandate in Obamacare. That's almost a 3-1 margin. The Obamacare flowchart is enough to show you how bad this program would be if it was implemented. Enlarged.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

US government admits that 3/4 of the Gulf oil has been cleaned up or broken down by natural forces.

Democrats give up hope for passing narrow energy bill before the August recess, but you can bet some ugly energy bill will come back in the lame duck session.

Obama won't let this little setback halt his agenda for destroying America. He's ordered the EPA to regulate CO2 despite having no legislation.

"The Environmental Protection Agency will soon begin regulating greenhouse gases factory by factory, power plant by power plant. That could be unwieldy, expensive and unpopular — even President Obama has said it’s not his preferred solution."

Obama would rather be able to pass the buck, but the destruction of America is his primary goal.

WAR:

Regarding the WikiLeaks leak:

"The Obama administration and the Pentagon insist release of these old reports from 2004–2009 "endanger our boys." Nonsense. The only thing the truth endangers are the politicians who have hung their hats on the Afghan War and some paid Afghan informers who are most likely well known to the Taliban and its allies."

I wish I had written that.

"Here’s the bottom line on Pakistan’s "duplicity." After 9/11, the US threatened to "bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age" unless it turned against Taliban, a religious, anti-Communist movement, and opened Pakistan to US military forces and intelligence operations. This was told to me be a former head of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service whose directors I have met with since 1985.

Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf says his nation was forced to give in to Washington’s threats of all-out war against Pakistan it did not accept all US demands that resulted in Pakistan becoming a semi-occupied nation.

Musharraf was compelled to abandon Taliban, which served as Pakistan’s proxy army in Afghanistan battling the still active Afghan Communist Party-Tajik Northern Alliance. Russia and Iran also backed the Northern Alliance. Islamabad had used Taliban to counter intensifying efforts by India to extend its influence into Afghanistan.

Pakistan was thus forced by the US to act against its own vital strategic interests. Southern Afghanistan has long been Pakistan’s sphere of influence and was seen as giving wasp-waisted Pakistan strategic depth in a major war with India.

This column revealed that in 2007, Pakistan and India concluded that the US and its dragooned allies would be defeated and driven from Afghanistan. Both old foes began implementing a proxy war to control strategic Afghanistan.

Pakistan adopted a dual-track policy: accepting semi-occupation by the US and $1 billion annually from Washington and paying lip service to the US-led war, while keeping open links to Taliban and tribal militants."

That's the best, concise description of the extent of the mess we've created in central Asia I've read yet.

"What Washington really wants is a totally obedient, obsequious Pakistan, not real ally. But the interests of the two nations must at times diverge. Trying to make Pakistan into a satellite state will result in that enormously important, nuclear-armed nation of 170 million one day exploding with anti-American hatred, as was the case in Iran in 1979. The US-led war in Afghanistan is putting the two nations on a collision course. Over 90% of Pakistanis already say that their nation’s primary enemy is the United States, followed by India."

Yikes.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Video of panelist who debunks all the misinformation about the Iranian nuclear program.

POLITICS:

The praise for the ruling class essay keeps rolling in.

"It is the arrogant presumption on the part of the governing elite that they are better than their inferiors, that “the elite is neat and the masses are _____.”  And what are asses but dumb beasts of burden which labor for their masters.  This is comparable to the aristocratic disdain of the peasantry in pre-Revolutionary France found in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities."

This is why I constantly call them aristocrats. I'm happy to see a conservative who finally understands this, who finally understands that both Republicans and Democrats are aristocrats, and maybe if other conservatives finally realize it too, that'll be a good thing. But libertarians know this. You have to realize it to be a libertarian. It's nothing new.

"Angelo Codevilla traces this arrogant posture of the elite back to its origins in progressivism."

This is baloney. The arrogance of aristocrats is as old as man. It's human nature. Some have always felt they were better than others and destined to rule others through violence. Progressives weren't the first to feel that way. The rationalizations used to justify this human urge aren't important. They change with the ages and they'll continue to change into the future. The intellectual aspect is window dressing and worrying about it is a distraction. This is basic human nature. Those people who can get away with looting others tend to because it's easier than working hard and profiting in a system of voluntary exchange, and our genes program us to take the easy route whenever possible. It doesn't matter if they use religion or mysticism or beauty or inheritance or intellectual arguments to obtain power. What matters is the rest of us are fools to allow it. Americans, because we are a self-selected subset of the world's population selected for fierce independence managed to hold off the ruling elites for longer than any country in history, but as our ancestors tamed this land and created riches, more and more people who were not fiercely independent immigrated here and enabled the aristocrats to seize power. To this day, that's why Democrats, the party of slightly bigger government, are beloved by immigrants.

The public doesn't get to lament "What happened to the adults?" when talking about the aristocrats. The public elected them. Washington aristocrats are the most evil people in America, serial looters and killers, yet Americans re-elect them 94 percent of the time.

Obama can't yet claim to be more divisive than Lincoln.

Barney Frank involved in MaxineWaters's corruption case. Is anybody surprised?

Another case of the government and the press being in bed together - literally.

MISC:

Earth weathers solar storm.

Primal snacks.

Now the FTC declares it will determine what changes Intel can make to its chips. Our government has gone nuts. It no longer cares about the illusion of operating in our interests.

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

After irresponsibly demonizing Toyota, the Dept. of Transportation is blocking the release of studies that would exonerate Toyota in some of those acceleration crashes.

TAX AND SPEND:

Thanks to our confiscatory tax system, there's a backlog of Americans trying to give up their citizenship. They're leaving the US faster than the US bureaucrats can process them.

The feds subsidies Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which promotes higher taxes and more government spending in the US.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Government hack, I mean economist, pretends that deflation mean inflation.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

New study shows that all three supposedly independent global temperature data sets are in fact interrelated and derived from one data set, and that master data set has been corrupted by over reliance on temperature obtained at lower latitudes - i.e. where people live and heat up their local environments with technological activity.

Since the ocean pretty much cleaned up the Gulf oil spill, the enviro-Marxists have to invent some other way to capitalize on the spill, so they're suing BP over use of dispersants. The problem is government bureaucrats OKed the use of the dispersants, and since they're the boss, the lawsuit should be against them. As always, government regulations undermine responsibility and liability which leads to bigger problems.

The global warming frauds are the comedy gift that keeps on giving. This time they claim we must reduce CO2 output to zero by the end of the century.

MISC:

Walter Williams explains there's nothing racist about profiling.

Android has outsold the iPhone for the last six months.

Of course butter from grass-fed cows is better than butter from grain-fed cows.

There’s No Such Thing as Unbiased News

There’s No Such Thing as Unbiased News
by Mark Luedtke

Many Americans and most journalists have a romantic notion that in the past, news organizations had integrity and published or broadcast unbiased news. That’s a delusion. There’s never been any such thing as unbiased news.

Ben Franklin was one of the most famous newspapermen in the colonies and published the Pennsylvania Gazette. He published the original drawing of the colonies depicted as a snake cut in multiple sections in order to influence the colonies to unite to fight the French and Indians before the French and Indian War. Franklin used his paper to promote the war for independence, and Revolutionary War supporters adopted the sectioned snake with the text “Don’t tread on me” to symbolize their cause.

Newspapers in Andrew Jackson’s 1828 campaign against John Quincy Adams gleefully slandered both candidates, and Jackson went so far as to write newspaper editors with advice about how to defend attacks on him and to attack Adams in response. Nicholas Biddle, President of the US central bank Jackson wanted to shut down, printed money out of thin air just as the Federal Reserve does today and used that money to bribe newspapers to print slanderous attacks on Jackson and defenses of the bank, similar to what we saw happen to Ron Paul in 2008. Biddle wrote one editor, “If you will cause the articles I have indicated and others which I may prepare to be inserted in the newspaper in question, I will at once pay to you one thousand dollars.”

We all know how William Randolf Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer led the country into the Spanish-American War. All you have to know about journalists is they named their highest award after a master of political activism posing as an unbiased newsman.

The pretense that the mainstream media is unbiased is a recent invention prompted by the FCC. Before the FCC, Americans understood that all humans are biased including journalists, and the news business was a free-for-all of competing views. But once the FCC was created and controlled who could broadcast on the airwaves, government propagated the myth that some journalists, the ones who were worthy of being blessed with licenses from the FCC, were super-human, supposedly unbiased. Of course that was a crock. It enabled more effective political advocacy by those government chose to favor - the leftist dominated mainstream media that then took over the print media too.

That’s how we ended up with “the most trusted man in America”: Walter Cronkite. Cronkite had to have been the most effective liar in America to earn that moniker, and because he was sanctioned by the FCC, Americans temporarily lost their skepticism. Cronkite was the most effective advocate of the left of his generation. His proclamation that we had lost the Vietnam war during the Tet offensive, when in fact we had won the battle, led to the murder of millions in Southeast Asia by empowering the antiwar movement ultimately leading to Democrats cutting off funding for Vietnam after Watergate.

The FCC exists for one reason - to control speech on the airwaves to government sanctioned opinions. The existence of the FCC is the most blatant violation of the First Amendment in history. But the American people instinctively rebel against the yoke of government. Talk radio and Foxnews are the happy beneficiaries of that rebellion. They provide alternate viewpoints to the leftist mainstream media, and many Americans are attracted to those viewpoints.

Without the pretense of being unbiased, the leftist media can’t compete, look up Air America, but it’s always been a fraud as the recent release of the journolist transcripts proves. One journolist transcript shows the mainstream media members actively conspired and acted as Barack Obama’s propaganda arm and protector during the 2008 campaign by spiking stories about Rev. Wright and calling right-wing pundits racists. They also plotted to smear Sarah Palin.

Until a few years ago, the leftist media had a monopoly on the news. Even after the rise of talk radio and Foxnews,  Americans had no choice but to consume the news chosen for them by others. But thanks to the internet, that’s no longer the case. So far in the internet age, the only reasons anybody limits themselves to news packaged by others is habit or intellectual laziness. The internet enables every American to search out the news that interests them and understand the whole story, not just the pieces of the story presented by news outlets in order to advance their agendas. The greatest benefit of the internet is it empowers independent thought.

People who think independently are hard to control. Government can’t stand that. Government’s propaganda arm in the mainstream media is dying because Americans prefer to think for themselves. In order to save that propaganda arm, government is calling for bailouts of the mainstream media, which has the nice side-effect of giving them even more control over the news.

Worse yet, government is working overtime to control speech on the internet.  The Obama administration recently shut down 73,000 blogs. The FCC recently lost a court case in which it tried to enforce net neutrality on Comcast. Undeterred, the FCC is changing its strategy so it can regulate the internet despite the court ruling. That’s not good enough for Joe Lieberman who wants to give the president power over an internet kill switch because the Chinese have one.

Thanks to the internet, we’re enjoying a revolution in the information available to individuals that is exposing government for what it is: a violent, criminal gang - the ultimate mafia - that cares only for expanding its own power at the expense of the people, and government will do everything in its power to crush that revolution.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Democrats try to blame Republicans for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The sad part is many Americans will fall for it.

The CBO promotes expanding government. Of course it does. It's a government bureaucracy.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Despite all the hype we've been hearing about how hot North America has been so far this year, it turns out that 62 percent of the US land experienced below normal temperature for the first half of the year.

Louisiana marshes are surprisingly resilient to some people. Who? I'm not the least bit surprised. I bet the people most surprised are the so-called experts who were wrong again.

BP tests plans to permanently cap the Gulf oil leak. The latest estimate is the well leaked 4.9 million barrels, but the ocean pretty much cleaned it up.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Obama's march toward dictatorship continues as he orders ICE to figure how to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants without Congressional approval.

POLITICS:

California representative Pete Stark tells his constituents like it is: the federal government has no limits on its powers. That's because Americans haven't voted for people who respect the Constitution, and it's unlikely that 2010 or 2012 will be any different. If you want government to respect the Constitution, you have to elect representatives who respect the Constitution then vote them out as soon as they become corrupt. I doubt that will ever happen.

Maxine Waters joins Charlie Rangel under the ethics spotlight. Why are these two singled out? They're all doing it.

The hypocrisy of ethics investigations is aristocrats who systematically, successfully and oppressively loot the American people like Kennedy and Byrd are lionized while the few who question this legalized corruption like Phil Hart are attacked for ethics violations.

""Among the states which purportedly ratified the 16th Amendment, at least four of them have overturned state income taxation on the basis that earning a living is a fundamental right which cannot be taxed," continues Hart. A tax on one's wages is a form of slavery; it is literally a tax on a person's right to exist.

The original intent of the 16th Amendment, as one Congressman pointed out during a 1943 speech on the House floor (see Congressional Record, March 27, 1943, p. 2580), was not to impose a tax "on income as such," but rather to impose an "excise tax with respect to certain activities and privileges which is measured by reference to the income which they produce." In other words, the income tax was applied to income derived from the privilege of acting as a government-created corporation.

As is the case with much of what happened in annus horribilis 1913 – the Federal Reserve System being the most notable example – the income tax was sold to the public as a way of protecting the common people from the predations of the super-wealthy.

At the time, the Republican-created tariff system amounted to "a tax placed on the American people not by government, but by business," writes Hart.

The income tax was designed to target those who profited from government-created and tariff-assisted monopolies. This was the "bait." The "switch" came once the 16th Amendment was ratified, when legislators in thrall to what used to be called the Money Power (with the detestable Nelson Aldrich playing a key role, as he did in the creation of the Federal Reserve) retrofitted language into the tax code that defined "wages" as the revenue source targeted by the income tax."

Original intent means nothing. What matters is the words that were ratified as understood by the people ratifying them. If the people believed newspaper editorials instead of the plain language of the amendment, they were fools and deserved what they got. However the amendment doesn't give government the power to tax some differently than others. It only allows a flat rate, and any deductions must apply equally to everybody.

""I read your book 'Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?'" Hart was notified in a letter from IRS agent Barbara Parks announcing that the state-sponsored terrorist clique employing her was beginning an "investigation" of the book. The purpose of that inquiry, she continued, was "to determine whether or not your statements are commercial speech and whether this activity causes harm to the government."

With the help of the Center for Individual Rights, Hart successfully sued the IRS to interdict the agency's demand that he turn over the names of everybody who had purchased his book. Four years later, the IRS retaliated against Hart by issuing a final audit report denying all of his business deductions for eight years, hitting him with an additional tax liability of roughly $125,000. When he protested his treatment to the IRS, an official with the agency gloatingly explained: "When you don't give us everything we ask for, you get all of your deductions denied."

"During [my] four year audit, I provided the IRS with all my canceled checks, receipts, invoices and so on – boxes worth," Hart recounts. "Yet these deductions were denied solely for political reasons.""
Every action government takes is political.

LOCAL:

E-schools growing fast in Ohio.

Previously we learned that Dayton hospitals have a higher than average incidence of MRSA, but this article wants you to believe our hospitals are better than average.

MISC:

Google updated docs and took it backwards at least two years. I can no longer post a doc to my blog. Google used to be a great company, but they sure are sucking lately.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

At least geeks realize that electric car subsidies are handouts to the rich.

REGULATION:

Mortgage loan originators to be fingerprinted and registered like sex offenders or find another job. Many will find another job with the obvious consequences ensuing.

EDUCATION:

This frustration is another consequence of education funded by violence.

POLITICS:

Now that leftists have ruined the word liberal, they want to co-opt and ruin a new word.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The illusion of recovery is fading, and aristocrats were forced to retroactively adjust down their numbers for the past few quarters.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Fossil fuel subsidies dwarf renewable energy subsidies. That's like complaining the Yankees spend more money than other baseball teams. Of course they do. Fossil fuel companies have far more money to influence the aristocrats. When are people going to wake up to the nature of government?

As expected, the government's response to the oil spill was far more damaging than the spill itself.

POLITICS:

Police clear Gore in masseuse case, but they can't clear him of the fraud he should be charged with.

MEDIA:

Can you imagine how the liberal media would howl if a right-wing power-broker paid three million dollars for his or her daughter's wedding? Funny how these liberal aristocrats are only against conspicuous consumption and carbon footprints when somebody other than one of their own is doing it. And now we know the Clintons are literally in bed with Wall Street just like the press is literally in bed with our rulers and Republicans are literally in bed with Democrats.

MISC:

In a funny reminder that government is the enemy of progress, the UK government refuses to upgrade from IE6, which is about a bazillion computer years old.

Unusual pattern of cosmic rays at south pole.

New solar spaceship produces amazingly detailed pictures of sunspots.

In essay about Trotsky, even Karl Marx "saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production." Too bad Marx's solution was create ultimate bureaucracy to run a slave state.

The role of religion in forming the classic liberal tradition.

Free kibbles

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Record cold in South America intensifies as La Nina strengthens. All you hear about in the news is the heat in the northern hemisphere, but the globe has two hemispheres.

POLICE STATE:

This is a great question, and you won't like the answer: "Why are police trained to be cowards?"

POLITICS:

As expected, the ethics investigation of Charlie Rangel that pundits were hyperventilating over was actually a farce, recommending only a reprimand. That's not even a slap on the wrist.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

The British continue to make more sense than Americans.

"Ministers want to end the “illogical” situation where people are effectively paid to remain unemployed because state benefits are more valuable than wages."

Who would have thought that when you pay people to not work, they won't work? Let's see if the British government really cuts welfare benefits.

REGULATION:

The financial oppression bill exempts the SEC from FOIA requests. How's that transparency working out for you?

The FAA has declared a no-fly zone over Chelsea Clinton's wedding.

EDUCATION:

New Jersey Gov.Christie is doing what I've long advocated, turning the greed argument around on leftists. People in the private sector aren't greedy. They provide quality goods and services that they voluntarily exchange with others. Greed is in the political economy where people are taking wealth they didn't earn from others by force. In this case, it's government teachers. We have no way of knowing the value of teachers because they are paid with stolen money, not in a system of voluntary exchange.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The New York Times claims that nuclear energy is more expensive than solar, but the New York Times has an anti-nuclear agenda, so I don't know if this is true or not. I also bet most of the cost of nuclear energy is the cost of meeting government regulations, not actually producing energy.

New report supposedly combining all temperature data sets claims that global warming is unmistakable. Not in the last 12 years it isn't. 1998 is still tied with 1934 as the hottest years on record. Climate warmed over the last 40 years, but so what? Climate changes. Climate has been changing for 4 billion years, and it will continue changing for 4 billion more. It's natural.

Even ultra-liberal Slate magazine acknowledges the Gulf oil spill has not been anything approaching a disaster.

POLICE STATE:

Obama to make it easier for FBI agents to get information on a person's internet activity without a warrant. No thank you.

POLITICS:

Because Obama is ruling exactly the way his record indicated he would, women, white men, Jews and Hispanics are abandoning him. But since he's exactly what we knew he'd be, why are they leading now? Why did they support him to begin with?

MEDIA:

Time magazine calls Rush Limbaugh "the obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh." I'm happy to see the leftist media is dropping the charade that it's unbiased.

The bigoted Dept. of Agriculture woman who refused to help a white farmer and pawned him off on "one of his own kind" is suing Breitbart for publishing the video. A judge should throw the case out because it has no merit - he just published a video of her speech - but in our messed country who knows what will happen.

MISC:

Science is losing credibility because it has been politicized and adopted an authoritarian tone. No doubt about that. Anything that becomes politicized becomes authoritarian. Another big reason it's losing credibility is all the pseudo-science posing as real science.

Eating local has led to me eating more fruits and vegetables.

Mises Academy is offering four courses this fall.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's economic advisor Christina Romer says a one percent tax increase reduces economic output by three percent. That's because you have to pay for spending twice. But Obama loves that. He wants to raise taxes specifically to reduce our economy and make us all poorer.

I always get a good laugh when I see Obama's claim on the campaign trail that he would cut spending.


REGULATION:


Here's another reminder that government is the enemy of progress:

"The Federal Trade Commission’s time machine worked its magic again, restoring the market for a particular group of herbicides to its pre-2008 condition"

The FTC dragged the country backwards 3 years.


GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:


Prizes offered for solutions to clean up the oil in the Gulf. Let nature do it. Send me my prize.


WAR ON DRUGS:


George Will reminds how stupid the war on drugs is and how misguided the prohibitionists are:

"In “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson,” historian David S. Reynolds writes that in 1820, Americans spent on liquor a sum larger than the federal government’s budget. By the mid-1820s, annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol reached seven gallons, more than three times today’s rate. “Most employers,” Reynolds reports, “assumed that their workers needed strong drink for stimulation: a typical workday included two bells, one rung at 11 a.m. and the other at 4 p.m., that summoned employees for alcoholic drinks.”"

End these wars on Americans.


POLICE STATE:


FBI agents busted for lying on test. Suppose you or I had been busted for lying on a test about national security given to us by the FBI. What do you think would happen to us? Needless to say, the FBI agents are above the law.


WAR:


Any honest rally supporting the troops would call to bring them home so they can live. Forcing them to fight and die so some politically connected rich guys and corporations can control the Afghanistan mineral wealth is abominable.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Obama deports illegal aliens in record numbers.


Federal judge temporarily blocks key sections of the new Arizona immigration law. This is all we're going to hear about for God knows how long. I have a better solution for Arizona. End your welfare state. Then the illegal aliens who don't pull their weight will go elsewhere.

POLITICS:

Democrats' new campaign finance bill, called the disclose act, favors Democrat donors. Imagine that.

MISC:

Doomsday shelters on the rise.

Blackmail should not be a crime. It's one of government's ways of protecting the rich and powerful from the consequences of their actions and from having to made honest deals with the common people.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

This explanation of why profits are soaring but jobs are not, while not without merit, misses the much greater problem of credit expansion. Note how the study identifies the Greenspan-Bernanke era as the era when things changed?

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Nature did what nature always does: cleaned up the Gulf oil spill. Clean-up crews can't find it. This is wonderful, expected news for the people who live on the Gulf and for everybody else except the environmental Marxists. It's terrible news for them because it reminds everybody that humans are just minuscule creatures on the face of this awesome planet and are unable to do any serious damage.

Pat Sajak (yes, that Pat Sajak) slams the global warming frauds for their hypocrisy. He does it very nicely as you would expect Pat Sajak to do.

"Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.

Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.

Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically."

The frauds aren't going to take their fraud that far, where they actually have to sacrifice themselves, and hooray for Pat Sajak for calling them on it.

Going green in Britain means the people wills suffer 33 percent higher bill even while being forced to cut their energy use. Thanks, global warming frauds.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Mexican prosecutors allege that prison guards use prisoners as hit squads in Mexico's drug war, letting them out, arming them, and letting them use prison vehicles to travel to and from the hit. But who's really on a drug cartel payroll? The guards? The prosecutor? Both? There's no way to know because the war on drugs has enriched and empowered drug cartels to the point that everybody is subject to corruption. The only way to put an end to that is to end the war on drugs.

WAR:

Some key findings of the Wikileaks documents.

POLITICS:

The new black panthers don't scare me. Without government backing, they're just some punks. Government scares me.

LOCAL:

Apparently this is supposed to make us feel good or proud or something:

"Ohio has been named one of 19 finalists in the second round of the federal “Race to the Top” school reform grant competition which comes with a chance to win a share of $3.4 billion."

Yay. Ohio government is in the running to steal part of $3.4 billion from the rest of Americans. How does it feel to be the possible recipient of a huge amount of stolen money? How does it feel to be the victims of theft who might not get any back? I didn't know the Dept. of Education was using stolen funds to fund a lottery. Dayton could receive millions of the stolen money too.

MISC:

Southwest Airlines kicks normal sized woman off airplane to make room for obese teenager who needed two seats. That's a load of crap. That teen should have been charged for two seats up front. If you consume two seats, you have to pay for two seats. I realize this is a stand-by issue, but still.

The longer you sit, the shorter your life. So that means that educated, wealthy, white-collar professionals live shorter lives than uneducated, less wealthy, physical laborers? I doubt it. Non-desk-bound professionals and desk-bound non-professionals must skew these numbers, and stress is probably the single most important factor.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's fraudulent debt commission is expected to call for 10s of trillions in new taxes. Of course it is. This is the only reason that debt commission exists.

Swindlers race to the Gulf coast to steal a portion of the $20 billion Obama extorted from BP.

REGULATION:

Aristocrats don't want you to know this fact about regulation:

"There's been plenty of government regulating, and as regulations grow, the incidences of financial booms and panics grow in step, as Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson chronicle in their wonderful new book Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System. Looking back at financial crises, the authors note "the impacts of rampant speculation, government involvement or poor government responses, misguided monetary polices, ill-designed regulation and misunderstood new financial technology, as well as the oft-repeated failure on the part of policy makers and legislators to draw the appropriate lessons from painful experiences" have been constant themes."

Inevitably, when government ostensibly tries to solve a problem, it makes it worse.

The US government regulates our economy more than the Nazis regulated Germany's.

"In sum, it would be very difficult to argue against the proposition that the US economy today is even more heavily controlled, regulated, and regimented by the state than Germany was at the time Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. Americans have travelled many miles down the road to serfdom by deluding themselves that the god of democracy will somehow save them from statist slavery. But as Hayek warned 56 years ago, "There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary…""

And you thought you were free.

HEALTH CARE:

Because socialized medicine has been such a disaster in Great Britain, Great Britain is reforming away from socialized medicine while Democrats are forcing us at the point of a gun toward full-blown socialized medicine.

The more government dominates our health care industry, the more unsafe hospitals become.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Inspector General investigating claims that Obama's Dept. of the Interior falsified statements made by experts to justify its ban in drilling in the Gulf. Obama will fire this guy ASAP. He won't let facts or honesty get in the way of his agenda.

Desperately seeking swelter. The frauds are working overtime to convince us that any hot spell is a sign of impending doom like hot weather never existed before. They don't let little things like the Dust Bowl or the Medieval Warm Period get in the way of their agenda. Every hot spell is a sign of man-made global warming but every cold snap is a reason to remind us that weather is not climate. These frauds would be funny if they weren't so dangerous.

Last year's blizzards weren't caused by global warming. Neither were any other blizzards in the past.

Who needs cap and trade legislation when Obama can dictate the EPA to tax CO2?

Documentation on BP's lobbying to release the Lockerbie bomber.

If BP has the choice to hire cheap prison labor versus more expensive labor and can get more productivity for its money, that makes good business sense. Guess who's selling the prison labor and is not demonized in this article.

WAR ON DRUGS:

The war on drugs claims another innocent life. This woman would be alive today, as would millions of others around the world, if not for this abominable war. Only evil people who enjoy using violence to force their will on others can rationalize that it's worth killing people to stop some from smoking pot or snorting coke.

POLICE STATE:

The next logical step in auto surveillance will be requiring cars to call the cops when their drivers are speeding. The police won't even have to send out an officer. The car's communication will be received by a computer which will print out a ticket and mail it. Or email it. No human need be involved until you open the ticket in the mail.

Walmart to put RFID tags in individual clothing items. The way to combat this is to force the Walmart check-out person to wand each item you purchased and remove all RFID tags before you purchase them. That'll cost Walmart a lot of money, and they'll rethink that policy.

WAR:

Wikileaks leaks Afghan war logs to the press. Our socialist masters are angry. War is socialism. The US government is waging war in Afghanistan in the name of all the people. It's a collectivist effort. Other than battle plans before they're implemented, there should be no classified information.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

This article wants me to feel sorry for Mexico because the Arizona law will lead to a flood of deportees. It didn't work. Mexico should be trying to entice workers to come back and build Mexico, not complaining about workers coming back.

Illegal aliens fleeing Arizona, one to Pennsylvania. This is the power federalism. This illustrates the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. This is why the Constitution doesn't give the federal government power to control the borders. The Tenth Amendment reserves that power to the states and individuals protecting their private property by expelling trespassers. If we obey the Constitution, federalism will solve this illegal immigration problem. As some states take hard stands, other states will suffer under the increased welfare burden until they either take a hard stand against illegal immigration, get rid of their welfare programs or collapse under the weight of their welfare states. Federalism works.

POLITICS:

Maureen Down complains that Obama's White House is too white. How's that post-racial presidency working out for you? What a joke.

Young voters fleeing Obama. Of course they are. Young voters always resent the man, and Obama is the man now. Democrats are the party in power.

LOCAL:

Local government determines who can build a hospital or not, as a result a couple of big corporations own all the hospitals so they face virtually zero competition. The result is higher than average incidences of disease, and higher prices I'm sure.

MISC:

America is divided into two classes: the ruling the class and the rest of us.

"Members of the two classes do not like one another. In particular, the ruling class views the rest of the population as composed of ignoramuses who are vicious, violent, racist, religious, irrational, unscientific, backward, generally ill-behaved, and incapable of living well without constant, detailed direction by our betters; and it views itself as perfectly qualified and entitled to pound us into better shape by the generous application of laws, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and unceasing declarations of its dedication to bringing the country—and indeed the entire world—out of its present darkness and into the light of the Brave New World it is busily engineering.

This class divide has little to do with rich versus poor or Democrat versus Republican. At its core, it has to do with the division between, on the one hand, those whose attitudes are attuned to the views endorsed by the ruling class (especially “political correctness”) and whose fortunes are linked directly or indirectly with government programs and, on the other hand, those whose outlooks and interests derive from and focus on private affairs, especially the traditional family, religion, and genuine private enterprise. Above all, as Codevilla makes plain, “for our ruling class, identity always trumps.” These people know they are superior in every way, and they are not shy about letting us know that they are. Arrogance might as well be their middle name."

Tell me something I don't know. Why do you think I call them aristocrats? The most interesting thing about this is that apparently some people don't realize it, and that makes it valuable.

"Despite the rulers’ chronic complaints about people’s exercising “discrimination” of one kind or another, they have no intention of treating everybody equally. Hence, “[l]aws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally.”  As the recent health-care and financial-reform statutes illustrate perfectly, however, much of the inequality is achieved not directly, but by the statutes’ delegation of authority to countless regulatory and administrative bodies, which will use their ample discretion to do the desired dirty work."

Stating the obvious again, but until every American who isn't in the ruling class or favored by the ruling class understands it, it bears repeating.

On the so-called mosque at ground zero:

"Islam has a rich history of building Mosques at the sites of great Muslim conquests"

What religion doesn't? You don't think Christians built churches on land they conquered? Or Hindus? Give me a break. Here's my email to Boortz in response.

"If you don't want Muslims to build a Muslim center four blocks away from ground zero, put together a coalition to buy the property. Make them an offer they can't refuse. Otherwise, shut up and support their property rights. This is the USA, and property rights are supposed to be an American value that every American should champion. If we don't support the property rights of everybody, we end up living in country where government confiscates the property of everybody and is the real owner of all property because it exercises final control. Sound familiar?"

Let's see if he has the balls to print it. Militant Muslims behind this project. Tell me something I didn't know, but it doesn't matter who bought it. This is America, and we have to stand for American values. Buy the land or quit complaining and defend property rights. That's how we win.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

If the Dow continues to follow the trends of the Great Depression like it has because Bush and Obama are repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, we can expect it to fall to 7,500.

Peter Schiff's prediction of the falling dollar is finally coming true as investors realize it's not a safe haven but a sinking ship. Shadowstats.com has alternate inflation at just under nine percent.

"Schiff predicts that when prices do start going up significantly, as the inflation train rushes towards us, it may be too late for anyone to do much about it, because the inflationary stimulus policies of the US government and its Federal Reserve have made the US economy so febrile that anypunitive Volcker-style interest rate rises required to shut down rapid price inflation will cripple the US economy completely. The analogy Schiff uses is of a man who has got rid of his party hangover (the 2008 bust following the preceding boom) by taking another large cup from the punch bowl (the Keynesian stimulus policy). This may have made the pain go away temporarily (producing the infamous green shoots of recovery), but have left the man in an even worse state to cope with reality when the second hangover inevitably kicks in (which is starting about now)."

Obama is achieving exactly what he wanted to achieve: making us all much poorer.

REGULATION:

The conspiracy against hemp. Too many producers of competing products don't want it legalized.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

If you believe the alarmist mainstream media stories, every place on earth is heating much faster than average, which is obviously impossible.

POLICE STATE:

On the hundreds of new top secret intelligence programs:

"Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers’ money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It’s loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.

And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one. It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade—after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI “captures” the unfortunate victims of the government’s entrapment.)

So, the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small—not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent. Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can’t be done won’t be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime."

Not only can we endure them, we have no choice. This isn't about stopping terrorism. It's about controlling the people. It's about power. In-depth description.

Pilot program in Britain using GPS satellites to identify and confiscate money from speeders. Take the battery out.

WAR:

Afghanistan war to get worse, but we'll be in control by the end of the year. The first rings true, the second does not.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Our situation with Israel shows that:

"you can’t have a republic and an empire: it’s one or the other. This is true not only because empires are constantly defending and extending their frontiers, and are in a state of constant warfare, which requires a centralized authority and the consolidation of State power, but also due to the peculiar vulnerability of democratic institutions to foreign subversion. An America that refused on principle to interfere in the affairs of other nations would have little or nothing to fear from foreign lobbyists and fifth columnists: on the other hand, a “democratic” empire in which the emperor is subjected to all sorts of political pressures, including the necessity of raising obscene amounts of money just in order to keep his throne, is indeed “something that can be easily moved,” as Bibi put it."

I choose Republic.

MEDIA:

Journolist - the vast left-wing media conspiracy.

LOCAL:

It looks like the MRSA problem is at Kettering Medical Center. But government didn't provide that information, a family member of a victim did. Once again, private individuals are helping each other while government attempts to keep that from happening.

MISC:

99 out of 100 people taking statins for cholesterol don't need them, and cholesterol does not cause heart disease.

Benefits of alcohol. I have to get another beer.

Anger at the ground zero mosque.

"To begin with, the proposed Islamic center – not a mosque, but the Muslim equivalent of the YMCA – a nonprofit foundation wants to build in New York City isn’t at "ground zero," it is four blocks from the site of the World Trade Center."

I haven't heard that in any of the stories. Funny how it's omitted.

"Never mind the fact that there is already a mosque four blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center (see here), which has been there for many years."

I hadn't heard that before either.

Of course language shapes the way we think. We think in the words we know.

Cool looking, centrally planned city Masdar, UAE. I wonder if people will make it thrive.

Smart drugs. I wonder if baseball will outlaw them.

Is our universe inside a black hole in a higher universe?

Alternative news links.

Why is Google buying a spy drone that can see through walls?

Free kibbles

EDUCATION:

Washington D.C. school system to fire 200 teachers, and the teachers' union is unhappy. Of course these evaluations are not perfect, and since they're done by government bureaucrats, they're probably terrible. But teachers who face a fear of being fired for poor performance will do a better job.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

BP had turned off the safety alarm on Deepwater Horizon so people could sleep. BP to drill in deep water off the coast of Libya. I bet they do a better job there. One of the great things about the private sector is businesses learn from their mistakes. Only government doesn't have to learn from its mistakes. It not only repeats them, it makes them worse and worse every time.

LOCAL:

Ohio state bureaucrats are investigating a local hospital for an outbreak of deadly bacteria, but because government hates the people, they won't release the name of the hospital. Maybe they get their kicks out of watching citizens play deadly bacteria roulette, or more likely, they're beholden to the medical industry, not the people. But you can bet if some local in their family gets sick, they'll know which hospital to avoid.

MISC:

Here's my model legislation backing up the constitutional power to make interstate commerce regular:

"Any product or service that meets the requirements for legal sale in one state is deemed to have met the requirements for sale in all states. Any federal law to the contrary is hereby repealed, and any state law to the contrary is hereby overruled."

That's the definition of making interstate commerce regular. That simple law would dramatically improve our economy virtually overnight. It would wipe out thousands of lines of federal code and probably hundreds of thousands of lines of state code that restrict trade and make us all poorer, yet every American can read it and understand it in seconds. In order to reestablish the rule of law and to regain our freedom, we must pass simple laws that protect freedom like this and wipe out all the complex, oppressive laws on the books today. But because this law would be of such great benefit to Americans, the chances that the Republican and Democrat aristocrats would pass it are zero.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Here's the Charlie Rangel story people should be talking about: Rangel introduces legislation to bring back slavery.

"To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes."

And you thought slavery was a thing of the past.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

I have zero confidence that seven Republican senators can stop Obama from enacting net neutrality. Government wants control of the internet.

TAX AND SPEND:

Grotesquely overpaid bureaucrats in Bell California referenced previously resigned and made off with hundreds of thousands of dollar a year pensions.

A few Democrats are pretending they don't want to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. Don't buy the hype. They're just saying what they think the voters want to hear before November.

Are you ready for the tax tsunami?

Ann Arbor government laying off firefighters but spends $850,000 on building a new sculpture.

REGULATION:

Obama's never-ending assault on America continues with proposed new unconstitutional regulations forcing:

"U.S. businesses to provide to the government data about employee pay as it relates to the sex, race and national origin of employees."

Obama will not stop until all that's left of America is rubble or we remove him from power.

EDUCATION:

Of course government schools don't teach or encourage entrepreneurship. Government doesn't want people to think for themselves. Especially leftists. That's why Obama is trying to destroy small business in America. Corporations can be controlled. Independent small businesses cannot.

HEALTH CARE:

Just like many of us warned, Obamacare was designed to fail so government would usher in full-blown socialized medicine. Democrats didn't waste any time either - they're already pushing a revived government option.

POLICE STATE:

Perverts in government aren't limited to the TSA. An investigation has uncovered many government security agents who purchased and downloaded child pornography.

WAR:

Gen. Petraeus scraps Gen. McChrystal's plan to take Kandahar and reworks entire Afghan strategy. That's good news, but it would be better news if he was leading our pullout.

Now that Obama has taken over Bush's wars, conservatives are losing interest.

POLITICS:

Obama's cabinet has far and away the least private sector experience of any cabinet since 1900. Seven percent. The next lowest was Kennedy's at 28 percent. I'm surprised it isn't zero percent.

How true is this? While America at large has obviously moved past race, Obama's election proves it, Obama, Democrats and race activists have not. I predicted Obama would be the most racially divisive figure since the 60s, and I was right.

MEDIA:

The smoking gun for media bias? That's quite the understatement. Journo-gate is smoking gun for the mainstream media as the propaganda arm of leftists in government. We've always known this to be true, but now it's undeniable.

LOCAL:

Fatal crashes nearly double in Butler County and on the rise throughout the state. Duh. It's because of omni-present, never-ending, irresponsible road construction. I-75 has been torn up and extra dangerous between Dayton and Hamilton since I moved up here in 2003, and there's no end in sight. Roads all around here have been torn up and dangerous for years. The aristocrats plan these road construction jobs to last years or decades. They tear up the roads and leave them torn up for months or years at a time with nobody working on them so they can get double revenue from tickets. The result is more crashes and more deaths. It's no coincidence these numbers are up in the same year that Obama's stimulus boondoggle is tearing up roads all over the state. Government kills.


MISC:


Saturn's rings as a model for planet formation.

Google guy rips java and C++. Good for him. I completely agree with these criticisms.

Census bureau calling businesses and asking about numbers of employees. Huh?

Capitalism eliminated starvation. Government domination of our lives is bringing it back.