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ECONOMY:

Zombie spending significant part of that phony GDP statistic.

"Porter Stansberry told us that together, public and private sectors in the US now spend $3.5 trillion just on interest. Since almost all the borrowed money was spent on consumption rather than capital investment, this expense is just one big drag on the economy. It produces no growth, no real jobs, and no real wealth.And here’s another big drag: taxes. Porter says the total tax take is about $2.5 trillion. Again, this is money almost 100% consumed…eaten up…used up, with nothing to show for it but people eager to consume even more next year.
These two expenses combined tote to about 40% of GDP.
No wonder the economy is not growing! Four out of every ten dollars is zombie spending. It supports hamburgers consumed in 1998…gasoline burned in 2002…bankers’ bonuses handed out in 2008…and food stamps distributed in 2011."

Looking at it another way, forget the taxes and let's talk about government spending instead. Government sucks about $4 trillion out of the productive economy and destroys those resources in the parasitic, political economy. Add the $3.5 trillion in interest, and that's $7 trillion of our GDP wasted. That's about 50 percent. No wonder our economy is screwed. The solution to our economic problems is to save our money and get government out of our economy.

Best, medium and worst case scenarios, all bad.

The Greeks are seeing the writing on the wall, taking their money out of the banks and talking about a revolution.

TAX AND SPEND:

The US government is tied with France for the second highest debt in the western world, behind Greece.

REGULATIONS:

How state and local regulations stifle job growth.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Monetary inflation is causing high prices all around the world including China and India.

Despite all the money the Fed and the government stole from us and gave to the banks, they are still in trouble.

Financial tools to protect your cash from inflation.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Pretend scientific journal Nature proves its really just a political propaganda arm of the government by claiming billions of people could be tried for failing to take care of environment. Shame on them. They should return to primitive ways and die.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Another SWAT team kills another American when a peaceful issuance of a warrant would have worked fine.

POLICE STATE:

That we have to have a federal court case to decide if people can legally video the police in public shows how twisted government has made our society.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The Republican establishment is mischaracterizing Ron Paul's position on foreign policy for political gain. Nothing new here.

POLITICS:

Evangelicals realizing that government is the threat, not a tool to be used against others, and therefore embracing Ron Paul.

"Ron Paul's recent appearance and the reaction of his audience reflect a growing trend among evangelicals who see the erosion of the constitutional right of freedom of religion to be the new threat.
"This is no longer about Christians trying to force prayer in schools or an end to abortion," a famous televangelist told me."

This is probably exaggerated, but it's still a great move in the right direction.

"Bill Spiegel, a former member of the Senior Bush President's Economic Council and the Southern Baptist Liaison for George H. W. Bush, says, "Much of the money that was going to evangelical lobbies in Washington is now going to Ron Paul. And the Christian leaders in Washington have been taken by surprise.
"It is because the people are seeing what the leaders are missing. They don't want power; they want to be left alone to worship in freedom and Ron Paul is the only candidate who is defending that right consistently.""

This is sounding better and better.

It looks Newt's ex-staff is heading to Rick Perry. That doesn't bode well for Perry.

Alaska releases emails from Sarah Palin when she was governor. Do you remember seeing such emails for Obama? McCain? Romney? Kerry? Anybody at all besides Sarah Palin? I'm all for these emails being released. I think every candidate should have his political emails from the preceding several years released, but they press will never demand that of its partners.

Prediction that Paul versus Bachmann will be the story of the Republican primary. If true, Romney will win. Frankly, I don't buy it. While Paul and Bachmann may compete for the far right of the party, the battle for victory is likely to be Romney versus Rick Perry.

MISC:

Scientists discover mechanism for what we all know: when smokers quit smoking, they eat more and put on weight. I suspected food tasted better. I also suspected smokers burned more calories through nervous movements. But this scientist discovered something more pernicious: nicotine makes people feel full after eating less food. Or maybe this manifests itself in making food less enjoyable smokers. So smokers might be so skinny because of calorie restriction, and calorie restriction can lengthen life, assuming smoking doesn't kill them. Apparently this isn't natural. The cigarette companies add weight loss drugs.

Like all government, IP laws promote corruption.

I wonder about people who become libertarians because they read something somebody wrote or a teacher convinced them. Why were they unable to use their own eyes and brains to understand that freedom is always the right answer? I welcome them. Better late than never.

Apparently Barack Obama really taught these Chicago thugs how to organize.

The ring of fire continues to burn.

Which country will the US government start a war with next?

Just off the top of my head, I think the US government is waging war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and South America. I'm probably missing a few.  If you know of any more, please comment. So...

Which country will the US government start a war with next?

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Criminal investigation, grand jury and prosecutorial misconduct in the governmen's crusade against WikiLeaks.

"The New Yorker's Jane Mayer echoes The Washington Postreport linked above in reporting that the Obama DOJ's espionage prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake is "crumbling." Mayer writes that "the government has been scrambling to find a way to avoid the trial now scheduled for next Monday" and that -- after indicting him on 10 felony counts, including espionage -- "the government has offered Drake the possibility of pleading to a misdemeanor, with no jail time," an offer he refuses to accept if it means admitting wrongdoing.  But the benefit of prosecuting whistleblowers endures even if the case crumbles because (as is true for the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks) it is legally frivolous: namely, it still serves as a thuggish deterrent to future would-be whistleblowers thinking about exposing government corruption, deceit and illegality."

Another example where the threat from government is enough to change behavior.

ECONOMY:

China's property bubble may be deflating.

City in India thrives because of lack of government despite lack of resources.

"Before it had malls, a theme park and fancy housing compounds … Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base.As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. …
Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets. …"

This is universally true - the laws of economics are real - and the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can return America to a trajectory of greatness.

Criticism of bitcoin. Just because it's not commodity money doesn't mean it can't be valuable. It seems very similar to scrip.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Comparing IPCC's prediction from 1990 to 2011 reality. You already know what it shows.

Australian government proposes killing camels to stop global warming. These people are nuts.

Urban buildup not only creates heat islands, it also traps pollutants in the local air.

POLITICS:

Newt Gingrich's staff gets fed up with him and quits en mass.

"[Former spokesman] Rials said Gingrich’s recent Mediterranean cruise – which ended this week – was a factor, “but no bigger than several other things.”"

I wonder if the Gingrich campaign wasn't more about making money than actually trying to win.

MISC:

Senators pressure Apple to remove apps for locating DUI checkpoints. Apple does. DUI checkpoints have to be publicized, so they have no grounds for doing this. This is a good reminder that government coerces people with threats without having to pass laws and regulations.

Chinese space probe visits moon then heads toward L2.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Dutch on the verge of making net neutrality law. This is bad news.

The internet forces Delta to change its policy charging soldiers for carrying four bags. This is power to the people. Government regulation will stamp this kind of thing out.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Obama trying to use the UN to ban guns.

TAX AND SPEND:

Setting the record straight on the debt ceiling.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Senate gives Fed power to limit what banks can charge for credit card transaction fees. This is price fixing, and price fixing always results in shortages. After this goes into effect, expect delays when you try to purchase with a credit card. Expect other fees to go up to compensate. Naturally the consumer will blame either the merchant or the bank even though the government is to blame.

EDUCATION:

Department of Education sends SWAT team to collect delinquent student loan.

""They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids," Wright said."
"The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife's defaulted student loans."

And you thought it smart for the federal government to take over the function of education. Lots of people might support the Department of Education but not this action. Those people are mistaken about the nature of government. Every government decree, law or regulation is the threat of violence against the people, backed by violence. If you give a government monopoly power over education, it's inevitable that the Department of Education will send SWAT teams after people. If you do not submit, heavily armed and armored government thugs will bust down your door and stick a gun in your face. If they don't murder you, they will kidnap you, drag you off and lock you in a tiny cage. All because you have the temerity not to submit to their crimes.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Good USA Today for tying this spring's weird weather to the strong La Nina, not global warming.

POLICE STATE:

Government's espionage case against NSA whistle-blower collapses, results in plea deal for misdemeanor.

POLITICS:

Gary Johnson is rudely introduced to the real world of failing to garner enough poll support to enter a debate. I don't see a problem with this. I didn't see a problem with it last year when Ron Paul was excluded. I don't see a problem with it today. Networks care about ratings. It makes perfect sense for them to demand some poll performance to be invited to a debate.

We get a little bit of insight and misinformation on this article about Obama's bad week.

"Barack Obama's worst week was about more than bad data. The two great legislative monuments to the first Obama term, the remaking of the health-care industry and the Dodd-Frank financial reform, look like they've got serious structural cracks. A McKinsey report estimates that a third of employers will abandon their health-insurance plans come 2014. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the failure (or inability) of Dodd-Frank's regulatory arm to write new rules for the $583 trillion derivatives market has the financial sector in a panic over its legal exposure."

The misinformation: Obamacare was designed to pressure employers to drop their health care plans and move employees into the government plan. Obamacare was designed to be the final step before full socialized medicine, so this revelation isn't a revelation at all. The insight: the real purpose of the Dodd-Frank bill was to protect financial firms. Many of us knew that all along, but this is the first time I've seen it leaked in the mainstream media. God forbid companies face legal exposure for their actions.

Hillary Clinton wants to become head of the World Bank. I want to abolish the World Bank. Clinton denies she's going to change jobs.

Yet another politician arrested for sexual assault.

LOCAL:

Dayton government schools to lay off 179 people. I feel sorry for them, it's always tough to lose a job, but it's good news for the rest of us. That's 179 people being freed from the parasitic political economy so they can begin working to create wealth that improves all our lives in the productive, private economy.

MISC:

How and why government agents corrupt scientists.

In a good reminder that corporate titans become that way because of their ability to partner with government to their advantage, not because they're prudent business men, Steve Jobs announces Apple will build a new campus that looks like a space ship. No doubt politicians at all levels will love this, so it will boost Apple despite costing way more than necessary. Jobs is a master at working with government to profit his company, especially with Apple's patent portfolio, and it enables him to produce average products and sell them at an exorbitant price. Another lesson is that government enables corporations to grow bigger and more inefficient than could happen in a free market. The bigger a corporation gets, the more it suffers from the fatal flaws of central planning. The bigger a corporation gets, the more insulated it gets from price information. Both of these factors put an upper limit on the size of corporations in a free market. But because government protects them from competition, they can grow much bigger and more inefficient in an economy dominated by government. Jobs is also great at capitalizing on the style over substance culture created by loose monetary policy and entitlement mentality. I'm no fan of Apple because it willingly partners with government to loot us, but blaming Apple for caving to threats from Senators, no matter how stupid, is misguided.


Mark Sisson's definitive guide to walking. Your mileage may vary.


How the US has evolved to look more like France before the French Revolution than the colonies before our Revolution.

"If a barn needed to be raised, a school roof repaired, or a social cause advanced, then people banded together — and the work was done. Tocqueville concluded, "Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France … in the United States you will be sure to find an association.""

Not any more.

"The reward of merit and the absence of punitive laws led to an unprecedented prosperity and social equality; and this made for communities bursting at the seams with energy.Today, America is a society of elites. Business elites claim subsidies, liability limits, and bailouts. Political elites enjoy the economic bounty of skimming off the sweat and blood of taxpayers: rich salaries, plush expense accounts (not counting bribes), platinum pensions and health insurance, etc. Bureaucratic elites (civil servants) "earn" much more than private-sector workers, even though they have greater job security and richer benefits, like plush pension plans that taxpayers can only dream about.
Economic privileges are accompanied by legal ones."

It's sickening when you think about it.


Here's another fantastic example of economic ignorance.


The folly of happiness research.

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TAX AND SPEND:

Even government-supported media outlet US Today reports the real US debt is $61.6 trillion.

The federal tax scheme encourages and enables identity theft.

HEALTH CARE:

Now the government wants to irradiate our food. It never ends. Whenever I see something like this, I wonder if the government created the crisis to grab more power and poison us further. This is a government non-solution to a government-created problem.

"Still, Americans get more irradiated foods than they realize. About a third of commercial spices — the kind added to processed foods — are irradiated, says Eustice, who's also a consultant to the Food Irradiation Processing Alliance."

Of course the FDA is irradiating our food and not telling us by hiding it in food processed by its corporate agents.

"There's no reason to fear irradiation but "there's no silver bullet here," cautions food-safety expert Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Irradiation doesn't kill viruses that also sometimes taint food, and it adds to the food's price."

Trust us, we're from the government. Just like with TSA's nude scanners. Baloney. If the radiation kills bacteria, it kills or at least damages the cells of the produce. The end result is not a natural product.

POLICE STATE:

Report claims more children getting groped by TSA. This is the natural progression. First you get parents comfortable with it. Then you start on their children. Soon everybody is brainwashed to accept being groped by government agents everywhere they go. What's twisted to me is that parents allow these goons to do this to their children. What's so important you can't find another means of traveling?

Muslim marine put on no-fly list for emailing an imam.

US immigration officials perform ridiculous security checks on 2,000 elderly British cruise passengers.

WAR:

If you looked back at the Afghan war headlines, you'd see headlines like this throughout the last nine years:

"Making inroads in Afghanistan"

If we've been making inroads for nine years, how come we're still there? Afghanistan is a disaster. It's unwinnable because the people will never unite behind a government propped up by foreign fighters. We'll never know how many terrorists we created by trying to nation-build there.

NATO escalates the war on Libya again. Could this be a more transparent attempt at seizing control of resources? This is not going to end up the way western central planners think.

"Rasmussen said Qaddafi’s degraded security forces, advances by rebels seeking to topple him and high-level defections marked “considerable progress” in the alliance’s 10-week campaign. He also said there are risks to the stability of a possibly fragmented country after the regime’s collapse."

Ya think?

"NATO commanders have intensified their targeting of Qaddafi’s military machine after rebel fighters who control eastern Libya failed to mount a campaign to push westward to Tripoli. The alliance’s campaign was aided by helicopters for the first time over the weekend."

Within ten years, maybe much less, western rulers will be denouncing these new Libyan rulers as anti-American and anti-western.

Pat Buchanan celebrates the resurgence of the anti-interventionism right.

FOREIGN POLICY:

It looks like the violence in Syria is reaching civil war proportions too.

POLITICS:

Yet another pervert in government exposed. They're all lying, cheating freaks. Government attracts the worst people in the world to it, and the worst of the worst rise to the top. The press just covers up for them. But sometimes they do things that can't be covered up.

"The New York Democrat apologized to his wife and his constituents but said he had no intention of resigning. He argued that he had shown bad judgment but never violated his oath of office — thus setting up a test of voters' willingness to separate personal behavior from professional performance."

One of the few differences between Republicans and Democrats is Democrats rarely resign after they've been exposed as lying, cheating freaks. Republicans typically do. The article contains a nice list of many who were busted recently.

"Politicians are among those who sometimes believe the rules don't apply to them, according to psychologists and sociologists who study behavior. They say the self-confidence politicians must exude to succeed can lead them to believe they are invincible, and ego can lead them astray."

Self-confidence my behind. It's impossible for politicians to represent more than one person - collectivism is impossible - so the primary qualification of all politicians is they must be unnaturally talented liars. We all know the joke, "How can you tell when a politicians is lying?" "His lips are moving." The reason that joke is funny is it's true. We all know it's true. Politicians are all freaks. Unfortunately, we tend to think it applies to everybody else's representative, but never to our own. That's human nature, and politicians use it against us to loot us and control us. And we fall for it every time. This is a convenient distraction from the real news of economic and war futility.

"There are few things more sickening -- or revealing -- to behold than a D.C. sex scandal.  Huge numbers of people prance around flamboyantly condemning behavior in which they themselves routinely engage.  Media stars contrive all sorts of high-minded justifications for luxuriating in every last dirty detail, when nothing is more obvious than that their only real interest is vicarious titillation.  Reporters who would never dare challenge powerful political figures who torture, illegally eavesdrop, wage illegal wars or feed at the trough of sleazy legalized bribery suddenly walk upright -- like proud peacocks with their feathers extended -- pretending to be hard-core adversarial journalists as they collectively kick a sexually humiliated figure stripped of all importance.  The ritual is as nauseating as it is predictable."

Well said.

"What makes the Anthony Weiner story somewhat unique and thus worth discussing for a moment is that, as Hendrick Hertzberg points out, the pretense of substantive relevance (which, lame though it was in prior scandals, was at least maintained) has been more or less brazenly dispensed with here.  This isn't a case of illegal sex activity or gross hypocrisy (i.e., David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley (who built their careers on Family Values) or Eliot Spitzer (who viciously prosecuted trivial prostitution cases)).  There's no lying under oath (Clinton) or allegedly illegal payments (Ensign, Edwards).  From what is known, none of the women claim harassment and Weiner didn't even have actual sex with any of them.  This is just pure mucking around in the private, consensual, unquestionably legal private sexual affairs of someone for partisan gain, voyeuristic fun and the soothing fulfillment of judgmental condemnation.  And in that regard, it sets a new standard: the private sexual activities of public figures -- down to the most intimate details -- are now inherently newsworthy, without the need for any pretense of other relevance. "

But this is mistaken. The press knows all about the sordid affairs of politicians. They cover them up. What makes this different is Weiner broadcast his perversion on Twitter. Is the press supposed to continue covering for him when he can't even cover himself? I don't think so. Think Tiger Woods. When a public figure allows his salacious private life to go public, the press jumps on them to sell stories.

Mitt Romney might be the only Republican Obama can beat because so many of their policies are the same - government run health care, gun control, abortion, etc. - so naturally Romney is leading the Republican pack, at least according to the mainstream media.

"The Washington Post-ABC poll suggests that widespread concerns about the state of the economy continue to make President Obama vulnerable, despite questions about the quality of the GOP field. The survey shows that Romney, who formally launched his economy-focused campaign last week, is starting off strong."

Remember, Romney is the candidate the mainstream media wants to win because he's the most liberal and big government of the Republicans. Rudy Guilliani gets this right:

"According to Giuliani, Romney has "taken away people's freedom" with his requirement that Massachusetts residents purchase health insurance, and his failure to admit it was a mistake is damaging to the party."[It] hurts us in being able to overthrow 'Obamacare.' In a general election, that would be a very big issue," he said."

Romney would look like a joke trying to attack Obamacare in the general election. Obama would expose him for the self-serving, duplicitous jerk he is. It would be easy. It would stick. Romney is the only Republican who has such weakness against Obama. It's hard to imagine anybody on the right supporting him, but the establishment does, and with the the winner take all format and so many candidates in the race, he could win the nomination. Of course, with the economy going down the tubes, even Romney could beat Obama, but since they support pretty much all the same policies, who would want that?

This is a good Ron Paul ad.

Speaker Boehner gives the boilerplate Republican speech about cutting spending, taxes and regulations but offering no details as to what he'll cut, but it's a pack of lies the same as when ever other Republican gives it. He supports raising the debt ceiling.

On the single party, two almost identical factions, rule in America.

"I think they are completely right that they can only retain total power in the U.S. IF they repress all real, serious challenges of Real Reformers from outside and inside the Party. But what they apparently do not realize is that by creating a vast one party state that is steadily building a totalitarian police state with vast armies of secret police from the NSA to the CIA and DEA and on and on [sixteen visible secret police armies in the U.S.], they are dooming themselves and the u.s. to closure which prevents any effective reforms to adapt to the rapidly changing world situations, so they have doomed the party and the u.s. to implosion very much as the Soviet party rulers doomed themselves to implosion in the same way."

No doubt about it.

I still don't understand how a tea party person saying they would back whichever Republican wins the nomination exposes something bad about them. They're whole deal is about smaller government, and Obama is the biggest government president in history. Of course they're going to vote against him. And while many tea partiers are regular Republicans, most are not. And while many groups have been co-opted by the Republican establishment, some have not. It's definitely a grass roots movement, and I expect a number of establishment Republicans will be ousted by them in the 2012 primaries.

MEDIA:

The Daily Show's ratings soar. Foxnews ratings slump. For two years, Democrats had all the power, so attacking Republicans wasn't very entertaining. But now that Republicans control the House, attacking them is entertaining again.

LOCAL:

It's no wonder people are so economically illiterate when newspapers print articles like this:

"Local government leaders across the Miami Valley say they are not hiring or expanding services as the economy begins to recover, mirroring a national trend and reversing the trend of previous recessions."

What recovery?

"The Great Recession officially ended two years ago this month. By the same point during previous recoveries, governments were engines for growth"

Governments were engines for growth?

"For a while, federal stimulus spending cushioned the blow to state and local finances. But that money is running out. And it probably won’t be replenished as the federal government prepares to cut its own spending to shrink massive budget deficits."

How does stealing money from people cushion the blow?

"States such as Wisconsin, New Jersey and Ohio have first-term governors who “are trying to make their names by cutting spending,” says Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors."

Kasich's budget was bigger than the last budget. How is that cutting spending?

"Even if income tax receipts rise, many cities rely heavily on property tax revenue, which is threatened by foreclosures and the collapse in home prices."

How is having lower house prices so it's easier to buy a house a bad thing? While I'm happy to see government's cut spending - unlike these authors - these cuts aren't nearly enough to allow our economy to turn around and really grow.

MISC:

Eating some dirt might be good for you, but I doubt just running outside and eating the first dirt you run into is. This is not new information.

The brain responds nearly identically to physical and emotional pain.

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ECONOMY:

A nice summary of the predictions and playout of the ongoing recession.

Six indicators show the economy is worse than most think.

"We're literally tens of trillions of dollars deeper in the hole now than we were in 2007. There's as much, if not more, leverage in the system today as there was then. Wall Street, it turns out, is now more corrupt than ever as failing institutions were merged with too-big-to-fails. There is no regulation to be had. There have been no significant criminal prosecutions. Main Street has gotten nothing but platitudes. And the worst of it is that the US government is enabling the entire thing. Double dip cones for everyone!"

Not only is the economy not recovering, thanks to the government, we're trillions more in debt than when debt collapsed the economy in 2007. It's not a double dip. It's an acceleration down the continuing collapse. Walter Williams reminds us that our economic problems were self-inflicted.

The richer the Chinese get, the more gold they buy.

REGULATION:

Despite regulations and tariffs, Vietnamese catfish is cheaper and comparably tasting to US catfish.

EDUCATION:

How to get a four year degree for $11,000.

Government schools, originally based on military structure, become more like prisons.

HEALTH CARE:

The FDA seizes birthing pools because they're unregistered medical devices.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

In yet another obvious negative feedback mechanism, trees are sucking up CO2 in their trunks. As if this wasn't predicted in advance.

POLICE STATE:

Obama's justice department dismisses Miranda rights.

WAR:

Yemeni president flees to Saudi Arabia to treat wounds but vows to return despite pressure to resign. Author claims the US dollar could be be ousted as the world's reserve currency along with the Yemeni president. This is happening anyway. Tying it all to Yemen is an exaggeration.

"America's CIA-sponsored AYM youth movements were behind the initial color revolutions. But notice how the mainstream press has stopped celebrating them. Perhaps they haven't worked out as planned. Either Western elites are encouraging a series of Arab Islamic Republics (so as to buttress what seems to be an essentially phony "war on terror") or they are trying to create controllable regulatory democracies that will likely be run by dependable militaries with a constitutional façade. Neither of these options looks to be feasible in the near term.Alternatively, the West seeks generalized chaos for some reason – or, more intriguingly, it has simply lost control of the situation. As we've stated before, Yemen is important because it may well indicate how much control the West actually has over the Arab Awakening. So far, what's been most apparent is dithering. The West hasn't shown a firm hand. There are reasons why."

I can't help but laugh when supposedly free marketers, people who claim to understand the fatal flaw of central planning, turn around and attribute great events to central planners as if they had some sort of divine power to recreate whole societies according to their central plan. No doubt elites are manipulating events. And no doubt the outcome will be different than they want.

Ex-CIA terrorist hunter claims he had opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden multiple times in the 1990s and was ordered not to each time.

With the US government declaring that cyber attacks are acts of war, watch for government to perform false flag cyber attacks to manipulate the public.

Our troops overseas have been told they are defending our freedom, but they're not.

"The reality is that you are not defending our freedoms with your actions overseas. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Your actions overseas are placing our freedoms here at home in ever-greater jeopardy.Consider your occupation of Iraq, a country that, as you know, never attacked the United States, making it the defender in the war and the United States the aggressor. Think about that: Every single person that the troops have killed, maimed, or tortured in Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.Yet, the countless victims of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have friends and relatives, many of whom have become filled with anger and rage and who now would stop at nothing to retaliate with terrorist attacks against Americans.Pray tell: How does that constitute defending our freedoms?"

The government lies to them like it lies to everybody.

Evidence that a bipartisan group of thieves recognizes that it's in their interest to end the wars so they can steal more money from us for under other guises.

"When Dennis Kucinich earlier this month introduced a bill to compel the withdrawal of all American troops from Libya within 15 days, the leadership of both parties and the political class treated it the way they do most of Kucinich's challenges to establishment political orthodoxy:  they ignored it except to mock its unSeriousness.  But a funny thing happened: numerous liberal House Democrats were joined by dozens of conservative GOP members to express support for his bill, and the White House and GOP House leadership became jointly alarmed that the bill could actually pass; that's why GOP House Speaker John Boehner introduced a Resolution purporting to rebuke Obama for failing to comply with the War Powers Resolution, but which, in fact, was designed to be an utterly inconsequential act.  Its purpose was to protect Obama's war by ensuring that Kucinich's bill failed; the point of Boehner's alternative was to provide a symbolic though meaningless outlet for those House members angry over Obama's failure to get Congressional support."

Gosh, it must suck for the greater nobles when the lessor nobles chose a different way to loot the people than the greater nobles. I'm unimpressed. Another perspective...

"At the last minute, House Speaker John “Crybaby” Boehner cobbled together a non-binding resolution giving the President an extension of the 60 days provided by the War Powers Resolution, asking for documents detailing our political and strategic goals, and slamming the administration for not providing “a compelling rationale” for military action. The resolution passed, 268-145, with 45 Democrats crossing the aisle and voting with the Republicans. More significantly, however, the Kucinich resolution – which would have cut off appropriations for the Libyan intervention – garneredmore Republican votes (87) than Democratic “ayes” (61).What’s going on here?"

The crooks in Congress are pretending to care about their constituents, but those constituents don't have the power to actually end the wars. Hope is a wonderful emotion, but this isn't a sign of hope. It's a sign of Congress's power to crush hope. And while 2012 may empower the people somewhat, it won't empower them enough to save our country from the robbery done in the last century.

"Context is everything, and the economic crisis that has gripped the nation in recent months – underscored by an unemployment rate over 9 percent and a disastrous housing market – has driven home the point anti-interventionists have been making for years: we’re “nation-building” abroad while our own country is falling to pieces. This is something that everyone – even a Republican – can readily understand, and the freshman “tea party” class of 2010 is learning very quickly the lesson their eldersrefused to absorb during the Bush era: we can’t afford to police the world."

Welcome to the economic reality party a couple of decades too late. This is like sending out a memo that communism might fall in 1993. Hello. The memo is late. The collapse of the US police state is already in progress. Nonsense is all we get from Washington.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

This is an unfortunate fact:

"If you give government a job to do, even one that seems justified in the abstract, it will use its power to make a terrible mess in practice. This is true in a host of areas from welfare to warfare, but it is even true in the complicated area of immigration."

No doubt about it.

"Just imagine this. The owners of Chuy's Mesquite Broiler in Phoenix and 13 other locations around western states have been kidnapped from their popular restaurants and dragged to jail. This will be followed by trial, and certain personal bankruptcy. They could face 80 years in prison. In the raid, "Homeland Security" stole their computers, their accounting and employment records, and walked out the door – just like a gang of thieves. The only difference is that these thugs operate under the cover of the law."

Government is brute force. This sucks. I love Chuy's. I support having businesses check ID like bartenders to make sure they don't hire illegal immigrants, but this response is ridiculous. As Rockwell points out, it's also predictable. This is a matter for the states, not the feds according to the Constitution.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Spain leads other European countries in Arabian-style protests.

POLITICS:

As much as I distrust the tea party, and as much as tea party candidates immediately betrayed the small-government ideals they ran on as I and others predicted, I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. Rand Paul got elected because of them. I expect the tea party will oust more establishment Republicans in the 2012 primary. So they are doing some good. Not as much as libertarians would wish, but still some good. But the little good they're doing is far too little, far too late to stop the two party government machine from destroying our economy and dragging us all into an extended period of poverty.

Free kibbles

ECONOMICS:

Robert Murphy explodes the myth that the Fed must devalue the dollar to fix the US trade imbalance.

HEALTH CARE:

Government seizes elderberry wine ostensibly to protect Americans. Do you feel safer?

E. coli outbreak in Europe spreads. Government control of our food supply is killing people.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Syrian government news claims Israeli soldiers killed four Syrians at a border demonstration, but nobody has confirmed the report.

POLITICS:

Ron Paul doesn't feel targeted by redistricting. He's flattered. This is a perfect, political response. The Ron Paul store has yard signs and more.

LOCAL:

PETA tries to capitalize on the China Arnold murder case.

"PETA says they are trying to draw a direct comparison to Arnold, who was recently convicted of burning her four week-old baby to death in her microwave."

Those aren't normal people.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Half of all jobs added last month were added by McDonalds. Flipping burgers is a growing business. Chart of unemployment over the last four years.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Movie claims fracking is responsible for leaking natural gas into water, but the effect is natural.

POLICE STATE:

Miami police seize man's phone at gunpoint and destroy it because they just recorded the police shooting a man dead.

"But what they didn’t know was that Narces Benoit had removed the SIM card and hid it in his mouth, which means the video survived."

That's awesome. This guy is heroic.

"Benoit and his girlfriend also said police smashed several phones from other witnesses, so hopefully they were able to recover the videos as well."

We did this to ourselves. None of these cops will be prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon as they should be.

"The new details emerged a day after police announced they had found a gun in the car they had shot up.It took police two-and-a-half days to find the gun in the Hyundai but they still haven’t determined if it was discharged that night."

Two and a half days. Are they selling land in Florida too?

"Four innocent bystanders were shot during that shooting, most likely from police bullets."

Every day we see outrageous examples of the ubiquitous corruption of the police in the US, but for some reason, it never penetrates into the brains of the American people.

WAR:

Report claims a top al Qaeda agent was killed by a US drone attack in Pakistan. How can we know? We have no way of verifying any claims like this.

LOCAL:

Very few people seem to understand that all the money in politics and lobbying was originally our tax dollars. It's money the government takes from us in taxes or forces us to pay corporations through regulations that drive up prices. Then the groups which receiver our tax dollars funnel a portion of it back into their lobbying efforts. The Dayton Tea Party realizes that and is suing two organizations to make it public.

Local police corruption.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The double-dip recession keeps getting deeper as unemployment jumps to 9.1 percent. Bernanke has papered over a lot of the double-dip, pushing the stock market higher with his counterfeit money, but he can't hide it all. Jeffrey Tucker disputes this is a double-dip. He claims this is a continuation of the same recession. He's right. It's not in our interest to pretend the economy rebounded when it never did. The Fed just manipulated the numbers with funny-money to make it look like it recovered.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Google opens R&D department for solar energy. Maybe the Google guys can produce a cost-effective product. It still cracks me up that nobody has talked about how much solar energy, trapping energy from the sun instead of allowing it to reflect back to space, will heat the planet.

How government is making air conditioners more expensive and lower quality.

"Having bigger, more complicated machines running on a less efficient refrigerant is a recipe for inefficiency."

Yes it is.

WAR:

Yemeni rebels wound president in rocket attack. This civil war is seriously hot.

Once again the craven Congress refuses to end an illegal war.

POLITICS:

The Republican establishment in Texas hopes to weaken Ron Paul by redistricting.

Sarah Palin declined to cut whats-his-establishment-names hand off at the wrist when he grabbed her like any normal would have. Her mistake.

MISC:

Chinese boy reportedly sells kidney for iPad2. I'm skeptical.

Internet Explorer marketshare drops below 55 percent.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

A former government supporter realizes the truth:

"I have witnessed the loss of jobs as a direct result of regulations by unnamed and unelected bureaucrats, who are backed up by threats of prosecution from the government. Our government is stifling job creation."

Welcome to libertarianism.

HEALTH CARE:

I don't want edible RFID tags in my food.

Changing from a pyramid to a plate is worthless because the government is still pushing grains.

New strain of E-coli killing people in Britain. How's that government control of the food supply working out for you?

In an article describing how experts are destroying our health care system, we get this wonder definition of expert:

"Drawing from Hayek's analysis and my own personal experience I have determined that the way to become an expert is as follows: don't challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of the institution; learn the history, underlying principles, and the inner workings of the institution; regurgitate the orthodoxy as you've been taught — it's best if you can do this in some sort of thesis paper; and finally, write a book, get yourself on CSPAN, and, if you're lucky, get appointed to a presidential committee."

Sounds like a super-sycophant.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

International carbon market falling. This is a good thing, taking resources from the corrupt political economy back into the productive private economy. Let's hope it collapses completely.

POLICE STATE:

Criticism of the Patriot Act and statism in general.

How politics infects police investigations and why private investigation firms would be superior.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

It's not often I think an article from the Mises Institute is dumb, but this one is dumb.

"Presumably, the goal [of laws against employing illegal immigrants] is to send the message that illegal immigrants need to move on down the road."

The goal is to encourage them to go to their home countries where they can apply to come here legally if they want. If the chose to become criminals instead of leaving, then they will be captured, deported and forbidden from ever returning. He doesn't even list the worst problem with illegal immigrants: many illegally vote and they tend to vote to increase the size of government. We have enough problems with Americans doing that. We don't need to add to our problems with big government by allowing illegal immigrants to pile on.

WAR:

It looks like a full-fledged civil war has broken out in Yemen.

POLITICS:

If book sales were votes, Ron Paul would win. But they're not.

MISC:

I completely understand why people are frustrated with the giant corporations. Their chieftains are part of the ruling class. It’s impossible to tell where the government ends and those corporations begin. I call them the sheriff of Nottingham’s tax collectors. I'm sure those tax collectors enjoyed thriving commerce protected from competition thanks to their partnership with the sheriff as well. They aren’t victims of government. They are eager partners with government. And it’s impossible for any individual to document all the ways in which these corporate chieftains partner with government to loot us, so if a guy can only come up the example that Taco Bell profits from corn subsidies to express his frustration with the partnership between the giant corporation and government, I get that. Each corporation probably has thousands of ways it partners with government, if not more. Why do you think every law the feds pass now is 2,000 lines long? At least he understands that Taco Bell wouldn’t exist in its current form without its partnership with government. Good for him. That won’t stop me from buying tacos there if I get a craving at midnight though.

FDR's brand of fascism.

"It is no wonder, then, as Professor Garraty writes, that "during the first years of the New Deal the German press praised him [Roosevelt] and the New Deal to the skies. … Early New Deal policies seemed to the Nazis essentially like their own and the role of Roosevelt not very different from the Führer's."America under FDR did not, of course, follow Germany and Russia on that fateful road to the bitter end. The main reason for this lies, as scholars such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Aaron L. Friedberg have recently written, in our deeply rooted individualist and antistatist tradition, dating back to colonial and Revolutionary times and never extinguished. Try as he might, Franklin Roosevelt could bend the American system only so far."

That tradition has been badly undermined since then.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

California continues its descent into oblivion by considering bill to tax Amazon and other internet businesses.

Government fireman watch man die because the government didn't pay them to go into the water. Another example of how government has corrupted the heroes of America.

"A witness finally pulled the apparently suicidal man's lifeless body from the 54-degree water."

He obviously wasn't a government employee. This is the consequence of grotesque, government dominated society we've created for ourselves.

HEALTH CARE:

In typical sledgehammer fashion, government wants to add lithium to drinking water in the UK. No thank you. Like government cares about what I think.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The eco-nuts blow it again. Biodegradable products produce methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

POLICE STATE:

City council in Britain sets up signs at intersection to intentionally confuse motorists, adds a camera, then collects over £5 million in fines. This is a good reminder that street signs and traffic lights are intended to loot the people, not make driving safer.

More evidence the police are uniformed tax collectors.

"A shocking news report recently documented how Tennessee police were stopping drivers on the interstate and confiscating large amounts of cash, even if the drivers were accused of no crime. The report was particularly shocking because the special unit was operating far outside of its jurisdiction in exchange for giving a cut of the seized cash to the local government in question."

I'm not shocked by that at all. I've heard the stories of police brazenly robbing people with criminal records without charging them with anything. I believe that's the norm for vice cops. But I didn't read this story anywhere. It didn't make it high enough on the aggregators I guess. Here's the video.

POLITICS:

I don't think PETA hates blacks. They're equal opportunity haters.

MISC:

Subjective value theory.

This article about "duh" science is totally misleading. Sure, many common misperceptions about the world exist, but the people who fund these studies don't care about that. This is all about politics and social engineering, as the article hints at:

"Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you."

The politicians and the bureaucrats have a big-government agenda, and they fund pseudo-scientific study after pseudo-scientific study as part of a propaganda campaign - a Big Lie - to convince Americans to support that agenda. I think I'm going to smoke a cigar.

Massachusetts tornadoes kill four. I've never heard of tornadoes in Massachusetts.