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GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Swiss glaciers melted faster in the 1940s than today.

POLICE STATE:

Perverts in control of airport security:

"What's seen versus what's not seen? It's easy to see all the Americans who expose themselves to be either photographed or groped by the TSA perverts.

But what's impossible to see at this time is the Americans who refuse to fly because of these invasive perversions. We won't know for months or years how much impact the pervert directed nude-scanners and gropes have on the airline business.

I predict a number of airlines will experience financial difficulty within the year."

That was me in an email. As if I have to point this out, aristocrats make millions off selling these nude-scanners to the government.

MEDIA:

Insightful prediction by Lew Rockwell who predicts that since Republicans won't do anything to actually cut government spending or power, they'll instead attack NPR to divert Americans from their complicity in everything else.

LOCAL:

Remember when our fascist casino amendment was going to bring all kind of tax revenue for the state? The corporation who received the benefit in Columbus while everybody else is banned from the market wants the government to steal money from us to build its casino. Think about that. We aren't allowed to open casinos. We aren't allowed to hold gambling games to earn money. But the corporation who is allowed wants the government to steal our money to fund their casino.

Ohio's war against drivers has gotten so bad that arrests for driving without a license are up 24 percent from 2004 to 2009. Suspensions were up 44 percent. Half of Dayton fatal car accidents involve a driver without a license. How do they think that our economy will get back on track if they take away people's driving privileges? Taking away somebody's license puts them in on a downward spiral that will most likely ruin their lives or force them to leave the state. This war on drivers is oppressive, counterproductive and deadly.

"The numbers point to an inescapable fact: With so many unlicensed drivers on the road, the chances of getting involved in a collision with one — and suffering serious or even fatal injuries — are greatly increased."

This policy isn't about making us safer. It makes us less safe. Like all government policies, this policy is about empowering the aristocrats at our expense. Here's a nice summary of the war on drivers:

"As the Daily News showed in a story earlier this year, there are 46 ways a person can lose their driver’s license, many unrelated to driving.

They can range from failing to pay child support to possession of marijuana. The Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles also blocks drivers’ ability to renew their licenses or register vehicles if they have a warrant out for their arrest. The warrants can include failure to pay fines in previous traffic cases."

This policy is a weapon of oppression. The only reason somebody should lose a license is they've proven themselves too dangerous to drive.

MISC:

How to lose weight without losing muscle, losing fat instead.

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ECONOMY:

Jim Rodgers calls commodities a win-win investment. If the economy picks up, people will want more commodities. If the economy falls off, the Fed will print more money. That sounds like a recipe for a future bubble in commodities. The key word is future.

TAX AND SPEND:

I did a search for Republican hypocrites, and I'm surprised I found nothing with substance. This story about Republicans who voted against the stimulus boondoggle but who then tried to get stimulus funds for their district is the closest I found high in the rankings. Taken by itself, there's nothing hypocritical about that. They voted against stealing the money from the American people, but since Democrats stole it anyway, they want to bring some to their district. But Republicans are such obvious hypocrites in the bigger picture, and I think Paul Ryan is the most dangerous hypocrite in a party of hypocrites. He voted for No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Bush's Porkulous Farm Bill, expanding SCHIP, TARP and more, yet he's convinced people he's the Republican fiscal responsibility guru. It's amazing how voters fall for those liars. Here's an article on ethics problems of Republican leaders. All aristocrats are corrupt.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

G-20 pays lip service to avoiding currency war. I don't believe a word of it. Ben Bernanke is still going to print $1 trillion new dollars, doing exactly what the G-20 said not to do. Our government is trying to force everybody else to behave one way while it behaves another, and it won't work. This only ends one way: with the destruction of the dollar.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Drug prohibitionists caused 13 more people to be murdered.

"Attackers in two vehicles pulled up to the houses in a lower-middle-class Ciudad Juarez neighborhood late Friday and opened fire on about four dozen partygoers gathered for a 15-year-old boy's birthday party.

The dead identified so far were 13 to 32 years old, including six women and girls, Chihuahua state Attorney General Carlos Salas told reporters at a news conference at the crime scene. The majority of the victims were high school students, a survivor said."

The scary part is most prohibitionists probably feel good about themselves over this. Most probably feel these people deserved what they got because they did drugs. Obviously the murderers are responsible for their own actions, but so are the prohibitionists who created this black market knowing full well that black markets always and inevitably lead to murder, crime and destruction far worse than the substance prohibited would if it was legal. How many times to we have to relearn this lesson?

POLICE STATE:

Janet Napolitano refuses to go through nude-scanner. Of course. They aren't for the ruling class, but the rest of us must submit.

WAR:

Weapon sales to the Middle East are motivated by politics, not security. On the same theme, this article shows that military spending is about propping up the ruling class, not protecting the American people. This chart of US exports should freeze the blood of American. Don't look at this if you have a history of heath trouble:


This is about as perfect an illustration of how government spending seizes resources from the productive private sector where they were being used to solve problems and improve the lives of the people into the political economy where they're used to buy votes for the aristocrats. Not only do we pay for this by government stealing our money from us at the point of a gun, we pay for it a second time with significantly higher prices for the goods and services we purchase to improve our lives. This is what we've done to our country by empowering Republicans and Democrats to rule us instead of keeping our wealth and power in our own hands.

POLITICS:

Obama campaigns for Harry Reid. Let's hope he continues to be the kiss of death.

Comparing the 2010 election to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

""Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." ~ H.L. Mencken"

No kidding.

"Like the Titanic, the Washington/Wall Street ship of state hit a Federal Reserve created iceberg under the command of George W. Bush with the recession/depression. Again, like recent evidence suggests, the original Titanic hit the iceberg and sank so fast because of a steering mistake turning the ship in the wrong direction which could have been avoided.

In a similar fashion, both Obama and Bush, following the self-serving orders of Bernanke and Wall Street steered the nation directly into the current depression and coming national debt and dollar collapse by following Keynesian economic principles instead of letting the market quickly resolve the crisis."

The difference is Obama's goal is to collapse the US.

"America today is a one-party state much like the Soviet Union, China or Nazi Germany and both nominal political parties are just façades presented to the public to create the illusion of competition and choice. The establishment leadership in both the GOP and the Democrats represent the goals of the same special interests."

They all have the same power and money for sale: ours. It's the only thing of value they have, so naturally they sell it to the highest bidders. The same groups are bidding to buy our power and money from all of them.

"Before the summer of 2011 is over, the Tea Party supporters will already be angry and disappointed as the GOP elites will maintain the status quo and there will only be empty rhetoric rather than political action to control spending, curtail the deficits and limit government. When the coming debt and dollar crisis takes hold, I guarantee the GOP will have an action plan supported by the Democrats which will pass with bilateral support to solve the economic crisis. The solution will be the theft of your private wealth and promised benefits all done in the public interest to save America."

That's guaranteed.

Lew Rockwell on the oligarchs:

"How fun to see the late Sam Konkin‘s vivid coinage “Kochtopus” hitting the MSM. But writers like Joe Conason do not understand the power elite. The goal of plutocrats like the Kochs is not free markets and less government. Nor is George Soros’s goal helping the poor and bringing honest peace to the Middle East. Nor does Warren Buffett seek to make us all good investors. Like the Rockefellers, such political magnates lust for more money and power through the State. That is, they itch to rule us, though not openly. That’s why they own so many politicians and public intellectuals: to cover their tracks. The Kochs even control swaths of large government universities. And speaking of the Kochs, here is the complete program for their latest secret meeting, with all the interesting names. As usual, regime-libertarians are indistinguishable from neocons. See also the interesting Lee Fang, though he doesn’t understand the ruling class either."

But this program for the Koch meeting stresses dramatically increasing economic freedom. I'm all for that. No doubt these people hope to do that through the political system, and no doubt they intend to profit along the way. But increasing economic freedom is good for everybody. It really is a noble goal and stands in direct opposition to claims to want to help people by stealing money from others.

Case for Bush the Younger as the worst president ever. This is an impressive case, but it's not even close. I put him way down with LBJ whom he most resembled, but Lincoln has to be by far the world president in history. He killed at least 618,000 Americans back when the population of the United States was 31,443,321. That would be like killing 6 million Americans today. That puts him in a similar category to Adolf Hitler. No other president compares. Not even FDR who's obviously second worst. But this is a really important point that conservatives still don't seem to get to our great detriment:

"The worst shame of Bush – worse than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars – is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro-free-market rhetoric in the very process of destroying those institutions. That makes his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters Bush caused on the free market simply because Bush constantly said he believed in it."

Exactly. Barack Obama is an obvious Marxist. He surrounds himself with Marxists. He implements policies designed to pave the way to Marxism. But we know it. We know he hates freedom. But Bush might have been more destructive of freedom than Obama because he pretended to support freedom including free markets while his policies did tremendous damage to them. Obama could never have become president without Bush pretending our economic problems were the result of market failure not government failure. To this day Obama acts like Bush and Republicans supported freedom and free markets, and he's using that against us. It's a lie just like their rhetoric in support of them was a lie.

"And he’s left OBAMA! with a fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars."

A great observation and comparison.


MEDIA:


Juan Williams embraces Laura Ingraham's metaphor about what happens to blacks "if they stray off the [leftist] farm". The allusion to slavery is obvious and accurate. The left treats blacks like property. They've punished those in the public eye who don't behave for centuries. From slavery to the Klu Klux Klan to Jim Crow to segregation to gun control, the minimum wage, the war on drugs and welfare, to attacking prominent blacks like Williams who stray off the leftist plantation, the left's history of racism is older than America, and the only thing that's changed is how they implement it. I'm not saying there aren't racists on the right too. There's plenty. But racists on the right are marginalized and pushed to the fringes. Racism on the left has been institutionalized for centuries, and it still is.

MISC:

Nice follow-up to my post about government subsidies making our food supply unhealthy.

"You've no doubt noticed that for about the last 60 years the majority of health care officials and the media have been telling you saturated fats are bad for your health and lead to a host of negative consequences, like elevated cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Meanwhile during this same 60 years the American levels of heart disease, obesity, elevated serum cholesterol and Alzheimer's have skyrocketed compared to our ancestors, and even compared to modern-day primitive societies using saturated fat as a dietary staple.

Did you know that multiple studies on Pacific Island populations who get 30–60% of their total caloric intact from fully saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease?^[1]"

That's because coconut oil is healthy. I cook exclusively with it now. Here's why:

"I only use two oils in my food preparation.

The first, extra-virgin olive oil, is a better monounsaturated fat that works great as a salad dressing.

However, it should not be used for cooking. Due to its chemical structure, heat makes it susceptible to oxidative damage.

And polyunsaturated fats, which include common vegetable oils such as corn, soy, safflower, sunflower and canola, are absolutely the worst oils to use in cooking. These omega-6 oils are highly susceptible to heat damage because of their double bonds.

I strongly urge you to throw out those omega-6 vegetable oils in your cabinets.

Why?

Reason # 1: Most people believe that frying creates trans-fat. That is not the major problem, in my opinion. Although some are created, they are relatively minor. There are FAR more toxic chemicals produced by frying omega-6 oils than trans-fat.

Frying destroys the antioxidants in oil and as a result oxidizes the oil. This causes cross-linking, cyclization, double-bond shifts, fragmentation and polymerization of oils that cause far more damage than trans-fat.

Reason # 2: Most of the vegetable oils are GMO. This would include over 90 percent of the soy, corn and canola oils.

Reason # 3: Vegetable oils contribute to the overabundance of damaged omega-6 fats in your diet, which creates an imbalance in the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. As you know from my extensive writing on this subject, I believe that excessive consumption of damaged omega-6 fats contributes to many health concerns.

They are all highly processed and consumed in amounts that are about 100 times more than our ancestors did a century ago. This causes them to distort the sensitive omega-6/omega-3 ratio which controls many delicate biochemical pathways which results in accelerating many chronic degenerative diseases.

There is only one oil that is stable enough to resist mild heat-induced damage, while it also helps you promote heart health and even supports weight loss and thyroid function – coconut oil.

So, whenever you need an oil to cook with, use coconut oil instead of butter, olive oil, vegetable oil, margarine, or any other type of oil called for in recipes. Even though I don't fully recommend frying foods, if you must fry, by all means use coconut oil – it's your smartest choice."

He doesn't mention anything wrong with butter, but it must be mostly Omega-6. I do eat extra-virgin olive oil, but I don't cook with it.

Japanese Obama action figures.

Lew Rockwell ties the bad social trends we've been seeing - more young adults living with their parents, having no job, not marrying, getting a college degree but no job - to the Nixon abolishing the gold standard.

"However, if we take a longer-term look, we can see that these trends date back decades, with the turning point being the severing of the dollar's last link to gold in 1971. This is the event that set up the explosion of government growth, of credit addiction across the population, of massive malinvestment in housing and many other sectors, of the gutting of American savings, and, most seriously, of the loss of freedom to the national-security state.

Long term, our living standards have been eroded in fundamental ways that have a profound cultural effect. The American family once lived well on one income. Now, two incomes is the expected reality. That shift took place following the great inflation of the late 1970s. Many people saw this as the great news that the workplace was being opened up to women. More likely it was not a sign of liberation, but of a dramatic demographic adjustment required to maintain high living standards. And the state didn't mind: it added millions to the tax rolls. One wonders if "liberation" is really the right word to use for this change.

Such adjustments are ongoing. The hidden tax of inflation, combined with the growing regulation of labor markets, makes maintaining the illusion of high living standards ever more difficult. This explains Generation Boomerang, the delay in entering the workforce, the delay of marriage, unemployment among the young, the dashed dreams after graduation, and the advent of the phenomenon of the lifetime student. These fundamental indicators are not reflected in the GDP data, which count government spending as economic growth and credit-fueled consumption as evidence of rising living standards."

All these effects corrode and coarsen our culture and our society. They undermine morality and personal responsibility.

"Abstracting from the periods of boom, we can see that these declines in living standards are making American society less of a place of dynamic change, risk taking, independent living, and opportunity, and more of a place of static living, struggling to get by, delayed adulthood, greater dependency, and ever-fewer opportunities for production, saving, and planning. These changes are making this country less of what it was, and more of what Europe is today."

This is how inflation rots a society and souls.

"It is not enough to cut back or even end the welfare state; the imperial warfare state must also be dismantled. That means taking apart the national-security apparatus as surely as we end the economic intervention in domestic life. To oppose one while supporting the other — and this is the very essence of the Republican Pledge to America — is self-defeating if not deliberately deceitful. We know the results of this kind of intellectual incoherence because we've seen it so many times before."

You can't have violent interventionism abroad without violent interventionism at home for a host of reasons. First, if we elect people with the character to violently force their will on foreigners, that same character will lead them to violently force their will on us. Second, if we violently force our will on foreigners, those foreigners will fight back, leading the security state interventions we're being crushed by today. Third, if you build an apparatus for violently forcing its will on foreigners, that apparatus will never be satisfied. It will demand more and more resources from us.

Farm Subsidies

Wikipedia lists the top farm subsides for the US:

2004 U.S. Crop Subsidies[20]
Commodity	Millions of US$	Share
Feed grains, mostly corn	2,841	35.4%
Upland cotton and ELS cotton	1,420	17.7%
Wheat	1,173	14.6%
Rice	1,130	14.1%
Soybeans and products	610	7.6%
Dairy	295	3.7%
Peanuts	259	3.2%
Sugar	61	0.8%
Minor oilseeds	29	0.4%
Tobacco	18	0.2%
Wool and mohair	12	0.1%
Vegetable oil products	11	0.1%
Honey	3	0.0%
Other crops	160	2.0%
Total	8,022	100%

The reason high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) poisons pretty much every food on the grocery counter is the feed corn subsidy at the top. Feed corn is used to fatten livestock before it's sold to market. HFCS is the highly purified fattener that's in every processed food we eat. Is it any wonder Americans are suffering from obesity and diabetes? But the corn lobby pays a tremendous amount of tribute to the aristocrats in Washington, so the aristocrats send them our tax dollars to produce the poison they put in our food supply. In a free country, HFCS wouldn't exist because it would be expensive to produce and nobody would voluntarily pay the extra health care costs.

Three out of the top four subsides are for grains. The aristocrats steal our money from us at the point of a gun, give our tax dollars to grain farmers, and they use our money to flood the airwaves with commercials about how healthy grain are for us. It's a lie. Grains are toxic to humans. They increase insulin resistance, leading to diabetes. They cause mineral deficiencies. They puncture our intestinal lining. They've been implicated in numerous diseases from asthma to the new digestive diseases nobody ever heard of 20 years ago. And whole grains are worse because they contain more toxins and indigestible material. In a free country, people would eat a lot less grain because it would be more expensive, and they would be a lot healthier because of it.

Government also subsidizes sugar, and we all know how unhealthy sugar is.

Vegetable oils are also unhealthy for us, so government subsidizes them too. Natural fats are healthy, healing fats.

And of course the government steals money from us and gives it to tobacco producers too. Phillip Morris, the giant cigarette company created by the regulations and subsidies from the aristocrats, is laughing all the way to the bank with our tax dollars.

Without government interference, farmers and consumers would reshape our food supply in a cooperative system of voluntary exchange to be much healthier. Of course all subsidies are theft and should be abolished, but they're part and parcel of the nature of government. Government exists to enrich and empower the aristocrats and their cronies at our expense. Aristocrats are gods to corporations, and corporations are their servants. They can strike them down with the stroke of a pen and raise them from the dead. Think Lehman Brothers and AIG. Anybody who thinks government works in our interest is a fool most likely educated at the point of the government's gun in government schools.

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SOCIALISM:

Union boss says tea partiers advocate returning to slavery. Who forces people to join unions against their will? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

ECONOMY:

Harry Reid says, "But for me, we'd be in a worldwide depression." You can't make this stuff up.

Here's some digestible info on foreclosuregate or fraudclosure, both terms being used.

"Foreclosure-gate is heating up and the mad scramble for what's left of $45 trillion in real estate is guaranteed to leave homeowners homeless, pension funds unable to pay their pensions and even some of the biggest banks insolvent.   A great housing goat rodeo was created when some of the 65 million mortgages on U.S. homes didn't follow proper legal procedures;  

• Fraud by homeowners who lied on their loan applications

• Fraud by banks who didn't follow proper legal procedures around the notarization and processing of mortgage documents

• Fraud by investment banks who packaged this junk and resold it to unsuspecting pension funds

• Pension funds promised returns to their pensioners they could never achieve

Lies, lies, lies and more lies.  In this jockeying for position, the only thing guaranteed is Leona Helmsley's Law i.e. "Laws and taxes are for the little people"."

This is what happens with inflationary monetary policy. It undermines the value of thrift and creates a culture of spending, borrowing and more spending. It pressures people to race to get theirs as fast as possible. Everybody wants in on the spoils. It brings out the worst in people. So it sounds like from a legal point of view, during the process of bundling, splitting and reselling these mortgages,

"So somewhere between the REMICs and MERS, the chain of title was broken."

And that means:

"That is, the person who took out the mortgage loan to pay for the house no longer owes the loan, because he no longer knows whom to pay."

And that means;

"BECAUSE IF THE CHAIN OF TITLE OF THE NOTE IS BROKEN, THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO FORECLOSE."

"The sheriff for Cook County, Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago, said on Tuesday he will not enforce foreclosure evictions for Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase and Co. and GMAC Mortgage/Ally Financial until they prove those foreclosures were handled "properly and legally.""

I find it hard to believe the rich, powerful and politically connected financial firms will be forced to eat these bad mortgages just because it's the law. The law doesn't apply to them because they're protected by the aristocrats.

""This is a major, major crisis. The Lehman bankruptcy could be a spring rain compared to this hurricane. And if this isn't handled right...and handled right quick, in the next couple of weeks at the outside...this crisis could also spell the end of the mortgage business altogether. Of banking altogether. Hell, of civil society. What do you think happens in a country when the citizens realize they don't need to pay their debts?""

This will never happen. Congress will fix it for their cronies.

Conservative and lazy investing.

TAX AND SPEND:

Because of big deficit spending, financiers have leverage over the aristocrats. I'm not so sure this isn't an improvement. It's unlikely the financiers are as evil as the aristocrats, though they'll use their leverage in their own self-interest like everybody else.

Britain's planned budget cuts by conservatives give hope that Republicans might do the same here. Unlikely, not impossible.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

How many things are wrong with this sentence?

"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he would use weekend meetings of G-20 finance ministers to advance efforts to "rebalance" the world economy so it is less reliant on U.S. consumers, to move toward establishing "norms" on exchange-rate policy, and to persuade others the U.S. doesn't aim to devalue its way to prosperity."

Everything except maybe the part about the G20 meeting. And it goes on:

"In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Geithner said the world sorely needs to agree on guidelines for exchange-rate policy. "Right now, there is no established sense of what's fair," he said."

I want tax cheats figuring out what's fair for all six billion people on the planet, don't you?

Ben Bernanke keeps talking about the threat of inflation, and he's promising to inflate to combat that threat, but Robert Murphy wants to know where the deflation is.

"There are several problems with the exclusive reliance on "core CPI" as a gauge of the tightness of monetary policy. First and most obvious, it is absurd to focus on the "core," which excludes food and energy prices. It is precisely these prices that are the most important for struggling households — and they are certainly not falling. According to the government's own figures, from September 2009 to September 2010, consumer food prices were up 1.4 percent, while consumer energy pricesrose 5.4 percent.

Given that many households are either in financial distress or are terrified that they soon will be, is it really so surprising that consumers aren't spending gobs of money on things besides food and energy?

Another problem is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics can't very well document changes in product quality, which tend to mute price increases. To take an example offered by Silas Barta, the next time you open a cereal box, check out how flimsy the cardboard is; it was sturdier several years ago. I doubt that the government CPI figures take this sort of thing into account when telling us how weakly prices have responded to Bernanke's incredible bouts of money creation."

All government statistic are lies to bolster the power and wealth of the aristocrats and their cronies.

"Besides nitpicking the construction of CPI data, there is the problem of focusing just on consumer prices in the first place. For example, according to the latest report of the Producer Price Index, in the last year prices for finished goods are up 4.0 percent, the prices for intermediate goods are up 5.6 percent, and prices for crude goods are up a whopping 20.3 percent."

Those prices are for products further down the production pipeline. They won't affect consumer prices until months or maybe years from now, but they will drive up consumer prices.

"According to economic theory, there's actually a very sensible reason toinclude asset prices when trying to determine the "cost of living." This is because most people don't want to live for a single day on milk and bread that they just bought at the grocery store. In principle an ideal price index would include prices for both present and future goods. As a convenient proxy, it makes sense to include asset prices when wondering whether monetary policy is causing the dollar to strengthen or weaken."

And Bernanke's inflation of the money supply has definitely driven up the stock market, commodities and other assets. And this chart of the dollar versus a basket of currencies shows how successful Greenspan and Bernanke have been at destroying the dollar.

"It was a futile attempt to evade a bad recession that led Alan Greenspan to blow up the housing bubble. Now Ben Bernanke is doing the same thing, only with far more intensity. If he really wanted to help the economy, Bernanke would stop debasing the dollar and would allow market prices to tell the truth."

Deception and manipulation are powerful tools of government, and the Fed exists solely to deceive us into allowing it to steal from us.

The Fed will print, print and print until the dollar is destroyed. That's why they put Helicopter Ben in charge. I like this idea:

"He suggested that, like the king in a fairytale, Mr. Obama should dress up at night like a pauper and go out and talk to business people. According to Marcus, King Obama would then realize how unpopular he is and how destructive his economic policies have been for small businesses. He also suggested that the academics at the Fed and in the administration should, for once in their lives, go out and work, instead of sitting in big glass office towers and having no clue about what is ailing the economy."

Nice summary of the process:

"Now, does anyone really think that, under the conditions Marcus has described, the Fed’s increase in the quantity of money will flow into US employment and real wage gains? As Marcus likes to say, “You must be kidding!”

The money flows will continue to boost employment in emerging economies, along with their wages and asset prices.

The best way to visualize this process is to think of a huge money-printing machine in the US that produces an unlimited quantity of dollars. Most of these dollars flow to the corporate sector, financial institutions, and wealthy individuals. A large proportion of these dollars is then transferred to emerging economies through the US trade deficit and investment flows, and boosts economic activity and increases wealth in emerging economies relative to the US."

Nice.

EDUCATION:

Government university sends email to students and faculty urging them to vote Democrat. Your tax dollars at work. Of course the mail is illegal. Of course the university apologized. Of course nobody will get in trouble. They're above the law. And you can't un-ring a bell.

I've long called the Ivy League the world leader at brainwashing smart people to be stupid. I've also claimed that children are their smartest before they enter kindergarten, when government begins the process of making them dumber. As John Taylor Gatto says, "Genius is as common as dirt." Until government gets its hooks in children. This author seems to have caught on as well, wondering if our education system makes students dumber.

HEALTH CARE:

Democrat governor of Tennessee explains how Obamacare is driving businesses to drop health coverage and force people onto the public option. He pretends this is an accident, but it's not. Obamacare was designed to destroy private insurance and usher in socialized medicine, and that's exactly what it's doing.

Author agrees with me: Republicans have no intention of repealing Obamacare. They're just going to modify so they can share in the looting. That's what they'll do even if the win the presidency, the House and a filibuster-proof Senate in 2012.

The political elite and their media propagandists are changing direction from climate change to biodiversity as the new crisis.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

USA Today is catching on: La nina to produce a cold winter.

I always get a kick out of it when people who think they know so much are surprised at what they learn. In this case:

"“Plants clean our air to a greater extent than we had realized,” says NCAR scientist Thomas Karl, the lead author."

That doesn't surprise me at all.

POLICE STATE:

Are the TSA's new porno-scanner rules hurting Disney? Let's hope so. The Mouse may get them changed. Here are the choices a parents has:

"1. a dose of ionizing radiation concentrated almost entirely on your skin to create a nude image on the government's computer screen. They call this Whole Body Imaging, or WBI. Please see attached sample image of a male subject, also here. Note that the detail of the image, even before zooming in, allows the viewer to see that the glans is uncircumcised.

2. a government agent using his gloved fingers to grope/frisk/probe the exterior of the child's entire clothed body (including inspection of private parts) in order to ascertain the same detail of information as the WBI would have done (see above). They call this Enhanced Pat-down.

3. police escort to interrogation by TSA security as to your reasons for refusing the above two choices...followed by confirmation that you did not verbally abuse any government agents...followed by being permitted to turn around and go home."

No thanks.

What's the real motive behind the rush to put these scanners not only into airports, but on the streets?

"Courtesy of the never-ending “War on Terror,” intrepid DHS bureaucrats have now deployed more than 500 mobile x-ray vans. The vans drive up to suspicious looking objects, vehicles, houses, or individuals, and zaps them with a focused stream of X-rays. Technicians then analyze the reflection of the x-rays (the “backscatter”) to determine if explosives, drugs, or other contraband substances are present."

Does that sound like an unreasonable search and seizure to you? I does to me. But as for the terrorist threat it's ostensibly meant to fight:

"Not so coincidentally, it turns out that full-body scanners are useless to protect against their purported target – terrorists carrying bombs into airplanes. “I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” the former chief security officer at the Israel Airport Authority recently testified. “That’s why we haven’t put them in our airport.”"

So the foremost experts in defending against terrorists in the world, the Israelis, think they're useless. Of course not all terrorists are smart enough to disguise the bomb that well, but it still makes you wonder if there isn't a different motive behind this:

"So, what’s the rush to employ full-body scanners – or backscatter x-ray mobile vans? Well, maybe it is to check out your teenage daughter…and not for drugs or bombs.

Maybe it’s time for a lead vest after all…if not for you, for her."

You can bet government will quickly ban any led clothing that can block the x-rays. The perverts are in charge.

WAR:

Clinton aid lost US nuclear codes for months.

Apparently WikiLeaks is planning an new Iraq war document dump. Naturally the Pentagon says it's a security threat. We've heard that before. They were lying then, and I bet they're lying now. Last time they were upset because the it provided insight into the war. But the American people largely ignored it. This time the Pentagon doesn't seem too worried. They probably realize it's better to not publicize it.

POLITICS:

Only 46 percent?

"Since 2006, the number of Americans who believe the federal government to be a threat has remained roughly the same. According to Gallup Polls, 46% of Americans believe the federal government "poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.""

Worse yet, these numbers are driven by partisanship, not an understanding that government by its very nature is the threat.

"Something else of interest to note ... throughout the Bush administration, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to perceive the government as a threat. Now that a Democrat (Marxist) president is in office, the reverse is true. In fact, the swing in those numbers is stunning. Back in September of 2006 when the Republicans had the presidency and both chambers in Congress, 57% of Democrats believed the federal government to be a threat. Now that number is down to just 21% with Democrats running the show in Washington. Meanwhile in 2006, just 21% of Republicans believed our imperial federal government to be a threat. Now with Obama, Reid and Pelosi running the show, that number has jumped to 66% who believe our federal government to be a threat."

It doesn't matter which party is in power. Once the aristocrats steal our money and our power, it's in the hands of the bureaucrats.

Thomas Sowell takes on Barney Frank. I want voters to take him down.

All this talk by Democrats about electing a new speaker if they keep the House is bull.

Another reminder that freeing the people from oppression is what makes a president beloved.

MEDIA:

Juan Williams win in the end.

"I guess it all turned out well for Juan Williams. Fox has now offered him a $2 million three-year contract to have an exclusive and expanded role on the network as well as a column on FoxNews.com."

Sweet. Maybe I should figure out a way to get fired from my jobs.

MISC:

Google busted for capturing emails and passwords. The reason these companies get so big and face no real competition is patents. The government granted IP monopoly is at the root of these issues.

I get what Hobbes is saying here:

"According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short""

If you look at the animal kingdom, this is certainly true. No doubt this perspective is deeply ingrained in men's instincts programmed by our genes. You can see it with crime and war. But that doesn't mean we have to voluntarily surrender our freedom to a sovereign to protect us. That's quite a leap most likely made because he was the product of his time. I still like the idea I came up with a while back: I think, therefore I am, therefore I own myself. Nobody has a right to do me harm. Self-ownership is the basis for libertarian philosophy, and I think this justifies that basis. I think Hobbes is way off base here:

"Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical and asocial."

As I've pointed out before, mammals are social, and in some sense political. Wolves form social groups with leaders. Apes form more complex social groups with leaders. Man in the natural state is indisputably social and political. The only reason we're social and political today is we're programmed that way by our genes.

"The social contract was an 'occurrence' during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs (e.g. person A gives up his/her right to kill person B if person B does the same)."

No social contract is necessary for this. All that's necessary is a recognition that every man owns himself and therefore none have a right to harm others. This is a bizarre rationalization to me, but mine is probably just as bizarre to others. Here's why it might seem to so bizarre to me:

"Modern Anglo-American law, like European civil law, is based on a will theory of contract, according to which all terms of a contract are binding on the parties because they chose those terms for themselves. This was less true when Hobbes wrote Leviathan; then, more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us."

But I think it seems bizarre because it fails Occam's Razor. None of the presuppositions require a contract with a sovereign to establish a society. This is more like it:

"What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No, that would mean but the continuation of [Rousseau’s] idea. The social contract is an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society. In this, the notion of commutative justice^[4], first brought forward by the primitive fact of exchange, …is substituted for that of distributive justice … Translating these words, contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of business, and you have commerce, that is to say, in its highest significance, the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially producers, and abdicate all pretension to govern each other."

But again, I don't see the need for a contract at all. Everybody owns themselves, so nobody has a right to harm anybody else. That seems to be the basis for the non-aggression principle, and I don't see why you need anything further to build a civil society.

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Government is using the privacy issue and the abuse of it by Facebook and Google as an excuse to regulate the internet. This is another case of people asking the nanny state to protect them, and it will be just about as effective as asking Godzilla to protect them from overeating.

More insight into hypocritical Republicans:

"Newt Gingrich says that since Williams worked for NPR: “Congress should investigate NPR for censorship and consider cutting off its public funding.” This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with Republicans. Why didn’t Newt and the Republicans cut the public funding of NPR when they controlled the Congress under Clinton? Why didn’t the Republicans cut the public funding of NPR down to zero when they controlled the Congress under Bush the Republican president? It is only when some unconstitutional government agency or program does something that Republicans don’t like that they ever talk about cutting its funding or eliminating it. Republicans are not the party of smaller government; they are the party of Republican government."

Big, Republican government.

SOCIALISM:

Nationwide strike over plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 leaves France in turmoil. That's what Obama wants to happen here. Somebody should ask him why, in light of this, he's taking the US down the same socialist path. I'd love to hear his answer. But here's the more important question:

"The real question should be, whether in France or in the U.S.: What is the government doing in the retirement and pension businesss for non-government employees? Republicans who complain about socialism in France should stop talking about saving Social Security in the U.S. But when do Republicans ever see the real issue behind anything?"

Never.

TAX AND SPEND:

In one of the most absurd statements I've heard from an aristocrat in a while, British aristocrat turns the spending argument upside-down in an attempt to steal the moral high ground.

"Joseph E. Stiglitz argued that the British government’s plan [to cut spending by about 19 percent] was “a gamble with almost no potential upside” and that it would lead to lower growth, lower demand, lower tax revenues, a deterioration of skills among the unemployed and an even higher national debt.

“We cannot afford austerity,” he wrote in The Guardian."

You can't make this stuff up.

Looks like government is going to steal another $363 billion from us to bail out Fannie and Freddie.

HEALTH CARE:

Thanks to Obamacare, here come the big health insurance premium hikes. Obama knew this all along. He's laughing at us.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The IPCC hides crucial information that its models are untrustworthy scattered deep inside a 996 page book while from beginning to the end it fills the books with bogus claims that its predictions have high confidence.

I have zero confidence in this government report that there is no evidence the Deepwater Horizon oil spill killed any fish. It may well be true, but the government has every reason to lie, and it lies without conscience.

The frauds continue to push to get the polar bear listed as endangered.

WAR:

A powerful case that the war on terror exists to create terrorists, not defeat them. Why? What's the primary purpose of government?

"The bottom line answer is that the "war on terror" is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides "security from terrorists," but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties."

Government exists to expand the power and wealth of the aristocrats and their cronies at our expense. This is the nature of government. Having terrorists attack the US makes that easy.

"Most Americans cannot see what is happening because of their conditioning. Most Americans believe that their government is the best on earth, that it is morally motivated to help others and to do good, that it rushes aid to countries where there is famine and natural catastrophes. Most believe that their presidents tell the truth, except about their sexual affairs."

That's the nature of the people. People instinctively trust the people they vote for even though rationally we know all politicians are liars and crooks. Except the ones we voted for.

"To keep Pakistan in line, the US government changed its position that the "Times Square Bombing" was the work of a "lone wolf." Attorney General Eric Holder switched the blame to the "Pakistani Taliban," and Secretary of State Clinton threatened Pakistan with "very serious consequences" for the unsuccessful Times Square bombing, which likely was a false flag operation aimed at Pakistan."

That story about this guy makes no sense. That bomb was a fake, not a real bomb, and the not-bomber caught on tape is bald and the man imprisoned for it doesn't appear to be bald.

POLITICS:

Voting in the US is like prisoners voting for a prison warden, but not voting is like prisoners not voting for the prison warden. What good is that? The winner doesn't give a damn about people who don't vote.

Another admonition to not vote.

"Imagine what a patriotic thrill you would receive if, in the next presidential election, a mere 10 percent of the electorate, instead of the usual 50 percent or so, voted. The unconstitutional regime in Washington would be de-legitimized. The upside is that it might just be possible that some politicians in Washington would get the message and start behaving more like a George Washington or Thomas Jefferson than a Tony Soprano or Vito Corleone (with apologies to all the distinguished Italian-Americans out there). The downside is that they will keep on behaving as they do now – with complete contempt for the Constitution and the population it is supposed to benefit. So be patriotic: Don’t vote."

If that scenario played out, government would get worse even faster as the aristocrats raced to buy more votes the only way they know how. Imagine instead if only 10 percent of electorate voted for Republicans and Democrats, and the rest of voters voted for libertarians who would repeal most of government. That would bring rapid change for the better. I'll keep voting libertarian wherever possible, and so should everyone else.

Koch brothers meeting with neocons outed. Lew Rockwell acts like this is a bad thing, but he has bad history with the Koch brothers. I don't. Since Obama was elected, I've said conservatives are the natural allies of libertarians right now. Teaming up with them makes perfect sense. According to the one of the brothers:

"He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “culture of prosperity” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations."

This is a fantastic goal that I wholeheartedly support. On the other hand, I understand the skepticism since the Koch's made their fortunes in the political economy just like Soros did. I don't know if that goal is real or not, if that's what this meeting was about or not, but I sure hope so.

Obama rules exactly as his record suggested, the opposite of his rhetoric.

I don't understand all the fervor over the NAACP report calling the tea party racist. What else did anybody expect?

Alaska's write-in Republican candidate for Senator is closing the gap.

H.L. Mencken writes in section II, chapter 4 of Democracy:

"I find myself quoting yet a third German: he is Professor Robert Michels, the economist. The politician, he says, is the courtier of democracy. A profound saying -  perhaps more profound than the professor, himself a democrat, realizes. For it was the essence of the courtier's art and mystery that he flattered his employer in order to victimize him, yielded to him in order to rule him. The politician under democracy does precisely the same thing. His business is never what it pretends to be. Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole aim in life is to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying he will hold by lying: if lying peters out he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground. If he is an adept he can hear the first murmurs of popular clamour before even the people themselves are conscious of them. If he is a master he detects and whoops up today the delusions that the mob will cherish next year. There is in him, in his professional aspect, no shadow of principle or honour. It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences, as the late Dr. Wilson did in 1916. It is moral to change convictions overnight, as multitudes of America politicians did when the Prohibition avalanche came down upon them. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is is to keep a place at the the public trough. That place is one of public honour, and public honour is the thing that caresses him and makes him happy. It is also one of  power, and power is the commodity that he has for sale."

How many times have I written something similar, though never as well?

MEDIA:

NPR fired Juan Williams for saying he gets worried when he flies on an airplane with Muslims.

LOCAL:

Clark County commissioners prohibit man from building gas station. I that burst his delusion that he was free.

MISC:

No court in the US should use any non-US law to determine cases.

Mark Sisson lampoons the claim that discovery of 30,000 year old rocks for grinding roots somehow refutes the paleo diet. Increasing root vegetables is on the of the principles of the paleo diet.

Misnamed IP pirates hope to put torrent site in orbit so governments can't shut it down. They'll still shut it down.

Because Facebook makes money by selling private information, it won't stop no matter what the privacy policy says. Until a competitor arises. This venture fund may produce a viable competitor.

Google's strategy for legally paying as little taxes as possible.

H.L. Mencken writes in section II, chapter 4 of Democracy:

"I find myself quoting yet a third German: he is Professor Robert Michels, the economist. The politician, he says, is the courtier of democracy. A profound saying -  perhaps more profound than the professor, himself a democrat, realizes. For it was the essence of the courtier's art and mystery that he flattered his employer in order to victimize him, yielded to him in order to rule him. The politician under democracy does precisely the same thing. His business is never what it pretends to be. Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole aim in life is to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying he will hold by lying: if lying peters out he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground. If he is an adept he can hear the first murmurs of popular clamour before even the people themselves are conscious of them. If he is a master he detects and whoops up today the delusions that the mob will cherish next year. There is in him, in his professional aspect, no shadow of principle or honour. It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences, as the late Dr. Wilson did in 1916. It is moral to change convictions overnight, as multitudes of America politicians did when the Prohibition avalanche came down upon them. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is is to keep a place at the the public trough. That place is one of public honour, and public honour is the thing that caresses him and makes him happy. It is also one of  power, and power is the commodity that he has for sale."

How many times have I written something similar, though never as well?

Criticism of Hobbes and his social contract.

"When I look at history, I see a time when the country I live in once got involved in a war against fascists in Germany by allying with communists in Russia to kick them out and hand France back to the socialists. When the war was over we instituted a ‘cold war’ with those same communists by enacting a fascist military-industrial state replete with secret police and backyard bomb shelters. And fully half, if not more, of the country’s current population still considers this the pinnacle of our civilization. A war fought on multiple continents destroying hundreds of years worth of accumulated wealth, destroying literally incalculable numbers of families and which culminated with the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilians."

Convenient omission of the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking and who were the aggressors. I realize Roosevelt did much to drag us into the war, but he didn't sneak attack a military base on a Japanese island. I think Americans are proud our ancestors helped end the war by winning it after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Our corrupt politicians are starting a trade war with China, and as a result China has halted trade of rare-earth minerals necessary for high-tech items to the US.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

This is a sad indictment of our trade situation.

"Historians tell us that by the very end of the Roman Empire, goods were pouring into Rome from all over the known world, but about the only thing being sent out of Rome was human waste and garbage. America has not yet reached that point, but we are certainly well on our way. In 2010, the number one U.S. export to China is "scrap and trash." Yes, you read the correctly. The number one thing that China buys from us is our garbage. According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China's number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment (nearly $50 billion) while our number one export to them is waste paper and scrap metal (approximately $8 billion)."

The Japanese bought tremendous amounts of scrap metal from the US too right up until they bombed Pearl Harbor.

I can't tell if this hysteria over foreclosure fraud is real or ginned up. With the explosion in foreclosures, I'm sure the process got royally screwed up, but how bad in reality?

TAX AND SPEND:

Boortz asks a wonderful question:

"This tax cheat was sentenced to work in a pizza joint for the next year.  What about the tax cheat running our Treasury Department?"

This is the kind of all-pervasive corruption government breeds.

Britain and Sweden reducing their welfare states to avoid collapse. But Obama wants the US to collapse, so he's expanding ours. Frankly, this gives me hope for November. It's possible Republicans will find it in their interests to cut the size and scope of government for the first time in our lifetimes. Unlikely, but possible.

More on government confiscation of retirement accounts to fund Social Security. The problem with this politically is senior have retirement accounts, they don't want them confiscated, and they vote.

Another prediction that the next big bubble to pop is US Treasuries.

REGULATION:

The fallacy of child labor laws. Parents are best positioned to determine what's best for their families, not bureaucrats.

Right after the rescue of the Chilean miners, I predicted that government would play the lead role in causing the mine collapse. Sure enough:

"Sure the government got behind the rescue, but the state was the body responsible for regulating the safety of the mine. Yet one third of the cost of the rescue is coming from private donations. And as it turns out, according to an article from Associated Press, "The Aug. 5 collapse brought the 125-year-old San Jose mine's checkered safety record into focus and put Chile's top industry under close scrutiny. Many believe the collapse occurred because the mine was overworked and violated safety codes...Also suing the San Esteban company is Gino Cortez, a 40-year-old miner who lost his left leg from the knee down a month before the accident as he was leaving the mine after his shift and a rock fell on him. He contends he was hurt because the mine was short on the metallic screens that protect miners from such collapses."⁴ So the accident occurred in a mine owned by the state and regulated by the state."

It had to be.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

This line right here should open up anybody's eyes who doesn't understand what the Fed does by design:

"What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale, in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1% interest cost? This is the game that is being played today."

Legally, nothing. Think about it. The Fed could print up enough money overnight to buy every asset in the world, and then do it. Obviously when people saw what was happening, they would stop selling and let prices settle, but by then the banksters could own half the world. The rest of us would be destitute. The only thing stopping them is fear of what the people would do to them afterwards. So they steal from us constantly at a lower pace so we don't get mad and stop them.

"Finance has become the new form of warfare – without the expense of military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign real estate and natural resources, infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership.

Who needs an army when you can obtain monetary wealth and asset appropriation simply by financial means? Victory promises to go to the economy whose banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources."

Allowing the Fed to exist is nuts.

"U.S. officials demonize countries suffering these dollar inflows as aggressive ‘currency manipulators’ for what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner calls “‘Competitive nonappreciation,’ in which countries block their currencies from rising in value.”[1A] Oscar Wilde would have struggled to find a more convoluted term for other countries protecting themselves from raiders trying to force up their currencies to make enormous predatory fortunes.

Competitive nonappreciation’ sounds like ‘conspiratorial non-suicide.’ These countries simply are trying to protect their currencies from arbitrageurs and speculators flooding their financial markets with dollars, sweeping their currencies up and down to extract billions of dollars from their central banks."

Tell me this doesn't sound like the death throws of our economic system.

"At issue is how long nations will succumb to the speculative dollar glut. The world is being forced to choose between subordination to U.S. economic nationalism or an interim of financial anarchy. Nations are responding by seeking to create an alternative international financial system, risking an anarchic transition period in order to create a fairer world economy."

That's why middle eastern nations are moving away from using the dollar for oil.

HEALTH CARE:

Because Big Pharma and Big Med were created by government and are protected by government, pharmaceutical companies are giving doctors kickbacks for prescribing medicines.

"Although the industry’s financial dealings are still private material, lawsuits aimed at Pharma’s marketing have required many of the larger companies to disclose much of their payout information. Although the details are scattered in public websites and documents, ProPublica compiled the information from these various resources. The result? A list of 17,000 doctors and $257 million dollars in payout. Additionally, the organization found that hundreds of physicians on the Pharma payroll lacked board certifications in their claimed fields or had been sanctioned by state medical boards for unprofessional (and in some cases heinous) behavior."

This is another example of the all-pervasive corruption bred by government.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

In today's reminder that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse, the EPA previews future regulations:

"Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed in a "Notice of Intent" that passenger vehicle fuel economy average as much as 62 miles per gallon 14 years from now. The agency was able to arrive at this lofty mark by conveniently ignoring everything we know about the state of automotive art and the marketplace today."

They can and will get a lot worse before they get better.

The enviromarxists hate this truth:

"We are no more “addicted” to fossil fuels than we are to food, housing and clothing. It’s simply that fossil fuels give us more abundant, reliable and affordable energy, from less land, than any alternatives we have today. They enable us to have jobs, hospitals, cars, schools, factories, offices, stores – and living standards better than royalty enjoyed a mere century ago. As fossil fuel consumption increases, so does agriculture, commerce, mobility, comfort, convenience, health and prosperity."

They hate the advance of man.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Look at all these cell phones confiscated in a prison. If guards can't keep cell phones out of prisons, how can government keep drugs off the street? Rhetorical question. Reason and all evidence says it can't.

By embracing liberty on one or a few issues, Presidents can insure popularity. Roosevelt won Americans' hearts and votes by repealing prohibition.

"Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. After dealing with the banking crisis and the budget during his first week on the job, on March 13 he called on Congress to repeal Prohibition. On March 23, he signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which legalized the sale in the United States of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2 percent.

He wasted no time: he signed it one day after Congress passed it. He said with great élan, "I think this would be a good time for a beer."

Only then, on March 16, did FDR begin to work on his New Deal agenda. Then he had the wind at his back."

How about we elect a president who embraces liberty on all issues?

"Somehow the historians have failed to credit his popularity to one of the greatest restorations of liberty in American history. The majority of Americans were drinkers, and the alcohol industry represented something like 5 percent of the overall economy. Prohibition made alcohol much more expensive, harder to find, and generally of a much lower quality.

In fact, because hard liquor is easier to conceal, Prohibition had turned Americans from beer to rot-gut whiskey, which as the name implies was of low quality and often was dangerous to your health. While total alcohol consumption remained about the same during Prohibition as before, whiskey's market share rose from 40 percent to as high as 90 percent."

The same effects have happened with drug prohibition.

POLICE STATE:

The American people don't mind going through TSAs nude scanners. I'm telling you, some TSA pervert is going to stalk some little girl or boy he sees and destroy the life of that child. I guarantee you TSA is hiring perverts left and right right now. Every pervert in America is applying for work there.

WAR:

After nine years of fighting in Afghanistan, the military has finally improved troop survivability from IEDs. While this is a good thing, can you imagine if a private sector company took nine years to improve like this? It could never happen. That company would have gone bankrupt eight years ago. I have a better plan to improve troop survivability. Bring them home.

POLITICS:

All presidents and all government aristocrats are an adversary to the American values of freedom and personal responsibility. Obama is the worst in our life, but that's the natural next step down the road to serfdom. Obama isn't our problem. Democrats aren't our problem. Surrendering our freedom to government no matter which party is in power every day, every year, and every decade for a century is our problem. We're on the verge of the coming of the strong man.

Washington elites understand this. They say the tea parties won't change anything.

"Washingtonians involved in the political or policy process believe overwhelmingly that tea party candidates will not “be able to bring change to Washington.” Only 11 percent of D.C. insiders polled said they thought the tea party could bring change, compared with 77 percent who did not."

They're right. A handful of noobs won't change anything.

Obama complaining Washington is broken is a farce.

"If your party has the White House, 59 Senate seats, and 255 House seats, though, for all intents and purposes it is Washington. The Obama Democrats have completed a period of surpassing legislative mastery.

They got a 1,073-page stimulus bill, a 2,409-page health-care bill, and a 2,319-page financial-reform bill passed. That's 5,801 pages in just three pieces of legislation, at a very conservative cumulative estimated cost of $1.9 trillion over ten years. If this is what Obama's broken Washington produces in three bills, what would a functioning one do?

For all their reputation as obstructionists, Republicans weren't able to stop any of this. Unlike in the early Clinton years, Republicans aren't benefiting from obstructionism so much as from failing to block a president's deeply unpopular priorities. Washington worked for Obama - and now he's paying the price."

That's exactly right. Everything government does is destructive, and Obama and his Democrats accomplished a lot of destruction in two years.

A little reminder on what Republican promises mean.

"Before even examining the text of the "Pledge to America," I would like to point out two major practical problems. First, like the "Contract with America," this is a House Republican document. And like what happened with the "Contract with American," there is no guarantee that Senate Republicans will pass legislation proposed by the House – assuming that Republicans even regain control of the Senate. The second problem is, like what happened with the "Contract with America," we have a Democratic president with veto power. So, even if the Pledge is a good thing (it isn’t), and even if the Republicans are sincere (they aren’t), there is no guarantee that Republicans will accomplish anything even if they do win back control of the House. And as it was pointed back out in 2000: "The combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%." Is there any doubt that things will turn out any different this time?"

As I pointed out above, you can't get blood from a turnip. It's possible, though unlikely, Republicans realize Americans are at the end of their rope. With the Fed printing and dragging us into an inflationary depression, voters aren't going to get any happier, and the only thing aristocrats respond to is voters. So maybe Republicans will make some tiny cuts around the edges. Whatever they do, it's guaranteed to be too little, too late. And they'll get blamed for failures right after they take power too. Maybe there's hope in that: hope that the American people will figure out our problems are a century in the making.

Another great quote:

"If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."

That's funny.

Hillary Democrats want to payback Obama and his gang for 2008 including Rahm Emanuel.

LOCAL:

Cincinnati high school holds mock election to teach students to vote, but only puts Democrats on the ballot. For voting Democrat, the students got an ice cream reward. Naturally, school officials don't think they did anything wrong. This is the kind of all-pervasive corruption that government breeds. Corruption becomes the norm, and the corrupt people perpetrating it don't even know it.

MISC:

These NFL head injuries are no joking matter, but I get a big kick out of the Roger Goodell and the owners pretending they care about the health of the players at the same time they're pushing to add two more games to the season. They haven't done any analysis to see what effect that would have on player health. The only concern they have for the players is how those players can make them more money. That's what happens when government creates cartels. Over the last 60 years, players have gotten bigger and faster, but players haven't advance nearly as fast as technology, yet the basic helmet design hasn't changed in that 60 years. That helmet is designed to be a weapon instead of armor. This sudden concern about player health is a farce. Far and away the simplest thing to do to protect the players' health is to design a new helmet. The second is to stop trying to extend the season.

One of the advantages of the BCS system is that every regular season game matters until you lose. If you take a game off and lose, your national title hopes are shot. But the downside to that is that once a team loses, it doesn't really matter any more. If you're an alum who goes and tailgates every game, maybe that's not true, but for the vast majority of fans, the excitement of the season is gone for good. A playoff system would insure fans stay interested all season long.