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GLOBAL WARMING:

Satellites discover 657 new islands. Global warming frauds attribute their creation to sea level rise then warn they are threatened by sea level rise. Apparently the irony is lost on them.

LOCAL:

City government will never acknowledge that its taxes and spending are what's destroying Dayton, so instead its blaming the problems on selling single servings of beer and pressuring businesses downtown to stop selling them. For some of those poor people, that single beer is the highlight of their day, and they can't afford a six pack. What a load of crap. Government always blames the people for the problems it creates.

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ECONOMY:

Five years after the housing bubble peaked, foreclosures are still running at record rates. That's because the government is doing everything it can to keep the market from reaching bottom so it can start growing again.

TAX AND SPEND:

Trying to identify this or that government expenditure as the one that is bankrupting the government is worthless. All government spending makes us poorer. Every dollar government spends it first steals from us, making us poorer. Then every dollar the government spends diverts resources from the productive private sector into the parasitic political economy, making us poorer again. We have to pay for every dollar government spends twice.

POLICE STATE:

Cops escort Charlie Sheen caravan at eighty miles per hour. Cops aid members of the ruling class to break the laws. Imagine if they spotted you doing 80 down city streets.

Janet Napolitano supports the TSA molestation of a six year old under the pretense of making us safer. This is an abomination.

Michigan police performing forensic data analysis of cell phones at traffic stops. You got to be kidding me.

WAR:

It looks like the ruling class has figured out the pretense it's going to use to put western troops in Libya: evacuating civilians.

This warning of a potential military coup if the government tried to bring all the troops overseas home sounds extremely paranoid. It makes no sense that troops would affect a coup so because they didn't want to be back in America.

POLITICS:

Comparison of how similar Obama is to Bush. Like Bush on steroids. It's nice to see somebody in the main stream figure that out. More people are figuring out that it doesn't matter who's in the White House, and that's why Obama is losing support from every demographic in America.

Obama's plan to accelerate the collapse of our economy in order to spark a Marxist revolution.

Somebody is releasing a birther book, and it's number two on Amazon. This birther thing is a huge story, and it's only going to get bigger. If Obama has a birth certificate, whatever it says must be horrific for him to not release it. Then again, we already know the governor of Hawaii, an Obama supporter, has reported Obama's birth certificate does not exist in Hawaii's archives. On December 28 I wrote:

"It's interesting that the incoming governor of Hawaii is a Democrat, Obama ally and knew him as a child and wants to release Obama's full birth certificate. This pits Obama against his core constituency. This lends more credence to my theory that the longer Obama refuses, the more damaging the information must be. If Abercrombie backtracks on this, and that's almost certain to happen, it will do more damage to Obama."

The AP article that link pointed to has been removed. More media cover-up for Obama. Here's basically the same article from the LA Times.

MEDIA:

CBS refuses to release the full audio from Obama's hot mike comments. This is similar to the LA Times decision during the campaign not to release recording of Obama at a party with Bill Ayers. The press covers up for their man.

MISC:

Government once again tries to fix a problem it created.

Jeffrey Tucker identifies three more government attacks on civilization. They won't be happy until we're living in the stone age again, and they really won't be happy then.

The libertarians' darling company Apple busted for creepy tracking feature on the iPhone. I think some libertarians wish corporations were like Randian heroes. None are. They're all in bed with government.

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TAX AND SPEND:

I like this skepticism over Standard & Poors warning about US government debt. If they're not downgrading it, what's the point? It might just be to fool the people into thinking something real is being done about the debt.

Paul Ryan's budget plan claims to cut $4 trillion from budget growth over ten years. In order to make his plan sound comparable, Obama is claiming it cuts $4 trillion too, but his is over twelve years. This is designed to confuse people.

Here's another reason why government pseudo-services are so expensive: the overhead of tax compliance.

"There is a lot more to taxes than simply paying the bill. Taxpayers must spend significantly more than $1 in order to provide $1 of income-tax revenue to the federal government.


To start with, individuals and businesses must pay the government the $1 in revenue plus the costs of their own time spent filing and complying with the tax code; plus the tax collection costs of the IRS; plus the tax compliance outlays that individuals and businesses pay to help them file their taxes.

In a study published last week by the Laffer Center, my colleagues Wayne Winegarden, John Childs and I estimate that these costs alone are a staggering $431 billion annually. This is a cost markup of 30 cents on every dollar paid in taxes. And this is not even a complete accounting of the costs of tax complexity."

It gets worse:

"David Keating of the National Taxpayers Union provides a useful perspective on how big the tax compliance industry is. According to his research, as of 2009 the income-tax industry employed "more workers than are employed at the five biggest employers among Fortune 500 companies—more than all the workers at Wal-Mart Stores, United Parcel Service, McDonald's, International Business Machines, and Citigroup combined." Without diminishing in any way the professionalism of tax attorneys, accountants and financial planners, all of these efforts produce nothing other than, well, tax compliance. "

That's a phenomenal waste of money.

Boortz reports: "There are now 72,536 pages of federal tax code rules, regulations, and IRS rulings." and "A hundred years ago, federal spending for each person was the equivalent of $200 in today’s dollars … This year, it’s over $12,000."

The Finns oust their ruling party in anger of the bailout of Portugal in another step in the sovereign debt collapse of Europe.

"The Portugal case and the Finnish reaction should serve as a wake-up call. All these bailouts and stimulus packages cannot hide the fact that the governments and banking systems of the United States and Europe are fundamentally bankrupt, sustained only by the power to create money out of thin air. Each intervention is working to buy time but not to deal with the fundamental problem. And each time, when the problems return, they are worse than before."

The same thing is happening here.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

More evidence that government creates poverty, death and disease.

"Research by the World Bank indicates that the increase in biofuels production over 2004 levels would push more than 35 million additional people into absolute poverty in 2010 in developing countries. Using statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Indur Goklany estimates that this would lead to at least 192,000 excess deaths per year, plus disease resulting in the loss of 6.7 million disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) per year. "

Every government policy is an act of aggression against the people and does the same.

Charles Manson joins the global warming frauds.

POLITICS:

Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter says what all politicians think: he would love a dictatorship. But he'll get blasted for being honest.

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POLICE STATE:

Here's an example of how government has created arbitrary laws so it can enforce them as it wishes.

"In his book, The Language of Dissent, former Federal Trade Commissioner, Lowell Mason, went to great lengths to point out how, under the various antitrust laws, if a firm charges a higher price than its competitors it is a “monopoly per se” (i.e., in a competitive market, one could not get away with this practice); if a firm charges a lower price than its competitors, it is engaged in “predatory pricing” (i.e., the only reason for pricing beneath the level of your competition was to drive them out of business); and if a firm charges the same price as its competitors, it is engaged in “price-fixing.” "

This way government can arbitrarily target any business or individual it doesn't like at any time. That's oppression, not the rule of law.

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FEDERAL RESERVE:

Here's another step in Bernanke's destruction of the dollar: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will no longer use the dollar in exchanges between each other. The demand for dollars just dropped, which means the value of the dollar just dropped.

Assuming Republicans control Congress, would Obama or a Republican do less damage after winning the White House in 2012?

Before the 2008 election, I claimed that Obama would do less damage than McCain unless Democrats won a filibuster-proof Senate. Unfortunately, Democrats won a filibuster-proof Senate, and they did tremendous damage. Now I'm considering a similar question:

Assuming Republicans control Congress, would Obama or a Republican do less damage after winning the White House in 2012?

Republicans are pretty good at resisting Democrat programs, but Democrats tend to go along with Republican expansion of government. We've seen that Boehner and Ryan have no interest in cutting spending. What do you think?

Criminal Gangs War Over Buses

Criminal Gangs War Over Buses
by Mark Luedtke

If you read the Dayton Daily News over the last couple of weeks, you might have thought the most important story in the world was whether or not Beavercreek city council would allow the RTA to run buses to Fairfield Commons. Oddly, the story was almost non-existent in the Greene County papers. Apparently this is a big deal to Dayton’s powers-that-be, so the Dayton Daily News tried to gin up support for the bus routes.

I find the entire affair enlightening. If you just look at the surface of the issue like the Dayton Daily News did, it’s obvious that discrimination against blacks played a major role in the council’s refusal.  One editorial noted:
“The council’s demands of RTA would be comical if the situation weren’t so sad.
Among them:
— Provide ‘state of the art’ surveillance cameras that ‘transmit real-time surveillance pictures to the Beavercreek Police Department.’
— ‘Provide heated and air-conditioned shelters.’
— Limit use of the stops to small ‘airport shuttle-type’ buses.”
The council knew these demands were absurd and could never be met. That was never their intention. These demands were designed to scare Beavercreek residents into believing RTA’s poor, mostly black riders were criminals, and the council wanted to protect them. It worked. By pretending to protect Beavercreek citizens, council members gained support from the people they manipulated. Like all government actions, this was a charade by council members to increase their power at the expense of the people.

But there are deeper issues here that haven’t been addressed. First, why is Beavercreek city council involved? Why doesn’t RTA drop riders off at the mall? Did the mall owners refuse to allow that? If so, that should have been the end of it. This matter should be decided by property owners, not government. Second, since RTA is also funded by taxes, why do we allow government to loot us to enrich the ruling class under the guise of helping the poor travel?

This conflict highlights the true nature of government. If thugs demanded money from you at the point of a gun so they could run a bus service, you would instantly know a criminal gang was robbing you. Nobody would claim that funding a bus service with stolen money was a legitimate service or good for the community. Everybody would know the goal was to enrich the thugs. If thugs forced you to pay them a fee for protection, you would instinctively know you were a victim of a protection racket. Nobody would claim being a victim of a protection racket made you safer. Everybody would know the goal was to enrich the thugs. But if the criminal gang occasionally gives us the privilege of choosing between Tony Soprano and Don Corleone to run it, we call it a government, call its armed robbery taxes, and think it works for us. Sycophants left and right claim the bus service and protection racket funded with stolen money benefit society.

But there are differences between ordinary criminals and the criminals who run government. Government is run by arch-criminals who are so successful they’ve seized control of the law-making process so they can make their crimes legal. They hate competition, so they hunt down less successful criminal gangs. Also, they must provide pseudo-services to give their looting programs the illusion of legitimacy to keep the people from rebelling. These services invariably cost more and are lower quality than equivalent services provided by the private sector.

Most people believe government exists to provide services that benefit the people, so they think government provides poor services because of inefficiency. That belief is mistaken. Like all criminal gangs, government exists to loot the people on behalf of the gang leaders and members - the ruling class, bureaucrats and agents - and it’s ruthlessly effective by design.

This conflict highlights how socialist America has become. The conflict was created by government and can only exist because of government. In a free society, the private owners of the mall and bus line would negotiate a mutually beneficial deal. Both would supply inexpensive, effective security to deal with the rare criminal. Both would profit. Store owners and workers would profit. Bus customers would profit. Everybody would profit. There’d be no council meetings. No protesters. No headlines. No ruling class looters. Just people improving their lives and the lives of everybody around them through a system of voluntary exchange.

Government doesn’t help the poor. By looting us, it destroys wealth, makes us all poorer and traps people in poverty. Government doesn’t protect us from criminals. Government initiates most violence in society, creates most conflicts in society, attacks people with arbitrary laws of aggression, creates black markets, steals from people, traps them in poverty, and divides them into winners and losers. It commits most crimes, legalized and not, and promotes criminal activity. The ruling class, bureaucrats and government agents profit from poverty and crime. That’s why regardless of whom we elect, government creates more of both, not less. Government is the enemy of civilized society and human advancement. And as this conflict illustrates, government promotes and institutionalizes racial discrimination for the benefit of our rulers.

Unleash Your Inner Carnivore

Unleash Your Inner Carnivore
by Mark Luedtke

Man is a meat eater. The ancestors of modern humans stalked game, fish and shellfish on Africa’s savannas, rivers and coasts, and scientists believe that by doing so they obtained so much energy and nutrients that they developed big brains and general intelligence which fueled man’s rise to the top of the food chain. To this day, the Inuit eat almost no grains, fruits or vegetables, no sugar of any kind, thriving on a high fat, high protein diet of healthy meat from salmon, seal and whales. Because of their meat diet - they eat every part of the animal - and exercise regime, they suffer almost none of the deadly diseases of modern man including cardiovascular disease, heart disease and cancer.

A new study in Britain showed that red meat is good for you, but civilized man is rapidly losing appreciation for the benefits of eating meat. It’s cheaper, easier and therefore more profitable to grow and sell grains than to raise and sell meat, so food corporations and government agencies blanket the airwaves with advertisements and public service announcements pushing people to eat more grains and less meat. The result is the escalation of the deadly diseases of modern society.

But few people would trade modern civilization for the Inuit lifestyle despite the lower risk of disease, and most meat on grocery shelves is not healthy like Inuit meat. Naturally raised meat is lower in fat and has a significantly higher Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio compared to grain-fed meat. Having too much Omega 6 produces inflammation and chronic disease. Additionally, most grocery meat is raised in unhealthy conditions in factory farms. Housing animals crammed together in small spaces, these farms become breeding grounds for pests and disease, so farmers shoot the animals with antibiotics and spray chemical pesticides. They feed them grains contaminated with pesticides and herbicides and pump them full of growth hormones to make them mature rapidly. Whether or not these chemicals create health problems in humans is an open question. Advocates of both sides point to studies in their favor. Regardless, Americans have options for more naturally grown food.

Certified Organic

One choice for people who want to feast on healthier meat is USDA Certified Organic meat. The USDA website describes that certification: “Organic food is produced by farmers who emphasize the use of renewable resources and the conservation of soil and water to enhance environmental quality for future generations.  Organic meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products come from animals that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.  Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation.” In addition, organically raised animals must be fed organic feed and have access to pasture, and both producers and processors must be certified by the USDA.

Miami Valley residents have numerous options to purchase certified organic meat retail. Healthy Alternative has a store on North Main and another on North Fairfield in Beavercreek. They specialize in supplements, processed organic food, organic produce, and they also sell organic meat. Assistant manager Laura Holland reports they have to get their organic meat from Wisconsin. Holland laments that organic meat is not a big part of their business. “I don’t think people realize how the government is using us for guinea pigs, doing GMO.” Genetically modified organisms created by gene splicing. Some argue that GMO is no different than centuries of selective breeding. Holland disagrees. “They’re not actually taking the color from butterfly wings and stuffing it in the salmon.” She explains one reason it’s easier to sell organic produce than organic meat: “I think one of the problems is organic meat is almost twice as much [money] as regular meat whereas produce is not quite as bad a bite into your pocketbook as meat would be.”

Jack Gridley has worked for Dorothy Lane Market (DLM) since 1976 and is currently VP of Meat and Seafood. DLM offers a limited selection of organic meat, much of it processed. Part of a growing trend, most DLM meats are naturally grown by local producers to keep the quality up and the price down. Gridley provides one reason organic meat is so expensive: “The only difference between the meats we sell here at DLM and certified organic is that the grain that the animals have been fed is certified organic. The trade-off for that is the organic grain is very expensive and limited in supply making the finished product much higher in price vs. the all natural antibiotic free meats.”

Locally Grown Organic, Non-certified

Dan Kremer sells his organic products in a stall in the west end of the Second Street Market on Saturdays. His E.A.T. Food for Life stall is packed with organic products and educational signs. Kremer seems more like an educator than a salesman. His website describes his mission: “E.A.T. Food for Life Farm is a 140-acre, certified organic, family farm located in northern Darke County near North Star, Ohio.  Our goal is to honor God in all that we do. Our family mission is to grow and distribute nutrient-dense, traditional, safe foods that nourish, protect, and support life for improved health and energy.”

With a mission like that, USDA certification would seem invaluable, but Kremer is dropping his. “I’m the only organic producer for my local processor. My land is certified organic, but our meats are not because my processors are not certified because they have to jump through all the hoops to certify.” The costs of certifying drive up the cost of certified organic meat and make it harder to sell.

Kremer explains the problem isn’t just the cost of the license. “It’s licensing fees, but then all of the paperwork that grows literally annually. That’s all frustrating, and boring and not productive. The whole climate of the culture is do you want more government or less government? I’d much rather say come to my farm. Let’s walk the land and let’s talk. You want to do any testing on my farm, consumer, have at it.” To him, the USDA certification is an obstacle that stands between him and his customer, and he’s tired of paying for it.

Customers buy his product regardless of certification. During the course of this interview, Kremer sold nearly all the meat in his freezer. E.A.T. Food for Life also sells its products at the Liberty Market in Kettering, his farm in Yorkshire, and online. Kremer credits his health to eating organic. “I have hemophilia, so each time I had internal bleeding, I’d take a pharmaceutical drug that stops that bleeding. That’s good and essential, but it also ads a certain amount of toxicity to my body as drugs do. So my immune system was really being depressed and declining. So it was really by the grace of God I came to understand that the quality of what we put in our body three times a day, that’s the essence of restoration and healing.”

John Stedman at the Aullwood Audubon Farm finds himself in a similar business situation. According to the farm website: “Aullwood strives to be a model of local sustainable, organic agriculture in the Miami Valley and direct markets our farm products. Grass-raised beef and lamb, pastured chicken, pork, and eggs are available seasonally. Aullwood purchases chicken and hog feed from local organic farmers and our meats are processed by local butchers.”

But the lone certified organic processor in southwest Ohio, King’s Poultry, recently dropped its certification because of cost. Stedmen relates, “We used to be organically certified, but we stopped that. There’s no benefit to us. Not only did we pay our certification here, but we helped pay their certification there.” That became too expensive as organic producers who had shared the costs dropped their certifications. “It cost us $500 for them, plus we had to pay for processing. Well, there’s no way in the world you could justify that.” There’s only one certified processor left in the state, northeast of Columbus, but Stedman can’t afford two trips just to be certified.

Stedman reports dropping the certification had no impact on his business. “When we dropped our certification, we asked the people here buying our meat, does it bother you if we drop it, and I think we had one woman say yes, but she didn’t buy enough meat to bother about.” Because Stedman feeds his animals very little grain, the meat is more natural and Aullwood’s prices are comparable to regular meat in grocery stores, about half the price of certified organic meats. A price list is available at the Aullwood website.

Stedman also pointed out problems with the certified organic standard. There are no standards for how much pasture is available to animals nor the quality of their feed. That means businesses can meet the standard by providing virtually no pasture for animals and by feeding them low quality, organic feed, like weeds. According to the Organic Consumers Association, weak guidelines enable big food corporations to drive small, healthy producers like Eat Food for Life and Aullwood Farm out of the market so they don’t face competition.

Locally Grown with Modern Technology

The sign in the window of the Tin Roof restaurant in Troy reads, “Eat the best steaks in town.” Owner Craig Hughes knows his beef. He raises the cattle and their feed, specifies how they are butchered and cooks the beef himself. “I only use four genetic patterns of beef in here. I raise Charlet, and I cross it with Angus, Shorthorn and Maine-anjou. That’s the only four breeds of cattle you will ever eat in here.”

But Hughes doesn’t use organic feed. “I see the organic as a far off dream people chase, but you can never get there. They think they do, but they don’t.” He explains that all it takes is one decent breeze to cross-pollinate organic and non-organic crops. As far as the USDA Certified Organic label, Hughes declares, “It’s a brilliant marketing ploy.” Hughes uses GMO corn so he doesn’t have to use pesticides, and he uses modern fertilizers for his crops.

Hughes says his customers approve. “I’ve had people that have eaten here that have had the beef and said ‘My God, I’ve eaten at Christie’s in Chicago, and Morton’s in New York and Kansas City steak houses and yours is just as good or better.’” Maybe his corn-burning grill has something to do with it. “It is the first corn-burning grill in operation in a restaurant in the US today.” According to Hughes, the corn burns cleaner and keeps the air moist, allowing the flavor of the beef to shine.

Conclusion

The Organic Consumer Association warns that because of regulatory capture by big food corporations, the USDA is attempting to weaken certified organic standards to allow hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and fish meal, making it easier and cheaper for the big producers to produce USDA Certified Organic food. DLM’s Gridley claims that most organic meat is already produced by a few corporations. Small, local producers committed to producing healthy food are being pushed out of the USDA Certified Organic market, reducing it to a corporate marketing gimmick. But by meeting, talking to and buying from a growing market of local, natural producers, people can obtain the healthy meat they need to thrive. Gridley sums up, “I would rather know who is raising my food and how it is raised rather than buy a Certified Organic product with much of it being raised by large companies and much of the grain being imported.”

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COMMUNISM:

Maryland governor announces Soviet-style five year plan for Maryland's economy.

"Comrade O’Malley’s Five-Year Plan is actually more like the variant of socialism known as fascism. Rather than pursuing their announced goal of egalitarianism by nationalizing industries, the fascists pursued socialism on the cheap by allowing private enterprise to exist, in name only, but regulated, regimented, and subsidized it so that the product of industry would only be that which was dictated by the state."

Communism. Fascism. Totalitarians don't care.

TAX AND SPEND:

House Republicans pass Ryan budget with zero votes from Democrats.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

How inflation leads to lower quality products.

HEALTH CARE:

The FDA’s factory farms and subsidized abuse of antibiotics have created resistant strains of bacteria in grocery meat.

"Researchers have found high levels of bacteria in meat commonly found on grocery store shelves, with more than half of the bacteria resistant to multiple types of antibiotics, according to a study released on Friday."

Government is the enemy of the people and civilization.

"USDA officials could not be reached immediately for comment."

Of course.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

In 2005 the climate frauds at the UN claimed there would be 50 million climate refuges by 2010. They were wrong, but instead of admitting they were wrong, they tried to make the web page disappear. Needless to say, Google has it cached.

POLICE STATE:

Government shuts down three thriving online poker businesses. And we wonder why our economy won't rebound.

POLITICS:

Web site shows Mitt Romney's flip-flops on about every issue. That's awesome. This guy's a self-serving creep. He's the Republican Obama, but with business experience.

MISC:

Why Austrian economics matters.

"Pretend you know nothing about the market, and ask yourself this question: how can society's entire deposit of scarce physical and intellectual resources be assembled so as to minimize cost; make use of the talents of every individual; provide for the needs and tastes of every consumer; encourage technical innovation, creativity, and social development; and do all this in a way that can be sustained?"

That's a great formulation of the question of economics.

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FEDERAL RESERVE:

"Other than food, gas and rent, prices haven't risen." That's too funny.

EDUCATION:

It's good to find an oasis in the desert of education. Students build life-size model of the Trojan horse on their own initiative.

"VanVorhees says they’re pretty pleased.“We’re hoping that this kinda makes the younger classes step up and do cool stuff,” VanVorhees said."

Now that's learning. Nice job.

HEALTH CARE:

Healthful behavior is key to health care system. Yes it is, and the biggest institutional obstacle to healthful behavior we have is the federal government which promotes a bad food supply, bad exercise and bad health care. There's two ways to reduce health care costs. One is by people becoming more healthy. Two is by reducing the cost of production of health care. The best thing we can do to promote both is to abolish the FDA and Health and Human Services get government at all levels out of our food supply and health care system.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Even though Americans have reduced their CO2 output to 1995 levels, the greens are coming for your refrigerator.

Solar cycle 24 has taken a big leap forward in activity.


The good news is, if this keeps up, this might keep the climate from falling into a Dalton-minimum-like cold spell. The bad news is, a return to high activity will warm the planet and more people will fall for the global warming fraud. Let's hope for something in between.

POLICE STATE:

TSA singling out people who complain about their abuses. Because that's what terrorists will do, drawing lots of attention to themselves. This is just a natural response of thugs.

"CNN has obtained a list of roughly 70 "behavioral indicators" that TSA behavior detection officers use to identify potentially "high risk" passengers at the nation's airports.Many of the indicators, as characterized in open government reports, are behaviors and appearances that may be indicative of stress, fear or deception. None of them, as the TSA has long said, refer to or suggest race, religion or ethnicity.
But one addresses passengers' attitudes towards security, and how they express those attitudes.
It reads: "Very arrogant and expresses contempt against airport passenger procedures.""

So how many of the 70 behavioral indicators did that 5 year old little girl set off? This is a load of crap.

WAR:

Theory on why the US military can't nation-build.

"Different jobs attract different personalities. The Mike Tysons of the world do not go into ballet, nor do the Mother Teresas become tank commanders. The career military attracts people who run from the merely abnormal to the frankly weird. For example, they place extreme value on ritual and ceremony, on ribbons and medals and colored things more appropriate to a Christmas tree than to a human being. They are authoritarian by nature, comfortable in a rigid, hierarchical, and conformist society that most of us would find equally unbearable and absurd. Suppose your boss told everyone in the office that they had to wear exactly the same clothes and stand at attention in the morning to that he could determine whether they had dressed themselves correctly. Militaries start with odd material."

I think this is a secondary effect. The authoritarian, bureaucratic nature of the military attracts people who like authoritarian, bureaucratic structure. And that's fine when the military is fighting another authoritarian, bureaucratic military. But that isn't the kind of enemy the military faces when nation-building. The root problem is the authoritarian, bureaucratic nature of the military, not the people who are naturally attracted to that structure. This is why I keep stressing we should go to our strength to hunt down terrorists, and our strength is entrepreneurship: people who come up with creative solutions to problems. People who are flexible so they can adapt to fluid circumstances. We should do this by issuing letters of Marque to hunt down Osama bin Laden, al Zawahiri, and others who are funding and training terrorists to attack us. Our military shouldn't be nation-building anyway.

"Constantly they are told that they are “the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and effective fighting force the world has seen.” This is not a statement of fact but of mandatory enthusiasm. The Pentagon’s record since WW II has been a sorry one. Further, effectiveness, training, and so on are relative to a particular situation: a force well-equipped for desert war against aging Iraqi armor is not necessarily equipped to fight guerrillas in Quang Tri or Helmand."

That's problem isn't caused by the personality of the officers. It's structural. Granted, the officers who are best suited for this structure rise to the top, and they naturally resist any changes to the structure.

"The norm is a wild overestimation of one’s own powers, disdain for the enemy, and inattention to tactical facts. Why? Not because soldiers are actually stupid, but because they prefer martial ardor to thought."

This is another failing of the system.

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TAX AND SPEND:

It seems Obama has figured out that Paul Ryan is the most dangerous Republican, so he invited him to sit front and center at his speech. Here's Ryan's comments.

"Exploiting people’s emotions of fear, envy, and anxiety is not hope. It’s not change. It’s partisanship. We don’t need partisanship. We don’t need demagoguery. We need solutions. And we don’t need to keep punting to other people to make tough decisions. If we don’t make tough decisions today, our children are going to have to make much, much tougher decisions tomorrow."

So Obama gives a campaign speech that masquerades as a policy speech. Ryan responds with a campaign attack. This is a personal battle for control of the government's looting apparatus between these two.

The city of Sandy Springs, Georgia is doing well during this recession because they outsourced everything. Well, not quite everything. They still have some employees, so there's room for improvement.

"The best government is government that is closest to the people."

The least-worst government is the government that's closest to the people, but no matter how small or how close, all government exists to loot the people. In this case, the smaller, closer government pushed away a larger, further away government, and that's an improvement.

Progressives are doing a rolling fast, whatever that is, to protest immoral spending cuts by Republicans. Those progressives know how to work the media.

Government wants to give the IRS the power to pre-determine your tax liability before you file, and if your filing is different, audit you. When will Americans finally put an end to our travesty of a government?

Thomas Sowell thinks giving young people to option to opt out of Social Security and Medicare will dramatically cut the the expense. But who will pay for today's seniors?

Republican controlled House passes budget compromise they claim cuts $38 billion from the budget but which the CBO reports actually increases the budget by $3.3 billion.

"The final vote on the fiscal 2011 budget deal was 260-167.In the end, 179 Republicans and 81 Democrats backed the measure, which was agreed to late last week just an hour before the federal government was slated to shut down.
Boehner, R-Ohio, lost 59 votes from his GOP majority."

One hundred seventy nine Republicans voted to increase spending and only 59 voted against it. With small government friends like those, who needs enemies?

REGULATION:

FAA bureaucrat resigns over sleeping air traffic controllers. Wow. That almost never happens in the US.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Researchers accidentally discover that light striking an insulator can create a magnetic field. The process produces hardly any heat, unlike traditional solar power, potentially opening the door to much cheaper solar power.

POLICE STATE:

Parents who allowed their child to be molested by TSA agents now blame the TSA agents.

"The Drexels said they stood powerless, watching as their daughter was patted down."

What a load of crap. These parents were not powerless. That's an excuse. They could have chosen not to fly in the first place. They could have chosen not to fly once they saw their child was going to get molested. They had plenty of power. They just refused to use it, and as a result, the TSA molested their child. They're just as responsible for the molestation as the government is.

POLITICS:

Obama's approval drops below 50 percent with poor people. His class warfare rhetoric and the consequences of his policies are costing him the people they're designed to attract.

Fighting for government to end its corruption is like fighting for water to stop being wet.

LOCAL:

Now Dayton city government is going to choose police and firefighters based solely on interviews, ignoring the written test scores in hopes that more blacks will get hired. The Feds made them change it.

MISC:

Private bus service thrives because it isn't regulated or subsidized by government. Includes Wi-Fi.

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Proof that the teacher's sick-out in Wisconsin was really a strike. Duh. Anybody who thought public sector unions wouldn't strike was a fool.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Sometimes it's hard to believe how effective brainwashing is. In this case, survivor of the Virginia Tech massacre, a situation in which all the victims had been disarmed by government so only the criminal had guns, calls for gun control. He's oblivious to the fact that gun control is what allowed this massacre to happen in he first place. The more powerful the gun control, the more power criminals have over the law-abiding.

ECONOMY:

Recommendation to not just buy gold, but buy gold coins and physically hold them.

Here's the fundamental truth about this market:

"The major, natural tendency of this market is towards contraction. The market wants to correct. No kidding. After a half-century of credit expansion, it’s time to pay up…to settle debts…to recognize bad investments and to write off mistakes. That’s what’s happening in the housing sector. That’s why about 12 million Americans don’t have jobs"

The problem is the government and the Fed won't let it correct. These two conflicting forces create tremendous uncertainty.

TAX AND SPEND:

Right after Obama was elected he he said he wanted to have a transformational presidency like FDR or Lincoln. That's code for wanting to kill a bunch of Americans, because that's what those two did more of than any other presidents in history. Obama again invokes Lincoln as an excuse for big, murdering government.

Yet another Republicans pledge broken as predicted. How are Republicans going to screw us next? By raising the debt ceiling. The CBO provides a more honest insight into the so-called record-breaking budget cuts than the media.

"Congressional Budget Office data, posted Wednesday morning, shows that total non-emergency appropriations will fall to $1.0498 trillion, a nearly $38 billion reduction from their level at the beginning of this year. But the impact on outlays or direct spending before the 2011 fiscal year ends Sept. 30 will be just $352 million compared to prior CBO reports reviewed by POLITICO."

$38 million from the level estimated at the beginning of the year. Not lower than the previous year which is what most people think of when they hear the term "budget cut". But remember, not matter how bad it is, it can always get worse, and it does:

"In fact, once overseas contingency funds related to Afghanistan and Pakistan are counted, the news gets worse: CBO now says that total discretionary outlays for 2011 are higher –not lower—by about $3.3 billion than it had estimated in December."

So after the historic budget cuts, the budget is actually bigger than at the beginning of the year. Imagine that. It would be funny if it wasn't so evil.

REGULATION:

I've often explained how government regulation costs us productivity and wealth, but a new study has quantified the cost, and it's fantastic.

"A new study by the Phoenix Center for the Advanced Study for Legal and Economic Policy Studies found that federal regulators cost taxpayers more than $200,000 each, but cost the economy over $6 million in jobs and productivity."

Each regulator makes us over $6 million poorer. Wow. Get rid of all of them.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bernanke and company bailed out the wives of some Wall Street fat cats when their personal investment scheme went south. This is one of the many scams Bernanke tried so hard to keep secret. It must be nice to be a member of the ruling class.

"Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous.""

This is exactly what the Austrians have been telling us for a century. The Fed exists to print money and give it to its cronies. It exists to line the pockets of the ruling class at the expense of the people. It exists to inflate the currency, not control inflation as it pretends. And because that's why it exists, that's what it's done for a century. It's a private slush fund of unlimited funds for the ruling class, including these two wives.

"The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called "giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all." If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like."

We're witnessing history. The Fed has never been this exposed before. The funniest thing about this article is the author keeps attacking Republicans as if Obama didn't just renominate Bernanke and Geithner wasn't one of the architects of these bailouts.

The Fed not only wipes out savings, it erases the savings ethic from the people, and undermines many other ethics in the process.

"Impetuous, high-time-preference behavior displayed by the young appears rational in an inflationary period, while prudence and conservatism appear to be not even quaint but downright silly."

And undermines the family by driving a wedge between generations.

If you use the same methodology to measure CPI as they used in the 1970s, CPI is around ten percent as it was in the 1970s.

HEALTH CARE:

In addition to all the great benefits of eating blueberries we already know about, apparently they get rid of fat cells too.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The push to release oil from the strategic reserve is another example of a government non-solution to a government-created problem. The real solution is to get government out of the marketplace.

I don't even know where to start.

WAR ON DRUGS:

The war on drugs claims Barry Bonds as another victim on the phony crime of obstruction of justice.

"Jeff Novitzky, the federal agent who started the BALCO probe, had been hoping the Bonds case would be part of a wider investigation of doping in baseball. Last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Novitzky and his team of investigators illegally seized urine samples and records from 104 players in 2004.Separately, Novitzky has helped develop the case against former star pitcher Roger Clemens, who is scheduled to stand trial in July for lying to Congress by denying he used performance-enhancing drugs. Novitzky also is a key player in the federal doping investigation of pro cyclists, including seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, recently suggested that the federal agent is motivated by a desire to bring down a celebrity."

And wouldn't he be? What's his motive to do otherwise? A little insight into the agent who targeted Bonds.

"Barry Bonds may be headed for prison because he piqued the malevolent interest of a squalid little person named Jeff Novitzky, described by reporter Matt Welch as “an ex-jock IRS agent who didn’t appreciate Bonds’s famously surly attitude.”"

This is an example of how the law is a weapon of aggression against the people and is applied by personal whim. That's not the rule of law. Also, this is another conflict that couldn't exist in a free society. In a free society, Bonds wouldn't hide that he did steroids. Neither would Clemens, who just as obviously did them as Bonds. If Armstrong did them, how come he didn't show any physical signs?

The link between inflation and war.

POLICE STATE:

This video of a cop afraid of a baby squirrel he subsequently pepper sprays is amazing.

I keep saying our government is conquering us, and this case shows what I mean.

WAR:

Calls for the US to escalate the war in Libya. I prefer to end it. Pat Buchanan reports that the rebels are on the verge of defeat unless the US re-engages Qaddafi's troops. Apparently we will be blamed if they lose. Of course.

POLITICS:

My contentions that big-government lover Paul Ryan is the most dangerous man in Washington because he's fooled people into thinking he supports small government and that the tea party is a fraud comprised of angry Republicans, not small government supporters, just got a big boost with the revelation that Paul Ryan is the number one favorite presidential hopeful for the tea party despite his grotesquely huge new budget proposal that doesn't even manage to balance the budget in a decade. You have to hand it to both Ryan and the tea party. They've fooled just about everybody. And we're all going to keep paying through the nose because of it.


Accusation that Bill Buckley split conservatives from libertarians by supporting intervention to defeat communism which actually allowed it to survive for decades longer than it would have otherwise. It also invited the neoconservatives to become the dominant force on the right. But I can't tell the difference between the policies of neoconservatives and progressives. All this makes perfect sense for a CIA agent because the CIA profits from bigger, more aggressive government.


LOCAL:

Perpetual construction in interstates is one of the great looting programs of modern America.

"The project is one of 74 new and continuous construction projects in the area announced Monday by the Ohio Department of Transportation for the 2011 construction season."

Construction season? Now we have construction seasons. Maybe they have a construction funding season, but every season is construction season from decades ago until government goes broke on I-75.

"All of the projects promote economic development and safer driving conditions, officials said."

That gave me a good belly laugh. Stealing money from people and using it to tear up roads, cause wrecks and kill people promotes economic development and safer driving conditions. Give me a break.

"“Even if it is minor inconvenience for the time being, down the road it is going to make a much smoother commute,” Abner said."

Another good belly laugh. I doubt the families of all the people who have been killed in these never-ending construction zones consider it a minor inconvenience. And this article is about one specific project that took four years. Four years. A woman could have three babies in that time. And I live right by malfunction junction. That's my exit. I drive or walk through some of that construction every day. Nobody is ever working on it.

"Transportation officials warn that construction zones can prove tricky for drivers because of the barrels, lane shifts and congestion problems. Last year, there were 5,038 work zone crashes in Ohio, resulting in 1,262 injuries and 10 fatalities, said Kurt Bailar, District 7 safety manager."

That's what government considers a minor inconvenience that never ends.

Note to Ohio politicians: I know how NASA determined the locations which would receive space shuttles. They did it by deciding what would best loot the people.

MISC:

It looks like Facebook and Zuckerburg, after finally winning against the Harvard twins, might be facing a bigger legal challenge as a man produces emails as evidence Zuckerburg promised him fifty percent of the company in return for funding which he seemingly provided.

Not too long ago I wrote that Kinect was the final piece of technology necessary to bring about Orwell's Big Brother watching through the TV system. Tell me this doesn't sound like Big Brother.

""Microsoft has given more information on the Kinect SDK to be released later in the year. It will include the body tracking software that is used by the Xbox version of the Kinect, allowing it to track up to two people at the same time and stay locked on to them even if they leave and re-enter the frame. In addition, they promise to allow the microphone array to be used with the PC's speech recognition API. So, not only will future Kinect projects be able to track you — they can listen to what you say.""

You know government will create an app to monitor every system. I'd unplug it when not in use. They'll require us all to buy one and make unplugging it illegal soon. They'll use safety of the children and infirm as an excuse. Let's hope the individual mandate to buy health care is struck down.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The establishment is demonizing hoarding, which could well be called saving or investing. This is part of a campaign to convince people to spend and consume instead of saving.

EDUCATION:

Here's another example of a conflict that couldn't happen without government. This couldn't happen in a free society. In a free society, these people would educate their children as they see fit. Nobody could force them to do otherwise. And if child services should be called every time a parent forces a child to do something against the child's will, they'd be at every home every day.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Jerry Brown continues pushing people out of California.

New continuing resolution cuts all funding for NOAA's climate boondoggle. Wow. Even a blind dog can tree a coon once in a while.

POLICE STATE:

Libertarian reforms for the justice system.

WAR:

I don't think that listing a handful of crimes committed by US soldiers in any way makes a case against wars of aggression. That would be like listing a handful of murders committed by free people and using that to make a case against freedom. The case against wars of aggression is the systematic killing of people who never did anything to us and the consequences that follow.

POLITICS:

Trump panders to the Christian right. It's looking more and more like he's running for real.

MEDIA:

Thriving, free internet news site reports on the damage done to the New York Times by erecting a pay wall.


MISC:


Ninth Circuit rejects endless lawsuits against Facebook. This quote says it all:

""The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace," three Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges said in a ruling."At some point, litigation must come to an end," the judges continued. "That point has now been reached.""

Zuckerburg made them multi-millionaires. If they really have any ability in the marketplace, that's more than enough seed money to make billions. Go earn something.

New image of Yellowstone super-volcano suggests the plume that builds to eruption is worse than previously thought.