Archive for November, 2008
Time To Bail On The Dollar
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008With the bailouts that have been going on over the past week, with Dictator Paulson pledging half of our national productivity to bail out failing financials, I think it's clear time to get out of the dollar. About two months ago, I had devised a plan. To buttress myself against ...
Urine-to-water purifying machine
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008Astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavor believe they have nearly perfected a machine that filters urine to produce drinkable water. The article quotes space station commander Mike Fincke: "Not to spoil anything, but I think up here the appropriate words are 'Yippee!'" Folks—he pees into a cup, pours it into a ...
What If…
Thursday, November 20th, 2008David Z over at No Third Solution has a series of posts in which he talks in great detail about taxes that show he is way more knowledgeable about economic issues than I am. They are quite long, and I will admit to not have read all of them completely yet ...
Free markets would have no “gold standard”
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008The Mises Institute recently published a speech by Mark Thornton called "Monetary Freedom and Its Opposite". It was about how monetary freedom could be established, how it would benefit everyone except the "power elite," and how the Federal Reserve, with its monetary monopoly and inflationary fiat currency, destroy an economy's ...
Algore for Secretary of Energy?
Sunday, November 16th, 2008One of George W. Bush's most derided and publicized shortcomings was all the terrible nominations and appointments he made for various governmental positions: Paul Wolfowitz as President of the World Bank, Harriet "Palpatine" Miers for Supreme Court justice, John Ashcroft as Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General, John Bolton ...
Carl Sagan reads from Pale Blue Dot
Sunday, November 16th, 2008I'm pretty sure this is the best video on the entire internets:
Arnold Kling on credit default swaps
Sunday, November 16th, 2008Arnold Kling at EconLog wrote the clearest explanation I've heard yet of what a credit default swap is and how it could have led to so many financial losses in our current recession. It sounds like a correct explanation. Maybe it's too simple to be true; it seems impossible to ...
Minarchist states and basic necessities
Saturday, November 15th, 2008What are the most basic necessities of life, of survival? I'd say food, water, and shelter. In our modern world, a fourth good one to add to the list would be medicine. I think it's fair to say that without these four and certainly without the first three being available ...
Bill O’reilly – Liar Extraordinaire
Friday, November 14th, 2008It has recently been brought to my attention that during a recent Daily Show interview, Bill O'reilly - one of the worst big-government neocons - told Jon Stewart that he was an anarchist. Sure enough (check the 4:02 mark): That's right. Bill O'reilly, the same guy who could find no fault ...
Failblog captures the essence of government
Friday, November 14th, 2008I don't blag enough on this shared blag between John and I. So when I do these drive-by postings, I feel guilt that I've gone so long without providing something of actual substance. But regardless, here I go again. I will frequent FAIL Blag for laughs. Today, they had this gem: At ...
Quick thought on an auto bailout
Friday, November 14th, 2008Another inflation-powered bailout of nearly an entire industry, this time U.S. automakers, is imminent. It is practically a certainty by this point. I'm not sure whether the Bush or Obama administrations will do it, but it doesn't matter. How is a $50 billion bailout of these behemoth failures different from taking ...
Peter Schiff’s predictions about Obama’s economy
Thursday, November 13th, 2008Peter Schiff needs a blag. Well, he has one, sort of; he publishes weekly commentaries at his website. I can't link to any of them, though, because they don't have URLs of their own. In his most recent one, "The Reagan Counterrevolution," he compares the relatively government-reducing ideology that won ...
Heroic Peter Schiff compilation
Thursday, November 13th, 2008The best parts are all the optimistic State cheerleaders scoffing in derision at Peter Schiff and his doom-and-gloom predictions. This will probably be the best ten minutes of TV you watch today. One of many favorite exchanges from this compilation was between Peter Schiff and Art Laffer: Schiff: It's not wealth ...
Early English law screwed the masses to benefit the aristocracy
Thursday, November 13th, 2008In my ongoing and very occasional progression through Bruce Benson's masterpiece The Enterprise of Law, I am learning more and more about the origins of authoritarian (State-originated and -enforced) law and its usurpation of customary (community-originated and reciprocal-incentive-enforced) law in Medieval England. The main thrust of chapter 3 is that ...
South Park on drug prohibition
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008"Whatevah! You don't know me! It's my body; I'll do what I want!"
Sarah Palin: same old neoconservatism cost them election
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008From an article at Politico.com, reporting on an interview that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News, we learn that Sarah Palin blames her and McCain's defeat on the fact that their campaign represented the "status quo" and that the people wanted change—anything different from the Bush regime—and the McCain/Palin ticket ...
P.J. O’Rourke explains collateralized debt obligations
Monday, November 10th, 2008The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a ...
Sheldon Richman on tacit consent
Sunday, November 9th, 2008Sheldon Richman wrote a good post about social contracts and tacit consent, which are attempts at justifications for Statism that cannot stand up to even the most basic and off-the-cuff libertarian objections. ...this got me thinking about the curious principle of tacit consent. Here are the thoughts I jotted down today. ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, November 9th, 2008"I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport." —Vince Foster
Merck’s lies about Vioxx and the FDA
Sunday, November 9th, 2008Merck's anti-inflammatory pain-reliever Vioxx was the most widely used drug to be pulled off the market, which Merck was forced to do in 2004. The biggest story about Vioxx is that Merck suppressed and manipulated data to make Vioxx seem less risky than it was. But when people started having ...
The new president’s uphill battle
Saturday, November 8th, 2008Robert Higgs on the dire situation facing the new president: On the stock markets, corporate share prices have fallen precipitously. Unemployment is rising. Housing construction has declined greatly, and home builders are going bankrupt. Many homeowners are losing their homes to foreclosure or tax sale. Many banks and other financial firms ...
Oh, but it isn’t a draft
Saturday, November 8th, 2008I've become quite fixated on two themes of our current political-economic climate in the last two or three months, since the recession seemed to be accelerating and a Democratic sweep on election day seemed nearly certain: making correct economic predictions and explanations (which the Austrians seemed to do pretty well) ...
Sheldon Richman on Black Tuesday
Saturday, November 8th, 2008I wish I had seen Sheldon Richman's thoughts about America's election of a black man to its highest and most vaunted position before I wrote my last post, because I think his take on it (and Wil Wilkinson's, whom he quotes) matches mine more closely than does Lew's, which, if ...
Race and Obama’s non-achievement
Friday, November 7th, 2008Compare semi-libertarian Radley Balko's commentary on President-elect Obama's achievement: Tonight, we took a huge step toward putting race behind us. It’s something to be proud of. to real libertarian Lew Rockwell's assessment of the perception that Obama (and his voters) achieved something monumental: The main message concerns race. All the headlines blared ...
Cap’n Mal on elections
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008I think a lot about my friends' perceptions of my somewhat-anti-voting and voting for "nobody" mentality. I don't talk about it much because, in all honesty, from what I've observed of their discussions amongst themselves, the extent of their understanding of political philosophy is "anti-Democrat = neocon Republican." So I ...
Almost vindicated
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008One of the main reasons I wrote that it's understandable to vote was to spread publicity about anti-establishment, anti-State candidates and thereby make a more specific, public statement of disapproval with the system (as opposed to the silent, inactive form of disapproval that is complete abstention). That's why I had ...
Zogby survey answers
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008I receive Zogby surveys in my Hotmail inbox occasionally, and I participate in about half of them. I did one today, which was mostly but not entirely about yesterday's advance auction in stolen goods. I was particularly intrigued by three questions in it, which asked me to type in my ...
It can’t get any worse
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008I heard an Obama supporter say this today (paraphrasing because I couldn't quite hear everything, from across the room): "When we elected Dubya eight years ago, we thought he would be halfway decent, and he turned out to be terrible. ... Although, at this point in time, everybody's saying, 'It ...
Well, that didn’t last long
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008Last night I wrote about the sick and depressed feeling that my unintentional, half-subconscious rooting for Barack Obama gave me; this feeling was very strong all day yesterday, from my trip to the polls to my viewing of Comedy Central's election coverage, because I found myself actually rooting for Obama ...
Rooting for Barack Obama
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008All of my friends and colleagues, being scientific researchers who are funded by the State (National Institutes of Health, mainly), want Obama to win so badly they can taste it. They preach about doing your civic duty of voting every chance they get, and they talk and email about how ...
Michigan ballot proposals
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008I broke down and went to my polling location this morning to vote for one ballot proposal and vote against four of them, and write in "NOBODY" for president, Senate, House of Representatives, state legislature positions, mayor, etc. The ballot proposal I voted Yes on was to legalize medical marijuana ...
Many, many quotes of the day!
Monday, November 3rd, 2008I probably visit Vox Popoli, Vox Day's blag, about once or twice a month, and when I can avoid or ignore the egomaniacal self-promotion and non-Christian-bashing, I am rarely disappointed. There were a couple gems in his recent posts: There's no shortage of evidence that most people are idiots. This is ...
On the Use of Language
Monday, November 3rd, 2008As the economic collapse grows larger and larger, should it really surprise anyone that the parasitic government would begin to determine new ways to leech off of the citizenry? Behold. Obviously, private citizens cannot properly save for retirement themselves. No, instead we need a Social Security system Part II. But I don't ...
Undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet
Monday, November 3rd, 2008In Michigan and probably some other states, there has been some moderate amount of discussion, amongst state legislators and radio hosts and other worthless people, about whether voters should be allowed to wear political shirts to their polling places on election day. Since campaign advertisements such as signs and flyers ...