Am I Anti-Environment?

Am I anti-environment? No, I'm anti environmentalist. I don't like watermelons. I want to leave to my children a planet that is cleaner than I found it, with scenic places and fresh air and water. However, I also want to leave to my children a world that is freer than I found it, with liberty and justice for all.

There has to be a balance. The definition of an extremist is someone who prioritizes their cause above everything else at any cost. The cost for environmentalism, is liberty. Environmentalists want government to force everyone to do what environmentalists think should be done to protect the planet. The trouble is, government bureaucracy is much harder to adapt to new conditions and new information than free markets, private enterprise and individual liberty. Private property, vested interest, individual stewardship, are the keys to a better environment. Just look at the evidence: a quick scan of the planet shows that the environment is cleaner where people are freer.

Google Can, You Can't, Joe!

Google runs a private blogging platform, blogger.com. In fact, it hosts Rage Against the Kakistocracy. Now, Joe Lieberman is exhorting Google to ban terrorist content on blogger.com. While I am no friend of Muslim extremism and terrorism, I am also no friend of government oppression, or the infringement of our First Amendment rights. As long as Google decides to ban terrorist content on their own property, that's fine. As an officer of the government, I don't think it's appropriate for senators to suggest it.

Now, Joe has freedom of speech also, and I'm not suggesting that he shut up. But instead of making veiled threats to Google's executives, telling them how to run their private enterprise, perhaps Joe would be more effective if he were to expose the terrorist blogs to the American public, and let us draw our own conclusions. We can shun those sites. We can flag the content or the site as offensive. We can boycott Google. As free Americans, we have all sorts of options. We don't need illiberal control freaks oppressing our civil liberties. That means you, Joe.

The risk is that once government has the power to control terrorist content, what's to stop it from designating Rage Against the Kakistocracy as dangerous to the regime? In fact, it is dangerous to kakistocrats. I intend it to be. And that is the exact reason The First Amendment exists in the first place.

Test Your News IQ -- Pew Research

Here's an interesting quiz. I got 11 out of 13. How about you?

Modern History -- Unrevised

From an email that is circulating on the Internet:

This is just a history lesson and nothing can change it.

The day the Democrats took over was not January 22nd 2009. It was actually January 3rd 2007, the day the Democrats took over the House of Representatives and the Senate, at the very start of the 110th Congress. The Democrat Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995. For those who are listening to the liberals propagating the fallacy that everything is "Bush's Fault", think about this: January 3rd, 2007, the day the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress:

• The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77
• The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
• The Unemployment rate was 4.6%
• George Bush's Economic policies set a record of 52 straight months of job creation!

Remember that day -- January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee. The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy? Banking and financial services!

Thank you Democrats (especially Barney) for taking us from 13,000 DOW, 3.5 GDP and 4.6% unemployment... to this crisis by (among many other things) dumping 5-6 trillion dollars of toxic loans on the economy from your Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiascoes! (BTW: Bush asked Congress 17 times to stop Fannie & Freddie -- starting in 2001 because it was financially risky for the US economy). Barney blocked it and called it a "Chicken Little Philosophy" (and the sky did fall!) And who took the third highest pay-off from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Obama! And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie? Obama and the Democrat Congress, especially Barney! So when someone tries to blame Bush, remember January 3rd, 2007: the day the Democrats took over!

Bush may have been in the car but the Democrats were in charge of the gas pedal and steering wheel. They were driving the economy into the ditch. Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democrat Party. Furthermore, the Democrats controlled the budget process for 2008 & 2009 as well as 2010 & 2011. In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases. For 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the 2009 budget.

And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete 2009. Let's remember what the deficits looked like during that period. If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.

If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself. In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is "I inherited a deficit that I voted for, and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th."

I think that just about covers it...

The Truth Will Set You Free!

The truth will set you free -- literally -- if you can find it. Canada is reported to be planning to announce it is leaving the Kyoto Protocols. If that isn't a huge blow for freedom, then I don't know what is. There isn't much of anything more oppressive than the government policies (Kyoto, Agenda 21) intended to reduce "global warming", or "climate change" as they now unfalsifiably call it.

The truth is, there is no experiment that you could run that can verify that humans cause global warming, global cooling, or anything in between. All good scientists are skeptics, in search of the truth.

This could be the best news of the year (read more...). I wonder how long before my own country comes to its senses. Although we never ratified the Kyoto treaty, we've been implementing it like mad.

Be Thankful...

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for. ~ Will Rogers

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Can You Say "Tone Deaf"? I Knew You Could...

When I first heard about this, I was sure it was a joke. I figured it came from The Onion, or The Nose on Your Face. But sadly, no, it was real -- just when I thought the kakistocracy couldn't get any more outrageous. Withering under well-deserved ridicule, the Obama regime reconsidered, and "delayed" the $0.15 Christmas tree tax.

The tax was “designed to benefit the industry and will be funded by the growers” and is “not expected to have any impact on the final price consumers pay for their Christmas tree.” It would fund a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expand existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” and to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States.” I'm stunned. I never knew Christmas trees had an image problem in the United States.

Just one question: Which article of The Constitution gives government the authority to do that?!?!

Fisker Karma Electric Car Gets Worse Mileage Than an SUV

Government should not be allowed to pick winners and losers. It can't be trusted to be honest about it. This article from Forbes illustrates the problem:

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52 in all electric mode (we will ignore the gasoline engine for this analysis).

Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place [by assuming perfect conversion of the potential energy in the fuel to electricity, the EPA is actually breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics]. (Continue reading...)

The free market works on the principle of natural selection. It has no agenda. Politicians, statists and bureaucrats always have an agenda. They cannot abide allowing citizens to make their own choices. There's always the risk that We the People might make choices that the illiberal control freaks might not agree with.