Breaking Analysis
2/1/10
Fla. woman fights ruling that kept her in hospital
1/26/10 Breitbart
These cases are always of interest, let us hope we keep the power of doctors and courts limited.
(Added to 'Government Kidnapping')
|
2/1/10
Poll: Fox most trusted name in news
1/27/09 Politico
Percent Trust:
Fox 49%
CNN 39%
CBS 32%
NBC 31%
Fox also had the lowest level of distrust: 37%.
Stats guaranteed to rile our friends on the left. :)
(Added to 'Media Bias')
|
2/1/10
Italian mobsters buck downturn, may target bourse
1/27/10 Reuters
Italy's mafia crime syndicates bucked the recession in 2009 to raise
'profits' by almost 8 percent with the financial crisis making companies and
even the stock market even more vulnerable to cash-flush mobsters.
It estimated that the impact on business equalled about 7 percent of Italy's
economic output, enjoying healthy growth in a year when the Italian economy
shrank by almost 5 percent.
Isn't it ironic, the mob, a source of much suffering in many other ways, proves to be a stimulating instrument for the Italian economy. The mob is able to help so many Italian businesses because it is outside of the control of the government and exists purely as a traditional contractual entity, provided the contractual terms are truly provided in transparency to the businesses owners. In contrast to our own banking system:
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows
1/29/10 Bloomberg
|
2/1/10
Americans arrested taking children out of Haiti
1/30/10 Reuters
"This is totally illegal," said Yves Cristalin, Haiti's social affairs minister. "No children can leave Haiti without proper authorization and these people did not have that authorization."
"I was going to come back here to do the paperwork," Sillsby said. "They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong."
The governments of third world countries often use the well intentioned adoption attempts of westerners to extract $$$. The power of governments over adoptions has resulted in extreme difficulty in adopting children and negation of mutually beneficial transactions, surely resulting in increased suffering in children whom would otherwise improve their living standards.
|
2/1/10
Justice Dept.: Obama administration may take action on BCS
1/30/10 SI
In 2008, Obama said he was going to "to throw my weight around a little bit" to nudge college football toward a playoff system, a point that Hatch stressed when he urged Obama last fall to ask the department to investigate the BCS.
"This seemingly discriminatory action with regard to revenues and access have raised questions regarding whether the BCS potentially runs afoul of the nation's antitrust laws," he wrote.
Hatch, a Utah Republican, was steamed that his home state team was deprived of
getting a chance to play for the title last year.
I'm glad our childish elected officials are addressing such pressing issues. DMV college football? Another reason to reject antitrust laws.
|
2/1/10
Cellphone Curbs May Not Decrease Car Crashes
1/30/10 WSJ
WASHINGTON—Laws that forbid motorists from using hand-held phones or texting while driving don't appear to result in a significant decrease in vehicle crashes, according to a new study by the Highway Loss Data Institute expected to be released Friday.
These sorts of social laws, generally, don't alter behavior. It is economic laws that play the greatest mischief, IMHO.
|
1/21/10
'Lifeless' prion proteins are 'capable of
evolution'
BBC News ^ | 1 January 2010 | BBC News / Scripps Research Institute
|
1/21/10
1/18/10 LA times
Let us salute this man! :)
(Added to 'American Heroes')
|
1/21/10
World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown
1/17/10
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it
was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal,
published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short
telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then
based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not
supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most
serious failures yet seen in climate research.
CRU ‘Scientist’ Got $540K ‘Stimulus’
(Added to 'The Environment')
|
1/21/10
California to Set Time Limit to See Doctors
1/19/10 WSJ
Regulations to be announced Wednesday require family practitioners in health maintenance organizations to see patients seeking an appointment within 10 business days. The deadline for specialists is 15 days.
If the state decrees it, it shall be so? Do these politicians really believe they can alter the laws of economics they have created? What if Canada or Britain or some other country with socialized medicine decreeded a similar wait time? We actually saw what happened, in Britain the patients sat in ambulances or in a different area of the hospital so they would not count as 'waiting in the ER'.
(Added to 'US Government Health')
|
1/21/10
To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid
1/19/10 WSJ
For Haitians, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity.
Don't Subsidize Haitian Corruption
1/19/10 Fox News
Neither Sachs nor Glover identified the chief culprit of current or past suffering in Haiti: intense corruption. Transparency International ranks Haiti as one of the most corrupt places on earth—only 7 of 180 countries have a worse ranking. The State Department’s human rights report on Haiti cites “severe corruption in all branches of government,” including serious police, judicial and voting improprieties. It notes that there were no charges even filed during the most recent year the report covered, despite plenty of investigations and evidence against senior officials.
The ultimate reason for the loss of life from the recent earthquake in Haiti is not the earthquake itself, but the underlying poverty of the country. Why is Haiti so vulnerable to natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes? Why do parts of Africa suffer from such serious 'droughts' and why does Chavez blame his electricity problems on 'drought'. The more modern and prosperous a country is the less its citizens are subject to the whims of the elements. Of course we are never completely free from the whims of nature, as seen by Hurricane Katrina (800 deaths) and Hurricane Andrew (25 deaths) here in the US, but surely such a large quake even in the most dense part of California would not cause such carnage as occurred in Haiti.
As mentioned in the dated 'Causes of Poverty in Developing Nations', the root cause of poverty in Haiti is lack of property rights, big government, corruption, and lack of freedom. For readers who recall Tsunami Tyranny, we already see, unfortunately, the same patterns emerging in Haiti. 'Aid', in the sense that we commonly define the term, will not help Haiti, and will likely only contribute to their longstanding suffering. Only raw ideology and political and economic reform can save the Haitian people and end the culture of dependence and poverty.
(Added to 'Tsunami Tyranny')
|
1/21/10
Chan: Lack of H1N1 vaccine demand surprising
1/19/10 Cidrap
The H1N1 influenza pandemic brought no "devastating surprises," but what has surprised public health agencies is the public's lack of interest in getting vaccinated, Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said yesterday.
Are the people smarter than the government expert agencies? :)
|
1/03/10
Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients
12/31/09 Bloomberg
The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.
If Medicare and Medicaid continue to stubbornly resist opportunities to be scaled back politically, then perhaps they can be scaled back economically. It is hopeful the trend to relegate them to second class healthcare, similar to the public systems in Britain and Canada will continue. If participation in these government programs is shrunk by medical providers, the patients and doctors who opt out will surely be the winners.
(Added to 'US Government Health')
|
1/03/10
Dave Barry's year in review: 2009
1/2/10 Dave Barry's year in review
Happy New Year! We waited all year for this. :)
|
1/03/10
Homewood church candlelight
Christmas services hit snag with fire laws
The Birmingham News ^ | 12/16/09 | Greg Garrison
Added to 'The Bureaucrat in your...'
|
1/03/10
Putting our economy in the hands of Chavez fans
12/12/09 Herald Sun
President Chavez brought the house down.
When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive,
but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial
dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of
applause.
When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost
was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.
But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute
speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl
Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the
other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save
the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and
make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.
Airborne fraction of C02 has not risen in past 150 years, new research finds
1/2/09 Examiner
New studies have found that most of the CO2 emitted by man does not stay in the atmosphere as previously believed. Instead, it is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans.
Added to 'The Environment'
|
1/03/10
Sovereign wealth funds on the hunt
12/23/09 Fortune
Sovereign wealth fund managers have reason to be hesitant. A notoriously secretive bunch with an estimated $3 trillion in assets, they have received unwanted attention over the last couple of years for making public missteps.
We should all be thankful the United States does not have a 'sovereign wealth fund', and that our oil companies are in private hands. Sovereign wealth funds, looted from the hard earned dollars of the citizens of said countries, represent a particularly egregious infringement of liberty.
|
12/13/09
US plan to round up wild horses draws opposition
12/7/09
In recent years, the government has rounded up and relocated wild horses to other lands in the West. Helicopters are used to drive the mustangs toward cowboys with lassos. The cowboys then put the horses onto trucks.
The BLM spent about $50 million this year to feed, corral and otherwise manage the nation's wild horses, up from $36 million last year. Without contraception or other such measures, mustang herds can double in size about every four years, authorities say.
The government feeds the wild horses and then worries they will starve and then attempts to move them all around. This example of government trying to play God over nature accomplishes nothing and is a waste of taxpayer money.
Coal company cuts 500 jobs, blames environmentalists
12/9/09 Washington Times
(Added to 'The Environment')
|
12/13/09
Virgin's Branson unveils first commercial spaceship
12/7/09 Reuters
"Subject to American government permission, we may well start developing a program to try to take people from continent to continent, you know, two hours from Los Angeles to Australia," Branson said in an interview with Reuters TV.
It is a matter of when, not if, such travel becomes possible and it will surely be done by a private company such as this, not NASA.
|
12/13/09
House to vote on letting bankruptcy judges modify loans
MarkWatch 12/10/09
This story is illustrative of the consistent and increasing degradation of the basic right to contract. The right of two free people to come together and contract with each other, compiling their own terms of agreement, condition, and consequence, does not exist in many instances. The result is a decayed financial system with tendency towards a combination of restrictive credit, excessive risk taking, and financial collapse. Bankruptcy law is determined by state and federal government and is so lax (ie 'pro-consumer') that in some instances the financial benefits to running up huge credit cards bills and foreclosing on homes are outweighed only by individual moral conscious.
|
12/13/09
Health Department says Cody, the store
Labrador, must go
The St Petersburg Times ^ | Dec 03, 2009 | Dominick Tao
The big beef
The Ottawa Citizen ^ | December 8, 2009 | David Gonczol
Two stories about big government infringing on the liberty of citizens.
|
12/1/09
Unquenchable, by Robert Glennon, a review
12/1/09 neoperspectives.com
In essence, this book describes the past, present, and future, of water policy in the United States. Glennon illustrates in extensive detail where we get our water, how we use it, treat it, conserve it, water law in the east/west and federal, various conflicts, and solutions over water and the merits of solutions to shortages.
Some interesting facts are the vast amounts of water used in the production of electricity, and in each pound of meat consumed. Glennon repudiates ethanol as an eco friendly substitute for gasoline, suggesting that ethanol is more polluting, especially when one accounts for the massive amount of water and fertilizer wasted on its production.
Also of mention is that of a certain type of recyclable toilet can be constructed/installed for $200 in California by a good plumber without following the state regulations, but the same thing costs over $2000 if it is done 'to code'.
It it only mentioned once, but on page 39 there is written this surprising sentence:
"... total water consumption in the United States actually went down slightly between 1980 and 2000."
This is attributed to a decline in manufacturing and also likely to a decrease in farming, and other efficiencies all across the board. How can there be a 'crisis' of water shortages and what appears to be increasing political fights over water when the total consumption is actually decreased?
Water, unfortunately, is under extreme political control, luckily mostly by municipalities and states. There is little reason to believe 'shortages' are due to anything other than how shortages always form, from government healthcare to soviet breadlines: the government preventing the private sector from attaining a commodity. This book did little to dissuade me from this admittedly priori assumption and even reinforced it. Glennon himself does not appear to share this belief, even if he does advocate for some form of what he calls 'market forces'.
In fact, 'Unquenchable' is replete with examples of government thwarting attempts by the private sector to expand the water supply in the fast growing drier states. Most devastatingly in aggregate appear to be environmental litigation. From stopping dams, canals, irrigation, desalination plants, development, and pretty much any large infrastructure project. Especially of interest are environmental litigations of manmade lakes and streams, that didn't exists until recently, but now can't be removed or modified!
The private sector has been remarkable in its ingenuity, drilling wills, which luckily, or unfortunately according to Glennon, are not heavily regulated. Especially of interest is the story of Aaron Million, who claims to have private financing available to bring water into Colorado, but is having difficulty navigating the byzantine legal and regulatory barriers to do so.
Readers may recall a recent 4/25 post below, which details how it is illegal in Colorado and Utah for citizens to collect their own rainwater, forcing folks to participate in the state monopoly. A further review of that story yields:
The city of Tucson, Ariz., which receives a meager 12 inches of rainfall in an average year (much of it coming in big downpours), decreed not only that collecting the rain is legal, but that all new commercial development starting in June 2010 must include a rainwater collection system.
These contradictions give merit to the old libertarian saying: "Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory."
Another criticism of 'Unquenchable' is little comparison to what is done in other countries, besides to say that US consumers have the cheapest water besides Canada in the developed world. And Glennon criticizes bottled water drinking in one chapter on one had while describing the unknown wastes and potential toxins in public water in another. It would also have been interesting to go more into detail regarding Atlanta's brief foray into token private ownership of water utilities.
I do agree with Glennon, who appears, ideologically, to be a moderate liberal, on the need for market based reform. The buying and selling of water rights, under the current state laws, without federal interventions, likely will produce good results, provided environmental and regulatory and state subsidies are removed. Utilities and water infrastructure should be sold to private companies, mandated conservation efforts should not be encouraged and instead will happen 'naturally' if the price of water is no longer subsidized and instead 'floats' at market price.
However, ultimately we might find the predictions of 'Unquenchable' analogous to the famous Paul Ehrlich vs. Julian Simon debate, most especially if government gets out of the way of the thirsty private sector.
(Added to 'Book Review')
|
For more of these 'blog-type' posts, see Archives.