I am not an optimist with respect to the pathway between here and there. Big Brother lurks in the state-maintained shrubbery of the pathway.
dimanche 31 octobre 2010
Le despotisme va toujours finir par perdre, inéluctablement.
samedi 30 octobre 2010
La technologie: l'allié de la population contre la répression
Ever since my friend Erwin Straus wrote a book called Basement Nukes in the 1970s, in which he argued that the average upper-middle-class American family could build a small nuclear device, I’ve been optimistic that government will not be able to stop progress. And that’s a good thing, because technological advances have always been to the greater benefit of the average man over those in power.
The greatest example of this is the invention of gunpowder, which made it possible for the average peasant to kill the heavily armored thugs – knights – who were dominating them.
L'empereur Américain en visite royale en Inde...
The Obamas will stay at the Taj Mahal Hotel, and his itinerary practically means Marine Drive will be shut for vehicular traffic on the day of the President’s visit, while buildings flanking it will be sanitised with security personnel manning them until Obama has left the place. Same would be the case with Obama’s visit to Mani Bhawan and Michelle going to Kamathipura.
An officer with the security establishment said, “Several other arterial roads in south Mumbai will also see restricted traffic movement, with tight security all around. The Obamas are not expected to schedule any engagements in the night due to security reasons.”
vendredi 29 octobre 2010
L''industrie' la plus mal gérée au Canada
Last year, the total amount paid into the system — or the revenues it pulled in, depending on how you look at it — topped out at a record $183.1 billion, enough to earn it third place on the Fortune 500, between oil giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron. And if it were a corporation, it would be in a state of dire crisis.
Ce serait naïf de croire nos politiciens dotés d'un tel gros bon sens.
Non, la 'solution' passera presque certainement par une augmentation des fonds alloués à ce système en déroute, fonds provenant évidemment de nos taxes, impôts, tarifs, et autres contributions 'volontaires'.
jeudi 28 octobre 2010
Quand les écofascistes s'expriment librement
Que se passerait-il si personne ne votait?
Why should a self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded in thievery? For that is what one does when one votes. If it be argued that we must let bygones be bygones, see what we can do toward cleaning up the institution so that it can be used for the maintenance of an orderly existence, the answer is that it cannot be done; we have been voting for one "good government" after another, and what have we got? Perhaps the silliest argument, and yet the one invariably advanced when this succession of failures is pointed out, is that "we must choose the lesser of two evils." Under what compulsion are we to make such a choice? Why not pass up both of them?
To effectuate the suggested revolution all that is necessary is to stay away from the polls. Unlike other revolutions, it calls for no organization, no violence, no war fund, no leader to sell it out. In the quiet of his conscience each citizen pledges himself, to himself, not to give moral support to an unmoral institution, and on election day he remains at home. That's all. I started my revolution 25 years ago and the country is none the worse for it.
Ordos, en Chine: une ville construite pour 1 million d'habitants, vide
Expérience économique historique contrôlée: l'Allemagne après la 2e guerre mondiale
Le NY Times et les médias traditionnels Américains vs Wikileaks, ou la défense de l'Establishment contre la diffusion de la vérité
Focusing on the tabloid aspects of Assange's personal life can have no effect -- and no purpose -- other than to distract public attention away from the heinous revelations about this war and America's role in it, and to cripple WikiLeaks' ability to secure and disseminate future leaks.
It's not hard to see why The New York Times, CNN and so many other establishment media outlets are eager to do that. Serving the Government's interests, siding with government and military officials, and attacking government critics is what they do. That's their role. That's what makes them the "establishment media." Beyond that, the last thing they want is renewed recognition of what an evil travesty the attack on Iraq was, given the vital role they know they played in helping to bring it about and sustain it for all those years (that's the same reason establishment journalists, almost by consensus, opposed any investigations into the Bush crimes they ignored, when they weren't cheering them on).
Sur la foi religieuse que les gens ont en nos 'planificateurs économiques' de la Federal Reserve
mercredi 27 octobre 2010
Un vent de prudence fiscale à Toronto?
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Toronto Embraces Fiscal Prudence; Guillotine of Spending Cuts Coming?
A guillotine of spending cuts may be headed Toronto's way after a resounding victory by right-wing candidate Rob Ford. Many Canadians wrote me this evening with the good news.
One of the best of them comes from "Bruno" who writes ...
Hi Mish
I am an avid reader of your blog. I wanted to point out a bit of news that would make you smile. The city of Toronto elected a new mayor last night with a sharp turn to fiscal prudence and rejecting the very very left wing it has been saddled with for most of the past three decades.
Rob Ford who is anything but presentable in the conventional context (very over-weight, loud, sometimes obnoxious) was elected by a landslide garnering more than the second and third place candidates combined. His leading opposition was a man named George Smitherman.
Smitherman is a failed provincial minister of health under whom the ministry blew $1 billion in consulting fees for something called "eHealth" that never resulted to so much as a single shovel turning over in new programs etc. It was a solid rejection of the spending class.
Ford has been a city counsellor for several years and was widely detested by the other counsellors because he never spent any of his allotted budget and actually returned calls from his constituents directly. He kept detailed memos of the waste by the mostly left-leaning counsel such as $12,000 retirement parties, rented bunny suits at local events, taxi bills spent by the transit commissioner, etc. He voiced them every week on a talk radio show and built up a momentum behind him sufficient enough to make the strongest statement yet in Canada in favour of fiscal prudence.
Ford plans to cut city counsel by half, out-source garbage collection, reduce government operating budgets, reduce staff through attrition, cut out all perks for city staff, eliminate many grants to thousands of groups, etc. In short, he wants to do many of the things you write about in your blog.
Will he be successful? Time will tell. Has his "end of the gravy train" message resonated? More than any taxpayer could ever have hoped.
Kind regards,
Bruno K.
Toronto
lundi 25 octobre 2010
Article de Newsweek, datant de 1975, prédisant un nouvel âge glaciaire causé par l'activité humaine
The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975
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Un professeur Émérite de l'American Physical Society démissionne...
Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
La citation du jour
dimanche 24 octobre 2010
La charité, une pathologie occidentale pour se donner bonne conscience
jeudi 21 octobre 2010
John Lennon était-il un libertarien dans le placard?
WAS JOHN LENNON A LIBERTARIAN? |
by Bradley Doucet |
I began to have my suspicions after watching the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon recently. Intrigued, I then read the extended, book-length version of the interview he and Yoko Ono gave to Playboy Magazine just a couple of months before he was shot dead in December 1980, and judging from this source, John Lennon was practically a libertarian.
Pour la bureaucratie fédérale, les récessions, ça n'existe pas!
Fonction publique fédérale: le club des 100 000$ explose
Publié le 21 octobre 2010
LA PRESSE
L'histoire officielle: glorification des meutriers de masse
-Doug Casey
Une autre fraude bancaire, immense: le foreclosuregate
Le «Foreclosure-gate»: la plus grande fraude de l’histoire?
On pensait avoir tout vu des banquiers de Wall Street. Mais le «Foreclosure-gate» pourrait battre tous les records de fraude financière… et nous replonger tous au cœur d’une nouvelle crise.
Le Royaume-Uni abandonne la religion Keynesienne
Keynesian Nonsense Falls Out of Favor in UK - Thank God!
At long last, Keynesian nonsense is recognized for the nonsense that it is. The New York Times reports In Britain, Keynesians Fall Out of Favor
Apôtre réchauffiste congédié de Wikipédia
Lawrence Solomon October 14, 2010 – 9:32 pm
William Connolley, arguably the world’s most influential global warming advocate after Al Gore, has lost his bully pulpit. Connolley did not wield his influence by the quality of his research or the force of his argument but through his administrative position at Wikipedia, the most popular reference source on the planet.
Through his position, Connolley for years kept dissenting views on global warming out of Wikipedia, allowing only those that promoted the view that global warming represented a threat to mankind. As a result, Wikipedia became a leading source of global warming propaganda, with Connolley its chief propagandist.
His career as a global warming propagandist has now been stopped, following a unanimous verdict that came down today through an arbitration proceeding conducted by Wikipedia. In the decision, a slap-down for the once-powerful Connolley by his peers, he has been barred from participating in any article, discussion or forum dealing with global warming. In addition, because he rewrote biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with, to either belittle their accomplishments or make them appear to be frauds, Wikipedia barred him — again unanimously — from editing biographies of those in the climate change field.
George Carlin et le vote
L'échec du système éducatif
mardi 19 octobre 2010
La cote de crédit du gouvernement fédéral Américain: inversement proportionnel au degré de liberté dans le monde
lundi 18 octobre 2010
La mythologie du 'manger local' et de l'autosuffisance alimentaire
par Hiroko Shimizu, Pierre Desrochers
jeudi 7 octobre 2010.
Le mouvement en faveur de la souveraineté alimentaire et de l’agriculture de proximité qui fait la promotion d’une plus grande autosuffisance alimentaire a pris beaucoup d’ampleur depuis quelques années. Contrairement aux préoccupations traditionnelles liées à la sécurité alimentaire visant à assurer un accès régulier à une alimentation saine, nutritive et suffisante, la souveraineté alimentaire est le droit présumé pour une communauté politique de définir ses propres politiques agricoles dans la mesure où elle ne compromet pas les politiques d’autrui. Les deux implications majeures de cette approche sont, d’une part, l’opposition à la libéralisation du commerce agricole et la protection de producteurs locaux non concurrentiels, et de l’autre, l’opposition aux exportations agricoles subventionnées qui constituent une concurrence déloyale pour les producteurs étrangers ne bénéficiant pas d’un tel support. Au niveau local, la souveraineté alimentaire favorise le maintien d’une agriculture de proximité pour alimenter les marchés régionaux et nationaux.
Nombre d’arguments sont invoqués pour promouvoir une approche qui est l’antithèse de l’agriculture industrielle moderne. L’agriculture de proximité créerait plus d’emplois et de retombées économiques régionales. Elle réduirait les émissions de gaz à effet de serre et les pertes de valeur nutritive liées au transport des aliments. De multiples productions vivrières à petite échelle augmenteraient la sécurité alimentaire des populations en les soustrayant aux aléas du commerce mondial (hausse rapide des prix, refus d’alimenter les populations étrangères en cas de crise, etc.) et serait davantage compatible avec la promotion de la biodiversité et du développement durable que les monocultures à grande échelle basées sur les produits chimiques et les organismes génétiquement modifiés. Le protectionnisme agricole protégerait les populations locales contre le dumping d’aliments moins nutritifs ou produits dans des conditions moins désirables pour la nature et les paysans. Finalement, l’agriculture de proximité favoriserait une relation plus étroite avec la nourriture, les producteurs voisins et le passage des saisons.
À notre connaissance, les leaders intellectuels des divers mouvements faisant la promotion de ces idées n’ont jamais véritablement discuté des contraintes géographiques, économiques et de sécurité alimentaire ayant historiquement motivé le passage de l’agriculture de subsistance à l’agriculture commerciale et, par la suite, le développement de la chaîne d’approvisionnement planétaire. Notre objectif dans ce Cahier de recherche est de combler cette lacune et d’illustrer par le fait même que leurs recommandations ne feront qu’aggraver les problèmes qu’ils disent vouloir adresser. Bien que notre argumentation de nature historique s’appuie principalement sur des sources francophones rédigées entre la fin du dix-huitième et le début du vingtième siècle, nous jugeons nos conclusions universelles dans la mesure où des problématiques et des constats similaires sont observables durant cette période dans toutes les économies développées.
L'expérience des rues sans feux de circulation
The Praxeology and Ethics of Traffic Lights
Mises Daily: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 by Justin T.P. Quinn
t's over. There can be no hope for the state now. Its time has finally come to an end. If you think this is irrationally optimistic, click here and watch the video. You will see the state's raison d'être smashed asunder.
How often do you hear the minarchist say, "Well, I don't like government, but we at least need things like traffic laws. We need a government to keep us safe"? For all those who call libertarians crazy for wanting to abolish the Federal Reserve, how much more dangerous and criminal would they accuse us of being if we actually began to publicly advocate the abolition of traffic regulations? Yet, here it is, on video, for the entire world to see, that Hobbes was wrong.
Martin Cassini, a photographer and advocate for road deregulation, has produced a marvelous series of videos documenting the results of the Cabstand Junction Trial that started in September of 2009 in North Somerset, in Great Britain. The videos, which can be viewed on his website FitRoads.comand on YouTube, show the remarkable before and after results of the experiment.
La seule issue possible aux troubles économico-politiques actuels: un retour à l'étalon-or
Antal Fekete On Why The Gold Standard Must Be Rehabilitated
Courtesy of Safe Harbor, must read speech delivered by Antal Fekete ealier today.
The Deep Cause Of The Great Financial Crisis: The Peace Diktat Of Versailles
Speech delivered at the Munich Economic Talks, October 6, 2010
Ladies and Gentlemen,
According to a recent news item, not widely circulated, after more than 90 years of slavery, on October 3, 2010, Germany made the final payment for its World War I debt. This event is highly symbolic. It gives me great pleasure to be one of the first to congratulate you, literally hours after the German people were finally freed from debt slavery.
I have been a student of money and credit for over fifty years. I could summarize the result of my studies as follows: Most, if not all, the great events in the history of mankind since the advent of money, have a causal explanation. The causes are to be found in the use or abuse of money and credit -- provided that we penetrate historiography sufficiently deeply.
samedi 16 octobre 2010
Gauche vs Droite: débat stérile
jeudi 7 octobre 2010
Howard Buffett et son fils Warren: la pomme est tombée loin de l'arbre!
- Howard Buffett (Père de Warren Buffett et ancien Congressman Américain)
mercredi 6 octobre 2010
The Greater Depression
Why do I bring up these examples? Because it’s clear to me the U.S. is heading in the direction of Russia before 1990, or Haiti today. Not in absolute terms, of course. But everything the U.S. government is doing – raising taxes, increasing regulations, and inflating the currency – is not only the wrong thing to do, but exactly the opposite of the right thing.
mardi 5 octobre 2010
Mendiance à Québec
The great thing about Quebec politics is that it’s not subtle.
In most provinces, if they wanted to squeeze money out of Ottawa to build a new hockey arena, they’d put up a big show about how hard they were working to raise some of the money themselves. You know — like trying to get rich local people to invest in the project, or rounding up wealthy corporations to buy in. It’s not like there are no successful businesses in Quebec that might be enticed to risk a few million on a new arena, for the sake of good community relations, or maybe as a show of their gratitude.
But not Quebec. No, in Quebec you don’t even have to pretend to pay for your own arenas. Need $400 million? Get $200 million out of the province, $50 million from the city, then start screaming that Ottawa owes you the rest. And vow that if Harper doesn’t come through with it, he’ll never get another vote from the good people of Quebec City. It’s Le Strategy de Danny Williams. Give us money or we screech REALLY LOUD!!
But wait a minute. Doesn’t Quebec already get $8.5 billion in equalization payments? Every year? And aren’t they always bragging about what a dynamic, entrepreneurial business culture they have?
So why should the rest of Canada buy them a new arena as an extra added bonus?
Because otherwise they’ll screech REALLY LOUD, that’s why. And you know how hard it is to ignore a child having a tantrum.
National Post