schachterrific!

Loyola Economics Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo takes a withering look at how governement uses the big lie to manipulate the populace in this great article from the Mises Institute:

The purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Throughout history, governments have used violence, intimidation, coercion, and mass murder to enforce this system. But governments’ first line of “defense” is always a blizzard of lies — about its own alleged benevolence, altruism, heroism, and greatness, along with equally big lies about the “evils” of the civil society, especially the free market.

The current economic crisis, which was instigated by the government’s central bank and its boom-and-bust monetary policies, among other interventions, has once again been blamed on “too little regulation” and too much freedom.

Will Americans ever catch on to this biggest of all of government’s Big Lies?

Read the rest here.

Yep, the Daily New is having a contest to see who can come up with the best flyover photoshopped image of Air Force One, a really nice way to bring home the point of how unnecessary the flyover actually was. You can find it here.

My favorite?

Hudson River Emergency Landing

The Associated Press is appearing to lead the way among the MainStreamMedia in discovering that our new President is just shy of reality on the proposal side of things. In this article, writers Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn point out eight areas in the President’s speech last night that appear to be no more than wishful thinking. Here’s a sample:

OBAMA: “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn’t only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.

Take it or leave it.

Weeks after the story of an Israeli attack on UNRWA schools in Gaza made its way around the world, the truth begins to come out that it didn’t quite happen that way.

John Ging, the director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, spoke to the Toronto Globe and Mail last week and agreed that no shell had actually struck the school building. Ging said he had never claimed that the school itself was hit, and he blamed Israel for confusion over where the strike took place.

Shortly after the alleged attack, Ging harshly criticized Israel for firing near the school, saying he had given the exact coordinates of the compound to the IDF and suggesting they had failed to avoid hitting the building.

While admitting that Israeli fire had not hit the school compound, Ging insisted it made little difference.

As the story was spread by UNRWA administrators, staff were told not to speak to the media. Wouldn’t want the facts to come to light, eh?

The editorials of Investor’s Business Daily are some of the finest op-ed pieces you will see coming out of the Fourth Estate. In one of today’s pieces, IDB takes a close look at Bibi Netanyahu, and sees a man with a very sharpened sense of history:

Speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Netanyahu cautioned that economic woes are distracting the West from a far greater danger. The former finance minister said that while global economic woes are reversible, “the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a fanatic radical regime” is not.

“We have never had, since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear weapons in the hands of such a fanatical regime,” Netanyahu added. Stopping Tehran “remains the greatest challenge facing the leaders of the 21st century at the beginning of the 21st century.”

Its worth the read. Take it or leave it.

From the Associated Press’ crack investigative team, via Yahoo, a great piece of investigative journalism about a captured terrorist who has remained a mystery since 1973. And is about to be released:

In 1973, a young terrorist named Khalid Duhham Al-Jawary entered the United States and quickly began plotting an audacious attack in New York City.

He built three powerful bombs — bombs powerful enough to kill, maim and destroy — and put them in rental cars scattered around town, near Israeli targets.

The plot failed. The explosive devices did not detonate, and Al-Jawary fled the country, escaping prosecution for nearly two decades — until he was convicted of terrorism charges in Brooklyn and sentenced to 30 years in federal penitentiary.

But his time is up.

Read it. This is a definite must read!

According to the English edition of Pravda, the Earth is on the brink of a new Ice Age. According to compiled data, we are living at the end of a 12,000 year warming period, and the Earth will now begin to cool down and return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

The theory of ‘anthropogenic (man-made) global warming’, or AGW took a swift kick in the butt this past year as temperatures around the globa fell, bringing us one of the colder winters in a while:

The central piece of evidence that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” The ‘hockey stick’ graph shows an acute upward spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years — evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.

Read the 3-page article here. Sorry, Al.

Take it or leave it.