Quote of the Day – Brian Lamb Edition

From Ed Driscoll’s “How is Your Son?”:

Has Al Gore, or any of his fellow travelers, even stopped to consider whether there has ever been a human society that was able to maintain a growing and vibrant economy during a period of declining population? I do not mean to suggest that population growth is necessary to economic growth, but I would like to hear some examples that demonstrate that it is not or even just some philosophical argument about why it is not. Or consider his call for government to dictate the development of new technologies–does anyone seriously think that some cadre of World Government bureaucrats would be competent to pick and choose what technologies are most likely to succeed, never mind the likelihood that such a system would simply be riddled with corruption. If the Twentieth Century proved anything it is that government is the enemy of human progress, perhaps even the enemy of mankind. But here is a prospective President of the United States who believes that government should be massively expanded and given an enormous range of powers over our lives. I find that pretty disturbing.

His fellow travelers don’t.

Preach It, Sister!

QotD, Tam (who else?) Edition:

All the probulating, door-kicking, snooping and spying, asset forfeiting, and armored personnel carriering has done more damage to this country than a hundred Woodstocks worth of stoners, to say nothing of the obscene profits we have basically legislated into existence for vicious criminal scum south of our borders and in our own cities.

I’d rather my neighbors smoked a bong every day than run the risk of a dyslexic SWAT team taking a battering ram to my front door at oh-dark-thirty. We need to stop burning the village to save it.

It is Not the Business of Government…

In related news, how to make hard-to-obtain Sudafed from readily obtainable street meth.

$134 Billion? Chicken Feed!

Back in June of 2009, I linked to reports that $134.5 billion in U.S. bearer-bonds were seized by Italian authorities from two Japanese men on a train from Italy to Switzerland. Another $116 billion were seized in August of that year. Now the Italians have found another $6 Trillion in bonds in safe-deposit boxes in Zurich, Switzerland.

The bonds in these cases are fakes (which means they’re worth about as much as real ones today), but wow. It takes a lot of chutzpah to print six trillion dollars worth of counterfeits.

Almost as much as it takes to print sixteen trillion worth of real ones.

From the comments, if you want to take a fascinating trip down the rabbit hole, check out the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System post on the topic.  Fascinating.

Grandma Got Indefinitely Detained

From the folks at Reason:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1uqrwLmQk?rel=0]

In October of 2008, when I asked Rev. Donald Sensing if he still believed what he wrote in 2003, that:

When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

He responded:

The demise of freedom in this country has accelerated even faster than I imagined back in 2003.

The only difference between the outcomes of McCain’s or Obama’s presidency is how quickly they will accelerate the robbery of the people’s rights, not whether they will.

No argument here.

Oh, and I am TJIC. I guess that makes me a domestic terrorist now?

Thomas Sowell: “What are they Buying?”

I’ve begun reading Thomas Sowell’s Dismantling America, a collection of his short pieces. I just finished “What are they Buying?” and wanted to share it with you. Here it is in video. It’s absolutely worth your 4:45.

http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf

Pullquote:

What are the Beltway politicians buying with all the hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending? They are buying what politicians are most interested in — power.

If you’re running an Apple product, the YouTube link is: http://youtu.be/8GWtJcPjxvE