Oklahoma state Rep. Todd Thomsen presented a resolution opposing the speaking engagement of famed atheist Richard Dawkins on the University of Oklahoma campus today. If he had his way, Dawkins would be shut up because his “published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe [...]]]> ~ Beware of atheist

Oklahoma state Rep. Todd Thomsen presented a resolution opposing the speaking engagement of famed atheist Richard Dawkins on the University of Oklahoma campus today. If he had his way, Dawkins would be shut up because his “published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.”

Most ironically, as the Ronald Bailey points out, Thomsen “introduced another bill in January entitled the “Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act.”

~ How to end up on a terror watch list

In reality, this simple list of the potential troublemakers was designed to be a secret intel tool for investigation purposes. Unfortunately, it has morphed into a symbol of governmental inefficiency. Because people are inherently lazy, in leiu of doing any kind of elementary investigation, circumstantial evidence has become the norm for placement on this list.

(via COEDmagazine.com)

~ So four months after being elected, the president still hasn’t proposed any banking reforms

Charles Krauthammer wants to know where President Obama’s priorities lie.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis. What’s going on? “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Things. Now we know what they are. The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his “Big Bang” agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society. Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

~ Quote of the Day

So you can take a market and beat it, tax it, regulate it, subsidize it, flood it with fake money, punish its performers and reward its losers, hobble its capital sector, strangle consumers, nationalize stuff at will, and erect every barrier to trade and cooperation, and STILL call it a market. When the scheme fails, it’s the free market that failed, so clearly we need the totalitarian state to sweep into action. – Jeffery Tucker

(via lowercase liberty, via Mises.org blog)

~ Past returns do not guarantee future results, we hope

When the president said yesterday at a press conference that now was a good time to jump into the stock market, you know we haven’t hit bottom. Worrisome still, he doesn’t understand a straightforward financial comparison tool like P/E ratio, and yet he wants to change the very “foundation” of the economy, as he said in his address to congress two weeks ago. Very alarming.

It looks like we have a good while to go until the P/E ratio does get into some historical norms, according to smarter people than me.

Obama cleartly doesn’t know what he is talking about and his apologists should be ashamed. If you were to follow his suggestion and apply the “Price to Earnings Ratio” to current market prices – you would not invest in the Market at this time – you would sell. Using the “Price to Earnings Ratio” as a guide, the S & P will need to drop to 500 (it is currently at 702.80) a fall of additional 200 points or an additional loss of 28% before becoming an attractive buy prospect. The “Price to Earnings Ratio” would indicate that the DJIA should be trading at 5500 not the 6781 it is currently trading at – so the DJIA would need to fall an additional 1300 points (a 20% loss) before becoming an attractive “buy” prospect.

~ The Daily Show at the White House

It speaks for itself.

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held – at [...]]]> ~ The Guantanamo File: a shameful legacy of the Bush presidency

It speaks for itself.

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held – at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total – were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or international terrorism.

~ Thomas Woods, intellectual bodyguard

His new book is already a New York Times bestseller — without any major media publicity.

We are learning what it is like to live in an Orwell novel. Our television screens are filled with people offering choices between idiotic and suicidal option A and idiotic and suicidal option B. We are being told that we must at least partially nationalize our banks, prop up zombie companies, lower interest rates to zero, and pass stimulus packages in order to escape the fate of Japan – which, um, partially nationalized its banks, propped up zombie companies, lowered interest rates to zero, and passed eight stimulus packages. We have a president who tells us we cannot rely on the free market to get us out of this mess because the free market is what got us here, as if the Federal Reserve and its bubble-inducing monetary policy never existed.

~ Pa. schools sells trailer for $1

Noticeably absent from the article is what disciplinary action is being taken against the person responsible for costing the school at least $5000 in revenue. Might that be because it would cost the taxpayers even more to fire the person responsible?

The East Stroudsburg School District was attempting to sell seven used classroom trailers, but an error in its ad on the online auction site allowed someone to bid and buy one trailer for only a dollar. The district had purchased the trailers three years ago for about $46,000 each. With transportation and setup costs, the total came to around $60,000. Officials were expecting to get around $5,000 to $10,000 per trailer on eBay.

~ It’s not the whole Internet, but it’s a start

Former vice president Al Gore submitted a proposal for a new top-level Web domain, .eco.

And Gore, who never actually quite claimed to have invented the Internet, though he did have some hand in getting it up and running, can claim to have partially invented a domain.

~ Pure Ownage: Thomas Friedman’s Five Worst Predictions

Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a staple of The New York Times, and a bestselling author, and thus this prediction should be taken very seriously—in some alternate universe where the news media is a meritocracy and Thomas Friedman is a competent observer of the world and its workings. The rest of us can probably relax.

The highlight for me:

Then, a month into the Afghanistan conflict, Friedman complained that “the hand-wringing has already begun over how long this might last” and advised readers to “take a deep breath,” noting that Afghanistan is “far away.” Besides, Friedman had “no doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a long war.” A month later, he noted in passing that “America has won the war in Afghanistan” and that “the Taliban are gone,” though he did express some concern about “all the nonsense written in the press about the concern for ‘civilian casualties’,” a term he took to using with scare quotes. Seven years later, civilian casualties remain a major item of concern for Afghan’s in the non-won war against the non-gone Taliban.

~ The war on drugs, the war on guns

The worst elements of the drug war are now taking precedent in the war on guns, according to the Cato Institute.

Contrary to popular myth, startup companies do not generate many new jobs, and actually create net job losses after their first year. Findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics support this fact. For example, in 1998 there were 152,668 people employed by new startups in the leisure and [...]]]> ~ On the president’s entrepreneurship spending:

Contrary to popular myth, startup companies do not generate many new jobs, and actually create net job losses after their first year. Findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics support this fact. For example, in 1998 there were 152,668 people employed by new startups in the leisure and hospitality industry, a number that declined year after year, until there were only 105,941 people employed by those same startups in 2002 — a 31% loss. The figures are similar for nearly all industries ….

While the average new business is a waste of resources, what about other startups that have generated millions of jobs, billions of dollars in revenue, and grown into multinational corporations? We can think of Google, FedEx, Dell, Microsoft, eBay, and many other startup companies that have benefited many people’s lives. The common link between all of these companies, however, is the market solution of venture-capital funding, not government intervention.

~ Stream the R3VOLution

While older devices weren’t able to transmit large amounts of live video in the bandwidth that was available to them, new 3G and 4G cell phone networks are supporting the ability to be able to transmit live, legible video from something as small as your cell phone, Smartphone, or Pocket PC.

~ The Green Energy Fantasy

Regardless of one’s views on global warming–and there is ample scientific evidence to reject the claim that man-made carbon emissions are causing catastrophe–the fact [...]]]> ~ I started uploading Ron Paul’s speech from Feb. 28 to the first-ever Texas Liberty Campaign convention. Not bad a job for my first video.

~ The Green Energy Fantasy

Regardless of one’s views on global warming–and there is ample scientific evidence to reject the claim that man-made carbon emissions are causing catastrophe–the fact is that kneecapping the fossil fuel industry while diverting tax dollars into expensive, impractical forms of energy will not be an economic boon, but an economic disaster. – Keith Lockitch

~ Smash the state. Thanks to Free Talk Live host Ian Freeman, you can now download a free audio book of “The Market for Liberty“. Simply amazing. Then again, why not also try Simply Anarchy for more ideas?

That’s where you’ll find this quote from Frederic Bastiat: The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

~ And another from Lysander Spooner:

It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men’s property, which they had not before, as individuals. And whenever any number of men, calling themselves a government, do anything to another man, or to his property, which they had no right to do as individuals, they thereby declare themselves trespassers, robbers, or murderers, according to the nature of their acts.