While I can understand the initial aid flooding into Haiti, this article in the Wall Street Journal highlights another reason why foreign aid is a bad idea. In order for liberals to feel good about themselves, they take their fellow citizens money at gun point and hand it over to foreign citizens, which allows them to bypass their local business. So the people they want to help are actually hurt.

Business for Ilia Alsene, one of Haiti’s ubiquitous “marchands”—or merchants—who sell food and beverages at curbside stalls here, is a lot worse since the country’s devastating earthquake. But Ms. Alsene doesn’t blame the quake so much as the international relief effort that followed.

“I have fewer customers now because they are handing out free food down the street,” says the 52-year-old, pointing to the nearby Champs de Mars plaza where aid organizations regularly hand out food to tens of thousands of people camped there in tents.

But only a tiny fraction of that money is being spent in Haiti, buying goods from local businesses. Worse, the aid is having the unintended consequence of making life harder for many businesses here, because of competition from free goods brought in by relief agencies. The damage to Haitian companies is making it harder for them to get back on their feet and create the jobs the country needs for a lasting recovery.

Alex Zamor’s drinking-water factory is operating again at near full capacity after suffering damage from the earthquake. But he still hasn’t rehired 200 employees at the factory because sales are so weak. He blames free water handed out by the relief effort.

“Of course we welcome the relief, but nobody wants to buy water if there’s free water on the streets,” he says. Mr. Zamor says international relief agencies should be sourcing more of their products for the relief effort from Haiti itself. “We should be helping Haitian companies instead of companies in Florida,” he says.

Tom Adamson, a transplanted Canadian, runs one of only two mattress companies in Haiti. Three of his 10 retail stores around the country were destroyed, and his factory suffered minor damage. But he says the biggest effect from the quake has been increased competition.

In the weeks after the temblor, a mattress company in the Dominican Republic sent 10,000 foam mattresses for the relief effort, getting import duties at the border waived. He and U.S. officials say nearly all relief supplies don’t get charged import taxes. Meanwhile, Mr. Adamson’s mattress company has a container of chemicals used to make foam mattresses stuck for months in Haitian customs, where is still being asked to pay import taxes.

“Things like this make it very hard for me to compete,” he says

via Global Aid Is No Relief for Small Haitian Businesses – WSJ.com.

Why buy products from the local business who employs your neighbors, when you can get the products free from foreign aid. Why grown your own wheat when the US drops in all it’s subsidized corn, which drives the price of your goods through the floor? Oh, and don’t think for a second this corn and other goods are donated out of the goodness of the grower’s heart. King Corn gets paid for the corn with tax money stolen from the tax payers. I’m sure they love foreign aid. It’s just another opportunity for corporate welfare, and it makes it harder for the people that are supposedly trying to be helped get back on their feet.

A great article by Pat Buchanan on global warming, climate change or whatever those crazy kids are calling it now-a-days.

What we learned in a year’s time: Polar bears are not vanishing. Sea levels are not rising at anything like the 20-foot surge this century was to bring. Cities are not sinking. Beaches are not disappearing. Temperatures have not been rising since the late 1990s. And, in historic terms, our global warming is not at all unprecedented.

Dennis Avery of Hudson Institute wrote a decade ago that from A.D. 900 to 1300, the Earth warmed by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, a period known as the Little Climate Optimum.

How horrible was it?

“The Vikings discovered and settled Greenland around A.D. 950. Greenland was then so warm that thousands of colonists supported themselves by pasturing cattle on what is now frozen tundra. During this great global warming, Europe built the looming castles and soaring cathedrals that even today stun tourists with their size, beauty and engineering excellence. These colossal buildings required the investment of millions of man-hours – which could be spared from farming because of higher crop yields.”

Today’s global warming hysteria is the hoax of the 21st century. H.L. Mencken had it right: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

via Hoax of the Century by Patrick J. Buchanan.

While reading some of the comments on the Wall Street Journal about the case before the Supreme Court, I had to chuckle. Liberals think guns are so horrible, and they talk about the gun as if it had legs and a mind to go shooting whoever it chooses.  They get all huffy and puffy saying things like, “Sure let’s have more guns, bigger guns, bazookas!” Then one guy said he’s sick of gun rights. People should be thrown in jail for life if they commit a crime with a gun and people should basically be economically raped for any gun related accident.

What is so funny about all these liberals is how much they focus on guns, when guns really aren’t that dangerous. Let’s look at some statistics.

There is about 1 gun for every person in these United States. That’s roughly 300 million guns. According to WikiAnswers, in 2007 there were roughly 10,000 people killed with firearms. That’s 1 death for every 30,000 guns.

OK, well how does that compare to other means of death.

Well, about 43,000 people die yearly in car accidents. According to US Department of transportation there are roughly 62 million registered vehicles and 6 million unregistered. That is 1 death for every 1581 vehicles.

In the book Freakonomics, the author’s talk about how when some parents find out little Junior’s buddy’s house has a gun it in, they get all worried and don’t allow Junior to go over there anymore. But, they have no problem with Junior going over there when there is a swimming pool, and the chance of a child being killed in a swimming pool related accident compared to a gun is much higher. The death of a child by swimming pool is something like 1 in 11,000 pools, while guns is like 1 in 1 million plus guns. Even the total number of deaths by pools are higher than by gun.  According to the authors, there are 550 deaths of a children under 10 in the US every year from drowing in swimming pools. There are roughly 175 children under 10 who died because of gun related accidents.

How about outright killings of babies, otherwise known as abortion. There are approximately 1.3 million abortions performed a year. Whoa! Tell me how bad guns are again! That is one killing for every 230 people. But wait! Men can’t even have abortions, so really you can only count women. That would bring the killing of a baby to one killing for every 115 women. That is assuming half the population are women, but I believe they actually account for a little more than half.

Also, these firearm related deaths don’t even take into account how many people protect themselves every year by using guns. According to a Florida State University study (cited in 2nd to last paragraph), there are 2.5 million cases a year where guns are used in self defense.  Also, from the same article, according to a Justice Department report, states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate.

It would appear if we wanted to have a safer world, we could forget about gun restrictions and focus on restricting liberals from making laws.

Some drug company must not like Cheerios eating into their cholesterol drug sales. The FDA better get involved.

Last year the Food and Drug Administration made itself fodder for late-night comedy when it warned the manufacturer of Cheerios against boasting about some of the cereal’s health benefits. “We have determined [Cheerios] is promoted for conditions that cause it to be a drug,” the FDA said in a letter to General Mills.

By this logic, consumers would need a prescription to buy a box of the oats.

The letter typifies the FDA’s longstanding discomfort with health claims made on food labels, particularly those touting the medical benefits of certain diets and ingredients.

via Scott Gottlieb: The FDA Takes on Cheerios – WSJ.com.

This is a perfect example of how we have all been brainwashed. Everyone just assumes that the FDA really has a clue what they are doing and that they really our there to protect us.

Would it be surprising to see Big Pharma using the FDA to go after companies that might eat into their drug sales? Who wouldn’t love eating Cheerios instead of taking cholesterol medicine?

Also, why don’t people ask how many people die as a result of the FDA’s involvement in drug testing. It takes almost $1 billion and up to 15 years for a drug to make it through the obstacle course laid out by the FDA. No wonder drugs are so expensive. So, how many people die because of the time lag of getting a drug to market? Also, how many drugs that could save peoples lives just can’t make enough profit to justify running it through this expensive, time consuming process?

Has anyone thought maybe the FDA and this expensive process was put into place to protect Big Pharma from small competitors? Like most government regulations, only the huge corporations can afford to play the game, so they love all the regulations. It prevents the up and comers from ever nipping at their toes.

Quit assuming the government is their to protect you. The FDA is not about protection. It is about control. As long as the government controls this part of society by deciding who can play, they maintain the power. They pick the winners and losers, and they are the ones who need bribed, elected, and need to remain in power.

While our government constantly preaches to the Chinese government about freedom of the internet, they are quietly attempting to get control of it themselves.

The president would have the power to safeguard essential federal and private Web resources under draft Senate cybersecurity legislation.

Federal is fine, but what gives the president power over “private Web resources”? This is how they sneak in the ability to take over the internet as a whole. Essential federal and private Web resources pretty much covers everything.

According to an aide familiar with the proposal, the bill includes a mandate for federal agencies to prepare emergency response plans in the event of a massive, nationwide cyberattack.

The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said.

Does anyone have confidence that the government can even pull this off?

Their renewed focus arrives on the heels of two, high-profile cyberattacks last month: A strike on Google, believed to have originated in China, and a separate, more disjointed attack that affected thousands of businesses worldwide.

Rockefeller and Snowe’s forthcoming bill would establish a host of heretofore absent cybersecurity prevention and response measures, an aide close to the process said. The bill will “significantly [raise] the profile of cybersecurity within the federal government,” while incentivizing private companies to do the same, according to the aide.

Oh boy, any time you read “incentivizing” you can pretty much get ready to be robbed. Businesses already have incentives to guard against cyber attacks. Unlike government they are accountable to the bottom line. If the chance of an attack would cost them more than the cost of safe-guarding against an attack, they will take the actions needed. They don’t need government to stick a gun to their head forcing them to do it.

Additionally, it will “promote public awareness” of Internet security issues, while outlining key protections of Americans’ civil liberties on the Web, the aide continued.

Good luck on the civil liberties. The last thing the government cares about is civil liberties.

Privacy groups are nonetheless likely to take some umbrage at Rockefeller and Snowe’s latest effort, an early draft of which leaked late last year.

When early reports predicted the cybersecurity measure would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” online privacy groups said they felt that would endow the White House with overly ambiguous and far-reaching powers to regulate the Internet.

It is unclear when Rockefeller and Snowe will finish their legislation. And the ongoing debate over healthcare reform, financial regulatory reform, jobs bills and education fixes could postpone action on the floor for many months.

I’d say let’s hope it never reaches the floor, but considering the other bills before it, I’m not sure it would be much worse.

Both lawmakers heavily emphasized the need for such a bill during a Senate Commerce Committee cybersecurity hearing on Wednesday.

“Too much is at stake for us to pretend that today’s outdated cybersecurity policies are up to the task of protecting our nation and economic infrastructure,” Rockefeller said. “We have to do better and that means it will take a level of coordination and sophistication to outmatch our adversaries and minimize this enormous threat.”

via Cybersecurity bill to give president new emergency powers – The Hill’s Hillicon Valley.

The only cybersecurity policies that might be outdated are the ones guarding federal computers. That is just more proof of the idiocy of government. Private enterprises on the other hand are not outdated and the highly sensitive businesses take it upon themselves to hire the experts needed and purchase the systems needed to properly security their networks.

As far as government goes, if this truly is just to secure the federal computers under a cyberattack, why do we even need legislation? Shouldn’t the government already be taking action on their own networks through current budgets? I’m sure we don’t require separate legislation to secure our military arsenals. That security is already part of the military arsenal budget itself. Also, wouldn’t the President already have power to declare an emergency over the federal networks?

It would appear that the President and the government already have all the power that they need…well unless they want the power to take control of the entire internet. Let’s not sugar coat this as The Hill and the Senators trying to pass this bill are. The government is pushing legislation for one thing only. They are pushing it to get control over “private Web resources”, the very resources that are already secured by private businesses themselves.

The government cannot be trusted with a power like this. They want to “secure” the internet to make sure if there is ever a challenge to their power from the people, they could cut off communication between those people. It is not to protect us from the boogieman overseas as they always claim it to be. It is to prevent us from ever challenging our government.