Back from sabbatical

You'll have to forgive my absence, I had to take some time to think.

I looked at the change.gov site, there's quite a lot there. The one thing that troubled me though, was what I didn't see. Nothing. Not one single program involves free market systems or no intervention. It's all government throwing money at everything to force change and regulate people's behavior, not government standing aside and occasionally giving incentives to encourage entrepreneurs with new ideas to move forward. People need to wake up and realise that in order for this economy to work, some businesses need to fail occasionally so they can learn from their mistakes or branch in new directions. We havent allowed that to happen with many large corporations, and now it has come back to bite us in the ass. And we're turning right around and repeating the same mistake we have for 50 years, turning to the government and pleading for it to bail us out and magically make everything better. If we don't take our economy back from government this will continue until we reach total collapse. And hopefully no sane person wants that.

Why cap and trade is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas

From factcheck.org

Cap-and-trade programs are designed to decrease the use of fossil fuels by requiring that industries (including power companies) cap their total carbon dioxide emissions. Companies would receive credits for CO2 emissions; any company that managed to stay under its quota would be permitted to sell its additional credits. The cap (or total number of credits issued) would shrink over time. Obama has proposed auctioning the initial credits, a policy that he says will generate revenue that can be invested into alternative energy research.

Eric Roston, of the nonpartisan Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, says that any cap-and-trade program will raise the cost of electricity. As he told FactCheck.org, "The goal of cap-and-trade is to make fossil fuels more expensive, which will make new technologies competitive with them." And since Obama would be auctioning credits, Roston says that it's "not unreasonable" to label Obama's program a tax politically.

Cap and trade sounds like a greenie's dream, but it is a nightmare waiting to happen to all of us. This is an artificial price gouge by the government to punish people for needing energy in an attempt to force them to accept "green energies". It does absolutely no good, and instead hurts everybody, especially those unlucky or not rich enough to be able to afford enough of these 'credits' to cover expected and unexpected emissions. So the cost to produce electricity goes up, which makes the cost to make things goes up, which means the cost for you to buy stuff goes up, meanwhile the need for energy can go nowhere but up, while the government slowly tightens the noose by issuing fewer credits at higher prices with higher fines. Oh, and meanwhile the government is pushing energies that are still in developement and require large amounts of energy to implement. You know, what I'd love to see is one of them screw up and set it low enough that human beings fall under this wonderful new system, it'll be hilarious to watch people get pissed off that they are now having to buy an indulgence from the almighty government for the right to breathe. Another example would be forcing someone to switch to the Model T by shooting their horses, not by touting the benefits of the Model T.

Oh, and this caught my attention. The study that says teens who watch sex on TV are more likely to get pregnant. Umm, why can't it be the other way around? Oh, right, cause that means its the teens' fault and not the TV, and we all know teens are children and therefore not expected to have any responsibility for their own actions. Hooray for anti-logic.