New Round of Fearmongering Over Texting and Driving. If you went by the breathless reporting on texting and driving, or the word of law enforcement or "traffic safety advocates" you'd think at any given moment someone is careening to their death because they or another driver had their eyes on their cellphones and not on the road. [Hit & Run]

I'll consider believing that phones are some sort of serious threat to driver safety that must be banned once they ban things that are unquestionably more distracting in cars, like small children.

Going green: Moroc­co bans use of plas­tic bags [AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)]

I’ve writ­ten in the past about how absurd it is for Amer­i­cans to wor­ry about Mus­lims impos­ing Shari­ah law in the US. Now, it seems that it’s the Mus­lims who have to wor­ry about Amer­i­can Shari­ah laws being imposed in their coun­tries.

Net Neu­tral­i­ty: Don’t Let the FCC Con­trol the Inter­net! Under the pro­pos­al cur­rent­ly in play, the FCC assumes an increased abil­i­ty to review ISP offer­ings on a “case-by-case basis” and kill any plan it doesn’t believe is “com­mer­cial­ly rea­son­able.” Good­bye fast-moving inno­va­tion and adjust­ment to chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy on the part of com­pa­nies, hel­lo reg­u­la­to­ry morass and long, drawn-out bureau­crat­ic has­sles. [Rea­son]

…as some­one who grew up eat­ing mar­garine, the notion that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is prepar­ing offi­cial­ly to ban it, as the FDA recent­ly announced, strikes me both as tru­ly bizarre and emblem­at­ic of the arro­gance of cen­tral plan­ning that char­ac­ter­izes the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

Ira Stoll

Pre­pared head­lines for Wednes­day. It all comes down to a choice between the left-wing social­ist and the right-wing social­ist.

South­ern­ers pre­fer a social­ist who will redis­trib­ute the wealth from the tax­pay­ers to gov­ern­ment employ­ees (mil­i­tary), agri­cul­tur­al inter­ests, and cor­po­ra­tions with “defense” con­tracts. They also pre­fer some­one who bombs lots of for­eign­ers in the name of “nation­al great­ness.”

North­ern­ers pre­fer a social­ist who will redis­trib­ute wealth from the tax­pay­ers to gov­ern­ment employ­ees (non-military), the urban poor, and union mem­bers. They also pre­fer some­one who will bomb lots of for­eign­ers (albeit with less brava­do) in the name of “human rights.” [LewRockwell.com Blog]

That’s what pres­i­den­tial elec­tions are, today: decid­ing which social­ist war­mon­ger you want rul­ing the Evil Empire. “Change” was nev­er one of the choic­es.

Finan­cial Mar­ket Deja Vu?. “The most seri­ous finan­cial prob­lem for the Nazi State is not the dan­ger of a break­down of the cur­ren­cy and bank­ing sys­tem, but the grow­ing illiq­uid­i­ty of banks, insur­ance com­pa­nies, sav­ing insti­tu­tions, etc.… Germany’s finan­cial orga­ni­za­tions are again in a sit­u­a­tion where their assets which should be kept liq­uid have become ‘frozen’.… But the total­i­tar­i­an State can tight­en its con­trol over the whole finan­cial sys­tem and appro­pri­ate for itself all pri­vate funds which are essen­tial for the fur­ther exis­tence of a pri­vate econ­o­my. Yet the insti­tu­tions which still exist as pri­vate enter­pris­es are not allowed to go bank­rupt. For an arti­fi­cial belief in cred­its and finan­cial oblig­a­tions has to be main­tained in open con­flict with real­i­ties.”

From Gunter Reimann, The Vam­pire Econ­o­my: Doing Busi­ness Under Fas­cism (1939), p. 174, about Ger­man eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy under Hitler.
[LewRockwell.com Blog]

Of course this applies equal­ly to US eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy under the Boot On Your Neck Par­ty. And to think there are still igno­rant peo­ple in this coun­try who actu­al­ly believe fas­cism was defeat­ed dur­ing World War Two.