Hey bloggers, do you trust the government?

That's what the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants you to do. In response to the controversy over the FTC's plans to start regulating the speech of bloggers over trumped up worries about product and service ads and reviews online, the agency now says it won't be going after individuals.

“We will be focusing any enforcements on advertisers, not on individual endorsers,” said Mary Engle, the FTC’s associate director for advertising practices, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We are not planning on investigating individual bloggers.”

Yeah, right.

Under the new FTC rules, bloggers, people posting to Twitter, Facebook users, and practically anyone else who might mention a product or a service on the Web, could come under FTC scrutiny.

What happened to global warming? That was the question that ran as a headline on a BBC report on climate that the British news agency published on October 9.

"This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998," the report noted. In fact, it continued, "For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures."

This won't shock too many people in the Poconos or anywhere in northern Pennsylvania. To see the cooling trend, residents there just need to look out their windows.

On October 16, Philly.com reported that the earliest snow on record, as much as in 9 inches in some locations, blanketed parts of the state, including the Penn State campus.

On Tuesday, October 13, I spoke to the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) Patriots, a local Green Bay activist group that got its start, I believe, in supporting Ron Paul during his presedential campaign and later grew to be a local branch of the Tea Party movement. The topic of my presentation was global warming, and whether or not restrictions on industry to fight carbon dioxide are justified by the facts, including the fact, recently reported by the BBC, that there hasn't been any warming in the last decade. The crowd was great, with a tremendous turnout, and are well deserving my thanks for their kind applause following my presentation. Of course, I owe a special thanks to the gentleman who bought me a beer afterwords!

For those who were there, or anyone else who may be interested, here is the slide presentation. It may take a moment to load below (works well in Safari). Otherwise you can download it.

Last night O'Reilly had on his show some bubble head blonde named MeMe who, masquerading as an NGO, is fighting what she would like you to believe is a moral crusade of some sort against obesity. She has the temerity to castigate all those out there who do not share her views on food consumption. From what I can tell, MeMe thinks that it might be a good idea if the government charged fat people a higher price for health care.

Sputtering to O'Reilly she said, and I paraphrase: "fat people are free to eat what they want, but they can't expect extreme measures to save their lives if they have a health problem." Typing that out, however, can't capture the shrill condescension and scorn of her manner and twangy nasally voice.

The fascist of the hour, as it turns out, is MeMe Roth, AKA Meredith Clements. Such a nice lady, she admits to having been ashamed of her fat family when she was growing up. In an interview with The Guardian, a UK paper, in May, she recalls: "no one taught me to be ashamed of obesity, but the day, on my birthday, that my mother was to bring cupcakes to my class, I put my head on the table because I knew that within minutes my mother would be there and everyone was going to know that my mother was fat. I felt ashamed. I was grateful that down the block there was another mother who was fatter than my mother."

How nice.

What goes around comes around. Naturally, those who have it coming to them are going to complain about it. And, unfortunately, those of us who don't deserve it, end up as collateral damage.

A case in point comes from the recent interview given by Gore Vidal to the London Times. Americans, who Vidal despises (calling them "dim-witted and ignorant"), may not even remember his name these days. And in truth, there is no reason why they should. The man is a bitter, washed up has been whose sole accomplishment was popularizing and celebrating perversion in his novels, as well as in his personal life. The Times notes, rather dryly, that Vidal "was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25." Ignoring his corrosive life and career, they celebrate him in print, calling him "The grand old man of letters."

Vidal, who hated the Bush administration with a passion, has likewise been a great supporter of President Obama. Falling, apparently, for the "hope and change" line, he switched his support to Obama from Hillary Clinton. "I was hopeful," he told the Times in retrospect about his support for Obama. "He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time."

It should be noted that he also hated, and still hates, the Republicans with a passion. John McCain, he says, is a liar. "We know the fool from Arizona," he says, referring to McCain, "is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane and was held captive."

As for Bush, he remarked to the Times that the former President is "the stupidest man in the country." And the Republicans in general raise his ire: "The Republican Party," he says, is "a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred -- religious hatred, racial hatred."

As if the U.S. military presence abroad hasn't caused enough trouble already (especially considering recent revelations about the hideously immoral behavior of our guns for hire at the Afghan embassy), our placement of soldiers abroad, coupled with our on again, off again flirtation with international agreements under the rubric of the UN have now opened the door, potentially, for U.S. soldiers to be tried under the ridiculous, but dangerous, International Criminal Court.

First, why should we consider the ICC to be ridiculous? Isn't it supposed to be the court that can be relied on to protect the innocent from the depredations of otherwise unaccountable dictators?

While that may be the propaganda, there is more than enough reason to question the reality. First, the ICC is an arm of the United Nations, an unaccountable world body that admits Communists and dictators alike. Fidel Castro? No problem at the UN. That guy from Libya? No problem at the UN. Communist China? Sure, why not. The USSR, back when there was a USSR? Why of course.

The UN is no friend of freedom, that's for sure. Take a look at the organization's Universal Declaration of Human Rights for example. That document starts out fine, or so it would seem, but quickly deteriorates.