The Donald Trump phenomenon: hidden meanings
Jon Rappoport
“You could take the five major news networks and filter Jesus Christ, Buddha, Hitler, Stalin, Attila, Gandhi, and Lawrence Welk through them, and eventually you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference among them. They’d all come across in the same way. That, in fact, is the purpose of television.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
I have nothing against hope, but the brand of naïve hope that surfaces during every presidential election season is truly ridiculous.
Candidate after candidate lies through his teeth, and the people buy in.
Now some are saying The Donald is running to form a third party and thus hand the election to Hillary. Whereas the preferred alternative would be what? Prince Jeb? There’s a difference between Hillary and Jeb? Who’s kidding who?
Or they say The Donald is running to provide a safety valve, so the American people can blow off steam, but ultimately wind up with nothing to show for it.
If that were true, so what? Public despondency will set in? What grotesque political swamp-soup are we wading in now?
I approach this from a different angle.
Trump is unpredictable. He’s the only unpredictable presidential candidate in recent memory. That’s a major plus, because the press can’t do anything with him. They attack him on point A, and he responds with his own attack, or he replies with a non-sequitur, or he just changes the subject because he’s bored with the reporters.
He’s mentioning taboo subjects. Bring back tariffs on US imports. Get rid of inner city gangs.
He says something culturally and politically incorrect, and the press jackals go after him with flashing teeth and claws, fully expecting a take-down, demanding a grovel—and he shrugs—and his approval ratings go up.
Putting the press into the wall—this alone is a feat worth celebrating. Reporters want Trump to beone defined thing they can identify, and then they want to assault that…but he keeps shifting ground and juking and putting on new moves and faces. He drives them crazy.
And the crowds at his speeches are building. Maybe he’ll fill a football stadium one of these days.
What brings the people out? They sense he hasn’t got a script. They love that. They think he’s a different breed from Politician 1-A Normal. They love that, too.
The press hates that.
Right now, The Donald is all throwaway lines—and that’s good. If he resorts to analysis, the press will bring on an army of experts to refute him “on the facts.”
Megyn Kelly thought she’d make a bigger name for herself by trumping the Trump, and instead helped power his new numbers-busting popularity. Another defeat for the press.
When it comes to election campaigns, you have to understand that the job of the media is to grind down every candidate to a small series of meaningless truisms.
The press wants empty generalities. They want android candidates in the debates. They want to make a possible something into nothing.
This is a form of intended political correctness that goes largely unnoticed.
Trump has broken the mold. Therefore, he must pay. But…it’s not working. Not so far. Something in the machinery has gone wrong.
Trump has triggered a response in an audience who feels they’ve been bottled up and straitjacketed for far too long. They’ve been seething and straining. They can’t say this, they can’t say that. And they can’t look to presidents for solutions. Presidents spout rhetorical bullshit.
And then a man shows up who seems to feel the same way they do and isn’t afraid to say so.
The press doesn’t know what to do. Every line they feed Trump, in an effort to slam him, becomes the occasion for one of his comebacks that carries the day.
Trump doesn’t use filler. He improvises. He doesn’t play fast and loose behind the scenes; he does it right out in the open.
Worst of all, the media, for decades, built up the image of Trump. He was great copy. His hair, his marriages, his business deals, his scandals, his greedy eagerness for self-promotion.
Now here he is, and he can’t be cast off like an old suit. He’s front and center.
Presidential campaigns ARE the press. That’s the way it’s been for decades. Campaigns are media events manufactured out of slime you’d sue the city for if it bubbled up in your back yard.
The press takes the slime and lies and packages them into neat little products and puts them in front of television viewers. The press runs the campaigns and wins every election.
But right now…a monster has showed up.
Making a joke out of him doesn’t help, either. People laugh, but the laughs are becoming with-Trump rather than at-him. So what if he’s a self-serving cartoon? Isn’t all presidential politics a cartoon?
You can be sure the foul stench-ridden execs at the major networks are trying to figure out how to torpedo Trump. They’re in a dither. This is supposed to be their presidential campaign, not his. They own the franchise. But he’s ripping huge chunks out of their hides.
Is it possible they could unearth some horrendous cheating scandal from Trump’s past, expose it to the sky, and then watch Trump nod and say, “Yeah, I screwed up, so what?”—and his ratings would jump another ten points? Yes, it’s possible.
Regardless of the issues coming to the fore in this presidential season, the real issue, as always, is the press itself. That’s not supposed to be noticed, but more and more people are noticing it. And because they instinctively hate the powdered and coiffed anchors with their presumptive attitudes, every time Trump hits a home run against one of these smug bloodless motherfuckers, it’s an occasion for great glee.
Trump is doing much more than gaining ground on the other candidates; he’s attacking the whole framework of the Show.
He’s sawing off the pillars of the studio sets. He’s slapping the faces of the news hosts. And as the ultimate insult, he’s lifting their ratings.
An interview with Trump isn’t an interview. It’s a circus. He’s essentially saying, with every breath he takes, “See, audience, see this whole charade, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Why should I agree to their terms? Why should I consider these doofus Demo-Repub media mouthpieces are any better than I am or you are? Watch me crack the illusion of television. It’s fun. Let’s kick some high-priced ass together…”
On the media front, it’s looking like Trump is too big to fail. The only thing the networks can do is try to shut him out. I’m not sure that’s going to work. He’s cranked up too much visibility jizz.
On the Disney spectrum of personality, Trump is Scrooge McDuck with some Goofy thrown in, plus a slice or two of Mickey Mouse’s good will. But then there is also a piece of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a clump of Ralph Nader (Nader would hate to admit it), a splash of Salvador Dali, and a passable imitation of Ronald Reagan.
Let the press try to reduce that down to a mainstream presidential candidate.
The television medium, in particular, sets itself up to accommodate the lies candidates tell. It builds studios and lights them for those lies and empty promises. It provides camera angles to feature those lies. It hires hosts and moderators who will facilitate the candidates who lie.
But even all this is not enough. The networks set themselves up to offer a style of lying. Candidates are expected to deploy all sorts of hollow, sanitized, and familiar phrases. They’re expected to affect a fake sense of passion. They’re prompted to offer some fake “new beginning,” as if no other candidate has ever tried that before.
Through these mechanisms, the viewing public is conditioned to expect predigested soulless corporate PR and accept it.
This, as much as anything else, is the death of modern politics. It’s bright grinning groomed zombie android death.
Any man or woman who can come along and punch a gaping hole in that illusion is a threat to the Big Sleep.
Trump is warming to the job.
Could he win the election? It’s hard to fathom it. But again, consider his crooked business past against the crimes of the Bush and Clinton families. In those terms, Trump is a mere piker.
But right now, he’s providing another service. He’s cracking the media egg. And any presidential candidate who even mentions laying on protective tariffs and getting rid of gangs is outdistancing Queen Hillary or Prince Jeb.
Trump is trying to roll crazy sevens and elevens. Hillary/Jeb roll snake eyes every time.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-donald-trump-phenomenon-hidden-meanings.html
Monday, August 31, 2015
Get ready...
Are you ready for the next big crash?
by Bob Livingston
Don’t worry. There won’t be a stock market crash. CNN told us so and even gave us five reasons to “remain (at least somewhat) bullish on the stock market.”
Great news. Someone — Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen? — has put the air back in the stock market balloon.
Even The Heritage Foundation chimed in. “Markets rise and fall all the time,” Heritage’s “expert” said of the recent carnage. “Monday’s drop is not all that unusual, and certainly not reason to panic.”
Of course, when the politicians, the talking head “experts” and the MSM tell you to not panic, it’s time to take notice … and likely time to panic, if you are like most people. Something bad is on the horizon.
So-called “experts” and the mainstream financial media claim they never see a crash coming. They are always “surprised” by bad economic news. And if it’s too “surprising,” they just manipulate the numbers after the fact to make them look better.
Yellen herself, in a Jan. 22, 2007 speech, said “I think the concerns we used to hear about the possibility of a devastating collapse — one that might be big enough to cause a recession in the U.S. economy — have been largely allayed.” Later that year in another speech she said, “[G]rowth in the U.S. is, and is likely to remain, healthy.” Recall that it was just a year later that the housing and derivatives bubbles burst and the economy went into the crapper, setting off the Great Recession under which we continue to suffer.
As late as mid-2007, Ben Bernanke, Yellen’s predecessor at the Federal Reserve (which is neither “federal” nor holds any “reserves”), said he thought the economy was behaving perfectly and would continue to expand and prosper. But Bernanke, despite (or maybe because of) heading up the Fed, knows little about managing money.
The truth is that Yellen, Bernanke, the banksters, the propaganda media, the politicians and their cronies lie, cheat and steal. All the talk about good times and recoveries is for public consumption to continue to prop up the phony market and provide cover for their crimes. The U.S. currency has been in a collapse since the Federal Reserve was created by the bankster criminals in 1913.
By hiding the truth, the money creators seek to control the system, or non-system of fiat dollars, which they use to control us. Americans believe they have trillions of dollars in savings and investments. In truth, what they have is only numbers, not substance. It is fiat, which is “money” only by the decree of the “authority” of government.
My friends, shocking economic events lie dead ahead. It is all too clear that Wall Street and the government have the propaganda machine wide open in a desperate attempt to maintain public confidence. We are set up to be slammed by another collapse of the stock market and economy. All signs point to September. I can’t say September for certain, but I believe it will be soon — very soon.
It is our hope that you readers will not be surprised, rather that you will be prepared for events just ahead.
There is serious reason for pessimism. The huge U.S. debt burden is unsustainable — even the Congressional Budget Office says so — and it absolutely could not withstand deflation and monetary collapse as happened in the 1930s. This type of deflation would bankrupt the system beyond recovery.
The Chinese have been liquidating U.S. Treasuries for several months and officially communicated with the U.S. this fact last week. This signals the Chinese economy is in really bad shape and is bad news for Yellen’s intentions to raise interest rates in September. It’s more than likely that the Chinese “boom economy” was a complete fiction anyway and built on ghost cities and infrastructure no one even uses.
The eurozone is also in sad shape. If those countries join China in dumping Treasuries, interest rates could spike.
Former Fed Chair (and author of the last bubble) Alan Greenspan is warning of a “pending bond market bubble.” Maybe he’s learned something since he retired.
“I knew something was brewing,” Greenspan said of his last days at the Fed, that ended in January 2006, “but I missed the actual date as in, frankly, did everybody else.”
That’s not exactly true. In my December 2007 issue of The Bob Livingston Letter™, I wrote:
The U.S. housing market is the largest market in the world. You can imagine what economic madness lies ahead.
The housing bubble was created to burst. It is a mess and the whole world is holding its breath. Hot air will not support anything, but this is the foundation of the housing bubble.
In my February 2008 BLL, I wrote:
The focus of the Federal Reserve is on preventing the collapse of the financial balloon.
There is no free market solution to the credit collapse. More likely we are witnessing a de facto nationalization of the banking system in which massive profits flow to the private sector while big losses accrue to the public, as always.
The banking system is insolvent or on the verge of insolvency. The Fed will be voicing repeated concerns about inflation while sacrificing the savers of the world to salvage the banking system.
We will float on paper money. Buy gold and silver!
Up to now, gold has served mainly as a bet against the dollar and U.S. policy failures, but just ahead, gold will be a strong bet against all fiat globalism. Gold is a tremendous alternative to political foolishness. We sit in the middle of a spectacular finale in the next two to three years.
In 2008, I expect silver to glitter maybe at an all time nominal high.
The planners are managing a silent and invisible reduction in the American living standard.
Be forewarned!
When the economic situation is good, the market makes a slow, but steady, climb. But when the economy is sour, the market is volatile, with wild swings up and down. Six of the 10 largest point gains in history occurred during the last collapse. It took months for the 2008 collapse to play out.
As The Burning Platform blog stated: “If you are a critical thinking awake individual who can see the wheels are coming off this debt dependent bus to nowhere, you would take the opportunity to sell into today’s dead cat bounce. If you choose to believe the shills, shysters and hucksters paraded on the corporate MSM over the last two days, you will end up like millions of other Muppets.”
The collapsing market will likely preclude any rate hikes by the Fed and will, in fact, usher in a new round of quantitative easing (money printing). This will set off a deflationary collapse.
The U.S. dollar will collapse as a direct result of an avalanche of printing press money. When the dollar crashes, to restore confidence there will be some form of a gold-backed dollar. It will have to happen somewhere in the future.
When a national currency is destroyed and the economy collapses, the only recourse is gold. The point is gold will have to be at a much higher price to back the U.S. dollar.
This will prove to be the catalyst that kick-starts the new bear market in gold and silver. Those who hold gold and silver will greatly benefit.
World renowned gold expert Jim Sinclair had this to say last week about what’s coming:
Number one, the downside on gold is extraordinarily limited here. Two, the rally we are facing that will come in gold is going to be stupendous. Three, they [his sources] tell me we may never call you back because this may be the rally you don’t sell. This may be the rally you don’t sell because gold is moving from a currency form to a valuation form. . . . This may be the last time we call you means this is a rally that is not meant to be sold. What is coming up in front of us is the Great Reset where currencies wear their gold like ladies wear a necklace, and the most beautiful necklace will be the strongest currency. The ladies without the necklace won’t be invited to the ball. Huge changes are coming. The dollar is always going to be with us, and the yuan and all of the currencies are still going to be there. We are not going to one single currency. The SDR (Special Drawing Rights) is nothing more than a glorified index of currencies. It’s a cure to nothing. How can a package of junk cure the problem of junk? It can’t. The two last men standing will be gold and gold on steroids — silver.
Sinclair predicts a gold price of $50,000 per ounce, and that silver will outperform gold by a multiple of two to five.
If you have gold and/or silver, you are not like most people and there is no need to panic. Just hang on and buy more while it’s still cheap. If you don’t have any, start buying now. Hold some cash to get you through any bank “holidays.” You shouldn’t have your cash in banks anyway, at least no more than is necessary to cover your bills. Have some food, water, guns and ammunition stored.
Gold and silver are forever! Paper money is always destroyed by its greedy creators.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/ready-next-big-crash/
by Bob Livingston
Don’t worry. There won’t be a stock market crash. CNN told us so and even gave us five reasons to “remain (at least somewhat) bullish on the stock market.”
Great news. Someone — Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen? — has put the air back in the stock market balloon.
Even The Heritage Foundation chimed in. “Markets rise and fall all the time,” Heritage’s “expert” said of the recent carnage. “Monday’s drop is not all that unusual, and certainly not reason to panic.”
Of course, when the politicians, the talking head “experts” and the MSM tell you to not panic, it’s time to take notice … and likely time to panic, if you are like most people. Something bad is on the horizon.
So-called “experts” and the mainstream financial media claim they never see a crash coming. They are always “surprised” by bad economic news. And if it’s too “surprising,” they just manipulate the numbers after the fact to make them look better.
Yellen herself, in a Jan. 22, 2007 speech, said “I think the concerns we used to hear about the possibility of a devastating collapse — one that might be big enough to cause a recession in the U.S. economy — have been largely allayed.” Later that year in another speech she said, “[G]rowth in the U.S. is, and is likely to remain, healthy.” Recall that it was just a year later that the housing and derivatives bubbles burst and the economy went into the crapper, setting off the Great Recession under which we continue to suffer.
As late as mid-2007, Ben Bernanke, Yellen’s predecessor at the Federal Reserve (which is neither “federal” nor holds any “reserves”), said he thought the economy was behaving perfectly and would continue to expand and prosper. But Bernanke, despite (or maybe because of) heading up the Fed, knows little about managing money.
The truth is that Yellen, Bernanke, the banksters, the propaganda media, the politicians and their cronies lie, cheat and steal. All the talk about good times and recoveries is for public consumption to continue to prop up the phony market and provide cover for their crimes. The U.S. currency has been in a collapse since the Federal Reserve was created by the bankster criminals in 1913.
By hiding the truth, the money creators seek to control the system, or non-system of fiat dollars, which they use to control us. Americans believe they have trillions of dollars in savings and investments. In truth, what they have is only numbers, not substance. It is fiat, which is “money” only by the decree of the “authority” of government.
My friends, shocking economic events lie dead ahead. It is all too clear that Wall Street and the government have the propaganda machine wide open in a desperate attempt to maintain public confidence. We are set up to be slammed by another collapse of the stock market and economy. All signs point to September. I can’t say September for certain, but I believe it will be soon — very soon.
It is our hope that you readers will not be surprised, rather that you will be prepared for events just ahead.
There is serious reason for pessimism. The huge U.S. debt burden is unsustainable — even the Congressional Budget Office says so — and it absolutely could not withstand deflation and monetary collapse as happened in the 1930s. This type of deflation would bankrupt the system beyond recovery.
The Chinese have been liquidating U.S. Treasuries for several months and officially communicated with the U.S. this fact last week. This signals the Chinese economy is in really bad shape and is bad news for Yellen’s intentions to raise interest rates in September. It’s more than likely that the Chinese “boom economy” was a complete fiction anyway and built on ghost cities and infrastructure no one even uses.
The eurozone is also in sad shape. If those countries join China in dumping Treasuries, interest rates could spike.
Former Fed Chair (and author of the last bubble) Alan Greenspan is warning of a “pending bond market bubble.” Maybe he’s learned something since he retired.
“I knew something was brewing,” Greenspan said of his last days at the Fed, that ended in January 2006, “but I missed the actual date as in, frankly, did everybody else.”
That’s not exactly true. In my December 2007 issue of The Bob Livingston Letter™, I wrote:
The U.S. housing market is the largest market in the world. You can imagine what economic madness lies ahead.
The housing bubble was created to burst. It is a mess and the whole world is holding its breath. Hot air will not support anything, but this is the foundation of the housing bubble.
In my February 2008 BLL, I wrote:
The focus of the Federal Reserve is on preventing the collapse of the financial balloon.
There is no free market solution to the credit collapse. More likely we are witnessing a de facto nationalization of the banking system in which massive profits flow to the private sector while big losses accrue to the public, as always.
The banking system is insolvent or on the verge of insolvency. The Fed will be voicing repeated concerns about inflation while sacrificing the savers of the world to salvage the banking system.
We will float on paper money. Buy gold and silver!
Up to now, gold has served mainly as a bet against the dollar and U.S. policy failures, but just ahead, gold will be a strong bet against all fiat globalism. Gold is a tremendous alternative to political foolishness. We sit in the middle of a spectacular finale in the next two to three years.
In 2008, I expect silver to glitter maybe at an all time nominal high.
The planners are managing a silent and invisible reduction in the American living standard.
Be forewarned!
When the economic situation is good, the market makes a slow, but steady, climb. But when the economy is sour, the market is volatile, with wild swings up and down. Six of the 10 largest point gains in history occurred during the last collapse. It took months for the 2008 collapse to play out.
As The Burning Platform blog stated: “If you are a critical thinking awake individual who can see the wheels are coming off this debt dependent bus to nowhere, you would take the opportunity to sell into today’s dead cat bounce. If you choose to believe the shills, shysters and hucksters paraded on the corporate MSM over the last two days, you will end up like millions of other Muppets.”
The collapsing market will likely preclude any rate hikes by the Fed and will, in fact, usher in a new round of quantitative easing (money printing). This will set off a deflationary collapse.
The U.S. dollar will collapse as a direct result of an avalanche of printing press money. When the dollar crashes, to restore confidence there will be some form of a gold-backed dollar. It will have to happen somewhere in the future.
When a national currency is destroyed and the economy collapses, the only recourse is gold. The point is gold will have to be at a much higher price to back the U.S. dollar.
This will prove to be the catalyst that kick-starts the new bear market in gold and silver. Those who hold gold and silver will greatly benefit.
World renowned gold expert Jim Sinclair had this to say last week about what’s coming:
Number one, the downside on gold is extraordinarily limited here. Two, the rally we are facing that will come in gold is going to be stupendous. Three, they [his sources] tell me we may never call you back because this may be the rally you don’t sell. This may be the rally you don’t sell because gold is moving from a currency form to a valuation form. . . . This may be the last time we call you means this is a rally that is not meant to be sold. What is coming up in front of us is the Great Reset where currencies wear their gold like ladies wear a necklace, and the most beautiful necklace will be the strongest currency. The ladies without the necklace won’t be invited to the ball. Huge changes are coming. The dollar is always going to be with us, and the yuan and all of the currencies are still going to be there. We are not going to one single currency. The SDR (Special Drawing Rights) is nothing more than a glorified index of currencies. It’s a cure to nothing. How can a package of junk cure the problem of junk? It can’t. The two last men standing will be gold and gold on steroids — silver.
Sinclair predicts a gold price of $50,000 per ounce, and that silver will outperform gold by a multiple of two to five.
If you have gold and/or silver, you are not like most people and there is no need to panic. Just hang on and buy more while it’s still cheap. If you don’t have any, start buying now. Hold some cash to get you through any bank “holidays.” You shouldn’t have your cash in banks anyway, at least no more than is necessary to cover your bills. Have some food, water, guns and ammunition stored.
Gold and silver are forever! Paper money is always destroyed by its greedy creators.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/ready-next-big-crash/
Just another progressive...
Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt killed over 500 large game animals on a single safari in 1909
by: J. D. Heyes
I was reminded just how much times and attitudes have changed in America over the course of a single century after witnessing so much outrage domestically and abroad over the killing of an African lion by a Minnesota dentist in July.
In particular, I was reminded of Teddy Roosevelt – adventurer, environmentalist, war hero, governor, Nobel Prize recipient, vice president, president, Mount Rushmore figurehead... and big game hunter who, on a single expedition to Africa in 1909, bagged 512 animals.
According to historical accounts, before Roosevelt became the nation's 26th president, at the time being the youngest to ever do so, he had gained fame as a frontiersman – once even capturing an outlaw in the Badlands of the Dakota territory. By the late 1800s he had moved back to his home state of New York where he became involved in Republican politics, eventually serving as governor following his famous charge up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War.
Roosevelt was vice president when President William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, six months into his second term. While serving as president, Roosevelt expanded U.S. foreign policy and the power of the Executive Branch; after two terms and despite unprecedented popularity in 1908, Roosevelt declined to run again for the presidency (the 22nd amendment, enacted after Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, now limits presidents to two terms). Upon stepping down, Roosevelt essentially anointed William Howard Taft, a close friend and his Secretary of War (the War Department was named the Department of Defense after World War II); Taft won the election easily.
Would Roosevelt even be hailed for his exploits today?
Immediately following Taft's inauguration in 1909, Roosevelt set out for his African safari; his goal was to hunt large game and collect other specimens for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He made his decision based on ensuring room on the political stage for his hand-picked successor and a natural desire for action.
In April 1909, he and his son, Kermit, landed in Mombasa. Roosevelt took charge of a safari that included 250 porters and guides, which trekked across British East Africa and into the Belgian Congo, then back to the Nile River which ended in Khartoum. During the expedition, more than 1,100 specimens were collected (or killed), a figure which included some 500 animals. It was "the most noteworthy collection of big animals that has ever come out of Africa," he would later claim.
EyewitnessHistory.com further noted:
Between the two of them, Theodore and Kermit slew 512 beasts including 17 lion, 11 elephant and 20 rhinoceros. The remaining animals were no doubt happy to see T.R. leave the plain. After the year-long hunt, Roosevelt proceeded to England for the funeral of King Edward VII and then on to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending the Russo-Japanese War. He returned to the U.S. in June, 1910.
Big game hunting versus harvesting baby body parts
At one point during his safari, Roosevelt shot and killed a massive charging rhino. As he was standing over a freshly killed eland, a native guide came over to him with news that a rhino had been seen nearby. The former president was accompanied by Captain Arthur Slatter, an Englishman who operated an ostrich farm and an avid, excellent hunter himself.
The pair, with another gun handler, crept up on the rhino over the next 10 minutes. Eventually, Roosevelt managed to get his first shot off, which hit the rhino but did not kill it, so the animal charged the group.
"Before he could get quite all the way round in his headlong rush to reach us, I struck him with my left-hand barrel, the bullet entering between the neck and shoulder and piercing his heart," Roosevelt said in an account of the incident. "At the same instant Captain Slatter fired, his bullet entering the neck vertebrae. Ploughing up the ground with horn and feet, the great bull rhino, still head toward us, dropped just thirteen paces from where we stood."
Now, just imagine of Roosevelt were alive today and had just completed such a hunt: His life and livelihood would be threatened and he would have to go into hiding and none of his other accomplishments would matter to millions – even as Planned Parenthood officials are defended for "harvesting" and selling body parts from aborted babies for "research."
Like I said, how times have changed.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050987_Theodore_Roosevelt_safari_Cecil_the_Lion.html#ixzz3kQL9EkpK
by: J. D. Heyes
I was reminded just how much times and attitudes have changed in America over the course of a single century after witnessing so much outrage domestically and abroad over the killing of an African lion by a Minnesota dentist in July.
In particular, I was reminded of Teddy Roosevelt – adventurer, environmentalist, war hero, governor, Nobel Prize recipient, vice president, president, Mount Rushmore figurehead... and big game hunter who, on a single expedition to Africa in 1909, bagged 512 animals.
According to historical accounts, before Roosevelt became the nation's 26th president, at the time being the youngest to ever do so, he had gained fame as a frontiersman – once even capturing an outlaw in the Badlands of the Dakota territory. By the late 1800s he had moved back to his home state of New York where he became involved in Republican politics, eventually serving as governor following his famous charge up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War.
Roosevelt was vice president when President William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, six months into his second term. While serving as president, Roosevelt expanded U.S. foreign policy and the power of the Executive Branch; after two terms and despite unprecedented popularity in 1908, Roosevelt declined to run again for the presidency (the 22nd amendment, enacted after Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, now limits presidents to two terms). Upon stepping down, Roosevelt essentially anointed William Howard Taft, a close friend and his Secretary of War (the War Department was named the Department of Defense after World War II); Taft won the election easily.
Would Roosevelt even be hailed for his exploits today?
Immediately following Taft's inauguration in 1909, Roosevelt set out for his African safari; his goal was to hunt large game and collect other specimens for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He made his decision based on ensuring room on the political stage for his hand-picked successor and a natural desire for action.
In April 1909, he and his son, Kermit, landed in Mombasa. Roosevelt took charge of a safari that included 250 porters and guides, which trekked across British East Africa and into the Belgian Congo, then back to the Nile River which ended in Khartoum. During the expedition, more than 1,100 specimens were collected (or killed), a figure which included some 500 animals. It was "the most noteworthy collection of big animals that has ever come out of Africa," he would later claim.
EyewitnessHistory.com further noted:
Between the two of them, Theodore and Kermit slew 512 beasts including 17 lion, 11 elephant and 20 rhinoceros. The remaining animals were no doubt happy to see T.R. leave the plain. After the year-long hunt, Roosevelt proceeded to England for the funeral of King Edward VII and then on to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending the Russo-Japanese War. He returned to the U.S. in June, 1910.
Big game hunting versus harvesting baby body parts
At one point during his safari, Roosevelt shot and killed a massive charging rhino. As he was standing over a freshly killed eland, a native guide came over to him with news that a rhino had been seen nearby. The former president was accompanied by Captain Arthur Slatter, an Englishman who operated an ostrich farm and an avid, excellent hunter himself.
The pair, with another gun handler, crept up on the rhino over the next 10 minutes. Eventually, Roosevelt managed to get his first shot off, which hit the rhino but did not kill it, so the animal charged the group.
"Before he could get quite all the way round in his headlong rush to reach us, I struck him with my left-hand barrel, the bullet entering between the neck and shoulder and piercing his heart," Roosevelt said in an account of the incident. "At the same instant Captain Slatter fired, his bullet entering the neck vertebrae. Ploughing up the ground with horn and feet, the great bull rhino, still head toward us, dropped just thirteen paces from where we stood."
Now, just imagine of Roosevelt were alive today and had just completed such a hunt: His life and livelihood would be threatened and he would have to go into hiding and none of his other accomplishments would matter to millions – even as Planned Parenthood officials are defended for "harvesting" and selling body parts from aborted babies for "research."
Like I said, how times have changed.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050987_Theodore_Roosevelt_safari_Cecil_the_Lion.html#ixzz3kQL9EkpK
Modern NAZIS...
The Nazis were huge supporters of abortion, calling it a "freedom of choice" issue for women
by: J. D. Heyes
Most Americans would agree that the Nazi regime founded by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s was one of the most racist, ruthless and vile governments ever formed in the history of the planet. Unfortunately for backers of abortion – especially abortion on demand – they share a dark history with one of the world's most evil political movements.
In a well-documented post on the Angel Fire blog, the site notes that today's pro-abortion movement has claimed in the past that Hitler's Nazi regime was anti-abortion and anti-choice and that anyone who takes such positions is a Nazi.
The reality, however, is much different.
Abortions encouraged for "inferior" people
The Nazi regime was not pro-choice, nor was it anti-abortion by a long shot. Like everything else, Hitler's Nazis believed that "a woman's body" belonged not to her but to the German state, and as such the state would decide what to do with it.
While the Nazis would not permit abortions by healthy "Aryan" German women, they demanded and even forced abortion on non-Aryans considered inferior to the race such as Jewish women, gypsies, Slavic women and so forth. This also included Aryan women thought to be "feeble-minded" and those who had hereditary diseases. [1]
In fact, the Nazis did everything they could to increase the number of Aryan types. That included establishing "Liebensborn" ("Fountain of Life") compounds in which SS-type men would impregnate young Aryan German girls, including very young girls, to increase the number of "pure Ayrans" in the country. Abortion for these young girls was verboten.
Another Nazi tactic was forcing abortion on non-Ayran women in conquered nations to keep their populations down. Eventually this led to mass murder in concentration camps and by other means.
As for the health and vitality of the mother, Angel Fire noted:
The first court to rule that "viability" and the "woman's health" were determinate factors in abortion was the Nazi Heredity Court of 1934, when it ruled that "...pregnancy may be terminated, with the consent of the woman concerned, unless the foetus is already capable of independent life, or unless the termination of the pregnancy entails a serious danger to either the life or health of the woman herself." [2]
Who are the modern Nazis?
One of Hitler's top aides, Martin Bormann, said the following regarding abortion as it applied to non-Ayrans:
The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health service are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to one hundred. At best an education which produces useful coolies for us is admissible. Every educated person is a future enemy. [3]
Consider how this kind of attitude and language applies to the purveyors of abortion – Planned Parenthood – in today's America.
This is an organization that can use the phrase "freedom of choice", which was coined by the Nazis [as noted in this tweet by Progressives Today, a far-left political organization]. This is the same organization that originated from a racist, eugenics movement focusing primarily on reducing the numbers of African Americans, Asians and ensuring the "feeble-minded" did not reproduce, and it's an organization that supports "research" by dismembering human fetuses in ways that would make Dr. Josef Mengele proud.
It's clear that the pro-life/anti-abortion crowd hasn't adopted the philosophy of Hitler's murderous Nazi regime. That would be the pro-abortion crowd.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050990_Planned_Parenthood_abortion_Nazis.html#ixzz3kQKltBJt
by: J. D. Heyes
Most Americans would agree that the Nazi regime founded by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s was one of the most racist, ruthless and vile governments ever formed in the history of the planet. Unfortunately for backers of abortion – especially abortion on demand – they share a dark history with one of the world's most evil political movements.
In a well-documented post on the Angel Fire blog, the site notes that today's pro-abortion movement has claimed in the past that Hitler's Nazi regime was anti-abortion and anti-choice and that anyone who takes such positions is a Nazi.
The reality, however, is much different.
Abortions encouraged for "inferior" people
The Nazi regime was not pro-choice, nor was it anti-abortion by a long shot. Like everything else, Hitler's Nazis believed that "a woman's body" belonged not to her but to the German state, and as such the state would decide what to do with it.
While the Nazis would not permit abortions by healthy "Aryan" German women, they demanded and even forced abortion on non-Aryans considered inferior to the race such as Jewish women, gypsies, Slavic women and so forth. This also included Aryan women thought to be "feeble-minded" and those who had hereditary diseases. [1]
In fact, the Nazis did everything they could to increase the number of Aryan types. That included establishing "Liebensborn" ("Fountain of Life") compounds in which SS-type men would impregnate young Aryan German girls, including very young girls, to increase the number of "pure Ayrans" in the country. Abortion for these young girls was verboten.
Another Nazi tactic was forcing abortion on non-Ayran women in conquered nations to keep their populations down. Eventually this led to mass murder in concentration camps and by other means.
As for the health and vitality of the mother, Angel Fire noted:
The first court to rule that "viability" and the "woman's health" were determinate factors in abortion was the Nazi Heredity Court of 1934, when it ruled that "...pregnancy may be terminated, with the consent of the woman concerned, unless the foetus is already capable of independent life, or unless the termination of the pregnancy entails a serious danger to either the life or health of the woman herself." [2]
Who are the modern Nazis?
One of Hitler's top aides, Martin Bormann, said the following regarding abortion as it applied to non-Ayrans:
The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health service are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to one hundred. At best an education which produces useful coolies for us is admissible. Every educated person is a future enemy. [3]
Consider how this kind of attitude and language applies to the purveyors of abortion – Planned Parenthood – in today's America.
This is an organization that can use the phrase "freedom of choice", which was coined by the Nazis [as noted in this tweet by Progressives Today, a far-left political organization]. This is the same organization that originated from a racist, eugenics movement focusing primarily on reducing the numbers of African Americans, Asians and ensuring the "feeble-minded" did not reproduce, and it's an organization that supports "research" by dismembering human fetuses in ways that would make Dr. Josef Mengele proud.
It's clear that the pro-life/anti-abortion crowd hasn't adopted the philosophy of Hitler's murderous Nazi regime. That would be the pro-abortion crowd.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050990_Planned_Parenthood_abortion_Nazis.html#ixzz3kQKltBJt
Got mercury???
Dementia now striking people in their 40s as mercury from vaccines causes slow, degenerative brain damage
by: David Gutierrez
Dementia and other neurological brain diseases are striking people younger and younger, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Bournemouth University in England and published in the journal Surgical Neurology International. These diseases have reached levels that are "almost epidemic," the researchers said, and they reached them so quickly that environmental factors must be largely to blame.
"The rate of increase in such a short time suggests a silent or even a 'hidden' epidemic, in which environmental factors must play a major part, not just ageing," lead researcher Colin Pritchard said. "Modern living produces multi-interactional environmental pollution but the changes in human morbidity, including neurological disease is remarkable and points to environmental influences."
Death rates have more than doubled
The researchers compared the rates of neurological brain diseases in 21 Western countries from 1989 to 2010. They found that as of 2010, the average rate of onset for dementia was 10 years earlier than it was in 1989. In addition, deaths from neurological disease had increased significantly in people aged 55 to 74 and had nearly doubled in people aged 75 and older.
These changes were seen in all 21 countries, but the United States fared the worst by far. In the United States, neurological deaths in men older than 74 tripled from 1989 to 2010, and they increased nearly fivefold in women of the same age. More elderly U.S. women are now dying from brain diseases than from cancer for the first time in recorded history.
The researchers' analysis showed that the findings could not simply be explained by improved treatment of other diseases.
"Crucially it is not just because people are living longer to get diseases they previously would not have lived long enough to develop but older people are developing neurological disease more than ever before," Pritchard said.
Instead, a large part of the cause must be environmental changes that have taken place over the past two decades.
"The environmental changes in the last 20 years have seen increases in the human environment of petro-chemicals - air transport- quadrupling of motor vehicles, insecticides and rises in background electro-magnetic-field, and so on.
"These results will not be welcome news as there are many with short-term vested interests that will want to ignore them," he said.
Vaccine connection?
Could mercury exposure from vaccines play a role in the rising rates of early onset dementia? Until 2001, mercury-containing thimerosal was used as a preservative in many childhood vaccines. Even today, the substance is still used in adult vaccines as well as in flu shots given to children and adults.
In a study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in 2010, researchers reviewed 100 prior experimental and clinical studies looking at the effects of mercury on cells, animals and humans. They found that long-term mercury exposure produced many of the same changes seen in Alzheimer's disease, including confusion and impairments to memory and cognitive function.
"Mercury is clearly contributing to neurological problems, whose rate is increasing in parallel with rising levels of mercury," researcher Richard Deth said. "It seems that the two are tied together."
Aluminum, another common vaccine ingredient, has also been linked to dementia. For example, a 2009 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that people with the highest aluminum content in their drinking water also had the highest risk of dementia. Clinical studies have also directly linked aluminum to brain damage.
Both aluminum and mercury are also widely found in the environment due to contamination from other sources. Coal-burning power plants are the world's foremost source of mercury pollution and a major contributor to mercury contamination of fish. Dental fillings are also a major source of human mercury exposure.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050994_Alzheimers_vaccines_mercury_exposure.html#ixzz3kQKPwFiB
by: David Gutierrez
Dementia and other neurological brain diseases are striking people younger and younger, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Bournemouth University in England and published in the journal Surgical Neurology International. These diseases have reached levels that are "almost epidemic," the researchers said, and they reached them so quickly that environmental factors must be largely to blame.
"The rate of increase in such a short time suggests a silent or even a 'hidden' epidemic, in which environmental factors must play a major part, not just ageing," lead researcher Colin Pritchard said. "Modern living produces multi-interactional environmental pollution but the changes in human morbidity, including neurological disease is remarkable and points to environmental influences."
Death rates have more than doubled
The researchers compared the rates of neurological brain diseases in 21 Western countries from 1989 to 2010. They found that as of 2010, the average rate of onset for dementia was 10 years earlier than it was in 1989. In addition, deaths from neurological disease had increased significantly in people aged 55 to 74 and had nearly doubled in people aged 75 and older.
These changes were seen in all 21 countries, but the United States fared the worst by far. In the United States, neurological deaths in men older than 74 tripled from 1989 to 2010, and they increased nearly fivefold in women of the same age. More elderly U.S. women are now dying from brain diseases than from cancer for the first time in recorded history.
The researchers' analysis showed that the findings could not simply be explained by improved treatment of other diseases.
"Crucially it is not just because people are living longer to get diseases they previously would not have lived long enough to develop but older people are developing neurological disease more than ever before," Pritchard said.
Instead, a large part of the cause must be environmental changes that have taken place over the past two decades.
"The environmental changes in the last 20 years have seen increases in the human environment of petro-chemicals - air transport- quadrupling of motor vehicles, insecticides and rises in background electro-magnetic-field, and so on.
"These results will not be welcome news as there are many with short-term vested interests that will want to ignore them," he said.
Vaccine connection?
Could mercury exposure from vaccines play a role in the rising rates of early onset dementia? Until 2001, mercury-containing thimerosal was used as a preservative in many childhood vaccines. Even today, the substance is still used in adult vaccines as well as in flu shots given to children and adults.
In a study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in 2010, researchers reviewed 100 prior experimental and clinical studies looking at the effects of mercury on cells, animals and humans. They found that long-term mercury exposure produced many of the same changes seen in Alzheimer's disease, including confusion and impairments to memory and cognitive function.
"Mercury is clearly contributing to neurological problems, whose rate is increasing in parallel with rising levels of mercury," researcher Richard Deth said. "It seems that the two are tied together."
Aluminum, another common vaccine ingredient, has also been linked to dementia. For example, a 2009 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that people with the highest aluminum content in their drinking water also had the highest risk of dementia. Clinical studies have also directly linked aluminum to brain damage.
Both aluminum and mercury are also widely found in the environment due to contamination from other sources. Coal-burning power plants are the world's foremost source of mercury pollution and a major contributor to mercury contamination of fish. Dental fillings are also a major source of human mercury exposure.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050994_Alzheimers_vaccines_mercury_exposure.html#ixzz3kQKPwFiB
The winner and still champion...Capitalism!!!!
Why Capitalism Will Win
By Gary North
In the first week of January, 1950, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter was completing the final edits of a manuscript which he had delivered as a speech on December 30, 1949. The title was: “The March into Socialism.” He died before he finished the editing.
The article became a classic. It was reprinted in the third edition of his 1942 book: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950). The book has never been out of print.
In his article, he argued that the success of the business class is in fact its own destruction. It had created a massive, centralized industrial structure, and the government was now going to come in and regulate it. He had seen this during World War II. Capitalist civilization was undermining the traditional Western family. It was going to be regulated by socialists. World War I killed laissez-faire, he said. Now World War II had completed the transition. Perennial inflation was weakening the social fabric of society. Price controls were universal. “In other words, price control may result in a surrender of private enterprise to public authority, that is, in a big stride toward the perfectly planned economy.” At that point, he died.
Others who had heard him deliver his 1949 speech worked on putting together this final entry, which they thought they had heard him say:
Marx was wrong in his diagnosis of the manner in which capitalist society would break down; he was not wrong in the prediction that it would break down eventually. The stagnationists are wrong in their diagnosis of the reasons why capitalist process should stagnate; they make still turn out to be right in their prognosis that it will stagnate–with sufficient help from the public sector (pp. 424-25).
Schumpeter was startlingly wrong. Economic growth has not declined. Economic growth was about to enjoy an extraordinary increase. What happened in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea after 1950, and in China after 1979, has completely and utterly refuted Schumpeter.
Socialism as an ideology is finished today. There is almost nobody who calls himself a socialist, although Bernie Sanders is one.
Marxism is finished. Outside of North Korea, nobody calls himself a Marxist, except for the political elite in Communist China. But the economy over which they reign is not Communist, but basically Keynesian.
Maybe Fidel Castro and his brother still call themselves Communists, but the handwriting is on the wall in Havana. They have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
The triumph of the Keynesian version of capitalism is so comprehensive that Schumpeter’s prediction looks silly in retrospect. How could he have been so blind?
Read the rest here:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/14208.cfm
By Gary North
In the first week of January, 1950, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter was completing the final edits of a manuscript which he had delivered as a speech on December 30, 1949. The title was: “The March into Socialism.” He died before he finished the editing.
The article became a classic. It was reprinted in the third edition of his 1942 book: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950). The book has never been out of print.
In his article, he argued that the success of the business class is in fact its own destruction. It had created a massive, centralized industrial structure, and the government was now going to come in and regulate it. He had seen this during World War II. Capitalist civilization was undermining the traditional Western family. It was going to be regulated by socialists. World War I killed laissez-faire, he said. Now World War II had completed the transition. Perennial inflation was weakening the social fabric of society. Price controls were universal. “In other words, price control may result in a surrender of private enterprise to public authority, that is, in a big stride toward the perfectly planned economy.” At that point, he died.
Others who had heard him deliver his 1949 speech worked on putting together this final entry, which they thought they had heard him say:
Marx was wrong in his diagnosis of the manner in which capitalist society would break down; he was not wrong in the prediction that it would break down eventually. The stagnationists are wrong in their diagnosis of the reasons why capitalist process should stagnate; they make still turn out to be right in their prognosis that it will stagnate–with sufficient help from the public sector (pp. 424-25).
Schumpeter was startlingly wrong. Economic growth has not declined. Economic growth was about to enjoy an extraordinary increase. What happened in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea after 1950, and in China after 1979, has completely and utterly refuted Schumpeter.
Socialism as an ideology is finished today. There is almost nobody who calls himself a socialist, although Bernie Sanders is one.
Marxism is finished. Outside of North Korea, nobody calls himself a Marxist, except for the political elite in Communist China. But the economy over which they reign is not Communist, but basically Keynesian.
Maybe Fidel Castro and his brother still call themselves Communists, but the handwriting is on the wall in Havana. They have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
The triumph of the Keynesian version of capitalism is so comprehensive that Schumpeter’s prediction looks silly in retrospect. How could he have been so blind?
Read the rest here:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/14208.cfm
"Eventually the United States will have to abandon the warfare state, the welfare state, and the fiat money system that fuels leviathan’s growth."
Blame the Federal Reserve, Not China, for Stock Market Crash
Ron Paul
Following Monday’s historic stock market downturn, many politicians and so-called economic experts rushed to the microphones to explain why the market crashed and to propose “solutions” to our economic woes.
Not surprisingly, most of those commenting not only failed to give the right answers, they failed to ask the right questions.
Many blamed the crash on China’s recent currency devaluation. It is true that the crash was caused by a flawed monetary policy. However, the fault lies not with China’s central bank but with the US Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies distort the economy, creating bubbles, which in turn create a booming stock market and the illusion of widespread prosperity. Inevitably, the bubble bursts, the market crashes, and the economy sinks into a recession.
An increasing number of politicians have acknowledged the flaws in our monetary system. Unfortunately, some members of Congress think the solution is to force the Fed to follow a “rules-based” monetary policy. Forcing the Fed to “follow a rule” does not change the fact that giving a secretive central bank the power to set interest rates is a recipe for economic chaos. Interest rates are the price of money, and, like all prices, they should be set by the market, not by a central bank and certainly not by Congress.
Instead of trying to “fix” the Federal Reserve, Congress should start restoring a free-market monetary system. The first step is to pass the Audit the Fed legislation so the people can finally learn the full truth about the Fed. Congress should also pass legislation ensuring individuals can use alternative currencies free of government harassment.
When bubbles burst and recessions hit, Congress and the Federal Reserve should refrain from trying to “stimulate” the economy via increased spending, corporate bailouts, and inflation. The only way the economy will ever fully recover is if Congress and the Fed allow the recession to run its course.
Of course, Congress and the Fed are unlikely to “just stand there” if the economy further deteriorates. There have already been reports that the Fed will use last week’s crash as an excuse to once again delay raising interest rates. Increased spending and money creation may temporally boost the economy, but eventually they will lead to a collapse in the dollar’s value and an economic crisis more severe than the Great Depression.
Ironically, considering how popular China-bashing has become, China’s large purchase of US Treasury notes has helped the US postpone the day of reckoning. The main reason countries like China are eager to help finance our debt is the dollar’s world reserve currency status. However, there are signs that concerns over the US government’s fiscal irresponsibility and resentment of our foreign policy will cause another currency (or currencies) to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency. If this occurs, the US will face a major dollar crisis.
Congress will not adopt sensible economic policies until the people demand it. Unfortunately, while an ever-increasing number of Americans are embracing Austrian economics, too many Americans still believe they must sacrifice their liberties in order to obtain economic and personal security. This is why many are embracing a charismatic crony capitalist who is peddling a snake oil composed of protectionism, nationalism, and authoritarianism.
Eventually the United States will have to abandon the warfare state, the welfare state, and the fiat money system that fuels leviathan’s growth. Hopefully the change will happen because the ideas of liberty have triumphed, not because a major economic crisis leaves the government with no other choice.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/blame-the-federal-reserve-not-china-for-stock-market-crash.html
Ron Paul
Following Monday’s historic stock market downturn, many politicians and so-called economic experts rushed to the microphones to explain why the market crashed and to propose “solutions” to our economic woes.
Not surprisingly, most of those commenting not only failed to give the right answers, they failed to ask the right questions.
Many blamed the crash on China’s recent currency devaluation. It is true that the crash was caused by a flawed monetary policy. However, the fault lies not with China’s central bank but with the US Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies distort the economy, creating bubbles, which in turn create a booming stock market and the illusion of widespread prosperity. Inevitably, the bubble bursts, the market crashes, and the economy sinks into a recession.
An increasing number of politicians have acknowledged the flaws in our monetary system. Unfortunately, some members of Congress think the solution is to force the Fed to follow a “rules-based” monetary policy. Forcing the Fed to “follow a rule” does not change the fact that giving a secretive central bank the power to set interest rates is a recipe for economic chaos. Interest rates are the price of money, and, like all prices, they should be set by the market, not by a central bank and certainly not by Congress.
Instead of trying to “fix” the Federal Reserve, Congress should start restoring a free-market monetary system. The first step is to pass the Audit the Fed legislation so the people can finally learn the full truth about the Fed. Congress should also pass legislation ensuring individuals can use alternative currencies free of government harassment.
When bubbles burst and recessions hit, Congress and the Federal Reserve should refrain from trying to “stimulate” the economy via increased spending, corporate bailouts, and inflation. The only way the economy will ever fully recover is if Congress and the Fed allow the recession to run its course.
Of course, Congress and the Fed are unlikely to “just stand there” if the economy further deteriorates. There have already been reports that the Fed will use last week’s crash as an excuse to once again delay raising interest rates. Increased spending and money creation may temporally boost the economy, but eventually they will lead to a collapse in the dollar’s value and an economic crisis more severe than the Great Depression.
Ironically, considering how popular China-bashing has become, China’s large purchase of US Treasury notes has helped the US postpone the day of reckoning. The main reason countries like China are eager to help finance our debt is the dollar’s world reserve currency status. However, there are signs that concerns over the US government’s fiscal irresponsibility and resentment of our foreign policy will cause another currency (or currencies) to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency. If this occurs, the US will face a major dollar crisis.
Congress will not adopt sensible economic policies until the people demand it. Unfortunately, while an ever-increasing number of Americans are embracing Austrian economics, too many Americans still believe they must sacrifice their liberties in order to obtain economic and personal security. This is why many are embracing a charismatic crony capitalist who is peddling a snake oil composed of protectionism, nationalism, and authoritarianism.
Eventually the United States will have to abandon the warfare state, the welfare state, and the fiat money system that fuels leviathan’s growth. Hopefully the change will happen because the ideas of liberty have triumphed, not because a major economic crisis leaves the government with no other choice.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/blame-the-federal-reserve-not-china-for-stock-market-crash.html
Sunday, August 30, 2015
"Once we succumbed to the temptation of empire, all else followed: the altered demographics, the bread and the circuses, the demagogues and the Caesars."
Imperial America
Or: Have we gone crazy?
by Justin Raimondo
“May you live in interesting times” – that old (supposedly Chinese) curse seems to define the world today. “Interesting” is meant in the snarkish sense: it is a euphemism for unpleasant, or even intolerable, although in the present context I think a more appropriate term is baffling.
The political elites are baffled by the rise of Donald Trump: how is it that the celebrity equivalent of a circus clown could be number one in the GOP presidential race? Here, after all, is someone who wants to deport upward of some 11 million people – kick down their doors, put them on a train, and send them off to Mexico, in spite of the fact that many of them were born here. Asked by Hugh Hewitt if he’s an authoritarian, Trump didn’t deny it: instead he answered: “Everyone is weak. We need someone strong.”
At the considerable risk of sounding like an old fogy, I must confess to waking up some mornings and thinking: Where in the hell am I? No, it’s not the onrush of senility, although that day may not be far: it’s the indisputable reality that things that wouldn’t have been tolerated, or even taken seriously, as little as fifteen or twenty years ago are now utterly commonplace, and even the norm. Trump is only a symptom of the normalization of the bizarre, and, for lack of a better word, the debased.
I was struck, the other day, by this piece in The National Interest, which discusses the odd changes we have experienced in terms of the foreign policy discourse. Too often, Richard Burt and Dmitri Simes complain, the debate takes the form of a battle of the bumperstickers: what we see are competing slogans rather than rival policies being bruited about. Or, as they put it:
“[T]he debate over international affairs is now badly debased, particularly in Congress. The media, meanwhile, lacks the interest and the expertise (particularly in the digital space) to present vital issues to the American people. At the same time, despite a number of national-security setbacks – including in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya – voters appear ready to delegate authority to political elites with few questions or constraints, perhaps because ordinary Americans see no direct negative impacts on their daily lives.”
A disengaged citizenry, a political class imbued with hubris and the spirit of Caesarism: where have we seen this before? It is late imperial Rome, perhaps at the height of its power – or, perhaps, at the moment before its long descent. There is indeed a certain Romanesque quality to the triumphalist tone of the foreign policy discourse in this country, as Burt and Simes go on to relate:
“With victory in the Cold War and absent a rival superpower to limit and shape U.S. choices, America’s new foreign-policy establishment has adopted a simplistic, moralistic and triumphalist mindset: foreign policy by bumper sticker. This mindset abandons traditional foreign-policy analysis, which emphasizes establishing a hierarchy of priorities, making difficult decisions over tradeoffs and considering the unintended consequences of US actions. It also ignores the fact that America’s political system has consistently failed to sustain costly international interventions when vital national interests are not at stake. Prominent voices dismiss those raising such concerns as cynical realists, isolationists or, more recently, unpatriotic Putin apologists. Many tacitly accept this form of intimidation by interventionists who substitute chest-thumping for coherent and serious, historically grounded arguments.”
What Burt and Simes are really complaining about is the fact that America has made the transition from republic to empire. An empire, particularly one such as the United States, doesn’t need – or thinks it doesn’t need – to establish priorities because, after all, we’re all-powerful, aren’t we? Traditional foreign policy analysis – who the heck needs it? As some anonymous White House aide told Ron Suskind back in 2004:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
In the age of the Caesars the function of reporters, analysts, and commentators is akin to that of ancient scribes: their job is not to note the facts and discern the truth but to reflect the self-created “reality” of the political class, and particularly its Great Leaders. Their job, in short, is to shout “Hail Caesar!” and record his (or her) great achievements for posterity.
“We’re an empire now” … well, yes. That old scold Garet Garrett, a former New York Times editor turned prophet, warned us at the dawn of the cold war of what was not only coming but was already a reality in 1952:
“We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: ‘You are now entering Imperium.’ Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: ‘Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.’ And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: ‘No U-turns.’"
No, there are no painted signs, but there are indications, portents, auguries of our fate: Trump, the cartoon Caesar, may be one of them. The Iraq war, and the ceaseless conflicts that followed in its wake, are less subtle symptoms of the imperial disease, the decadence that eats away at the heart of all republics similarly afflicted with the virus of imperialism. And the symptoms are not limited to the foreign policy and political realms, as the conservative theorist Claes Ryn has pointed out: there are cultural and psychological traits that infiltrate and eventually overthrow the old “republican virtues” of self-restraint, modesty, and civic duty. In our own case, these have been replaced, much to Ryn’s disgust, by recklessness and narcissism, and in this piece he relates his personal experience with the phenomenon.
Ryn describes lunchtime at a McDonald’s in “one of the most affluent and pretentious suburbs in America just outside of Washington, D.C.” It is, in short, the territory of America’s ruling elite, and the behavior of the children is described by Ryn with damning precision: they scream if they don’t get their French fries fast enough, they make noise as if the decibel level measures the degree of their enjoyment, and of course the parents are oblivious to how all this impacts on everyone else in the room. The children are merely reflections of their egotistical parents: in short, both children and parents are spoiled brats. Ryn goes on to write:
“Yes,this picture has everything to do with US foreign policy. This is the emerging American ruling class, which is made up increasingly of persons used to having the world cater to them. If others challenge their will, they throw a temper tantrum. Call this the imperialistic personality – if ‘spoilt brat’ sounds too crude.”
An arrogant, ingrown patrician class, increasingly out of touch, and contemptuous of those who live in “flyover country,” is, in turn, matched in its debasement by America’s plebeians.
Here we see the “trickle-down” theory of cultural decadence demonstrated in the rise of a new form of journalism: news reporting as a function of what Jacob Heilbrunn calls the “entertainment-industrial complex.” Citing an essay by Sam Tannehaus in The American Prospect, Heilbrunn avers that it’s the media and not Trump who are responsible for The Donald’s rise on account of “the temptation to turn every event into a mini-drama.” He notes Tannehaus’s point that this is “deeply injurious” to the journalistic profession which has even infiltrated the newsroom over at the New York Times, that temple of journalistic punctiliousnes – but is this really something new?
Didn’t the “reporting” of Judith Miller turn the run up to the Iraq war into a “mini-drama” – a story of brave “dissidents” like Ahmed Chalabi & Co. uncovering the alleged deception of the bloody tyrant Saddam Hussein? Going farther back in history, what about the Hearst papers reporting the sinking of the Maine as an act of Spanish treachery? And then there were those Belgian babies supposedly speared on German bayonets whose grisly and entirely fictitious fate inspired us to enter the Great War – a lie that was limned by the Great Lantos Hoax which provoked the first Gulf War. Is it really something novel that journalism is no longer about the truth but rather about selling a “narrative”?
Yes, American journalism in the age of empire has become a form of entertainment. In chronicling the decline of the Roman republic, the writer Juvenal disdained the abdication of civic duty by citizens who were content to suffer demagogues so long as they were the source of plentiful “bread and circuses.” The latter surely fits Heilbrunn’s description of the “entertainment-industrial complex.”
Disengaged yet disgruntled, kept down and yet increasingly uppity, average Americans are both apathetic and angry when it comes to politics. They are ready for someone who simultaneously entertains and entrances them with the prospect of an American Caesar. As that grumpy old republican (small-“r”) George Will puts it:
“Some supporters simply find Trump entertainingly naughty. Others, however, have remarkable cognitive dissonance. They properly execrate Obama’s executive highhandedness that expresses progressivism’s traditional disdain for the separation of powers that often makes government action difficult. But these same Trumpkins simultaneously despise GOP congressional leaders because they do not somehow jettison the separation of powers and work conservatism’s unimpeded will from Capitol Hill.
“For conservatives, this is the dispiriting irony: The administrative state’s intrusiveness … may benefit the principal architect of this state, the Democratic Party. This is because the other party’s talented critics of the administrative state are being drowned out by Trump’s recent discovery that Americans understandably disgusted by government can be beguiled by a summons to Caesarism.”
It is truly ironic that today’s “conservative” Trump supporters long for a Caesar to undo the effects of … Caesarism, i.e. Big Government. And yet there is more irony to be had in the rise of Trumpismo, which first caught the nation’s attention on account of the immigration issue.
Every empire has open borders: it cannot be otherwise. Just as we claim the “right” to invade the world, so the world claims the corollary right to invade us. Where else will those Vietnamese allies who fled our defeat find sanctuary? What of the Iraqis made homeless by our wars of “liberation”?
Half a century after Sen. Ted Kennedy’s immigration “reform” changed the demographics of this country forever – legislation that caused barely a ripple at the time – the Trumpkins have decided to make a last stand of it. Indeed, one can locate the date when the issue was decided much farther back – all the way back to the war with Mexico that handed us Texas and the rest of the American Southwest, including California.
Trump wants to send the Mexicans back in railroad cars and buses – but they were here first, and no mere wall will keep them out. We conquered them and they are ours. We’re a global empire – so why are we surprised to wake up one day to find the peoples of the world teeming in our streets?
Once we succumbed to the temptation of empire, all else followed: the altered demographics, the bread and the circuses, the demagogues and the Caesars. Garrett, the prophet of our doom, gave us plenty of warning: he told us there are “no U-turns” – and perhaps he was right. However, that’s one prophecy that has yet to be proved true.
Link:
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/08/27/imperial-america/
Or: Have we gone crazy?
by Justin Raimondo
“May you live in interesting times” – that old (supposedly Chinese) curse seems to define the world today. “Interesting” is meant in the snarkish sense: it is a euphemism for unpleasant, or even intolerable, although in the present context I think a more appropriate term is baffling.
The political elites are baffled by the rise of Donald Trump: how is it that the celebrity equivalent of a circus clown could be number one in the GOP presidential race? Here, after all, is someone who wants to deport upward of some 11 million people – kick down their doors, put them on a train, and send them off to Mexico, in spite of the fact that many of them were born here. Asked by Hugh Hewitt if he’s an authoritarian, Trump didn’t deny it: instead he answered: “Everyone is weak. We need someone strong.”
At the considerable risk of sounding like an old fogy, I must confess to waking up some mornings and thinking: Where in the hell am I? No, it’s not the onrush of senility, although that day may not be far: it’s the indisputable reality that things that wouldn’t have been tolerated, or even taken seriously, as little as fifteen or twenty years ago are now utterly commonplace, and even the norm. Trump is only a symptom of the normalization of the bizarre, and, for lack of a better word, the debased.
I was struck, the other day, by this piece in The National Interest, which discusses the odd changes we have experienced in terms of the foreign policy discourse. Too often, Richard Burt and Dmitri Simes complain, the debate takes the form of a battle of the bumperstickers: what we see are competing slogans rather than rival policies being bruited about. Or, as they put it:
“[T]he debate over international affairs is now badly debased, particularly in Congress. The media, meanwhile, lacks the interest and the expertise (particularly in the digital space) to present vital issues to the American people. At the same time, despite a number of national-security setbacks – including in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya – voters appear ready to delegate authority to political elites with few questions or constraints, perhaps because ordinary Americans see no direct negative impacts on their daily lives.”
A disengaged citizenry, a political class imbued with hubris and the spirit of Caesarism: where have we seen this before? It is late imperial Rome, perhaps at the height of its power – or, perhaps, at the moment before its long descent. There is indeed a certain Romanesque quality to the triumphalist tone of the foreign policy discourse in this country, as Burt and Simes go on to relate:
“With victory in the Cold War and absent a rival superpower to limit and shape U.S. choices, America’s new foreign-policy establishment has adopted a simplistic, moralistic and triumphalist mindset: foreign policy by bumper sticker. This mindset abandons traditional foreign-policy analysis, which emphasizes establishing a hierarchy of priorities, making difficult decisions over tradeoffs and considering the unintended consequences of US actions. It also ignores the fact that America’s political system has consistently failed to sustain costly international interventions when vital national interests are not at stake. Prominent voices dismiss those raising such concerns as cynical realists, isolationists or, more recently, unpatriotic Putin apologists. Many tacitly accept this form of intimidation by interventionists who substitute chest-thumping for coherent and serious, historically grounded arguments.”
What Burt and Simes are really complaining about is the fact that America has made the transition from republic to empire. An empire, particularly one such as the United States, doesn’t need – or thinks it doesn’t need – to establish priorities because, after all, we’re all-powerful, aren’t we? Traditional foreign policy analysis – who the heck needs it? As some anonymous White House aide told Ron Suskind back in 2004:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
In the age of the Caesars the function of reporters, analysts, and commentators is akin to that of ancient scribes: their job is not to note the facts and discern the truth but to reflect the self-created “reality” of the political class, and particularly its Great Leaders. Their job, in short, is to shout “Hail Caesar!” and record his (or her) great achievements for posterity.
“We’re an empire now” … well, yes. That old scold Garet Garrett, a former New York Times editor turned prophet, warned us at the dawn of the cold war of what was not only coming but was already a reality in 1952:
“We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: ‘You are now entering Imperium.’ Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: ‘Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.’ And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: ‘No U-turns.’"
No, there are no painted signs, but there are indications, portents, auguries of our fate: Trump, the cartoon Caesar, may be one of them. The Iraq war, and the ceaseless conflicts that followed in its wake, are less subtle symptoms of the imperial disease, the decadence that eats away at the heart of all republics similarly afflicted with the virus of imperialism. And the symptoms are not limited to the foreign policy and political realms, as the conservative theorist Claes Ryn has pointed out: there are cultural and psychological traits that infiltrate and eventually overthrow the old “republican virtues” of self-restraint, modesty, and civic duty. In our own case, these have been replaced, much to Ryn’s disgust, by recklessness and narcissism, and in this piece he relates his personal experience with the phenomenon.
Ryn describes lunchtime at a McDonald’s in “one of the most affluent and pretentious suburbs in America just outside of Washington, D.C.” It is, in short, the territory of America’s ruling elite, and the behavior of the children is described by Ryn with damning precision: they scream if they don’t get their French fries fast enough, they make noise as if the decibel level measures the degree of their enjoyment, and of course the parents are oblivious to how all this impacts on everyone else in the room. The children are merely reflections of their egotistical parents: in short, both children and parents are spoiled brats. Ryn goes on to write:
“Yes,this picture has everything to do with US foreign policy. This is the emerging American ruling class, which is made up increasingly of persons used to having the world cater to them. If others challenge their will, they throw a temper tantrum. Call this the imperialistic personality – if ‘spoilt brat’ sounds too crude.”
An arrogant, ingrown patrician class, increasingly out of touch, and contemptuous of those who live in “flyover country,” is, in turn, matched in its debasement by America’s plebeians.
Here we see the “trickle-down” theory of cultural decadence demonstrated in the rise of a new form of journalism: news reporting as a function of what Jacob Heilbrunn calls the “entertainment-industrial complex.” Citing an essay by Sam Tannehaus in The American Prospect, Heilbrunn avers that it’s the media and not Trump who are responsible for The Donald’s rise on account of “the temptation to turn every event into a mini-drama.” He notes Tannehaus’s point that this is “deeply injurious” to the journalistic profession which has even infiltrated the newsroom over at the New York Times, that temple of journalistic punctiliousnes – but is this really something new?
Didn’t the “reporting” of Judith Miller turn the run up to the Iraq war into a “mini-drama” – a story of brave “dissidents” like Ahmed Chalabi & Co. uncovering the alleged deception of the bloody tyrant Saddam Hussein? Going farther back in history, what about the Hearst papers reporting the sinking of the Maine as an act of Spanish treachery? And then there were those Belgian babies supposedly speared on German bayonets whose grisly and entirely fictitious fate inspired us to enter the Great War – a lie that was limned by the Great Lantos Hoax which provoked the first Gulf War. Is it really something novel that journalism is no longer about the truth but rather about selling a “narrative”?
Yes, American journalism in the age of empire has become a form of entertainment. In chronicling the decline of the Roman republic, the writer Juvenal disdained the abdication of civic duty by citizens who were content to suffer demagogues so long as they were the source of plentiful “bread and circuses.” The latter surely fits Heilbrunn’s description of the “entertainment-industrial complex.”
Disengaged yet disgruntled, kept down and yet increasingly uppity, average Americans are both apathetic and angry when it comes to politics. They are ready for someone who simultaneously entertains and entrances them with the prospect of an American Caesar. As that grumpy old republican (small-“r”) George Will puts it:
“Some supporters simply find Trump entertainingly naughty. Others, however, have remarkable cognitive dissonance. They properly execrate Obama’s executive highhandedness that expresses progressivism’s traditional disdain for the separation of powers that often makes government action difficult. But these same Trumpkins simultaneously despise GOP congressional leaders because they do not somehow jettison the separation of powers and work conservatism’s unimpeded will from Capitol Hill.
“For conservatives, this is the dispiriting irony: The administrative state’s intrusiveness … may benefit the principal architect of this state, the Democratic Party. This is because the other party’s talented critics of the administrative state are being drowned out by Trump’s recent discovery that Americans understandably disgusted by government can be beguiled by a summons to Caesarism.”
It is truly ironic that today’s “conservative” Trump supporters long for a Caesar to undo the effects of … Caesarism, i.e. Big Government. And yet there is more irony to be had in the rise of Trumpismo, which first caught the nation’s attention on account of the immigration issue.
Every empire has open borders: it cannot be otherwise. Just as we claim the “right” to invade the world, so the world claims the corollary right to invade us. Where else will those Vietnamese allies who fled our defeat find sanctuary? What of the Iraqis made homeless by our wars of “liberation”?
Half a century after Sen. Ted Kennedy’s immigration “reform” changed the demographics of this country forever – legislation that caused barely a ripple at the time – the Trumpkins have decided to make a last stand of it. Indeed, one can locate the date when the issue was decided much farther back – all the way back to the war with Mexico that handed us Texas and the rest of the American Southwest, including California.
Trump wants to send the Mexicans back in railroad cars and buses – but they were here first, and no mere wall will keep them out. We conquered them and they are ours. We’re a global empire – so why are we surprised to wake up one day to find the peoples of the world teeming in our streets?
Once we succumbed to the temptation of empire, all else followed: the altered demographics, the bread and the circuses, the demagogues and the Caesars. Garrett, the prophet of our doom, gave us plenty of warning: he told us there are “no U-turns” – and perhaps he was right. However, that’s one prophecy that has yet to be proved true.
Link:
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/08/27/imperial-america/
Drop the Whole Language and go back to Phonics...
The total dumbing down of America: Eleventh graders given assignment to read "Three Little Pigs" book for kindergarteners
by: J. D. Heyes
For years, Americans concerned with declining educational standards on the primary level have watched as politicians in bed with the teachers unions continually make excuses for poor performances and promise to "fix" discrepancies with "more money" and "more teacher training."
Nothing has worked, even though the United States spends more per student, per capita, on primary education than any other industrialized nation. U.S. students still lag behind those of developed nations.
As CBS News noted in 2014:
The United States spent more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student. When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system -- more than any other nation covered in the report.
In December 2013, the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, added:
American 15-year-olds continue to turn in flat results in a test that measures students' proficiency in reading, math and science worldwide, failing to crack the global top 20.
Book is regularly assigned to kindergarteners
If a recent assignment at a school in New York City is any indication, the reason that American students lag ought to become very obvious.
As reported by the New York Post under the headline "Here's the proof a NYC diploma is worthless," state education officials recently discovered that 11th graders at Landmark High School were assigned a third-grade tome – The Three Little Pigs – as a reading assignment earlier this year.
"The report from the state Education Department says the classic children's fairy tale was just one of several ridiculously easy reading assignments uncovered at" the same school this year, the Post noted.
"'The Three Little Pigs' story was read round-robin style in a grade 11 classroom, which demonstrated limited student access in this class to grade-level text," said the report, from the department's Office of Accountability.
Following a two-day review of the Chelsea school – an institution that has been flagged for poor outcomes and performance – investigators found very "low level" texts in other classes as well, the Post reported.
Some students at Landmark struggled when it came to reading, digesting and understanding age- and grade-appropriate texts.
Private schools okay for the elite, not for the little people
"In classes where students were observed reading challenging text, when asked to answer simple questions about the text, most either reread the words in the text or said they did not know," the report noted.
Here's another telling fact: The classic Three Little Pigs, which is largely illustrated, is actually recommended at all city public schools, but only for kids who just finished Kindergarten.
"I can't even believe this is part of a high school's instruction," the ex-official told the Post. "I'm very surprised to see this. This doesn't seem reasonable for a high school."
That's putting it mildly.
In additional state Education Department findings, young adults at Flushing High School, where the Post reported that 150 failing students took quick "credit recovery" courses so they could graduate, did not remember ever getting a single assignment that was "memorable or challenging."
The Post continued:
At Brooklyn's Boys and Girls High School, more than one-third of all classes were being disrupted by students' chatter a month after Mayor Bill de Blasio touted supposed improvements there in March.
Meanwhile, the ruling class and financial elite continue sending their kids to swanky, expensive private schools on the primary and secondary levels while doing little to nothing to fix failing public schools that do not prepare American kids to compete with children in other developed countries for higher-end employment or to be the next generation's leaders.
Unless, of course, you're President Obama. Then you hypocritically complain about "other people" who use private schools while sending your own kids to one.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050979_public_schools_education_system_NYC.html#ixzz3kJmFtMHe
by: J. D. Heyes
For years, Americans concerned with declining educational standards on the primary level have watched as politicians in bed with the teachers unions continually make excuses for poor performances and promise to "fix" discrepancies with "more money" and "more teacher training."
Nothing has worked, even though the United States spends more per student, per capita, on primary education than any other industrialized nation. U.S. students still lag behind those of developed nations.
As CBS News noted in 2014:
The United States spent more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student. When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system -- more than any other nation covered in the report.
In December 2013, the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, added:
American 15-year-olds continue to turn in flat results in a test that measures students' proficiency in reading, math and science worldwide, failing to crack the global top 20.
Book is regularly assigned to kindergarteners
If a recent assignment at a school in New York City is any indication, the reason that American students lag ought to become very obvious.
As reported by the New York Post under the headline "Here's the proof a NYC diploma is worthless," state education officials recently discovered that 11th graders at Landmark High School were assigned a third-grade tome – The Three Little Pigs – as a reading assignment earlier this year.
"The report from the state Education Department says the classic children's fairy tale was just one of several ridiculously easy reading assignments uncovered at" the same school this year, the Post noted.
"'The Three Little Pigs' story was read round-robin style in a grade 11 classroom, which demonstrated limited student access in this class to grade-level text," said the report, from the department's Office of Accountability.
Following a two-day review of the Chelsea school – an institution that has been flagged for poor outcomes and performance – investigators found very "low level" texts in other classes as well, the Post reported.
Some students at Landmark struggled when it came to reading, digesting and understanding age- and grade-appropriate texts.
Private schools okay for the elite, not for the little people
"In classes where students were observed reading challenging text, when asked to answer simple questions about the text, most either reread the words in the text or said they did not know," the report noted.
Here's another telling fact: The classic Three Little Pigs, which is largely illustrated, is actually recommended at all city public schools, but only for kids who just finished Kindergarten.
"I can't even believe this is part of a high school's instruction," the ex-official told the Post. "I'm very surprised to see this. This doesn't seem reasonable for a high school."
That's putting it mildly.
In additional state Education Department findings, young adults at Flushing High School, where the Post reported that 150 failing students took quick "credit recovery" courses so they could graduate, did not remember ever getting a single assignment that was "memorable or challenging."
The Post continued:
At Brooklyn's Boys and Girls High School, more than one-third of all classes were being disrupted by students' chatter a month after Mayor Bill de Blasio touted supposed improvements there in March.
Meanwhile, the ruling class and financial elite continue sending their kids to swanky, expensive private schools on the primary and secondary levels while doing little to nothing to fix failing public schools that do not prepare American kids to compete with children in other developed countries for higher-end employment or to be the next generation's leaders.
Unless, of course, you're President Obama. Then you hypocritically complain about "other people" who use private schools while sending your own kids to one.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050979_public_schools_education_system_NYC.html#ixzz3kJmFtMHe
" Throughout our recent history, there are a number of examples where Congress and the Executive Branch have proposed or passed legislation that, in practice, does exactly the opposite of what elected officials said it would do, in direct contradiction of their titles."
Why do government agencies do the opposite of what they say? EPA pollutes, DEA runs drugs, ATF smuggles guns, FBI plots terrorism
by: J. D. Heyes
The Affordable Care Act that isn't affordable and has raised health insurance rates and the cost of healthcare.
The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, designed to improve food labeling but which actually bans states from enacting their own GMO labeling requirements, thus keeping food labels inaccurate.
The USA Patriot Act, a major post-9/11 bill that redefined "patriotism" as massive unconstitutional government surveillance and intrusion.
And so on.
Throughout our recent history, there are a number of examples where Congress and the Executive Branch have proposed or passed legislation that, in practice, does exactly the opposite of what elected officials said it would do, in direct contradiction of their titles.
The same is true of the federal bureaucracy: There are innumerable examples of federal agencies performing tasks and undertaking missions that are diametrically opposite of their founding purpose.
Consider these examples:
-- EPA polluting rivers: The EPA recently caused over 3 millions gallons of toxic waste to spill into Colorado's Animas River while "cleaning up" the Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO. A local retired geologist predicted that the EPA would actually cause a massive toxic spill in order to secure federal funding for a "Superfund" site. And that is exactly what happened, and is happening. Since the incident, the EPA has declared that the affected river water is perfectly clean and safe, although toxic lead and arsenic now line the river banks on historic Navajo land. After spreading their poison on Navajo land and putting countless lives at risk, appointed EPA officials are now defying Congress members elected to represent Americans and refusing to release documents related to the mine spill.
-- Operation Fast and Furious: Begun at the outset of the Obama Administration, Fast and Furious was a gun-running operation headed by the Justice Department and, specifically, by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – the federal agency charged with investigating, among other crimes, gun-running. In particular, the ATF sold thousands of guns to "straw" purchasers who were buying them to transfer to Mexican drug lords south of the border. The plan, according to some, was to have the ATF track those weapons and, upon locating them in the hands of the drug lords, make arrests.
None of that seems plausible from the outset, when you consider that the U.S. government has no authority to arrest anyone in Mexico, and for that to have ever happened would have required the cooperation of the Mexican authorities.
Secondly, there were no tracking devices placed on any of the trafficked weapons, which consisted primarily of "assault weapons" – that is, semi-automatic rifles that resemble military counterparts which are truly assault weapons – so there was no way to actually track them.
Why the operation in the first place? Because, as investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson for CBS News pointed out, it was an administration attempt to push for stricter gun control laws.
-- Drug Enforcement Agency making drug deals: As reported by Business Insider (BI) in January 2014, the DEA – an agency formed to enforce federal drug laws and battle drug trafficking – was actually involving in drug trafficking.
Citing El Universal, BI reported that, "between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels."
From "drug enforcement" to "drug smuggling."
-- The FBI's staged anti-terror campaign: Since 9/11, the FBI – no doubt in an effort to remain relevant, powerful and well-funded, has expended no small amount of resources to manufacture "terrorism" cases.
As reported by The New York Times in 2012, the FBI has essentially created a cottage industry of terrorism, using undercover operatives who pretend to be planning attacks on the United States, only to ensnare "suspects" it has created out of whole cloth.
The paper noted:
THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naively played their parts until they were arrested.
Such operations are legal, the paper noted, but just how ethical are they? And in a time when real terrorism is a real threat, should the FBI be in the business of creating terrorist incidents when the agency is supposed to be rooting out and foiling legitimate plots?
-- The Department of State: The diplomatic wing of the U.S. government, the role of the State Department "is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world." But in practice, the State Department has often been used as an organ of espionage for the U.S. intelligence community.
As laid out in Executive Order 12333, titled, "United States Intelligence Activities" and signed by President Ronald Reagan in December 1981, under Section 1.9, the department is required to conduct intelligence operations, which is different from, say, spreading democracy.
As the editor of Natural News, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported recently, the federal bureaucracy's myriad of alphabet agencies has a long history of doing exactly the opposite of what you'd expect them to be doing.
"Almost EVERY federal government agency is now functioning as a rogue entity. Nearly all of them routinely carry out false flag events in order to justify their own existence (and increase their budgets)," he wrote. "In a very real way, U.S. government agencies have become mafia-style cartels carrying out domestic terrorism across America in order to justify their own existence."
The Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense after World War II, by the way. While the Pentagon certainly defends the country, it also conducts offensive operations – makes war, in other words – when ordered to do so by the Congress and president.
Just another dichotomy.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050986_government_agencies_bureaucracy_hypocrisy.html#ixzz3kJlRzEFc
by: J. D. Heyes
The Affordable Care Act that isn't affordable and has raised health insurance rates and the cost of healthcare.
The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, designed to improve food labeling but which actually bans states from enacting their own GMO labeling requirements, thus keeping food labels inaccurate.
The USA Patriot Act, a major post-9/11 bill that redefined "patriotism" as massive unconstitutional government surveillance and intrusion.
And so on.
Throughout our recent history, there are a number of examples where Congress and the Executive Branch have proposed or passed legislation that, in practice, does exactly the opposite of what elected officials said it would do, in direct contradiction of their titles.
The same is true of the federal bureaucracy: There are innumerable examples of federal agencies performing tasks and undertaking missions that are diametrically opposite of their founding purpose.
Consider these examples:
-- EPA polluting rivers: The EPA recently caused over 3 millions gallons of toxic waste to spill into Colorado's Animas River while "cleaning up" the Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO. A local retired geologist predicted that the EPA would actually cause a massive toxic spill in order to secure federal funding for a "Superfund" site. And that is exactly what happened, and is happening. Since the incident, the EPA has declared that the affected river water is perfectly clean and safe, although toxic lead and arsenic now line the river banks on historic Navajo land. After spreading their poison on Navajo land and putting countless lives at risk, appointed EPA officials are now defying Congress members elected to represent Americans and refusing to release documents related to the mine spill.
-- Operation Fast and Furious: Begun at the outset of the Obama Administration, Fast and Furious was a gun-running operation headed by the Justice Department and, specifically, by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – the federal agency charged with investigating, among other crimes, gun-running. In particular, the ATF sold thousands of guns to "straw" purchasers who were buying them to transfer to Mexican drug lords south of the border. The plan, according to some, was to have the ATF track those weapons and, upon locating them in the hands of the drug lords, make arrests.
None of that seems plausible from the outset, when you consider that the U.S. government has no authority to arrest anyone in Mexico, and for that to have ever happened would have required the cooperation of the Mexican authorities.
Secondly, there were no tracking devices placed on any of the trafficked weapons, which consisted primarily of "assault weapons" – that is, semi-automatic rifles that resemble military counterparts which are truly assault weapons – so there was no way to actually track them.
Why the operation in the first place? Because, as investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson for CBS News pointed out, it was an administration attempt to push for stricter gun control laws.
-- Drug Enforcement Agency making drug deals: As reported by Business Insider (BI) in January 2014, the DEA – an agency formed to enforce federal drug laws and battle drug trafficking – was actually involving in drug trafficking.
Citing El Universal, BI reported that, "between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels."
From "drug enforcement" to "drug smuggling."
-- The FBI's staged anti-terror campaign: Since 9/11, the FBI – no doubt in an effort to remain relevant, powerful and well-funded, has expended no small amount of resources to manufacture "terrorism" cases.
As reported by The New York Times in 2012, the FBI has essentially created a cottage industry of terrorism, using undercover operatives who pretend to be planning attacks on the United States, only to ensnare "suspects" it has created out of whole cloth.
The paper noted:
THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naively played their parts until they were arrested.
Such operations are legal, the paper noted, but just how ethical are they? And in a time when real terrorism is a real threat, should the FBI be in the business of creating terrorist incidents when the agency is supposed to be rooting out and foiling legitimate plots?
-- The Department of State: The diplomatic wing of the U.S. government, the role of the State Department "is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world." But in practice, the State Department has often been used as an organ of espionage for the U.S. intelligence community.
As laid out in Executive Order 12333, titled, "United States Intelligence Activities" and signed by President Ronald Reagan in December 1981, under Section 1.9, the department is required to conduct intelligence operations, which is different from, say, spreading democracy.
As the editor of Natural News, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported recently, the federal bureaucracy's myriad of alphabet agencies has a long history of doing exactly the opposite of what you'd expect them to be doing.
"Almost EVERY federal government agency is now functioning as a rogue entity. Nearly all of them routinely carry out false flag events in order to justify their own existence (and increase their budgets)," he wrote. "In a very real way, U.S. government agencies have become mafia-style cartels carrying out domestic terrorism across America in order to justify their own existence."
The Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense after World War II, by the way. While the Pentagon certainly defends the country, it also conducts offensive operations – makes war, in other words – when ordered to do so by the Congress and president.
Just another dichotomy.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050986_government_agencies_bureaucracy_hypocrisy.html#ixzz3kJlRzEFc
Saturday, August 29, 2015
These people are no better than NAZIS executed for crimes against humanity...
If you're outraged over the killing of Cecil the Lion, but NOT over Planned Parenthood murdering babies for organ harvesting, you're mentally ill
by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
The international community was in an uproar over the recent killing of "Cecil the Lion" in Zimbabwe. But very little attention, at least from the mainstream media, is being given to the Planned Parenthood scandal as brought to light by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), which is continuing to release a series of undercover videos exposing the nation's largest abortion provider for illegally harvesting tissue and organs from aborted human babies and selling them to biologics companies.
Sure, the media is reporting on the Planned Parenthood saga, but not necessarily from an angle of truth. Like the Obama White House, news corporations like CNN and MSNBC remain in denial about Planned Parenthood's nefarious and illegal activities involving the callous harvesting and sale of human hearts, brains and other body parts extracted from murdered unborn babies in the womb, which is a much more serious offense than a single lion death in Africa.
Late-night talk show goon Jimmy Kimmel, for instance, who back in the spring made fun of vaccine skeptics and parents of vaccine-injured children, was seen manufacturing a few tears in response to Cecil the Lion's death during a recent segment on his show. But Kimmel hasn't said a word about the thousands of unborn babies who are murdered every single day throughout America and chopped up for profit so amoral individuals like Planned Parenthood's Mary Gatter can buy expensive cars.
This disparity in the public's response to these two events is a clear sign of mental illness, and it appears to be rampant throughout the West these days. A lion's death, though unwarranted, is seen as more evil than senior-level officials at Planned Parenthood openly discussing how to sidestep the law as they barter over the value of bloody human body parts in a Petri dish.
ALL life is valuable: human, animal and otherwise
Has the modern world gone so completely mad that human life is now seen as completely irrelevant, while the lives of animals are elevated to a status beyond even humans? Cecil the lion's death is admittedly disheartening, especially if the details surrounding his death are true as they're being presented in the media. But what about unborn human life being terminated for purposes of eugenics and greed?
Watch the undercover Planned Parenthood videos for yourself to see these completely heartless individuals discuss unborn baby organs as if they were nothing more than automotive parts being sold on eBay to the highest bidder.
In this first CMP video, Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood Federation of America's Senior Director of Medical Services, goes into great detail about how her organization utilizes techniques to minimize the "crushing" of unborn human beings so their organs won't be destroyed (and thus be salable, which is a felony crime):
The second CMP video expounds upon this, with Planned Parenthood's Medical Director's Council President, Mary Gatter, getting down and dirty into the negotiation process for murdered baby body parts. Gatter jokes about wanting a Lamborghini with all the money she can make over the illegal sale of aborted human baby organs:
If this isn't enough to get your stomach churning, a third CMP video shows Savita Ginde of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains talking about how her organization avoids legal ramifications for illegally selling baby body parts. She even shows to undercover actors samples of this tissue in the lab, remarking how Planned Parenthood has to be careful not to "get caught," especially in states that are "really anti" abortion:
As the Health Ranger, Mike Adams, puts it, "All butchery of innocent life is wrong." But the blatant neglect of Planned Parenthood's genocidal actions against the most innocent of life, that of the unborn baby, is much more deeply unsettling than the isolated killing of a lion.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050976_Cecil_the_Lion_Planned_Parenthood_organ_harvesting.html#ixzz3kDhvB7xz
by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
The international community was in an uproar over the recent killing of "Cecil the Lion" in Zimbabwe. But very little attention, at least from the mainstream media, is being given to the Planned Parenthood scandal as brought to light by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), which is continuing to release a series of undercover videos exposing the nation's largest abortion provider for illegally harvesting tissue and organs from aborted human babies and selling them to biologics companies.
Sure, the media is reporting on the Planned Parenthood saga, but not necessarily from an angle of truth. Like the Obama White House, news corporations like CNN and MSNBC remain in denial about Planned Parenthood's nefarious and illegal activities involving the callous harvesting and sale of human hearts, brains and other body parts extracted from murdered unborn babies in the womb, which is a much more serious offense than a single lion death in Africa.
Late-night talk show goon Jimmy Kimmel, for instance, who back in the spring made fun of vaccine skeptics and parents of vaccine-injured children, was seen manufacturing a few tears in response to Cecil the Lion's death during a recent segment on his show. But Kimmel hasn't said a word about the thousands of unborn babies who are murdered every single day throughout America and chopped up for profit so amoral individuals like Planned Parenthood's Mary Gatter can buy expensive cars.
This disparity in the public's response to these two events is a clear sign of mental illness, and it appears to be rampant throughout the West these days. A lion's death, though unwarranted, is seen as more evil than senior-level officials at Planned Parenthood openly discussing how to sidestep the law as they barter over the value of bloody human body parts in a Petri dish.
ALL life is valuable: human, animal and otherwise
Has the modern world gone so completely mad that human life is now seen as completely irrelevant, while the lives of animals are elevated to a status beyond even humans? Cecil the lion's death is admittedly disheartening, especially if the details surrounding his death are true as they're being presented in the media. But what about unborn human life being terminated for purposes of eugenics and greed?
Watch the undercover Planned Parenthood videos for yourself to see these completely heartless individuals discuss unborn baby organs as if they were nothing more than automotive parts being sold on eBay to the highest bidder.
In this first CMP video, Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood Federation of America's Senior Director of Medical Services, goes into great detail about how her organization utilizes techniques to minimize the "crushing" of unborn human beings so their organs won't be destroyed (and thus be salable, which is a felony crime):
The second CMP video expounds upon this, with Planned Parenthood's Medical Director's Council President, Mary Gatter, getting down and dirty into the negotiation process for murdered baby body parts. Gatter jokes about wanting a Lamborghini with all the money she can make over the illegal sale of aborted human baby organs:
If this isn't enough to get your stomach churning, a third CMP video shows Savita Ginde of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains talking about how her organization avoids legal ramifications for illegally selling baby body parts. She even shows to undercover actors samples of this tissue in the lab, remarking how Planned Parenthood has to be careful not to "get caught," especially in states that are "really anti" abortion:
As the Health Ranger, Mike Adams, puts it, "All butchery of innocent life is wrong." But the blatant neglect of Planned Parenthood's genocidal actions against the most innocent of life, that of the unborn baby, is much more deeply unsettling than the isolated killing of a lion.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/050976_Cecil_the_Lion_Planned_Parenthood_organ_harvesting.html#ixzz3kDhvB7xz
Great...
Washington Redskins Change Their Name
News Bulletin:
Daniel Snyder, owner of the NFL Redskins, has announced that the team is dropping the word "Washington" from the team name,
and it will henceforth be simply known as "The Redskins".
It was reported that he finds the word 'Washington' imparts a negative image of poor leadership, mismanagement, corruption, cheating and lying,and is not a fitting role-model for young fans of football.
Link:
http://www.targetliberty.com/2015/08/wahington-redskins-change-their-name.html
News Bulletin:
Daniel Snyder, owner of the NFL Redskins, has announced that the team is dropping the word "Washington" from the team name,
and it will henceforth be simply known as "The Redskins".
It was reported that he finds the word 'Washington' imparts a negative image of poor leadership, mismanagement, corruption, cheating and lying,and is not a fitting role-model for young fans of football.
Link:
http://www.targetliberty.com/2015/08/wahington-redskins-change-their-name.html
Friday, August 28, 2015
Good question...
Reality Check: Why Aren’t Shootings Sparking Debate Over Anti-Depressants?
Ben Swann
The crime scene tape was still up in Roanoke, Virginia when politicians began calling—almost predictably—for tougher gun control laws.
Here’s a question: why is it always a discussion about guns and not about mental health and mood altering prescription drugs?
This is a Reality Check you won’t see anywhere else.
In response to the live TV shooting in Virginia, the usual voices began talking about the need for more gun control without knowing any facts regarding the shooter or how he got that gun.
Without question, Vester Flanagan—the man who carried out the murder of Allison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward—was disturbed. The extent to which he was disturbed we do not know at this time. But what we do know is that, as we watch these high-profile shootings continue to grab headlines, there are important links that are being missed or ignored.
Take the Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, who Flanagan referenced in his manifesto sent to ABC News. Politicians and media talked about the gun he obtained to carry out that church shooting.
And they—and we—have talked a great deal about the Confederate flag.
But what has received very little coverage…
According to CBS News, earlier this year cops searched Roof after he was acting suspiciously inside a Bath & Body Works store. They found “orange strips” that Roof told officers was Suboxone, a narcotic that is used to treat opiate addiction.
Suboxone has a reported history of causing violent episodes in some users.
But there is much more. Back in 1989, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac, shot 20 workers in Louisville, Ky., killing nine.
Prozac maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.
1999: 15-year old Oregon school shooter Kip Kinkel, who opened fire in his school cafeteria, had been on Prozac.
1999: Eric Harris, the Columbine killer, was taking Luvox.
1999: Conyers, Georgia school shooter T.J. Solomon was on Ritalin.
2005: Red Lake Indian Reservation shooter Jeff Weise was taking Prozac.
2007: Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui, who shot and killed 32 people, was on anti-depressants and taking Prozac.
2012: Colorado theater shooter James Holmes… was reportedly heavily hooked on the prescription painkiller Vicodin. And he took a cocktail of anti-depressants before his shooting spree.
2012: Conn. school shooter Adam Lanza’s uncle said the boy was prescribed Fanapt, a controversial anti-psychotic medicine.
And those are only a few examples. There have been no less than 26 cases of mass shootings in the U.S. where the shooter has been taking anti-depressant drugs.
To be clear, we’re not saying Prozac and Vicodin are to blame. But consider the side effects of these drugs:
Prozac: nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, inner restlessness, suicidal thoughts, self mutilation, manic behavior
Vicodin: confusion, fear, unusual thoughts or behavior; anxiety, dizziness, drowsiness; headache, mood changes.
Xanax: depressed mood, thoughts of suicide or hurting yourself, unusual risk-taking behavior, decreased inhibitions, no fear of danger; agitation, hostility, hallucinations.
What you need to know is that the use of anti-depressants in America has skyrocketed. Now, 1 in 10 Americans take them, four times as many as did in the 1990s. And while millions of people do not suffer violent episodes, the drug makers warn that some people may, and do.
So when politicians want to have a “national discussion about gun control” after one of these shootings—if we’re being honest—shouldn’t we want to have a national debate about what these drugs might be doing to the minds of some people who already suffer from mental issues?
Link:
http://truthinmedia.com/reality-check-shootings-debate-anti-depressants/?utm_content=bufferadbcb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Ben Swann
The crime scene tape was still up in Roanoke, Virginia when politicians began calling—almost predictably—for tougher gun control laws.
Here’s a question: why is it always a discussion about guns and not about mental health and mood altering prescription drugs?
This is a Reality Check you won’t see anywhere else.
In response to the live TV shooting in Virginia, the usual voices began talking about the need for more gun control without knowing any facts regarding the shooter or how he got that gun.
Without question, Vester Flanagan—the man who carried out the murder of Allison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward—was disturbed. The extent to which he was disturbed we do not know at this time. But what we do know is that, as we watch these high-profile shootings continue to grab headlines, there are important links that are being missed or ignored.
Take the Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, who Flanagan referenced in his manifesto sent to ABC News. Politicians and media talked about the gun he obtained to carry out that church shooting.
And they—and we—have talked a great deal about the Confederate flag.
But what has received very little coverage…
According to CBS News, earlier this year cops searched Roof after he was acting suspiciously inside a Bath & Body Works store. They found “orange strips” that Roof told officers was Suboxone, a narcotic that is used to treat opiate addiction.
Suboxone has a reported history of causing violent episodes in some users.
But there is much more. Back in 1989, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac, shot 20 workers in Louisville, Ky., killing nine.
Prozac maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.
1999: 15-year old Oregon school shooter Kip Kinkel, who opened fire in his school cafeteria, had been on Prozac.
1999: Eric Harris, the Columbine killer, was taking Luvox.
1999: Conyers, Georgia school shooter T.J. Solomon was on Ritalin.
2005: Red Lake Indian Reservation shooter Jeff Weise was taking Prozac.
2007: Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui, who shot and killed 32 people, was on anti-depressants and taking Prozac.
2012: Colorado theater shooter James Holmes… was reportedly heavily hooked on the prescription painkiller Vicodin. And he took a cocktail of anti-depressants before his shooting spree.
2012: Conn. school shooter Adam Lanza’s uncle said the boy was prescribed Fanapt, a controversial anti-psychotic medicine.
And those are only a few examples. There have been no less than 26 cases of mass shootings in the U.S. where the shooter has been taking anti-depressant drugs.
To be clear, we’re not saying Prozac and Vicodin are to blame. But consider the side effects of these drugs:
Prozac: nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, inner restlessness, suicidal thoughts, self mutilation, manic behavior
Vicodin: confusion, fear, unusual thoughts or behavior; anxiety, dizziness, drowsiness; headache, mood changes.
Xanax: depressed mood, thoughts of suicide or hurting yourself, unusual risk-taking behavior, decreased inhibitions, no fear of danger; agitation, hostility, hallucinations.
What you need to know is that the use of anti-depressants in America has skyrocketed. Now, 1 in 10 Americans take them, four times as many as did in the 1990s. And while millions of people do not suffer violent episodes, the drug makers warn that some people may, and do.
So when politicians want to have a “national discussion about gun control” after one of these shootings—if we’re being honest—shouldn’t we want to have a national debate about what these drugs might be doing to the minds of some people who already suffer from mental issues?
Link:
http://truthinmedia.com/reality-check-shootings-debate-anti-depressants/?utm_content=bufferadbcb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
"If you would like to see what a police state looks like without going to Cuba, travel to the border regions of the U.S.-Mexico border. The area is filled with agents of the Border Patrol, who have the authority to enter onto (i.e., trespass) onto people’s ranches and farms without a warrant. Oftentimes, they leave gates open and damage the natural habitat with their vehicles. They don’t care. They know that they can’t be sued for what they do. They know that they have the authority to “control the border” and that private owners had better not resist them."
Should Libertarians Support Socialism and Tyranny?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
With laws come enforcement. Whenever one supports a law, he necessarily supports the enforcement of the law. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to support a law and oppose its enforcement. That would be like supporting lightning and opposing thunder.
This point is an important one for libertarians in the context of the immigration debate.
There are obviously lots of people, including some libertarians, who support immigration laws — that is, laws that prevent the unrestricted entry by foreigners into the United States.
The support of immigration laws is no big deal for non-libertarians. For them, immigration laws are, in principle, no different from any other laws.
Not so for libertarians, however. Libertarians pride themselves for being about freedom. Liberty is the essence of the libertarian philosophy. It’s what sets us apart from liberals, conservatives, and everyone else.
Thus, as part of the freedom philosophy, libertarians oppose socialism and police-state totalitarianism and support the right to do “anything that’s peaceful.”
There’s one big problem, however, for libertarians who support immigration controls: The enforcement of immigration laws entails socialism, police-state totalitarianism, and infringements on economic liberty. That means, obviously, that libertarians who support immigration controls are, at the same time, supporting socialism, police-state totalitarianism, and infringements on the exercise of economic liberty.
Is that a good thing?
What does it say for a philosophy that prides itself on freedom when its adherents are endorsing socialism, police-state tyranny, and infringements on economic liberty? Doesn’t that make libertarians just like everyone else?
Immigration controls involve socialist central planning. A government commission plans, in a top-down, fashion, the movements of millions of people, usually as part of a complex international labor market. It assigns quotas to each country and it decides the qualifications for entry.
It shouldn’t surprise any libertarian that there has been an ongoing immigration “crisis” for than 50 years. Every libertarian knows that that’s what central planning, as compared to a free market, does. It always produces economic crises or what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” Is there any better term than that to apply to America’s immigration situation?
Mises also pointed out that when government intervenes in a particular economic activity, each intervention will inevitably lead to more interventions, in order to fix the crises that always arise from the previous interventions. Ultimately, the situation moves increasingly in a totalitarian direction.
If you would like to see what a police state looks like without going to Cuba, travel to the border regions of the U.S.-Mexico border. The area is filled with agents of the Border Patrol, who have the authority to enter onto (i.e., trespass) onto people’s ranches and farms without a warrant. Oftentimes, they leave gates open and damage the natural habitat with their vehicles. They don’t care. They know that they can’t be sued for what they do. They know that they have the authority to “control the border” and that private owners had better not resist them.
And no, we are not talking about only ranches and farms along the border itself. We are also talking about ranches and farms miles away from the border.
Take a trip down to my hometown of Laredo, Texas. But if you are a dark-skinned Hispanic you had better be sure to take your passport with you. No, I’m not saying anything about traveling into Mexico and returning. I’m saying, just go to Laredo, Texas, and never enter Mexico. Then, try driving north without your passport. You will not be permitted to go north and return home. Unless you can get your passport sent to you, you might well have to spend the rest of your life in Laredo. That’s because the immigration gendarmes will not let you proceed through their highway checkpoint 40 miles north of town unless you can show your papers.
If you think you can avoid the problem by taking a flight to San Antonio or Dallas, forget it. At the airport, the immigration police are there too. You not only have to go through a TSA check, you also have to go through an immigration check, even though you’ve never entered a foreign country. If you’re a dark-skinned Hispanic-American who can’t speak English very well (and there are many of those in Laredo and elsewhere along the border), you’re not going anywhere unless you can provide your papers.
On a flight out of Laredo, a young Hispanic man seated next to me, who was born and raised in Laredo but who now lives in Dallas, told me that when he comes to Laredo to visit family, he always carries his passport.
And it’s not just in Laredo. Go to Arizona and travel east-west on the Interstate highway. You’ll encounter the same types of checkpoints.
You might decide that you’re not going to cooperate with these officials by refusing to answer their questions or to show your papers. Be prepared for the possibility of having your car window shattered and being dragged from your car, beaten up, and incarcerated. That’s what they sometimes do to people who don’t show the necessary deference to their authority.
What better example of police-state tyranny than these immigration checkpoints? They’re in the American Southwest and they’re also found in communist Cuba.
Should libertarians really be supporting this sort of thing?
That’s not all. There are also roving Border Patrol checkpoints. That’s when the immigration cops just drive around and stop cars indiscriminately and demand to search them. No warrant. No probable cause. Just a “reasonable suspicion” because your car seemed to be riding a bit low and, therefore, might have illegal immigrants in the trunk.
By the way, if they find illegal drugs during any of these immigration checkpoints, I don’t need to tell you what happens. Just ask Willie Nelson.
Should libertarians be supporting this sort of thing?
That’s not all. Remember the point that Mises made: Every new intervention brings new interventions, ultimately leading to omnipotent government.
To enforce immigration controls, they’ve made it illegal to hire, transport, or harbor illegal immigrants.
What does that mean? Let’s assume that a housewife in Laredo hires an illegal immigrant to be a maid or nanny. The immigrant likes the deal because otherwise she wouldn’t have entered into it. If that maid or nanny spends the night in her employer’s home, the employer is guilty of both hiring and harboring an illegal immigrant. Those are felonies, crimes that carry hefty terms in jail.
Or suppose the employee is just a day laborer. At the end of the day, a rancher or farmer gives a ride to his employee to the international bridge. If he happens to be pulled over by an immigration cop, he will be charged with transporting an illegal alien, once again a felony.
Let’s not forget the immigration raids on private businesses in cities across America — that is, the places where American employers have hired illegal immigrants owing to their strong work ethic. Here we have a perfect example of a peaceful, harmonious exchange. The employer wants to hire the foreigner and the employee wants to take the job because it’s much better than what he can get back home.
And then the raid takes place. Well-armed immigration SWAT teams suddenly swarm into a business, screaming and yelling, terrifying everyone, separating out the illegals and arresting them and summarily deporting them, oftentimes without permitting them to notify and say goodbye to their spouses and children.
That’s what a police state looks like. That’s what libertarian supporters of immigration controls are supporting. That’s what they’re trying to get the rest of us libertarians to support — socialism and police-state tyranny.
And it’s not going to stop. We all know that. Despite more than 50 years of the ongoing crisis that immigration controls have produced, nothing has changed. Everyone is still pacing the floors and pulling out his hair in consternation over the immigration “crisis,” a crisis that is caused by immigration controls themselves.
So, that means more and more plans and interventions, which means moving more and more in a totalitarian direction. And the movement toward totalitarianism — toward omnipotent government — becomes permanent because no plan and no intervention will ever accomplish what they want to accomplish.
Is this what libertarians want? Is this what the libertarian movement has come to — the support of socialism and police-state tyranny for the sake of such things as expedience, credibility, or respectability? Are we going to become like the liberals and conservatives?
Heaven forbid. Libertarians and libertarianism are the last best hope for mankind, including people everywhere who are simply trying to pursue happiness and better their lives. We stand for freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony among the people of the world. Let’s keep it that way.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/08/28/libertarians-support-socialism-tyranny/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
With laws come enforcement. Whenever one supports a law, he necessarily supports the enforcement of the law. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to support a law and oppose its enforcement. That would be like supporting lightning and opposing thunder.
This point is an important one for libertarians in the context of the immigration debate.
There are obviously lots of people, including some libertarians, who support immigration laws — that is, laws that prevent the unrestricted entry by foreigners into the United States.
The support of immigration laws is no big deal for non-libertarians. For them, immigration laws are, in principle, no different from any other laws.
Not so for libertarians, however. Libertarians pride themselves for being about freedom. Liberty is the essence of the libertarian philosophy. It’s what sets us apart from liberals, conservatives, and everyone else.
Thus, as part of the freedom philosophy, libertarians oppose socialism and police-state totalitarianism and support the right to do “anything that’s peaceful.”
There’s one big problem, however, for libertarians who support immigration controls: The enforcement of immigration laws entails socialism, police-state totalitarianism, and infringements on economic liberty. That means, obviously, that libertarians who support immigration controls are, at the same time, supporting socialism, police-state totalitarianism, and infringements on the exercise of economic liberty.
Is that a good thing?
What does it say for a philosophy that prides itself on freedom when its adherents are endorsing socialism, police-state tyranny, and infringements on economic liberty? Doesn’t that make libertarians just like everyone else?
Immigration controls involve socialist central planning. A government commission plans, in a top-down, fashion, the movements of millions of people, usually as part of a complex international labor market. It assigns quotas to each country and it decides the qualifications for entry.
It shouldn’t surprise any libertarian that there has been an ongoing immigration “crisis” for than 50 years. Every libertarian knows that that’s what central planning, as compared to a free market, does. It always produces economic crises or what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” Is there any better term than that to apply to America’s immigration situation?
Mises also pointed out that when government intervenes in a particular economic activity, each intervention will inevitably lead to more interventions, in order to fix the crises that always arise from the previous interventions. Ultimately, the situation moves increasingly in a totalitarian direction.
If you would like to see what a police state looks like without going to Cuba, travel to the border regions of the U.S.-Mexico border. The area is filled with agents of the Border Patrol, who have the authority to enter onto (i.e., trespass) onto people’s ranches and farms without a warrant. Oftentimes, they leave gates open and damage the natural habitat with their vehicles. They don’t care. They know that they can’t be sued for what they do. They know that they have the authority to “control the border” and that private owners had better not resist them.
And no, we are not talking about only ranches and farms along the border itself. We are also talking about ranches and farms miles away from the border.
Take a trip down to my hometown of Laredo, Texas. But if you are a dark-skinned Hispanic you had better be sure to take your passport with you. No, I’m not saying anything about traveling into Mexico and returning. I’m saying, just go to Laredo, Texas, and never enter Mexico. Then, try driving north without your passport. You will not be permitted to go north and return home. Unless you can get your passport sent to you, you might well have to spend the rest of your life in Laredo. That’s because the immigration gendarmes will not let you proceed through their highway checkpoint 40 miles north of town unless you can show your papers.
If you think you can avoid the problem by taking a flight to San Antonio or Dallas, forget it. At the airport, the immigration police are there too. You not only have to go through a TSA check, you also have to go through an immigration check, even though you’ve never entered a foreign country. If you’re a dark-skinned Hispanic-American who can’t speak English very well (and there are many of those in Laredo and elsewhere along the border), you’re not going anywhere unless you can provide your papers.
On a flight out of Laredo, a young Hispanic man seated next to me, who was born and raised in Laredo but who now lives in Dallas, told me that when he comes to Laredo to visit family, he always carries his passport.
And it’s not just in Laredo. Go to Arizona and travel east-west on the Interstate highway. You’ll encounter the same types of checkpoints.
You might decide that you’re not going to cooperate with these officials by refusing to answer their questions or to show your papers. Be prepared for the possibility of having your car window shattered and being dragged from your car, beaten up, and incarcerated. That’s what they sometimes do to people who don’t show the necessary deference to their authority.
What better example of police-state tyranny than these immigration checkpoints? They’re in the American Southwest and they’re also found in communist Cuba.
Should libertarians really be supporting this sort of thing?
That’s not all. There are also roving Border Patrol checkpoints. That’s when the immigration cops just drive around and stop cars indiscriminately and demand to search them. No warrant. No probable cause. Just a “reasonable suspicion” because your car seemed to be riding a bit low and, therefore, might have illegal immigrants in the trunk.
By the way, if they find illegal drugs during any of these immigration checkpoints, I don’t need to tell you what happens. Just ask Willie Nelson.
Should libertarians be supporting this sort of thing?
That’s not all. Remember the point that Mises made: Every new intervention brings new interventions, ultimately leading to omnipotent government.
To enforce immigration controls, they’ve made it illegal to hire, transport, or harbor illegal immigrants.
What does that mean? Let’s assume that a housewife in Laredo hires an illegal immigrant to be a maid or nanny. The immigrant likes the deal because otherwise she wouldn’t have entered into it. If that maid or nanny spends the night in her employer’s home, the employer is guilty of both hiring and harboring an illegal immigrant. Those are felonies, crimes that carry hefty terms in jail.
Or suppose the employee is just a day laborer. At the end of the day, a rancher or farmer gives a ride to his employee to the international bridge. If he happens to be pulled over by an immigration cop, he will be charged with transporting an illegal alien, once again a felony.
Let’s not forget the immigration raids on private businesses in cities across America — that is, the places where American employers have hired illegal immigrants owing to their strong work ethic. Here we have a perfect example of a peaceful, harmonious exchange. The employer wants to hire the foreigner and the employee wants to take the job because it’s much better than what he can get back home.
And then the raid takes place. Well-armed immigration SWAT teams suddenly swarm into a business, screaming and yelling, terrifying everyone, separating out the illegals and arresting them and summarily deporting them, oftentimes without permitting them to notify and say goodbye to their spouses and children.
That’s what a police state looks like. That’s what libertarian supporters of immigration controls are supporting. That’s what they’re trying to get the rest of us libertarians to support — socialism and police-state tyranny.
And it’s not going to stop. We all know that. Despite more than 50 years of the ongoing crisis that immigration controls have produced, nothing has changed. Everyone is still pacing the floors and pulling out his hair in consternation over the immigration “crisis,” a crisis that is caused by immigration controls themselves.
So, that means more and more plans and interventions, which means moving more and more in a totalitarian direction. And the movement toward totalitarianism — toward omnipotent government — becomes permanent because no plan and no intervention will ever accomplish what they want to accomplish.
Is this what libertarians want? Is this what the libertarian movement has come to — the support of socialism and police-state tyranny for the sake of such things as expedience, credibility, or respectability? Are we going to become like the liberals and conservatives?
Heaven forbid. Libertarians and libertarianism are the last best hope for mankind, including people everywhere who are simply trying to pursue happiness and better their lives. We stand for freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony among the people of the world. Let’s keep it that way.
Link:
http://fff.org/2015/08/28/libertarians-support-socialism-tyranny/
"Flanagan, who admitted hating whites, is absolved of that “hate crime” – and the folks at the website that reported it are branded as racists instead."
My Neighbor, the Mass Murderer
By Christopher Manion
This past Wednesday, a racist drove down I-66, a mile from our house, fleeing from the town where he had murdered two of his former colleagues in the broadcast business.
The killer’s name was Vester Flanagan. We now know that he was motivated by racial hatred and spite at having lost his job.
In 2012, he supported Obama’s reelection, even wearing an Obama pin while reporting on election day.
When he heard of the double murder, Obama blamed it on guns. He did not say that “Vester Flanagan could have been my son.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Breitbart carried a news story featuring Flanagan’s racist rants, under the headline, “RACE MURDER IN VIRGINIA: BLACK REPORTER SUSPECTED OF EXECUTING WHITE COLLEAGUES – ON LIVE TELEVISION!”
The story recounted the racist taunts and epithets contained what Flanagan called his “suicide note”: You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE …(deleted)!!!”
On Wednesday evening, ABC’s evening news reported Flanagan’s desire for a race war, without recriminations. But in Breitbart’s report, the Left went bananas.
I find this reactionary response curious, and worthy of analysis.
We have to understand that, in their hearts, many of Breitbart’s hateful critics no doubt agree – or at least sympathize with — killer Flanagan’s allegations that he was discriminated against on the basis of race. The Left has always been burdened by collective guilt, and has thus celebrated Affirmative Action to the max.
The addition of Flanagan’s “coming out” as gay as he “goes out” (kills himself) with a “BOOM” just adds to the Left’s sentimental attachment to the fellow.
Although they oppose (of course – of COURSE!) violence, the Left teaches us that, if there is anyone who had the right to feel aggrieved and to vent his anger, resentment, and envy on whites, it was Vester Flanagan.
But there’s more to it than that, and no one has mentioned it.
Flanagan not only hated, he envied.
He envied his victims, former colleagues Alison Parker and Adam Ward –not only because they had jobs, but because they were both in successful romantic relationships, something that Flanagan’s suicide note complained that he could never achieve.
In his brilliant book Envy, Helmut Schoeck explains this deadly sin thus: Is envy the same as jealousy? Not at all. The jealous person looks at the successful person and says, I don’t have that, and I’d like to have it, so I’ll work hard to achieve it.”
For Schoeck, the envious person is far different: he says, “I’d like to have that, but I’m too incompetent-lazy-unattractive-poor to have it – BUT I don’t want HIM to have it, either!”
Envy is the engine of socialism. The leftist critics of Breitbart’s story envy anyone who tells the truth – look at how they treated Dr. Ron Paul, who has been proven so right that he started a liberty movement that that the bipartisan Crony Establishment can only – envy.
So they lie. Flanagan, who admitted hating whites, is absolved of that “hate crime” – and the folks at the website that reported it are branded as racists instead.
Envy enthroned.
Flanagan envied both of his victims because they had the jobs he wanted and the love he wanted – and they were of the race that he hated.
Three strikes, and they’re out.
We’ve seen the same movie repeatedly. The Left envies any and all truthtellers because they are popular, honest, and brave – qualities which the Left profoundly lacks.
Envy and hate. They drove Flanagan to kill. That’s the crime. Telling the truth is simply our duty.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/christopher-manion/my-neighbor-the-murderer/
By Christopher Manion
This past Wednesday, a racist drove down I-66, a mile from our house, fleeing from the town where he had murdered two of his former colleagues in the broadcast business.
The killer’s name was Vester Flanagan. We now know that he was motivated by racial hatred and spite at having lost his job.
In 2012, he supported Obama’s reelection, even wearing an Obama pin while reporting on election day.
When he heard of the double murder, Obama blamed it on guns. He did not say that “Vester Flanagan could have been my son.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Breitbart carried a news story featuring Flanagan’s racist rants, under the headline, “RACE MURDER IN VIRGINIA: BLACK REPORTER SUSPECTED OF EXECUTING WHITE COLLEAGUES – ON LIVE TELEVISION!”
The story recounted the racist taunts and epithets contained what Flanagan called his “suicide note”: You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE …(deleted)!!!”
On Wednesday evening, ABC’s evening news reported Flanagan’s desire for a race war, without recriminations. But in Breitbart’s report, the Left went bananas.
I find this reactionary response curious, and worthy of analysis.
We have to understand that, in their hearts, many of Breitbart’s hateful critics no doubt agree – or at least sympathize with — killer Flanagan’s allegations that he was discriminated against on the basis of race. The Left has always been burdened by collective guilt, and has thus celebrated Affirmative Action to the max.
The addition of Flanagan’s “coming out” as gay as he “goes out” (kills himself) with a “BOOM” just adds to the Left’s sentimental attachment to the fellow.
Although they oppose (of course – of COURSE!) violence, the Left teaches us that, if there is anyone who had the right to feel aggrieved and to vent his anger, resentment, and envy on whites, it was Vester Flanagan.
But there’s more to it than that, and no one has mentioned it.
Flanagan not only hated, he envied.
He envied his victims, former colleagues Alison Parker and Adam Ward –not only because they had jobs, but because they were both in successful romantic relationships, something that Flanagan’s suicide note complained that he could never achieve.
In his brilliant book Envy, Helmut Schoeck explains this deadly sin thus: Is envy the same as jealousy? Not at all. The jealous person looks at the successful person and says, I don’t have that, and I’d like to have it, so I’ll work hard to achieve it.”
For Schoeck, the envious person is far different: he says, “I’d like to have that, but I’m too incompetent-lazy-unattractive-poor to have it – BUT I don’t want HIM to have it, either!”
Envy is the engine of socialism. The leftist critics of Breitbart’s story envy anyone who tells the truth – look at how they treated Dr. Ron Paul, who has been proven so right that he started a liberty movement that that the bipartisan Crony Establishment can only – envy.
So they lie. Flanagan, who admitted hating whites, is absolved of that “hate crime” – and the folks at the website that reported it are branded as racists instead.
Envy enthroned.
Flanagan envied both of his victims because they had the jobs he wanted and the love he wanted – and they were of the race that he hated.
Three strikes, and they’re out.
We’ve seen the same movie repeatedly. The Left envies any and all truthtellers because they are popular, honest, and brave – qualities which the Left profoundly lacks.
Envy and hate. They drove Flanagan to kill. That’s the crime. Telling the truth is simply our duty.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/08/christopher-manion/my-neighbor-the-murderer/
Thursday, August 27, 2015
"So it seems Mother Nature is the scapegoat, not the culprit..."
Draining California
Written by Rebecca Terrell
A parched California is suffering through its fourth year of severe drought. Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in 2014 and has since issued increasingly strict mandates, including his April executive order on urban water reduction, calling for fines of $500 a day for people watering their lawns or taking long showers. “The idea of your nice little green grass getting lots of water every day, that’s just going to be a thing of the past,” said Brown at a press conference held in an uncharacteristically snowless stretch of the Sierra Nevada.
Yet the California Water Action Plan published by the state’s Environmental Protection Agency (CEPA) and Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) declares, “Much of California’s water system was originally designed to withstand a seven-year dry period without severe damage to the economy and environment.”
A water system ready for seven years of drought, failing in half that time? Brown blames the washout on global warming. “And I can tell you, from California, climate change is not a hoax,” the governor warned ABC News. “We’re dealing with it, and it’s damn serious.”
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Indeed, Brown’s Drought Task Force website compares shocking before-and-after pictures of lakes and waterways transformed from verdant vistas into withered wastelands. CNBC reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Palmer Drought Severity Index confirms this is the worst California drought in a century.
But CEPA and CDFA admit that “water has always been a scarce resource in California,” and the state’s climate “has always included extended dry periods.” For example, the catastrophic drought of 1862-1865 wiped out southern California’s cattle industry and ushered in a devastating smallpox epidemic, since drought conditions exacerbate the spread of that disease. The Historical Society of Southern California records that “the rainfall for the season of 1862-63 did not exceed four inches, and that of 1863-64 was even less.” How does this drought measure up? California as a whole averages 20 inches per year, according to NASA, which reported in July that since 2012 the state has accumulated a precipitation debt of about 20 inches, the equivalent of almost a year’s worth of rainfall. So it received on average about 13 inches a year for the past three years.
Over time, farmers and ranchers built their own irrigation systems, until the state took over in the 1930s and teamed with the U.S. Department of the Interior to build the Central Valley Project (CVP), providing water from northern california to towns and farmers in the Central Valley. Building on its infrastructure, in the 1960s, then-Governor Pat Brown — the current governor’s father — spearheaded the California Water Project, a complex system of more than 700 miles of reservoirs, canals, tunnels, pumps, and pipelines that store water and deliver it from northern and eastern rivers to more arid regions of the state. This famous California Aqueduct justifies the boast that the water system was “originally designed to withstand a seven-year dry period.”
So why is the current drought such a crisis?
It “should not be a crisis at all,” writes U.S. Representative Devin Nunes in a recent Investor’s Business Daily editorial. “Much of the media and many politicians blame the San Joaquin Valley’s water shortage on drought, but that is merely an aggravating factor,” claims the California Republican, whose congressional district is centered in the hydro-challenged area. “From my experience representing California’s agricultural heartland, I know that our water crisis is not an unfortunate natural occurrence; it is the intended result of a long-term campaign waged by radical environmentalists who resorted to political pressure as well as profuse lawsuits.”
Former Hewlett Packard CEO and presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina agrees. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia,” she told Glenn Beck in April, “liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”
What’s That Smelt?
Like Fiorina and Nunes, many blame green extremists — especially the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Sierra Club — groups continually hammering California with litigation and government lobbying for more than two decades. Their efforts have paid off in laws, regulations, and settlements that siphon off hundred of billions of gallons of water annually for environmental causes and wildlife refuges.
Their posterchild is the delta smelt, a three-inch minnow declared endangered in 1993. Environmentalists claim massive water diversions are necessary to maintain water levels, temperature, and salinity necessary for these and various other California fish species to survive.
Spurred by green propagandists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) issued a 2008 “biological opinion” blaming water pumps used to irrigate central and southern California for declining populations of smelt. Central Valley farmers countered with a lawsuit pointing to the faulty data and specious conclusions in the FWS study, but to no avail. “To protect smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008,” writes Allysia Finley in the Wall Street Journal. “That would have been enough to sustain 6.4 million Californians for six years.”
Instead, it has sustained only drought. As central and southern California transform into a dust bowl, smelt populations have continued to plummet. FWS found a single smelt in its spring trawl survey this year, prompting farmers to demand that the species be declared extinct, allowing them to once again pump water to their parched land. “California fruits and vegetables are sent all over the world,” Republican state Assemblyman Travis Allen told Fox News. “When we are diverting our water to save a few pinky-sized fish and leaving hundreds of thousands of acres fallow — there is something wrong with our priorities.”
Yet even without delta smelt, eco-extremists have plenty of ammunition. “We have 80 fish species in California, like the delta smelt, that are in trouble,” Dr. Peter Moyle of UC Davis told Fox News. “There are other species deserving of protection.”
For example, the 2006 San Joaquin River Restoration Program ensures massive water diversions to create salmon runs. FWS bolstered the program in 2009 with another green-initiated “biological opinion” that the Chinook salmon are at “high risk” of extinction. The state estimates the program has already cost taxpayers more than $1.2 billion. Is the expense justified? “The salmon, which have not been in the river for more than half a century,” explains Nunes, “have proven so incapable of sustaining themselves that agents have resorted to plucking them out of the water and trucking them wherever they are supposed to go.” And while they campaign for the salmon, these absurd environmentalists “also champion protections for the striped bass, a non-native species that eats both salmon and smelt.”
For that matter, none of these fish are indigenous to the San Joaquin Delta. “The entire Delta system is not natural at all. It’s a man-made network of islands that functions only thanks to upstream water storage projects,” Nunes points out. “In fact, without man-made storage projects, canals and dams, in dry years such as this the rivers would quickly run dry meaning there would be no water and no fish.”
He reports the toll of California’s misguided environmental policies to be that 70 percent of water runoff from the Sierra Nevada ends up in the Pacific Ocean at the expense of the state’s farmers and residents. During the first three years of drought, California “flushed 652 billion gallons into the ocean due to the aforementioned biological opinions, which have prevented the irrigation infrastructure from operating at full capacity,” laments Nunes.
Man Made Drought
So it seems Mother Nature is the scapegoat, not the culprit, in California’s water shortage. Instead, environmentalists have carefully orchestrated the crisis, with the typical ruse of animal rights to conceal their true agenda: depopulation — in this case, targeting the Central Valley through water deprivation. Nunes recounts a meeting in 2002 with NRDC representatives lobbying for increased water restrictions. They admitted “their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production.”
“They showed me maps that laid out their whole plan,” recalls Nunes. “From Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side, productive agriculture would end and the land would return to some ideal state of nature.”
Their propaganda campaign to demonize California’s farmers reinforces his story. The media-parroted eco-myth blames big agriculture robber barons for greedily gulping down 80 percent of the state’s water. But California Department of Water Resources data reveal a gross distortion in this statistic, which conveniently ignores captured water not intended for human use. In reality, roughly 50 percent of California water goes toward environmental causes, while agriculture uses about 40 percent, with residents and businesses sharing the remaining 10. Take away the fish’s share, and voilà, farmers use 80 percent!
Meanwhile, environmentalists march relentlessly on toward their 1.3 million-acre goal. And they are unnervingly close to reaching it. Nunes tallies one million acres of farmland that now stand idle due to eco-regulations and water restrictions. And the State Water Resources Control Board is poised to help them capture the remaining 300,000 acres, and then some, by means of mandatory limits on human consumption and use of water.
Even as half of California’s water flowed unreservedly to failed fish preservation schemes, last year state regulators imposed pumping restrictions on junior-rights holders — those with post-1914 water permits. This June the Water Board ordered California’s senior water-rights holders to stop pumping surface water, a move affecting more than 100 irrigation districts and water agencies across the state. Historically sheltered from government restrictions, senior water rights are those established prior to 1914 when California first started issuing permits. This is only the second time in California history when the state has limited senior rights; the first was in 1977, also under Governor Jerry Brown. Violators of the new restriction face fines up to $1,000 per day and $2,500 per acre foot of water, or roughly 326,000 gallons.
Both farmers and residents are already feeling the heat. The Sacramento Bee quoted Water Board executive director Tom Howard warning, “There will be some land ending up being fallowed as a result.” Electric generation and municipal water supplies are endangered, too. For example, senior right holder Byron Bethany Irrigation District in northern California supplies water to several power plants and, until shortly after the ruling, was the sole water source for one suburban community, which quickly scrambled to buy water from a neighboring district.
One of several districts that have answered the new regulation with lawsuits, Byron Bethany now faces an unprecedented $1.55 million fine for continuing to draw restricted water. Likewise, West Side Irrigation District based in Tracy, California, about 60 miles east of San Francisco, sued the Water Board and found itself slapped with a hefty fine. The board denies charges by both districts of retaliation for their lawsuits.
Rights holders are justifiably incensed. Last November California voters approved a $7.5 billion bond to build new water storage facilities. Though the measure was Governor Brown’s top priority in his 2014 reelection bid, only “$750 million [have] been allocated so far, but not a dime for dams.” This is according to Stephen Frank, political consultant and publisher of California Political News & Views, who relates that more than one-third of the allocated funds, $287.5 million, is earmarked for smelt preservation and salmon run development.
“Why does Jerry Brown so dislike Californians?” asks Frank. “He openly lied about the water bond.... Now in the midst of a water shortage HE caused, he wants to use close to $300 million to give water to fish, not people. This may be the sickest policy ever.”
Not that Brown doesn’t have plans for the remaining $6.75 billion. He held a July 10 summit in Sacramento to discuss “Leveraging Technology to Build a Drought Resilient California.” Greenbiz.com lists some of the high-tech drought defense solutions offered by scientists and policymakers who attended:
Water conservation software based on behavioral science and cloud computing. Agricultural irrigation technology using sensors to measure sap in grape vines. Satellites that measure plant water needs. Home greywater recycling systems. Water meters connected to the Internet. Solar-powered desalination.
Along with plans of government surveillance of water use, there were also suggestions for protecting California’s fish. But the day’s theme was limited to conserving water resources that will continue to dwindle thanks to government management of water allocation. Brown’s agenda omitted reference to storage facilities, dams, pumps, etc. — the measures voters approved last November. Nor was there mention of reversing disastrous environmental policies that perpetuate the crisis.
To add insult to injury, “More than $320 million that was supposed to be rushed to drought-stricken California communities sits unspent in government bank accounts,” according to CBS News Sacramento. This is the balance of the $687 million Governor Brown set aside back in 2014 when he declared a state of emergency. Lawmakers claimed the funds would upgrade outdated water systems and protect wells from contamination. Pipelines and water-treatment plants have yet to receive funding, though expenditures have ensured a “vanishing pond near Sacramento has been replenished, protecting a popular breeding ground for the threatened giant garter snake.”
Enter the federal government. In December and again in July, the U.S. House passed bills to restore some of the water diverted for salmon and smelt back to farmers in central and southern California. But President Obama has promised to veto such legislation. “Instead, administration policy regarding the crisis has amounted to a welfare program,” noted Jack Kenny, writing for The New American. “Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary, said … the administration is not considering any policy changes, adding that Obama has offered relief to the state in the form of $60 million to California food banks and $15 million for farmers and ranchers.” Unfortunately, those unconstitutionally distributed funds are just as likely to be misallocated as California’s bond money and emergency reserve.
And it’s no use trying to drill a well for relief from the radical assault on surface water. Governor Brown took care of that last September when he signed an unprecedented law that forever limits even private property owners from groundwater pumping. The new restrictions will be phased in during the next decade, turning authority over to the Water Board.
“With the stroke of his pen,” wrote Republican State Senator Jim Nielsen, “the Governor changed over 100 years of water laws — without the people’s input.” He warned, “Californians who rely on groundwater will now have to deal with not only new and unaccountable government agencies that will police water usage; they will be at the mercy of these faceless bureaucrats who will impose unknown fees and fines.” Nunes likewise predicts, “Many farmers will not be able to keep growing food if they continue to receive zero water allocations and are restricted from tapping enough ground water.”
Water Wars
Water has long been a fighting word in the American West. It’s said that Mark Twain observed on his return from a trip to California, “Out there, whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting over.” So is there a solution to this age-old dilemma?
“The bottom line for solving California’s water problem is that there needs to be a move toward a market-oriented method for the distribution of water,” wrote economist Walter Williams in an editorial published in The New American online. “Water is distributed in California and other Western states not by market prices but by the political process,” he pointed out. “I need someone to show me that there is such a desperate need for somewhere to grow potatoes, corn and other crops that we need to subsidize making a desert bloom.”
Williams explains a basic economic principle which dictates that, if there is a scarcity of something, the price is probably too low. For years state and federal subsidies have forced this artificial imbalance on taxpayers, who must pay higher prices for their own water as they help foot the bill for farmers. This imbalance is nonexistent in a free market, where agriculture meets demand by the most economic route — e.g., irrigating and farming arid land or importing products — without accusations of over-consumption, and without the government handouts, crippling regulations, and eventual failure that inevitably go hand-in-hand.
California agriculture was founded on such a free market system. The September 1910 Pacific Monthly magazine records how German settlers who founded Anaheim, just outside Los Angeles, began irrigating their vineyards in 1857, thereby surviving the harsh drought of 1862-1865, even as the desiccated cattle industry perished. Within the next two decades, Anaheim became California’s leading wine producer, until most of the vineyards succumbed to a deadly parasite. Instead of throwing their hands up in defeat, farmers found profit in citrus, berries, vegetables, grains, nuts, beans, potatoes, sugar cane, livestock, and a plethora of other agricultural products. The name “Orange County” is a testimony to their free-market entrepreneurialism.
Now that the government divvies up water rights in California, with an inefficient and inflexible system that promises more water than it can deliver, scarcity abounds. Could free market economics make a difference? They have to ask residents in Kern County, north of Los Angeles, where the Tehachapi Basin provides groundwater for residents, industry, and agriculture. In the 2015 edition of their book Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation, authors Terry Anderson and Donald Leal explain that government mismanagement of the aquifer between the 1930s and 1960s caused exorbitant pumping costs and many dry wells, while “withdrawals from the aquifer exceeded recharge by 60 percent.” Acting on behalf of a citizen advisory committee fearful of losing their farms, in 1966 the local water district sued for and won a market-based groundwater rights exchange. In 2006, the California Department of Water Resources credited the move with recovering groundwater levels. “The city of Tehachapi no longer rations water as it did during some periods prior to adjudication,” relate Anderson and Leal, “and rising water tables have brought previously marginal wells back into production.”
Unfortunately, most other California farmers have shackled themselves with dependence on federal and state subsidies. Now that Big Brother has turned on them, they’re crying foul. Yet it should come as no surprise that government distribution of anything encourages costly and inefficient use; water is no exception. Leaving distribution to the free market would allow the price to stabilize and water to be distributed where there is actual need and where it can be used most efficiently. For their own good, Californians should let the market dictate water prices. After all, says Williams, “Government management has been a failure.”
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/21465-draining-california
Written by Rebecca Terrell
A parched California is suffering through its fourth year of severe drought. Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in 2014 and has since issued increasingly strict mandates, including his April executive order on urban water reduction, calling for fines of $500 a day for people watering their lawns or taking long showers. “The idea of your nice little green grass getting lots of water every day, that’s just going to be a thing of the past,” said Brown at a press conference held in an uncharacteristically snowless stretch of the Sierra Nevada.
Yet the California Water Action Plan published by the state’s Environmental Protection Agency (CEPA) and Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) declares, “Much of California’s water system was originally designed to withstand a seven-year dry period without severe damage to the economy and environment.”
A water system ready for seven years of drought, failing in half that time? Brown blames the washout on global warming. “And I can tell you, from California, climate change is not a hoax,” the governor warned ABC News. “We’re dealing with it, and it’s damn serious.”
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Indeed, Brown’s Drought Task Force website compares shocking before-and-after pictures of lakes and waterways transformed from verdant vistas into withered wastelands. CNBC reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Palmer Drought Severity Index confirms this is the worst California drought in a century.
But CEPA and CDFA admit that “water has always been a scarce resource in California,” and the state’s climate “has always included extended dry periods.” For example, the catastrophic drought of 1862-1865 wiped out southern California’s cattle industry and ushered in a devastating smallpox epidemic, since drought conditions exacerbate the spread of that disease. The Historical Society of Southern California records that “the rainfall for the season of 1862-63 did not exceed four inches, and that of 1863-64 was even less.” How does this drought measure up? California as a whole averages 20 inches per year, according to NASA, which reported in July that since 2012 the state has accumulated a precipitation debt of about 20 inches, the equivalent of almost a year’s worth of rainfall. So it received on average about 13 inches a year for the past three years.
Over time, farmers and ranchers built their own irrigation systems, until the state took over in the 1930s and teamed with the U.S. Department of the Interior to build the Central Valley Project (CVP), providing water from northern california to towns and farmers in the Central Valley. Building on its infrastructure, in the 1960s, then-Governor Pat Brown — the current governor’s father — spearheaded the California Water Project, a complex system of more than 700 miles of reservoirs, canals, tunnels, pumps, and pipelines that store water and deliver it from northern and eastern rivers to more arid regions of the state. This famous California Aqueduct justifies the boast that the water system was “originally designed to withstand a seven-year dry period.”
So why is the current drought such a crisis?
It “should not be a crisis at all,” writes U.S. Representative Devin Nunes in a recent Investor’s Business Daily editorial. “Much of the media and many politicians blame the San Joaquin Valley’s water shortage on drought, but that is merely an aggravating factor,” claims the California Republican, whose congressional district is centered in the hydro-challenged area. “From my experience representing California’s agricultural heartland, I know that our water crisis is not an unfortunate natural occurrence; it is the intended result of a long-term campaign waged by radical environmentalists who resorted to political pressure as well as profuse lawsuits.”
Former Hewlett Packard CEO and presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina agrees. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia,” she told Glenn Beck in April, “liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”
What’s That Smelt?
Like Fiorina and Nunes, many blame green extremists — especially the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Sierra Club — groups continually hammering California with litigation and government lobbying for more than two decades. Their efforts have paid off in laws, regulations, and settlements that siphon off hundred of billions of gallons of water annually for environmental causes and wildlife refuges.
Their posterchild is the delta smelt, a three-inch minnow declared endangered in 1993. Environmentalists claim massive water diversions are necessary to maintain water levels, temperature, and salinity necessary for these and various other California fish species to survive.
Spurred by green propagandists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) issued a 2008 “biological opinion” blaming water pumps used to irrigate central and southern California for declining populations of smelt. Central Valley farmers countered with a lawsuit pointing to the faulty data and specious conclusions in the FWS study, but to no avail. “To protect smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008,” writes Allysia Finley in the Wall Street Journal. “That would have been enough to sustain 6.4 million Californians for six years.”
Instead, it has sustained only drought. As central and southern California transform into a dust bowl, smelt populations have continued to plummet. FWS found a single smelt in its spring trawl survey this year, prompting farmers to demand that the species be declared extinct, allowing them to once again pump water to their parched land. “California fruits and vegetables are sent all over the world,” Republican state Assemblyman Travis Allen told Fox News. “When we are diverting our water to save a few pinky-sized fish and leaving hundreds of thousands of acres fallow — there is something wrong with our priorities.”
Yet even without delta smelt, eco-extremists have plenty of ammunition. “We have 80 fish species in California, like the delta smelt, that are in trouble,” Dr. Peter Moyle of UC Davis told Fox News. “There are other species deserving of protection.”
For example, the 2006 San Joaquin River Restoration Program ensures massive water diversions to create salmon runs. FWS bolstered the program in 2009 with another green-initiated “biological opinion” that the Chinook salmon are at “high risk” of extinction. The state estimates the program has already cost taxpayers more than $1.2 billion. Is the expense justified? “The salmon, which have not been in the river for more than half a century,” explains Nunes, “have proven so incapable of sustaining themselves that agents have resorted to plucking them out of the water and trucking them wherever they are supposed to go.” And while they campaign for the salmon, these absurd environmentalists “also champion protections for the striped bass, a non-native species that eats both salmon and smelt.”
For that matter, none of these fish are indigenous to the San Joaquin Delta. “The entire Delta system is not natural at all. It’s a man-made network of islands that functions only thanks to upstream water storage projects,” Nunes points out. “In fact, without man-made storage projects, canals and dams, in dry years such as this the rivers would quickly run dry meaning there would be no water and no fish.”
He reports the toll of California’s misguided environmental policies to be that 70 percent of water runoff from the Sierra Nevada ends up in the Pacific Ocean at the expense of the state’s farmers and residents. During the first three years of drought, California “flushed 652 billion gallons into the ocean due to the aforementioned biological opinions, which have prevented the irrigation infrastructure from operating at full capacity,” laments Nunes.
Man Made Drought
So it seems Mother Nature is the scapegoat, not the culprit, in California’s water shortage. Instead, environmentalists have carefully orchestrated the crisis, with the typical ruse of animal rights to conceal their true agenda: depopulation — in this case, targeting the Central Valley through water deprivation. Nunes recounts a meeting in 2002 with NRDC representatives lobbying for increased water restrictions. They admitted “their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production.”
“They showed me maps that laid out their whole plan,” recalls Nunes. “From Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side, productive agriculture would end and the land would return to some ideal state of nature.”
Their propaganda campaign to demonize California’s farmers reinforces his story. The media-parroted eco-myth blames big agriculture robber barons for greedily gulping down 80 percent of the state’s water. But California Department of Water Resources data reveal a gross distortion in this statistic, which conveniently ignores captured water not intended for human use. In reality, roughly 50 percent of California water goes toward environmental causes, while agriculture uses about 40 percent, with residents and businesses sharing the remaining 10. Take away the fish’s share, and voilà, farmers use 80 percent!
Meanwhile, environmentalists march relentlessly on toward their 1.3 million-acre goal. And they are unnervingly close to reaching it. Nunes tallies one million acres of farmland that now stand idle due to eco-regulations and water restrictions. And the State Water Resources Control Board is poised to help them capture the remaining 300,000 acres, and then some, by means of mandatory limits on human consumption and use of water.
Even as half of California’s water flowed unreservedly to failed fish preservation schemes, last year state regulators imposed pumping restrictions on junior-rights holders — those with post-1914 water permits. This June the Water Board ordered California’s senior water-rights holders to stop pumping surface water, a move affecting more than 100 irrigation districts and water agencies across the state. Historically sheltered from government restrictions, senior water rights are those established prior to 1914 when California first started issuing permits. This is only the second time in California history when the state has limited senior rights; the first was in 1977, also under Governor Jerry Brown. Violators of the new restriction face fines up to $1,000 per day and $2,500 per acre foot of water, or roughly 326,000 gallons.
Both farmers and residents are already feeling the heat. The Sacramento Bee quoted Water Board executive director Tom Howard warning, “There will be some land ending up being fallowed as a result.” Electric generation and municipal water supplies are endangered, too. For example, senior right holder Byron Bethany Irrigation District in northern California supplies water to several power plants and, until shortly after the ruling, was the sole water source for one suburban community, which quickly scrambled to buy water from a neighboring district.
One of several districts that have answered the new regulation with lawsuits, Byron Bethany now faces an unprecedented $1.55 million fine for continuing to draw restricted water. Likewise, West Side Irrigation District based in Tracy, California, about 60 miles east of San Francisco, sued the Water Board and found itself slapped with a hefty fine. The board denies charges by both districts of retaliation for their lawsuits.
Rights holders are justifiably incensed. Last November California voters approved a $7.5 billion bond to build new water storage facilities. Though the measure was Governor Brown’s top priority in his 2014 reelection bid, only “$750 million [have] been allocated so far, but not a dime for dams.” This is according to Stephen Frank, political consultant and publisher of California Political News & Views, who relates that more than one-third of the allocated funds, $287.5 million, is earmarked for smelt preservation and salmon run development.
“Why does Jerry Brown so dislike Californians?” asks Frank. “He openly lied about the water bond.... Now in the midst of a water shortage HE caused, he wants to use close to $300 million to give water to fish, not people. This may be the sickest policy ever.”
Not that Brown doesn’t have plans for the remaining $6.75 billion. He held a July 10 summit in Sacramento to discuss “Leveraging Technology to Build a Drought Resilient California.” Greenbiz.com lists some of the high-tech drought defense solutions offered by scientists and policymakers who attended:
Water conservation software based on behavioral science and cloud computing. Agricultural irrigation technology using sensors to measure sap in grape vines. Satellites that measure plant water needs. Home greywater recycling systems. Water meters connected to the Internet. Solar-powered desalination.
Along with plans of government surveillance of water use, there were also suggestions for protecting California’s fish. But the day’s theme was limited to conserving water resources that will continue to dwindle thanks to government management of water allocation. Brown’s agenda omitted reference to storage facilities, dams, pumps, etc. — the measures voters approved last November. Nor was there mention of reversing disastrous environmental policies that perpetuate the crisis.
To add insult to injury, “More than $320 million that was supposed to be rushed to drought-stricken California communities sits unspent in government bank accounts,” according to CBS News Sacramento. This is the balance of the $687 million Governor Brown set aside back in 2014 when he declared a state of emergency. Lawmakers claimed the funds would upgrade outdated water systems and protect wells from contamination. Pipelines and water-treatment plants have yet to receive funding, though expenditures have ensured a “vanishing pond near Sacramento has been replenished, protecting a popular breeding ground for the threatened giant garter snake.”
Enter the federal government. In December and again in July, the U.S. House passed bills to restore some of the water diverted for salmon and smelt back to farmers in central and southern California. But President Obama has promised to veto such legislation. “Instead, administration policy regarding the crisis has amounted to a welfare program,” noted Jack Kenny, writing for The New American. “Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary, said … the administration is not considering any policy changes, adding that Obama has offered relief to the state in the form of $60 million to California food banks and $15 million for farmers and ranchers.” Unfortunately, those unconstitutionally distributed funds are just as likely to be misallocated as California’s bond money and emergency reserve.
And it’s no use trying to drill a well for relief from the radical assault on surface water. Governor Brown took care of that last September when he signed an unprecedented law that forever limits even private property owners from groundwater pumping. The new restrictions will be phased in during the next decade, turning authority over to the Water Board.
“With the stroke of his pen,” wrote Republican State Senator Jim Nielsen, “the Governor changed over 100 years of water laws — without the people’s input.” He warned, “Californians who rely on groundwater will now have to deal with not only new and unaccountable government agencies that will police water usage; they will be at the mercy of these faceless bureaucrats who will impose unknown fees and fines.” Nunes likewise predicts, “Many farmers will not be able to keep growing food if they continue to receive zero water allocations and are restricted from tapping enough ground water.”
Water Wars
Water has long been a fighting word in the American West. It’s said that Mark Twain observed on his return from a trip to California, “Out there, whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting over.” So is there a solution to this age-old dilemma?
“The bottom line for solving California’s water problem is that there needs to be a move toward a market-oriented method for the distribution of water,” wrote economist Walter Williams in an editorial published in The New American online. “Water is distributed in California and other Western states not by market prices but by the political process,” he pointed out. “I need someone to show me that there is such a desperate need for somewhere to grow potatoes, corn and other crops that we need to subsidize making a desert bloom.”
Williams explains a basic economic principle which dictates that, if there is a scarcity of something, the price is probably too low. For years state and federal subsidies have forced this artificial imbalance on taxpayers, who must pay higher prices for their own water as they help foot the bill for farmers. This imbalance is nonexistent in a free market, where agriculture meets demand by the most economic route — e.g., irrigating and farming arid land or importing products — without accusations of over-consumption, and without the government handouts, crippling regulations, and eventual failure that inevitably go hand-in-hand.
California agriculture was founded on such a free market system. The September 1910 Pacific Monthly magazine records how German settlers who founded Anaheim, just outside Los Angeles, began irrigating their vineyards in 1857, thereby surviving the harsh drought of 1862-1865, even as the desiccated cattle industry perished. Within the next two decades, Anaheim became California’s leading wine producer, until most of the vineyards succumbed to a deadly parasite. Instead of throwing their hands up in defeat, farmers found profit in citrus, berries, vegetables, grains, nuts, beans, potatoes, sugar cane, livestock, and a plethora of other agricultural products. The name “Orange County” is a testimony to their free-market entrepreneurialism.
Now that the government divvies up water rights in California, with an inefficient and inflexible system that promises more water than it can deliver, scarcity abounds. Could free market economics make a difference? They have to ask residents in Kern County, north of Los Angeles, where the Tehachapi Basin provides groundwater for residents, industry, and agriculture. In the 2015 edition of their book Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation, authors Terry Anderson and Donald Leal explain that government mismanagement of the aquifer between the 1930s and 1960s caused exorbitant pumping costs and many dry wells, while “withdrawals from the aquifer exceeded recharge by 60 percent.” Acting on behalf of a citizen advisory committee fearful of losing their farms, in 1966 the local water district sued for and won a market-based groundwater rights exchange. In 2006, the California Department of Water Resources credited the move with recovering groundwater levels. “The city of Tehachapi no longer rations water as it did during some periods prior to adjudication,” relate Anderson and Leal, “and rising water tables have brought previously marginal wells back into production.”
Unfortunately, most other California farmers have shackled themselves with dependence on federal and state subsidies. Now that Big Brother has turned on them, they’re crying foul. Yet it should come as no surprise that government distribution of anything encourages costly and inefficient use; water is no exception. Leaving distribution to the free market would allow the price to stabilize and water to be distributed where there is actual need and where it can be used most efficiently. For their own good, Californians should let the market dictate water prices. After all, says Williams, “Government management has been a failure.”
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/21465-draining-california
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