Friday, April 29, 2016
"Americans, for their part, ended up with the Cold War against their old WWII partner, along with a totalitarian-like structure known as the national security establishment or military-industrial complex, which, as president Eisenhower would later point out, posed a grave risk to the freedom of the American people and their democratic processes. That’s the part of the government, of course, that now runs the U.S. death machine, which has brought untold death and destruction to people in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as other parts of the world."
Trump and America First
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Whatever else might be said of Donald Trump, no one can deny that he has the most remarkable ability to make the GOP and mainstream establishment go ballistic. The most recent example is his use of the term “America First” in a foreign policy speech that he delivered right in the center of U.S. Empire, Washington, D.C.
Once again, he has caused the Washington establishment and mainstream pundits and commentaries to scream like banshees.
Why?
Because Trump’s use of “America First” focuses people’s attention on what known as the America First Committee, a nationwide organization that opposed U.S. intervention into World War II.
Given the horrific consequences of U.S. interventionism, it’s not surprising that the interventionists would get upset if any indirectly questions their interventionist shibboleth, World War II. It’s that war that interventionists inevitably revert to when anyone points out the massive death and destruction that the U.S. interventionist death machine has produced in the Middle East and Afghanistan, including the rise of ISIS, partnerships with crooked, corrupt dictatorial regimes, torture, crooked and corrupt regimes, and the enormous refugee crisis.
It’s also the war they raise whenever someone points to the horrific consequences of other interventions, such as the one in Iran that destroyed the country’s experiment in democracy. Or Chile, where U.S. interventionism did the same thing in that country. Or Guatemala, where it did the same thing there. Or Korea, where tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were forced to die in an unconstitutional intervention into another country’s civil war. Or Vietnam, where tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died for nothing.
But the idea is that Americans are supposed to ignore all the horrific consequences of interventionism because of World War II, which, they say, proved the success of interventionism. And anyone who questions that notion is considered a heretic within the religion of interventionism, one who must be shut down immediately, even if that includes charges of anti-Semitism or other such smears.
In practically every mainstream piece criticizing the America First Committee, the author will inevitably suggest that the America First Committee was composed of anti-Semites. The implication is that anyone who was a member hated Jews and loved the Nazis.
Really?
There were 800,000 Americans, many of them extremely prominent, in the America First Committee. Members or supporters included future President Gerald Ford, future Peace Corps Director Sergeant Shriver, future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, future President John F. Kennedy, H. Smith Richardson of the Vick Chemical Corporation, Gen. Robert E. Wood of Sears-Roebuck, and Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.
Gee, I didn’t know all those people hated Jews and loved Nazi Germany. Did you?
The truth is that the America First Committee was organized to oppose entry into another European war. The operative word is “another.” You see, this is that interventionists never mention when they smear the America First Committee — that it was formed as a direct result of the horrific consequences of the previous big intervention known as World War I and to make sure that that never happened again.
In other words, America First wasn’t formed to criticize Jews or extol Nazi Germany. It was formed to prevent a repeat of World War I, a war that Americans realized had sacrificed American lives and American values for nothing.
Don’t forget: Prior to World War I, Germany had never attacked or invaded the United States. It was the U.S. government, under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson, who had decided to reject America’s heritage of non-involvement in foreign wars by intervening in a conflict that was no business of the U.S. government.
His goal? To make this the final war—the war that would bring an end to all future wars. The interventionists were going to show how their philosophy of violent intervention could remake the world — could make the world “safe for democracy.”
In the process, they conscripted American men to serve in their grand crusade, many of whom were killed and maimed.They also destroyed civil liberties by jailing Americans who dared question the war or the draft.
And at the end of it all? Nothing but death, destruction, and ruination, along with a peace treaty whose terms would soon give rise to Hitler and the Nazis.
That’s why the America First Committee was formed — to make sure that the interventionists would never again foist their philosophy of interventionism onto America.
And there is something important to note here: The America First Committee represented the views of the overwhelming majority of the American people.
Were there members of the America First Committee who were anti-Semitic? Were there members who liked Nazi Germany?
Well, duh! In an organization that opposed another disastrous foreign intervention against Germany, of course there would be some people of that mindset. But to suggest that the organization was formed to be a gigantic enterprise against Jews and in favor of Nazi Germany is ridiculous.
And let’s not forget something else of import here: Anti-Semitism was a prevalent mindset, not only in Nazi Germany but also right here in the good old USA, and one need look any further than interventionist icon President Franklin Roosevelt and his State Department for confirmation.
After all, who was it that turned down Hitler’s offer to let Germany Jews exit the country? It was FDR himself, using the excuse of immigration quotas. If he had instead said yes, there never would have been a Holocaust.
Who was it who turned away a German ship containing Jewish refugees, knowing full well that they would almost certainly have to be returned to Nazi Germany? You guessed it: U.S. officials themselves. Just Google “Voyage of the Damned.”
And hey, some of the members of the America First Committee weren’t the only ones who thought Hitler was great. So did Winston Churchill. Prior to World War II, he declare that if England ever found herself in desperate straits, he hoped that the country would find its own Adolf Hitler.
And why not — after all, Hitler was employing the same statist economic policies that Roosevelt was employing in America as part of his New Deal socialist-fascist program to get the country out of the Great Depression. In fact, that’s what caused Hitler to praise Roosevelt!
And while we are on the subject of FDR, let’s also not forget how he deceived the American people into making them believe that he was a non-interventionist too. That was during his 1940 presidential campaign for a third term in office, when he told Americans that he would never send their boys to die in another foreign war.
But as everyone now acknowledges, he was lying. In fact, he was determined to manipulate things to circumvent the overwhelming will of the American people.
Under the Constitution, FDR was required to seek a congressional declaration of war before he could intervene into World War II. That was the law. That’s the way things work in a representative democracy.
Not for Roosevelt, who had already shown dangerous signs of dictatorial tendency in his first two terms. (Google “FDR” and “court-packing scheme.”). He knew that given the overwhelming sentiment against another intervention, Congress would never vote for a declaration of war.
So, Roosevelt decided that his only hope was to provoke Germany or Japan into “firing the first shot” so that he could say, “We’ve been attacked! We’ve been attacked! We have no choice now but to go to war.”
It was the oldest political trick in the book. It didn’t work with Germany — it refused to take Roosevelt’s bait. But it worked with the Japanese, especially when they began feeling the effects of FDR’s embargo on oil, which their military machine desperately needed.
Interventionists now admit that Roosevelt lied and deceived the American people into the war. What’s fascinating is that they don’t see anything wrong with what he did. And while mourning the loss of soldiers at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, they have nothing but praise for the man who intentionally sacrificed those men so that he could circumvent the will of the American people against getting involved in another world war.
When the America First Committee dissolved a few days after the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR must have been so pleased over how he had outsmarted his non-interventionists opponents. You can just imagine the smile on his face.
England had declared war on Germany with the aim of freeing Poland and Eastern Europe from dictatorship. At the end of the war, Nazi Germany lay defeated, but England and the U.S. surrendered Poland and Eastern Europe to the control of their wartime partner and ally, the Soviet Union, which was headed by a brutal communist regime.
Meanwhile, China, which FDR wanted to free from Japanese tyranny, ended up with a brutal communist regime, which still holds power today.
And Americans, for their part, ended up with the Cold War against their old WWII partner, along with a totalitarian-like structure known as the national security establishment or military-industrial complex, which, as president Eisenhower would later point out, posed a grave risk to the freedom of the American people and their democratic processes. That’s the part of the government, of course, that now runs the U.S. death machine, which has brought untold death and destruction to people in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as other parts of the world.
With victories like that in World War II, who needs defeats?
Donald Trump, needless to say is an interventionist himself, but he is providing a valuable service in causing people to focus on the final redoubt of interventionists — World War II, the war that interventionists actually call “the good war.”
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/29/trump-america-first/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Whatever else might be said of Donald Trump, no one can deny that he has the most remarkable ability to make the GOP and mainstream establishment go ballistic. The most recent example is his use of the term “America First” in a foreign policy speech that he delivered right in the center of U.S. Empire, Washington, D.C.
Once again, he has caused the Washington establishment and mainstream pundits and commentaries to scream like banshees.
Why?
Because Trump’s use of “America First” focuses people’s attention on what known as the America First Committee, a nationwide organization that opposed U.S. intervention into World War II.
Given the horrific consequences of U.S. interventionism, it’s not surprising that the interventionists would get upset if any indirectly questions their interventionist shibboleth, World War II. It’s that war that interventionists inevitably revert to when anyone points out the massive death and destruction that the U.S. interventionist death machine has produced in the Middle East and Afghanistan, including the rise of ISIS, partnerships with crooked, corrupt dictatorial regimes, torture, crooked and corrupt regimes, and the enormous refugee crisis.
It’s also the war they raise whenever someone points to the horrific consequences of other interventions, such as the one in Iran that destroyed the country’s experiment in democracy. Or Chile, where U.S. interventionism did the same thing in that country. Or Guatemala, where it did the same thing there. Or Korea, where tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were forced to die in an unconstitutional intervention into another country’s civil war. Or Vietnam, where tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died for nothing.
But the idea is that Americans are supposed to ignore all the horrific consequences of interventionism because of World War II, which, they say, proved the success of interventionism. And anyone who questions that notion is considered a heretic within the religion of interventionism, one who must be shut down immediately, even if that includes charges of anti-Semitism or other such smears.
In practically every mainstream piece criticizing the America First Committee, the author will inevitably suggest that the America First Committee was composed of anti-Semites. The implication is that anyone who was a member hated Jews and loved the Nazis.
Really?
There were 800,000 Americans, many of them extremely prominent, in the America First Committee. Members or supporters included future President Gerald Ford, future Peace Corps Director Sergeant Shriver, future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, future President John F. Kennedy, H. Smith Richardson of the Vick Chemical Corporation, Gen. Robert E. Wood of Sears-Roebuck, and Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.
Gee, I didn’t know all those people hated Jews and loved Nazi Germany. Did you?
The truth is that the America First Committee was organized to oppose entry into another European war. The operative word is “another.” You see, this is that interventionists never mention when they smear the America First Committee — that it was formed as a direct result of the horrific consequences of the previous big intervention known as World War I and to make sure that that never happened again.
In other words, America First wasn’t formed to criticize Jews or extol Nazi Germany. It was formed to prevent a repeat of World War I, a war that Americans realized had sacrificed American lives and American values for nothing.
Don’t forget: Prior to World War I, Germany had never attacked or invaded the United States. It was the U.S. government, under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson, who had decided to reject America’s heritage of non-involvement in foreign wars by intervening in a conflict that was no business of the U.S. government.
His goal? To make this the final war—the war that would bring an end to all future wars. The interventionists were going to show how their philosophy of violent intervention could remake the world — could make the world “safe for democracy.”
In the process, they conscripted American men to serve in their grand crusade, many of whom were killed and maimed.They also destroyed civil liberties by jailing Americans who dared question the war or the draft.
And at the end of it all? Nothing but death, destruction, and ruination, along with a peace treaty whose terms would soon give rise to Hitler and the Nazis.
That’s why the America First Committee was formed — to make sure that the interventionists would never again foist their philosophy of interventionism onto America.
And there is something important to note here: The America First Committee represented the views of the overwhelming majority of the American people.
Were there members of the America First Committee who were anti-Semitic? Were there members who liked Nazi Germany?
Well, duh! In an organization that opposed another disastrous foreign intervention against Germany, of course there would be some people of that mindset. But to suggest that the organization was formed to be a gigantic enterprise against Jews and in favor of Nazi Germany is ridiculous.
And let’s not forget something else of import here: Anti-Semitism was a prevalent mindset, not only in Nazi Germany but also right here in the good old USA, and one need look any further than interventionist icon President Franklin Roosevelt and his State Department for confirmation.
After all, who was it that turned down Hitler’s offer to let Germany Jews exit the country? It was FDR himself, using the excuse of immigration quotas. If he had instead said yes, there never would have been a Holocaust.
Who was it who turned away a German ship containing Jewish refugees, knowing full well that they would almost certainly have to be returned to Nazi Germany? You guessed it: U.S. officials themselves. Just Google “Voyage of the Damned.”
And hey, some of the members of the America First Committee weren’t the only ones who thought Hitler was great. So did Winston Churchill. Prior to World War II, he declare that if England ever found herself in desperate straits, he hoped that the country would find its own Adolf Hitler.
And why not — after all, Hitler was employing the same statist economic policies that Roosevelt was employing in America as part of his New Deal socialist-fascist program to get the country out of the Great Depression. In fact, that’s what caused Hitler to praise Roosevelt!
And while we are on the subject of FDR, let’s also not forget how he deceived the American people into making them believe that he was a non-interventionist too. That was during his 1940 presidential campaign for a third term in office, when he told Americans that he would never send their boys to die in another foreign war.
But as everyone now acknowledges, he was lying. In fact, he was determined to manipulate things to circumvent the overwhelming will of the American people.
Under the Constitution, FDR was required to seek a congressional declaration of war before he could intervene into World War II. That was the law. That’s the way things work in a representative democracy.
Not for Roosevelt, who had already shown dangerous signs of dictatorial tendency in his first two terms. (Google “FDR” and “court-packing scheme.”). He knew that given the overwhelming sentiment against another intervention, Congress would never vote for a declaration of war.
So, Roosevelt decided that his only hope was to provoke Germany or Japan into “firing the first shot” so that he could say, “We’ve been attacked! We’ve been attacked! We have no choice now but to go to war.”
It was the oldest political trick in the book. It didn’t work with Germany — it refused to take Roosevelt’s bait. But it worked with the Japanese, especially when they began feeling the effects of FDR’s embargo on oil, which their military machine desperately needed.
Interventionists now admit that Roosevelt lied and deceived the American people into the war. What’s fascinating is that they don’t see anything wrong with what he did. And while mourning the loss of soldiers at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, they have nothing but praise for the man who intentionally sacrificed those men so that he could circumvent the will of the American people against getting involved in another world war.
When the America First Committee dissolved a few days after the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR must have been so pleased over how he had outsmarted his non-interventionists opponents. You can just imagine the smile on his face.
England had declared war on Germany with the aim of freeing Poland and Eastern Europe from dictatorship. At the end of the war, Nazi Germany lay defeated, but England and the U.S. surrendered Poland and Eastern Europe to the control of their wartime partner and ally, the Soviet Union, which was headed by a brutal communist regime.
Meanwhile, China, which FDR wanted to free from Japanese tyranny, ended up with a brutal communist regime, which still holds power today.
And Americans, for their part, ended up with the Cold War against their old WWII partner, along with a totalitarian-like structure known as the national security establishment or military-industrial complex, which, as president Eisenhower would later point out, posed a grave risk to the freedom of the American people and their democratic processes. That’s the part of the government, of course, that now runs the U.S. death machine, which has brought untold death and destruction to people in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as other parts of the world.
With victories like that in World War II, who needs defeats?
Donald Trump, needless to say is an interventionist himself, but he is providing a valuable service in causing people to focus on the final redoubt of interventionists — World War II, the war that interventionists actually call “the good war.”
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/29/trump-america-first/
"Once we were vaccinated against diseases like measles, mumps and rubella, they said, we were never again at risk of getting those diseases. Well, it turns out – again – that the vaccine Nazis were wrong."
Forty people contract mumps at Harvard ... all were vaccinated ... mumps vaccines based on scientific fraud
by: J. D. Heyes
It wasn't supposed to happen this way – at least, that's what the vaccine Nazis have always told us in justifying forced ingestion of poisonous, infectious substances into our bodies.
Once we were vaccinated against diseases like measles, mumps and rubella, they said, we were never again at risk of getting those diseases. Well, it turns out – again – that the vaccine Nazis were wrong.
Officials at Harvard University have sent out an urgent appeal to students, asking them to take better precautions against infecting each other with mumps, after at least 40 cases have been confirmed since the beginning of the year.
That's 40 cases of confirmed mumps in students who were vaccinated, by the way.
School officials began warning the student body in February, after the disease had been confirmed in two students. The warning letter even discussed the fallacy of permanent immunity from a mumps vaccine:
[T]hose who have been vaccinated for mumps—though much less likely to contract the virus—can still be infected.
Only one way to become permanently immune
By the way, the letter – from Paul J. Barreira, MD, Director: Harvard University Health Services and the Henry K. Oliver Professor of Hygiene – also noted another medical truth: That self-immunization is much more effective than a vaccine.
Individuals who have previously had mumps are considered immune to the virus.
Much has changed since that initial outbreak. By March, school and local health officials reported that mumps had spread to 16 students, despite the fact that all of them "were fully immunized against the mumps prior to contracting the disease."
Now, at least 40 people are sick with mumps, and that's got the school's chief health official worried.
"I'm actually more concerned now than I was during any time of the outbreak," Barreira toldThe Harvard Crimson. "I'm desperate to get students to take seriously that they shouldn't be infecting one another."
In fact, the disease is spreading so rapidly that it may even affect the university's May 26 commencement, Barreira added.
"If there's a spike this week, that means those students expose others, so now we're looking at a potential serious interruption to commencement for students," he told the student newspaper. "Students will get infected and then go into isolation."
Mumps is a viral infection that affects the salivary glands, and while it is generally considered rare, it certainly is becoming more common on the campus of an Ivy League school filled with young adults from well-to-do families. If mumps can strike and flourish there, it can strike and flourish anywhere.
Series of outbreaks
There have been additional outbreaks at other college campuses. Between 2011 and 2013, there were outbreaks on campuses in California, Virginia and Maryland, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
There were even larger outbreaks from 2009 to 2010, the CDC noted:
-- One multi-year outbreak involved about 3,000 people and mostly affected high school-aged students who were part of a close-knit religious community in New York City and attended schools in which they had very close contact. The outbreak started when an infected student in this religious community returned from the United Kingdom where a large mumps outbreak was occurring.
-- The second outbreak involved about 500 people, mostly school-aged children, in the U.S. Territory of Guam.
But the most serious recent outbreak occurred in 2006, the CDC noted:
In 2006, the United States experienced a multi-state mumps outbreak involving more than 6,500 reported cases. This resurgence predominantly affected college-aged students living in the Midwest, with outbreaks occurring on many different Midwestern college campuses.
Remember all that faked data?
In reporting on the mumps outbreak in 2010, Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, noted that the CDC has been less than forthright about the success rates for mumps vaccines.
"The CDC claims the mumps vaccine is 76 to 95 percent effective, but they offer no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that claim. To date, there has never been a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study published on the mumps vaccine in humans. The so-called 'scientific' evidence supporting these vaccines is purely imaginary," he wrote.
That claim was borne out a few years later, when he reported that two Merck scientists who filed a False Claims Act complaint in 2010 – a complaint which has just now been unsealed – accused vaccine manufacturer Merck of knowingly falsifying its mumps vaccine test data, spiking blood samples with animal antibodies, selling a vaccine that actually promoted mumps and measles outbreaks, and ripping off governments and consumers who bought the vaccine thinking it was "95% effective."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053842_mumps_outbreak_vaccine_science_Harvard.html#ixzz47DGVb7tw
by: J. D. Heyes
It wasn't supposed to happen this way – at least, that's what the vaccine Nazis have always told us in justifying forced ingestion of poisonous, infectious substances into our bodies.
Once we were vaccinated against diseases like measles, mumps and rubella, they said, we were never again at risk of getting those diseases. Well, it turns out – again – that the vaccine Nazis were wrong.
Officials at Harvard University have sent out an urgent appeal to students, asking them to take better precautions against infecting each other with mumps, after at least 40 cases have been confirmed since the beginning of the year.
That's 40 cases of confirmed mumps in students who were vaccinated, by the way.
School officials began warning the student body in February, after the disease had been confirmed in two students. The warning letter even discussed the fallacy of permanent immunity from a mumps vaccine:
[T]hose who have been vaccinated for mumps—though much less likely to contract the virus—can still be infected.
Only one way to become permanently immune
By the way, the letter – from Paul J. Barreira, MD, Director: Harvard University Health Services and the Henry K. Oliver Professor of Hygiene – also noted another medical truth: That self-immunization is much more effective than a vaccine.
Individuals who have previously had mumps are considered immune to the virus.
Much has changed since that initial outbreak. By March, school and local health officials reported that mumps had spread to 16 students, despite the fact that all of them "were fully immunized against the mumps prior to contracting the disease."
Now, at least 40 people are sick with mumps, and that's got the school's chief health official worried.
"I'm actually more concerned now than I was during any time of the outbreak," Barreira toldThe Harvard Crimson. "I'm desperate to get students to take seriously that they shouldn't be infecting one another."
In fact, the disease is spreading so rapidly that it may even affect the university's May 26 commencement, Barreira added.
"If there's a spike this week, that means those students expose others, so now we're looking at a potential serious interruption to commencement for students," he told the student newspaper. "Students will get infected and then go into isolation."
Mumps is a viral infection that affects the salivary glands, and while it is generally considered rare, it certainly is becoming more common on the campus of an Ivy League school filled with young adults from well-to-do families. If mumps can strike and flourish there, it can strike and flourish anywhere.
Series of outbreaks
There have been additional outbreaks at other college campuses. Between 2011 and 2013, there were outbreaks on campuses in California, Virginia and Maryland, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
There were even larger outbreaks from 2009 to 2010, the CDC noted:
-- One multi-year outbreak involved about 3,000 people and mostly affected high school-aged students who were part of a close-knit religious community in New York City and attended schools in which they had very close contact. The outbreak started when an infected student in this religious community returned from the United Kingdom where a large mumps outbreak was occurring.
-- The second outbreak involved about 500 people, mostly school-aged children, in the U.S. Territory of Guam.
But the most serious recent outbreak occurred in 2006, the CDC noted:
In 2006, the United States experienced a multi-state mumps outbreak involving more than 6,500 reported cases. This resurgence predominantly affected college-aged students living in the Midwest, with outbreaks occurring on many different Midwestern college campuses.
Remember all that faked data?
In reporting on the mumps outbreak in 2010, Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, noted that the CDC has been less than forthright about the success rates for mumps vaccines.
"The CDC claims the mumps vaccine is 76 to 95 percent effective, but they offer no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that claim. To date, there has never been a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study published on the mumps vaccine in humans. The so-called 'scientific' evidence supporting these vaccines is purely imaginary," he wrote.
That claim was borne out a few years later, when he reported that two Merck scientists who filed a False Claims Act complaint in 2010 – a complaint which has just now been unsealed – accused vaccine manufacturer Merck of knowingly falsifying its mumps vaccine test data, spiking blood samples with animal antibodies, selling a vaccine that actually promoted mumps and measles outbreaks, and ripping off governments and consumers who bought the vaccine thinking it was "95% effective."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053842_mumps_outbreak_vaccine_science_Harvard.html#ixzz47DGVb7tw
"As these Founders taught us, when states and individuals take action, they are extremely effective as a roadblock to increasing federal power."
The Founders’ word: Void
by Michael Boldin
When it comes to limits of federal power under the Constitution, the view of many Founding Fathers fits under the same theme. That is, federal acts outside of the Constitution are null and void.
During the ratification debates, Oliver Ellsworth, the Supreme Court’s third chief justice, put it this way: “If the United States go beyond their powers, if they make a law which the Constitution does not authorize, it is void.”
In Federalist #78, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void.”
And in 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”
See the pattern?
I won’t get into a laundry list of everything that should qualify as “void” today under the Founders’ Constitution, but here are a few to set the stage: ACA, ATF, DEA, EPA, GCA, NFA, NSA, TSA.
What to do?
It’s my opinion that no one in their right mind should expect the federal government to limit itself. This also includes the federal courts, a branch of the federal government. And, as I noted in my July 2013 article, “voting the bums out” hasn’t been a good strategy either.
In other words, if you have a problem with the federal government, you need something outside the federal government to stop it. That would be the states and the people.
First, let me be clear. This isn’t my idea. I didn’t dream it up one night. It comes from some of the most prominent Founding Fathers.
While James Madison wrote the most specific and complete set of instructions on how to stop the federal government without relying on the federal government to limit itself, he was far from the only Founder to talk about states and individuals as a check on federal power.
Even Hamilton agreed. In Federalist #28 he wrote that state governments would offer security against “invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.”
A little-known Founding Father from Massachusetts also made the case, just like Madison and Hamilton did, that the states were the strongest check on federal power, should they work together to oppose it.
In the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, Theophilus Parsons said that the state legislatures were, “superior to all the parchment checks that can be invented.” And when they’re organized in opposition against federal acts, he said that “none but madmen would attempt a usurpation.”
Like Madison, who in Federalist #46 recommended that states and individuals employ “a refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union,” Parsons advised the same.
He continued, “But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal to arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance.”
Taking action
The common thread from Madison to Parsons and even to Hamilton is that states and individuals are an essential part of the checks-and-balances system of the Constitution. They are a counteracting force, especially when two or more branches of the federal government work against us.
As these Founders taught us, when states and individuals take action, they are extremely effective as a roadblock to increasing federal power.
Whether it’s blocking federal gun control, rejecting mass surveillance, ending asset forfeiture or even bringing down the Federal Reserve, the focus should be on individuals and states, not on federal courts and federal elections.
This is just what Thomas Jefferson advised as well. In response to powers “which have not been delegated,” he told us that nullification is the “rightful remedy.”
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/the-founders-word-void/
by Michael Boldin
When it comes to limits of federal power under the Constitution, the view of many Founding Fathers fits under the same theme. That is, federal acts outside of the Constitution are null and void.
During the ratification debates, Oliver Ellsworth, the Supreme Court’s third chief justice, put it this way: “If the United States go beyond their powers, if they make a law which the Constitution does not authorize, it is void.”
In Federalist #78, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void.”
And in 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”
See the pattern?
I won’t get into a laundry list of everything that should qualify as “void” today under the Founders’ Constitution, but here are a few to set the stage: ACA, ATF, DEA, EPA, GCA, NFA, NSA, TSA.
What to do?
It’s my opinion that no one in their right mind should expect the federal government to limit itself. This also includes the federal courts, a branch of the federal government. And, as I noted in my July 2013 article, “voting the bums out” hasn’t been a good strategy either.
In other words, if you have a problem with the federal government, you need something outside the federal government to stop it. That would be the states and the people.
First, let me be clear. This isn’t my idea. I didn’t dream it up one night. It comes from some of the most prominent Founding Fathers.
While James Madison wrote the most specific and complete set of instructions on how to stop the federal government without relying on the federal government to limit itself, he was far from the only Founder to talk about states and individuals as a check on federal power.
Even Hamilton agreed. In Federalist #28 he wrote that state governments would offer security against “invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.”
A little-known Founding Father from Massachusetts also made the case, just like Madison and Hamilton did, that the states were the strongest check on federal power, should they work together to oppose it.
In the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, Theophilus Parsons said that the state legislatures were, “superior to all the parchment checks that can be invented.” And when they’re organized in opposition against federal acts, he said that “none but madmen would attempt a usurpation.”
Like Madison, who in Federalist #46 recommended that states and individuals employ “a refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union,” Parsons advised the same.
He continued, “But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal to arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance.”
Taking action
The common thread from Madison to Parsons and even to Hamilton is that states and individuals are an essential part of the checks-and-balances system of the Constitution. They are a counteracting force, especially when two or more branches of the federal government work against us.
As these Founders taught us, when states and individuals take action, they are extremely effective as a roadblock to increasing federal power.
Whether it’s blocking federal gun control, rejecting mass surveillance, ending asset forfeiture or even bringing down the Federal Reserve, the focus should be on individuals and states, not on federal courts and federal elections.
This is just what Thomas Jefferson advised as well. In response to powers “which have not been delegated,” he told us that nullification is the “rightful remedy.”
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/the-founders-word-void/
Anyone surprised???
SURPRISE! Campus Noose Drawing Was Created By Black Students. NO CHARGES FILED For ‘Hate Crime’
By Eric Owens
Two black students at Salisbury University drew a stick figure hanging from a noose on a whiteboard in the taxpayer-funded school’s library, police say. The image also featured the word “Nigger!” (with the exclamation point) and the hashtag #WhitePower
The hoax incident caused great calamity on the 8,657-student campus in Salisbury, Md. The Salisbury University Police Department initiated a hate-crime investigation. However, upon learning that the unidentified students are black, authorities chose to file no charges, reports The Daily Times, a local newspaper.
The racist image appeared on a Blackwell Library on April 10, around the time of the school’s eighth annual “Stop Hatin’” week, which centers on diversity and acceptance...
Read the rest here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/no_author/campus-noose-drawing-created-black-students/
By Eric Owens
Two black students at Salisbury University drew a stick figure hanging from a noose on a whiteboard in the taxpayer-funded school’s library, police say. The image also featured the word “Nigger!” (with the exclamation point) and the hashtag #WhitePower
The hoax incident caused great calamity on the 8,657-student campus in Salisbury, Md. The Salisbury University Police Department initiated a hate-crime investigation. However, upon learning that the unidentified students are black, authorities chose to file no charges, reports The Daily Times, a local newspaper.
The racist image appeared on a Blackwell Library on April 10, around the time of the school’s eighth annual “Stop Hatin’” week, which centers on diversity and acceptance...
Read the rest here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/no_author/campus-noose-drawing-created-black-students/
Thursday, April 28, 2016
"The values that are being relentlessly pounded into the heads of our young people are directly opposed to the values that this nation was founded upon, and it is these young people that will determine the path that this country ultimately takes."
The Future Of America? – More Than Half Of All U.S. Adults Under Age 30 Now Reject Capitalism
Michael Snyder
A shocking new survey has found that support for capitalism is dying in America. In fact, more than half of all adults in the United States under the age of 30 say that they do not support capitalism at this point. You might be tempted to dismiss them as “foolish young people”, but the truth is that they are the future of America. As older generations die off, they will eventually become the leaders of this country. And of course our nation has not resembled anything close to a capitalist society for quite some time now. In a recent article, I listed 97 different taxes that Americans pay each year, and some Americans actually end up returning more than half of what they earn to the government by the time it is all said and done. So at best it could be said that we are running some sort of hybrid system that isn’t as far down the road toward full-blown socialism as most European nations are. But without a doubt we are moving in that direction, and our young people are going to be cheering every step of the way.
When I first heard of this new survey from Harvard University, I was absolutely stunned. The following is from what the Washington Post had to say about it…
The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it.
It isn’t clear that the young people in the poll would prefer some alternative system, though. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. The survey had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
Could it be possible that young adults were confused by the wording of the survey?
Well, other polls have come up with similar results…
The university’s results echo recent findings from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who surveyed 1,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 26 and found that 58% of respondents believed socialism to be the “more compassionate” political system when compared to capitalism. And when participants were asked to sum up the root of America’s problem in one word, 29% said “greed.”
This trend among our young people is very real, and you can see it in their support of Bernie Sanders. For millions upon millions of young adults in America today, Hillary Clinton is not nearly liberal enough for them. So they have flocked to Sanders, and if they had been the only ones voting in this election season, he would have won the Democratic nomination by a landslide.
Sadly, most of our young people don’t seem to understand how socialism slowly but surely destroys a nation. If you want to see the end result of socialism, just look at the economic collapse that is going on in Venezuela right now. The following comes from a Bloomberg article entitled “Venezuela Doesn’t Have Enough Money to Pay for Its Money“…
Venezuela’s epic shortages are nothing new at this point. No diapers or car parts or aspirin — it’s all been well documented. But now the country is at risk of running out of money itself.
In a tale that highlights the chaos of unbridled inflation, Venezuela is scrambling to print new bills fast enough to keep up with the torrid pace of price increases. Most of the cash, like nearly everything else in the oil-exporting country, is imported. And with hard currency reserves sinking to critically low levels, the central bank is doling out payments so slowly to foreign providers that they are foregoing further business.
Venezuela, in other words, is now so broke that it may not have enough money to pay for its money.
We are losing an entire generation of young people. These days, there is quite a lot of talk about how we need to get America back to the principles that it was founded upon, but the cold, hard reality of the matter is that most of our young people are running in the opposite direction as fast as they can.
And Americans under the age of 30 are not just becoming more liberal when it comes to economics. Surveys have found that they are more than twice as likely to support gay rights and less than half as likely to regularly attend church as the oldest Americans are.
So why is this happening?
Well, the truth is that our colleges and universities have become indoctrination centers for the progressive movement. I know, because I spent eight years at public universities in this country. The quality of the education that our young people are receiving is abysmal, but the values that are being imparted to them will last a lifetime.
And of course the same things could be said about our system of education all the way down to the kindergarten level. There are still some good people in the system, but overall it is overwhelmingly dominated by the progressives.
Meanwhile, the major entertainment providers in the United States are also promoting the same values. In a recent article entitled “Depressing Survey Results Show How Extremely Stupid America Has Become“, I discussed a Nielsen report which detailed how much time the average American spends consuming media on various electronic devices each day…
Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes
Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes
Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes
Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes
Overall, the average American spends about 10 hours a day consuming one form of entertainment or another.
When you allow that much “programming” into your mind, it is inevitable that it is going to shape your values, and our young people are more “plugged in” than any of the rest of us.
So yes, I believe that it is exceedingly clear why we should be deeply concerned about the future of America. The values that are being relentlessly pounded into the heads of our young people are directly opposed to the values that this nation was founded upon, and it is these young people that will determine the path that this country ultimately takes.
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-future-of-america-more-than-half-of-all-u-s-adults-under-age-30-now-reject-capitalism
Michael Snyder
A shocking new survey has found that support for capitalism is dying in America. In fact, more than half of all adults in the United States under the age of 30 say that they do not support capitalism at this point. You might be tempted to dismiss them as “foolish young people”, but the truth is that they are the future of America. As older generations die off, they will eventually become the leaders of this country. And of course our nation has not resembled anything close to a capitalist society for quite some time now. In a recent article, I listed 97 different taxes that Americans pay each year, and some Americans actually end up returning more than half of what they earn to the government by the time it is all said and done. So at best it could be said that we are running some sort of hybrid system that isn’t as far down the road toward full-blown socialism as most European nations are. But without a doubt we are moving in that direction, and our young people are going to be cheering every step of the way.
When I first heard of this new survey from Harvard University, I was absolutely stunned. The following is from what the Washington Post had to say about it…
The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it.
It isn’t clear that the young people in the poll would prefer some alternative system, though. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. The survey had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
Could it be possible that young adults were confused by the wording of the survey?
Well, other polls have come up with similar results…
The university’s results echo recent findings from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who surveyed 1,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 26 and found that 58% of respondents believed socialism to be the “more compassionate” political system when compared to capitalism. And when participants were asked to sum up the root of America’s problem in one word, 29% said “greed.”
This trend among our young people is very real, and you can see it in their support of Bernie Sanders. For millions upon millions of young adults in America today, Hillary Clinton is not nearly liberal enough for them. So they have flocked to Sanders, and if they had been the only ones voting in this election season, he would have won the Democratic nomination by a landslide.
Sadly, most of our young people don’t seem to understand how socialism slowly but surely destroys a nation. If you want to see the end result of socialism, just look at the economic collapse that is going on in Venezuela right now. The following comes from a Bloomberg article entitled “Venezuela Doesn’t Have Enough Money to Pay for Its Money“…
Venezuela’s epic shortages are nothing new at this point. No diapers or car parts or aspirin — it’s all been well documented. But now the country is at risk of running out of money itself.
In a tale that highlights the chaos of unbridled inflation, Venezuela is scrambling to print new bills fast enough to keep up with the torrid pace of price increases. Most of the cash, like nearly everything else in the oil-exporting country, is imported. And with hard currency reserves sinking to critically low levels, the central bank is doling out payments so slowly to foreign providers that they are foregoing further business.
Venezuela, in other words, is now so broke that it may not have enough money to pay for its money.
We are losing an entire generation of young people. These days, there is quite a lot of talk about how we need to get America back to the principles that it was founded upon, but the cold, hard reality of the matter is that most of our young people are running in the opposite direction as fast as they can.
And Americans under the age of 30 are not just becoming more liberal when it comes to economics. Surveys have found that they are more than twice as likely to support gay rights and less than half as likely to regularly attend church as the oldest Americans are.
So why is this happening?
Well, the truth is that our colleges and universities have become indoctrination centers for the progressive movement. I know, because I spent eight years at public universities in this country. The quality of the education that our young people are receiving is abysmal, but the values that are being imparted to them will last a lifetime.
And of course the same things could be said about our system of education all the way down to the kindergarten level. There are still some good people in the system, but overall it is overwhelmingly dominated by the progressives.
Meanwhile, the major entertainment providers in the United States are also promoting the same values. In a recent article entitled “Depressing Survey Results Show How Extremely Stupid America Has Become“, I discussed a Nielsen report which detailed how much time the average American spends consuming media on various electronic devices each day…
Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes
Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes
Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes
Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes
Overall, the average American spends about 10 hours a day consuming one form of entertainment or another.
When you allow that much “programming” into your mind, it is inevitable that it is going to shape your values, and our young people are more “plugged in” than any of the rest of us.
So yes, I believe that it is exceedingly clear why we should be deeply concerned about the future of America. The values that are being relentlessly pounded into the heads of our young people are directly opposed to the values that this nation was founded upon, and it is these young people that will determine the path that this country ultimately takes.
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-future-of-america-more-than-half-of-all-u-s-adults-under-age-30-now-reject-capitalism
WHY???
Why the Screwed-Up Society?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
According to the New York Times, “Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years … with increases in every age group except older adults…. The overall suicide rate rose by 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.”
According to a 2015 report by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, “Illicit drug use in the United States has been increasing. In 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans aged 12 or older — 9.4 percent of the population — had used an illicit drug in the past month. This number is up from 8.3 percent in 2002.”
Of course, everyone is familiar with the mass murders that periodically take place in the United States.
Why all the dysfunctionality? Is that what we would expect from a “free” society?
Nope, but in my humble opinion — and mind you, I’m no psychologist—the notion that America is a free society is a big part of the problem.
Ever since the advent of the welfare-warfare state way of life in the 20th century, Americans convinced themselves — or permitted themselves to be convinced — that as long as they continued believing that America was still a “free enterprise” country, then everything would be fine. The idea has been that people can make their own reality and as long as people believe it, no harm would come of it.
But any psychologist will tell you that living a life that is based on falsehoods and delusions is inevitably going to have adverse consequences, maybe even psychosis.
Consider the fact that all those people who committed suicide, or who on drugs, or who initiated those killing sprees were under the control of the government for some 12 years, either directly in public schools or indirectly with government-approved educational supervision. During that entire time, state officials undoubtedly told them that suicide was bad, drug use was bad, and murder was bad.
So, how come all those people took their own lives, are destroying their lives with drugs, or going out and murdering people? Why didn’t all that control and indoctrination for 12 years work?
Everyone will no doubt call for doubling down in the public schools — telling teachers and administrators to reemphasize that students should just say no to suicide, drugs, and murder.
Unfortunately, no one — except libertarians — will question whether it’s the public schooling system itself that is screwing up people in the head, with its system of conformity and deference to authority.
Ever since the U.S. death machine began killing people in the Middle East, starting in the early 1990s, Americans have felt that so long as the killing is taking place “over there” — so long as photographs of the hundreds of thousands of dead people, including children and wedding parties — were kept out of the mainstream press — all that killing, destruction, and mayhem would have no adverse effect on Americans. Life could just go on as normal, with people going to their PTA meetings, sports events, work, vacations, and church.
I have never thought that was possible. As I have long maintained, when a government is killing people abroad on a constant basis, day after day, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade, it’s ultimately going to have an emotional, psychological, and spiritual impact on the citizenry living under the government that is doing the killing.
Some people speculate that some of those people who have committed suicide did so for economic reasons, such as losing their job and unable to get another one. But of course, most everyone blames the economic woes on America’s “free enterprise system,” as if a welfare-state, managed-economy, militarily-dominated way of life is “free enterprise.” No one, except us libertarians, points out that economic morass and spiritual depression always comes with socialism and economic interventionism. Just ask anyone who lived in the Soviet Union or who lives in Cuba.
It’s just one massive life of the lie. Since Americans have been inculcated since the first grade (in those government schools) with the notion that they live in a free-enterprise society, it never occurs to them to question whether that belief is consistent with reality. When a libertarian tells them that Cuba, a socialist country, also has Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income taxation, drug laws, immigration controls, trade restrictions, subsidies, a central bank, an enormous military and intelligence force, and the like, they don’t want to hear it … or they think to themselves, “Wow, Cuba is going free enterprise, just like us.”
Delusions, myths, a life of the lie, a governmental death machine that is killing in the name of “enduring freedom” — how can it all not end up in psychosis and disorder? Why would it surprise anyone that a young person especially would look around and say to himself, “If this is the best there is — if this really is freedom — then I’m checking out”? “Freedom”—or what he has been taught is freedom — just doesn’t look very attractive to him.
Personally, I’m not surprised at the suicides, drug use, and mass murders. I’d be surprised if such things didn’t happen under America’s welfare-warfare state way of life. But then again, I’m a libertarian. I know that a welfare-warfare state is about as far from freedom and free enterprise that one can get.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/27/why-the-screwed-up-society/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
According to the New York Times, “Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years … with increases in every age group except older adults…. The overall suicide rate rose by 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.”
According to a 2015 report by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, “Illicit drug use in the United States has been increasing. In 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans aged 12 or older — 9.4 percent of the population — had used an illicit drug in the past month. This number is up from 8.3 percent in 2002.”
Of course, everyone is familiar with the mass murders that periodically take place in the United States.
Why all the dysfunctionality? Is that what we would expect from a “free” society?
Nope, but in my humble opinion — and mind you, I’m no psychologist—the notion that America is a free society is a big part of the problem.
Ever since the advent of the welfare-warfare state way of life in the 20th century, Americans convinced themselves — or permitted themselves to be convinced — that as long as they continued believing that America was still a “free enterprise” country, then everything would be fine. The idea has been that people can make their own reality and as long as people believe it, no harm would come of it.
But any psychologist will tell you that living a life that is based on falsehoods and delusions is inevitably going to have adverse consequences, maybe even psychosis.
Consider the fact that all those people who committed suicide, or who on drugs, or who initiated those killing sprees were under the control of the government for some 12 years, either directly in public schools or indirectly with government-approved educational supervision. During that entire time, state officials undoubtedly told them that suicide was bad, drug use was bad, and murder was bad.
So, how come all those people took their own lives, are destroying their lives with drugs, or going out and murdering people? Why didn’t all that control and indoctrination for 12 years work?
Everyone will no doubt call for doubling down in the public schools — telling teachers and administrators to reemphasize that students should just say no to suicide, drugs, and murder.
Unfortunately, no one — except libertarians — will question whether it’s the public schooling system itself that is screwing up people in the head, with its system of conformity and deference to authority.
Ever since the U.S. death machine began killing people in the Middle East, starting in the early 1990s, Americans have felt that so long as the killing is taking place “over there” — so long as photographs of the hundreds of thousands of dead people, including children and wedding parties — were kept out of the mainstream press — all that killing, destruction, and mayhem would have no adverse effect on Americans. Life could just go on as normal, with people going to their PTA meetings, sports events, work, vacations, and church.
I have never thought that was possible. As I have long maintained, when a government is killing people abroad on a constant basis, day after day, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade, it’s ultimately going to have an emotional, psychological, and spiritual impact on the citizenry living under the government that is doing the killing.
Some people speculate that some of those people who have committed suicide did so for economic reasons, such as losing their job and unable to get another one. But of course, most everyone blames the economic woes on America’s “free enterprise system,” as if a welfare-state, managed-economy, militarily-dominated way of life is “free enterprise.” No one, except us libertarians, points out that economic morass and spiritual depression always comes with socialism and economic interventionism. Just ask anyone who lived in the Soviet Union or who lives in Cuba.
It’s just one massive life of the lie. Since Americans have been inculcated since the first grade (in those government schools) with the notion that they live in a free-enterprise society, it never occurs to them to question whether that belief is consistent with reality. When a libertarian tells them that Cuba, a socialist country, also has Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income taxation, drug laws, immigration controls, trade restrictions, subsidies, a central bank, an enormous military and intelligence force, and the like, they don’t want to hear it … or they think to themselves, “Wow, Cuba is going free enterprise, just like us.”
Delusions, myths, a life of the lie, a governmental death machine that is killing in the name of “enduring freedom” — how can it all not end up in psychosis and disorder? Why would it surprise anyone that a young person especially would look around and say to himself, “If this is the best there is — if this really is freedom — then I’m checking out”? “Freedom”—or what he has been taught is freedom — just doesn’t look very attractive to him.
Personally, I’m not surprised at the suicides, drug use, and mass murders. I’d be surprised if such things didn’t happen under America’s welfare-warfare state way of life. But then again, I’m a libertarian. I know that a welfare-warfare state is about as far from freedom and free enterprise that one can get.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/27/why-the-screwed-up-society/
It's all part of the plan, folks...
Climate Regulations Cost You
William O'Keefe
This year’s Earth Day celebrations, dating from 1972, followed a predictable script: they predicted environmental catastrophe unless developed countries change their profligate life styles and plunder of resources. As icing on the Earth Day cake, President Obama signed the Paris Agreement on climate change, which aims to keep the world below two degrees Celsius of warming.
In 1972, the major environmental concerns were air and water pollution and the apocalypse that would take place by the end of the 20th century from the exhaustion of the earth’s natural resources. The predictions of dread, whether they be the exhaustion of food supplies, the depletion of oil resources, a growing cancer epidemic, or deadly urban air pollution have all proven false. Since 1998, the ultimate threat to mankind has been sold as the threat of climate change.
Although these predictions were political contrivances, the cost to society in addressing them as if they were real has continued to grow and weakened our economic resiliency. Economic growth is stalled at 2 percent, productivity has declined to less than 1 percent, over $2 trillion in potential investment is held offshore, and labor participation is at 1970s levels.
The Code of Regulations, a proxy for the burdens imposed on industry, has grown from about 23,000 pages in 1960 to over 175,000 pages in 2014. And, it keeps growing, now measuring over 24 feet high. The effect of this complexity of regulation falls disproportionately on younger firms, which according to economists John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, are the engines of new job creation.
A new study published by the Mercatus Center estimates that the regulatory burden in the United States represents $4 trillion in lost GDP. This exceeds total federal government spending in 2015. According to the study, if regulatory costs were a country, they would represent the world’s fourth largest economy, bigger than Germany, France, or the United Kingdom...
Read the rest here:
http://www.economics21.org/html/climate-regulations-cost-you-1778.html
William O'Keefe
This year’s Earth Day celebrations, dating from 1972, followed a predictable script: they predicted environmental catastrophe unless developed countries change their profligate life styles and plunder of resources. As icing on the Earth Day cake, President Obama signed the Paris Agreement on climate change, which aims to keep the world below two degrees Celsius of warming.
In 1972, the major environmental concerns were air and water pollution and the apocalypse that would take place by the end of the 20th century from the exhaustion of the earth’s natural resources. The predictions of dread, whether they be the exhaustion of food supplies, the depletion of oil resources, a growing cancer epidemic, or deadly urban air pollution have all proven false. Since 1998, the ultimate threat to mankind has been sold as the threat of climate change.
Although these predictions were political contrivances, the cost to society in addressing them as if they were real has continued to grow and weakened our economic resiliency. Economic growth is stalled at 2 percent, productivity has declined to less than 1 percent, over $2 trillion in potential investment is held offshore, and labor participation is at 1970s levels.
The Code of Regulations, a proxy for the burdens imposed on industry, has grown from about 23,000 pages in 1960 to over 175,000 pages in 2014. And, it keeps growing, now measuring over 24 feet high. The effect of this complexity of regulation falls disproportionately on younger firms, which according to economists John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, are the engines of new job creation.
A new study published by the Mercatus Center estimates that the regulatory burden in the United States represents $4 trillion in lost GDP. This exceeds total federal government spending in 2015. According to the study, if regulatory costs were a country, they would represent the world’s fourth largest economy, bigger than Germany, France, or the United Kingdom...
Read the rest here:
http://www.economics21.org/html/climate-regulations-cost-you-1778.html
And everything else for that matter...
We Need Separation of Bathroom and State
By Roy Cordato
The saga of the so-called Charlotte bathroom ordinance — and the state of North Carolina’s response to it — has taken on a life of its own. At the national level leftists are accusing North Carolina of bigotry while, in the name of tolerance, a growing list of performers and businesses are boycotting the state. Unfortunately, what has gotten lost in all the rhetoric surrounding this issue is the truth about both the original Charlotte law and the state’s response to it.
In late February the Charlotte, North Carolina, the city council passed an “antidiscrimination” law, scheduled to go into effect on April 1. It was aimed at protecting what, in the view of the city council, are the rights of those in the gay, lesbian, and transgender community. The centerpiece of this law was a provision that prohibits businesses providing bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers from the segregating usage of those facilities by gender, biologically defined. Biological males or females must be allowed to use the facilities of the opposite sex if they claim that that is the sex they identify with psychologically. (Note, no proof was required.)
Much of the criticism of the Charlotte bill was centered around two issues: the religious freedom of business owners and the privacy rights of people, particularly women, using a public bathroom and shower facilities. Most of the vocal opposition to the ordinance came from religious organizations and advocacy groups that focused on traditional values. As argued by John Rustin, President of the Family Policy Council:
Similar ordinances have been used to force small business owners like florists, bakers, photographers and bed-and-breakfast owners and others either to conform to a government-dictated viewpoint in violation of those sincerely held religious beliefs or to face legal charges, fines and other penalties that have ultimately caused some to go out of business.
Private Property, Not Religion, Is the Key
While religious liberty is an important concern, the issue is much broader. This ordinance was an assault on the rights of private property owners and economic freedom, regardless of one’s religious beliefs.
The primary targets of the Charlotte ordinance were privately owned businesses that offer bathrooms, changing rooms, showers, etc., for their customer’s convenience. The decision of how to structure access to these facilities may, for some, be based on their religious beliefs but for many others, it is a secular business decision. Their goal is customer satisfaction driven by the desire to make a profit and earn a living. The property that they use is privately owned, the investments that they make come from private funds, and those who reap the rewards or suffer the losses are private entrepreneurs. The bathrooms in their establishments are part of the product that they provide.
In a free society based on property rights and free markets, as all free societies must be, a privately owned business would have the right to decide whether or not it wants separate bathrooms strictly for men and women biologically defined, bathrooms for men and women subjectively or psychologically defined, completely gender neutral bathrooms with no labels on the doors, or no bathrooms at all.
Businesses Seek to Please Their Customers
Their goal is to provide the products and services that most of their customers want in an environment that those customers feel comfortable in. This environment may indeed be different for different establishments depending on the desires and cultural makeup of their clients. This Charlotte ordinance told businesses that they are not allowed to adjust their decisions regarding their bathroom, locker room, or shower facilities in order to accommodate customer preferences. In this sense, the now overturned Charlotte ordinance was a gross violation of property rights and economic freedom and on libertarian grounds needed to be overturned.
So what was the state of North Carolina’s response to all this? In fact, it was to restore freedom and property rights and to guarantee those rights across the state. The law in North Carolina that so many progressives are up in arms about does not prohibit businesses from having bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, etc., that allow use by people of all genders defined biologically, psychologically, or whatever. In a “myths vs facts” explanatory statement put out by the governor of North Carolina this was made quite clear:
Can private businesses, if they choose, continue to allow transgender individuals to use the bathroom, locker room or other facilities of the gender they identify with …?
Answer: Yes. That is the prerogative of private businesses under this new law. …The law neither requires nor prohibits them from doing so.
In other words, the state of North Carolina codified a basic libertarian principle: the separation of bathroom and state.
The only place where bathrooms, showers, etc., must conform with biological sex is in government-owned facilities — courtrooms, city halls, schools, etc., where this separation is not possible. So yes, in North Carolina 12-year old boys, defined by what body parts they are sporting, may not use the girls’ locker room and showers after gym class at the local public middle school. Of course, private middle schools are free to do what they want. If not believing that this is unjust discrimination makes me a bigot, then so be it.
So where does this approach leave the issue of religious freedom? For the most part, and particularly in cases like this, religious freedom is nothing more than the right to use your own property in a way that comports with your religious beliefs. This applies not only to the issue of who gets to use what bathrooms but also to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Obama’s contraceptive mandate, and most of the other religious freedom cases that are of concern to traditional values advocates. If property rights and economic freedom are the values that are upheld, then religious freedom will take care of itself.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/roy-cordato/need-separation-bathroom-state/
By Roy Cordato
The saga of the so-called Charlotte bathroom ordinance — and the state of North Carolina’s response to it — has taken on a life of its own. At the national level leftists are accusing North Carolina of bigotry while, in the name of tolerance, a growing list of performers and businesses are boycotting the state. Unfortunately, what has gotten lost in all the rhetoric surrounding this issue is the truth about both the original Charlotte law and the state’s response to it.
In late February the Charlotte, North Carolina, the city council passed an “antidiscrimination” law, scheduled to go into effect on April 1. It was aimed at protecting what, in the view of the city council, are the rights of those in the gay, lesbian, and transgender community. The centerpiece of this law was a provision that prohibits businesses providing bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers from the segregating usage of those facilities by gender, biologically defined. Biological males or females must be allowed to use the facilities of the opposite sex if they claim that that is the sex they identify with psychologically. (Note, no proof was required.)
Much of the criticism of the Charlotte bill was centered around two issues: the religious freedom of business owners and the privacy rights of people, particularly women, using a public bathroom and shower facilities. Most of the vocal opposition to the ordinance came from religious organizations and advocacy groups that focused on traditional values. As argued by John Rustin, President of the Family Policy Council:
Similar ordinances have been used to force small business owners like florists, bakers, photographers and bed-and-breakfast owners and others either to conform to a government-dictated viewpoint in violation of those sincerely held religious beliefs or to face legal charges, fines and other penalties that have ultimately caused some to go out of business.
Private Property, Not Religion, Is the Key
While religious liberty is an important concern, the issue is much broader. This ordinance was an assault on the rights of private property owners and economic freedom, regardless of one’s religious beliefs.
The primary targets of the Charlotte ordinance were privately owned businesses that offer bathrooms, changing rooms, showers, etc., for their customer’s convenience. The decision of how to structure access to these facilities may, for some, be based on their religious beliefs but for many others, it is a secular business decision. Their goal is customer satisfaction driven by the desire to make a profit and earn a living. The property that they use is privately owned, the investments that they make come from private funds, and those who reap the rewards or suffer the losses are private entrepreneurs. The bathrooms in their establishments are part of the product that they provide.
In a free society based on property rights and free markets, as all free societies must be, a privately owned business would have the right to decide whether or not it wants separate bathrooms strictly for men and women biologically defined, bathrooms for men and women subjectively or psychologically defined, completely gender neutral bathrooms with no labels on the doors, or no bathrooms at all.
Businesses Seek to Please Their Customers
Their goal is to provide the products and services that most of their customers want in an environment that those customers feel comfortable in. This environment may indeed be different for different establishments depending on the desires and cultural makeup of their clients. This Charlotte ordinance told businesses that they are not allowed to adjust their decisions regarding their bathroom, locker room, or shower facilities in order to accommodate customer preferences. In this sense, the now overturned Charlotte ordinance was a gross violation of property rights and economic freedom and on libertarian grounds needed to be overturned.
So what was the state of North Carolina’s response to all this? In fact, it was to restore freedom and property rights and to guarantee those rights across the state. The law in North Carolina that so many progressives are up in arms about does not prohibit businesses from having bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, etc., that allow use by people of all genders defined biologically, psychologically, or whatever. In a “myths vs facts” explanatory statement put out by the governor of North Carolina this was made quite clear:
Can private businesses, if they choose, continue to allow transgender individuals to use the bathroom, locker room or other facilities of the gender they identify with …?
Answer: Yes. That is the prerogative of private businesses under this new law. …The law neither requires nor prohibits them from doing so.
In other words, the state of North Carolina codified a basic libertarian principle: the separation of bathroom and state.
The only place where bathrooms, showers, etc., must conform with biological sex is in government-owned facilities — courtrooms, city halls, schools, etc., where this separation is not possible. So yes, in North Carolina 12-year old boys, defined by what body parts they are sporting, may not use the girls’ locker room and showers after gym class at the local public middle school. Of course, private middle schools are free to do what they want. If not believing that this is unjust discrimination makes me a bigot, then so be it.
So where does this approach leave the issue of religious freedom? For the most part, and particularly in cases like this, religious freedom is nothing more than the right to use your own property in a way that comports with your religious beliefs. This applies not only to the issue of who gets to use what bathrooms but also to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Obama’s contraceptive mandate, and most of the other religious freedom cases that are of concern to traditional values advocates. If property rights and economic freedom are the values that are upheld, then religious freedom will take care of itself.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/roy-cordato/need-separation-bathroom-state/
"If the government does not obtain a search warrant and listens to phone conversations or reads emails or text messages nevertheless and attempts to use what it heard or read to acquire other evidence or directly in the prosecution of a defendant, that is unlawful."
Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
By Andrew P. Napolitano
Would all of our lives be safer if the government could break down all the doors it wishes, listen to all the conversations it could find and read whatever emails and text messages it could acquire? Perhaps. But who would want to live in such a society?
To prevent that from happening here, the Framers ratified the Fourth Amendment, which is the linchpin of privacy and was famously called by Justice Louis Brandeis “the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” He wrote those words in his dissent in the first wiretapping case to reach the Supreme Court, Olmstead v. the United States, in 1928.
Roy Olmstead had been convicted for bootlegging on the basis of words he used in overheard telephone conversations. Because he had used a phone at his place of work that the government had tapped without breaking and entering his workplace, the high court ruled — despite the fact that the government had not obtained a warrant — that he had no right to privacy. Brandeis dissented.
Over time, the Brandeis dissent became the law. The Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of all in our “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” was interpreted to cover telephone conversations and eventually emails and text messages. So today, if the government wants information contained in those communications, it needs to obtain a search warrant, which the Fourth Amendment states can only be given by a judge — and only upon a showing of probable cause of evidence of a crime contained in the communications it seeks.
If the government does not obtain a search warrant and listens to phone conversations or reads emails or text messages nevertheless and attempts to use what it heard or read to acquire other evidence or directly in the prosecution of a defendant, that is unlawful. That type of information is known as the fruit of the poisonous tree.
Evidence procured that is the fruit of the poisonous tree has been inadmissible in federal criminal prosecutions in the United States for the past 100 years and in state criminal prosecutions for the past 50 years.
Until now.
Now comes the super-secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reaffirmed by Congress last year under the so-called USA Freedom Act. Beware the names of federal statutes, as they often produce results that are the opposite of what their names imply; and this is one of them.
Congress has unconstitutionally authorized the FISA court to issue search warrants on the basis of governmental need — a standard that is no standard at all because the government can always claim that it needs what it wants. The FISA court does not require a showing of probable cause for its warrants, because it accepts the myth that the government is listening to or reading words by foreign people for foreign intelligence purposes only, not for prosecutorial purposes.
Never mind that Congress cannot change the plain meaning of the Constitution. Never mind that the Fourth Amendment protects all people in the United States, American or foreign, from all parts of the government for all purposes, not just criminal prosecutions.
Yet the FISA court still grants general warrants — look where you wish and seize what you find — exposing our innermost thoughts to the prying eyes of the intelligence community in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment.
Enter the USA Freedom Act. One of its selling points to Congress was that it would permit the FISA court to appoint a lawyer to challenge hypothetically some of its behavior. The court recently made such an appointment, and the lawyer appointed challenged the policy of the National Security Agency, the federal government’s domestic spying agency, of sharing data it acquires via the unconstitutional FISA warrants with the FBI. She argued that the data sharing goes far beyond the stated purpose of the FISA warrants, which is to gather foreign intelligence data from foreign people, not evidence of domestic crimes of anyone whose emails might be swept up by those warrants.
The challenge revealed publicly what many of us have condemned for years: The NSA actually makes its repository of raw data from emails and text messages available for the FBI to scour at will, without the FBI’s obtaining a warrant issued by a judge pursuant to the Fourth Amendment.
In an opinion issued in November but kept secret until last week, the FISA court rejected the hypothetical challenge of its own appointee and ruled that the NSA could continue to share what it wants with the FBI.
There are several problems with this ruling. The first is the hypothetical nature of the challenge. Federal courts do not exist in a vacuum. They do not render advisory opinions. They can only hear real cases and real controversies involving real plaintiffs and real defendants, not hypothetical ones as was the case here.
The whole apparatus of hypothetical challenge and a hypothetical ruling is constitutionally meaningless. It was the moral and legal equivalent of a law school moot court oral argument. Yet federal and soon state law enforcement will interpret it as giving cover to the NSA/FBI practice of data sharing, which is clearly unconstitutional because it is the use of fruit from a poisonous tree.
FISA and the USA Freedom Act were enacted under the premise — the pretense — that the data collected under them would be used for foreign intelligence purposes only so that attacks could be thwarted and methods could be discovered. Yet the use by the FBI of extraconstitutionally obtained intelligence data for ordinary criminal prosecutions defies the stated purposes of the statutes and contradicts the Fourth Amendment.
If this is keeping us safe, who or what will safeguard our freedoms? Who will keep us safe from those who have sworn to uphold the Constitution yet defy it?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/andrew-p-napolitano/poisonous-tree/
By Andrew P. Napolitano
Would all of our lives be safer if the government could break down all the doors it wishes, listen to all the conversations it could find and read whatever emails and text messages it could acquire? Perhaps. But who would want to live in such a society?
To prevent that from happening here, the Framers ratified the Fourth Amendment, which is the linchpin of privacy and was famously called by Justice Louis Brandeis “the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” He wrote those words in his dissent in the first wiretapping case to reach the Supreme Court, Olmstead v. the United States, in 1928.
Roy Olmstead had been convicted for bootlegging on the basis of words he used in overheard telephone conversations. Because he had used a phone at his place of work that the government had tapped without breaking and entering his workplace, the high court ruled — despite the fact that the government had not obtained a warrant — that he had no right to privacy. Brandeis dissented.
Over time, the Brandeis dissent became the law. The Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of all in our “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” was interpreted to cover telephone conversations and eventually emails and text messages. So today, if the government wants information contained in those communications, it needs to obtain a search warrant, which the Fourth Amendment states can only be given by a judge — and only upon a showing of probable cause of evidence of a crime contained in the communications it seeks.
If the government does not obtain a search warrant and listens to phone conversations or reads emails or text messages nevertheless and attempts to use what it heard or read to acquire other evidence or directly in the prosecution of a defendant, that is unlawful. That type of information is known as the fruit of the poisonous tree.
Evidence procured that is the fruit of the poisonous tree has been inadmissible in federal criminal prosecutions in the United States for the past 100 years and in state criminal prosecutions for the past 50 years.
Until now.
Now comes the super-secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reaffirmed by Congress last year under the so-called USA Freedom Act. Beware the names of federal statutes, as they often produce results that are the opposite of what their names imply; and this is one of them.
Congress has unconstitutionally authorized the FISA court to issue search warrants on the basis of governmental need — a standard that is no standard at all because the government can always claim that it needs what it wants. The FISA court does not require a showing of probable cause for its warrants, because it accepts the myth that the government is listening to or reading words by foreign people for foreign intelligence purposes only, not for prosecutorial purposes.
Never mind that Congress cannot change the plain meaning of the Constitution. Never mind that the Fourth Amendment protects all people in the United States, American or foreign, from all parts of the government for all purposes, not just criminal prosecutions.
Yet the FISA court still grants general warrants — look where you wish and seize what you find — exposing our innermost thoughts to the prying eyes of the intelligence community in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment.
Enter the USA Freedom Act. One of its selling points to Congress was that it would permit the FISA court to appoint a lawyer to challenge hypothetically some of its behavior. The court recently made such an appointment, and the lawyer appointed challenged the policy of the National Security Agency, the federal government’s domestic spying agency, of sharing data it acquires via the unconstitutional FISA warrants with the FBI. She argued that the data sharing goes far beyond the stated purpose of the FISA warrants, which is to gather foreign intelligence data from foreign people, not evidence of domestic crimes of anyone whose emails might be swept up by those warrants.
The challenge revealed publicly what many of us have condemned for years: The NSA actually makes its repository of raw data from emails and text messages available for the FBI to scour at will, without the FBI’s obtaining a warrant issued by a judge pursuant to the Fourth Amendment.
In an opinion issued in November but kept secret until last week, the FISA court rejected the hypothetical challenge of its own appointee and ruled that the NSA could continue to share what it wants with the FBI.
There are several problems with this ruling. The first is the hypothetical nature of the challenge. Federal courts do not exist in a vacuum. They do not render advisory opinions. They can only hear real cases and real controversies involving real plaintiffs and real defendants, not hypothetical ones as was the case here.
The whole apparatus of hypothetical challenge and a hypothetical ruling is constitutionally meaningless. It was the moral and legal equivalent of a law school moot court oral argument. Yet federal and soon state law enforcement will interpret it as giving cover to the NSA/FBI practice of data sharing, which is clearly unconstitutional because it is the use of fruit from a poisonous tree.
FISA and the USA Freedom Act were enacted under the premise — the pretense — that the data collected under them would be used for foreign intelligence purposes only so that attacks could be thwarted and methods could be discovered. Yet the use by the FBI of extraconstitutionally obtained intelligence data for ordinary criminal prosecutions defies the stated purposes of the statutes and contradicts the Fourth Amendment.
If this is keeping us safe, who or what will safeguard our freedoms? Who will keep us safe from those who have sworn to uphold the Constitution yet defy it?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/andrew-p-napolitano/poisonous-tree/
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Got fluoride???
The Fluoride Wars: Loving Cancer, Loving Lower IQ
Jon Rappoport
It’s no surprise that the US government would look the other way when lower IQ and cancer are business as usual.
One of the major agencies that would look the other way is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
—But suppose scientists within the EPA spoke out, revolted, and issued official rebukes to their own Agency’s position on fluorides?
Talk about cognitive dissonance. Contradiction. “We at the EPA know fluorides are wonderful and safe and beautiful. Of course, our own scientists disagree. Strongly. But don’t worry, we’re ignoring them. And we’re keeping their statements out of the press. Our position on fluorides is administrative. It has nothing to do with science. Anyway, we support cancer and plummeting IQ. They’re wonderful.”
Case in point, going back 17 years. Buckle up. Here is what the EPA Union of scientists had to say about fluoridation:
Quoting from a May 1, 1999, statement— “Why EPA’s Headquarters Union of Scientists Opposes Fluoridation”—written by William Hirzy, PhD, [Union of Scientists] Senior Vice-President, Chapter 280:
“…our opposition to drinking water fluoridation has grown, based on the scientific literature documenting the increasingly out-of-control exposures to fluoride, the lack of benefit to dental health from ingestion of fluoride and the hazards to human health from such ingestion. These hazards include acute toxic hazard, such as to people with impaired kidney function, as well as chronic toxic hazards of gene mutations, cancer, reproductive effects, neurotoxicity, bone pathology and dental fluorosis.”
“In support of this concern are results from two epidemiology studies from China that show decreases in I.Q. in children who get more fluoride than the control groups of children in each study. These decreases are about 5 to 10 I.Q. points in children aged 8 to 13 years.”
“Another troubling brain effect has recently surfaced: fluoride’s interference with the function of the brain’s pineal gland. The pineal gland produces melatonin which, among other roles, mediates the body’s internal clock, doing such things as governing the onset of puberty. Jennifer Luke has shown that fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland and inhibits its production of melatonin. She showed in test animals that this inhibition causes an earlier onset of sexual maturity, an effect reported in humans as well in 1956…”
“EPA fired the Office of Drinking Water’s chief toxicologist, Dr. William Marcus, who also was our local union’s treasurer at the time, for refusing to remain silent on the cancer risk issue. The judge who heard the lawsuit he [Marcus] brought against EPA over the firing made that finding—that EPA fired him over his fluoride work and not for the phony reason put forward by EPA management at his dismissal. Dr. Marcus won his lawsuit and is again at work at EPA.”
“…data showing increases in osteosarcomas in young men in New Jersey, Washington and Iowa based on their drinking fluoridated water. It was his [Dr. Marcus’] analysis, repeated statements about all these and other incriminating cancer data, and his requests for an independent, unbiased evaluation of them that got Dr. Marcus fired.”
“Regarding the effectiveness of fluoride in reducing dental cavities, there has not been any double-blind study of fluoride’s effectiveness as a caries preventative. There have been many, many small scale, selective publications on this issue that proponents cite to justify fluoridation, but the largest and most comprehensive study, one done by dentists trained by the National Institute of Dental Research, on over 39,000 school children aged 5-17 years, shows no significant differences (in terms of decayed, missing and filled teeth) among caries [cavities] incidences in fluoridated, non-fluoridated and partially fluoridated communities. The latest publication on the fifty-year fluoridation experiment in two New York cities, Newburgh and Kingston, shows the same thing. The only significant difference in dental health between the two communities as a whole is that fluoridated Newburgh, N.Y. shows about twice the incidence of dental fluorosis (the first, visible sign of fluoride chronic toxicity) as seen in non-fluoridated Kingston.”
“John Colquhoun’s publication on this point of efficacy is especially important. Dr. Colquhoun was Principal Dental Officer for Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, and a staunch supporter of fluoridation—until he was given the task of looking at the world-wide data on fluoridation’s effectiveness in preventing cavities. The paper is titled, ‘Why I changed My Mind About Water Fluoridation.’ In it Colquhoun provides details on how data were manipulated to support fluoridation in English speaking countries, especially the U.S. and New Zealand. This paper explains why an ethical public health professional was compelled to do a 180 degree turn on fluoridation.”
“…mutation studies…show that fluoride can cause gene mutations in mammalian and lower order tissues at fluoride concentrations estimated to be present in the mouth from fluoridated tooth paste. Further, there were tumors of the oral cavity seen in the NTP cancer study…further strengthening concern over the toxicity of topically applied fluoride.”
“So, in addition to our concern over the toxicity of fluoride, we note the uncontrolled — and apparently uncontrollable — exposures to fluoride that are occurring nationwide via drinking water, processed foods, fluoride pesticide residues and dental care products…For governmental and other organizations to continue to push for more exposure in the face of current levels of over-exposure coupled with an increasing crescendo of adverse toxicity findings is irrational and irresponsible at best.”
“We have also taken a direct step to protect the [EPA] employees we represent from the risks of drinking fluoridated water…the union filed a grievance, asking that EPA provide un-fluoridated drinking water to its employees.”
“The implication for the general public of these calculations is clear. Recent, peer-reviewed toxicity data, when applied to EPA’s standard method for controlling risks from toxic chemicals, require an immediate halt to the use of the nation’s drinking water reservoirs as disposal sites for the toxic waste of the phosphate fertilizer industry.”
That last sentence lets you know where the fluorides are coming from.
So…an employees’ union of scientists within the EPA has made its position clear.
Quite clear.
The mainstream press has refused to cover this story in any significant way for at least 17 years.
In 2013, the EPA denied a petition from Dr. Hirzy calling for the removal of fluorides from water supplies. In a pinch, I guess the Agency can find scientists hanging around bus stations and bars and crack houses and get them to say what they want them to say and stamp it official.
—Scientists who’ve been guzzling fluoridated water themselves and thus have microscopic IQs.
Link:
http://www.activistpost.com/2016/04/fluoride-wars-loving-cancer-loving-lower-iq.html
Jon Rappoport
It’s no surprise that the US government would look the other way when lower IQ and cancer are business as usual.
One of the major agencies that would look the other way is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
—But suppose scientists within the EPA spoke out, revolted, and issued official rebukes to their own Agency’s position on fluorides?
Talk about cognitive dissonance. Contradiction. “We at the EPA know fluorides are wonderful and safe and beautiful. Of course, our own scientists disagree. Strongly. But don’t worry, we’re ignoring them. And we’re keeping their statements out of the press. Our position on fluorides is administrative. It has nothing to do with science. Anyway, we support cancer and plummeting IQ. They’re wonderful.”
Case in point, going back 17 years. Buckle up. Here is what the EPA Union of scientists had to say about fluoridation:
Quoting from a May 1, 1999, statement— “Why EPA’s Headquarters Union of Scientists Opposes Fluoridation”—written by William Hirzy, PhD, [Union of Scientists] Senior Vice-President, Chapter 280:
“…our opposition to drinking water fluoridation has grown, based on the scientific literature documenting the increasingly out-of-control exposures to fluoride, the lack of benefit to dental health from ingestion of fluoride and the hazards to human health from such ingestion. These hazards include acute toxic hazard, such as to people with impaired kidney function, as well as chronic toxic hazards of gene mutations, cancer, reproductive effects, neurotoxicity, bone pathology and dental fluorosis.”
“In support of this concern are results from two epidemiology studies from China that show decreases in I.Q. in children who get more fluoride than the control groups of children in each study. These decreases are about 5 to 10 I.Q. points in children aged 8 to 13 years.”
“Another troubling brain effect has recently surfaced: fluoride’s interference with the function of the brain’s pineal gland. The pineal gland produces melatonin which, among other roles, mediates the body’s internal clock, doing such things as governing the onset of puberty. Jennifer Luke has shown that fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland and inhibits its production of melatonin. She showed in test animals that this inhibition causes an earlier onset of sexual maturity, an effect reported in humans as well in 1956…”
“EPA fired the Office of Drinking Water’s chief toxicologist, Dr. William Marcus, who also was our local union’s treasurer at the time, for refusing to remain silent on the cancer risk issue. The judge who heard the lawsuit he [Marcus] brought against EPA over the firing made that finding—that EPA fired him over his fluoride work and not for the phony reason put forward by EPA management at his dismissal. Dr. Marcus won his lawsuit and is again at work at EPA.”
“…data showing increases in osteosarcomas in young men in New Jersey, Washington and Iowa based on their drinking fluoridated water. It was his [Dr. Marcus’] analysis, repeated statements about all these and other incriminating cancer data, and his requests for an independent, unbiased evaluation of them that got Dr. Marcus fired.”
“Regarding the effectiveness of fluoride in reducing dental cavities, there has not been any double-blind study of fluoride’s effectiveness as a caries preventative. There have been many, many small scale, selective publications on this issue that proponents cite to justify fluoridation, but the largest and most comprehensive study, one done by dentists trained by the National Institute of Dental Research, on over 39,000 school children aged 5-17 years, shows no significant differences (in terms of decayed, missing and filled teeth) among caries [cavities] incidences in fluoridated, non-fluoridated and partially fluoridated communities. The latest publication on the fifty-year fluoridation experiment in two New York cities, Newburgh and Kingston, shows the same thing. The only significant difference in dental health between the two communities as a whole is that fluoridated Newburgh, N.Y. shows about twice the incidence of dental fluorosis (the first, visible sign of fluoride chronic toxicity) as seen in non-fluoridated Kingston.”
“John Colquhoun’s publication on this point of efficacy is especially important. Dr. Colquhoun was Principal Dental Officer for Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, and a staunch supporter of fluoridation—until he was given the task of looking at the world-wide data on fluoridation’s effectiveness in preventing cavities. The paper is titled, ‘Why I changed My Mind About Water Fluoridation.’ In it Colquhoun provides details on how data were manipulated to support fluoridation in English speaking countries, especially the U.S. and New Zealand. This paper explains why an ethical public health professional was compelled to do a 180 degree turn on fluoridation.”
“…mutation studies…show that fluoride can cause gene mutations in mammalian and lower order tissues at fluoride concentrations estimated to be present in the mouth from fluoridated tooth paste. Further, there were tumors of the oral cavity seen in the NTP cancer study…further strengthening concern over the toxicity of topically applied fluoride.”
“So, in addition to our concern over the toxicity of fluoride, we note the uncontrolled — and apparently uncontrollable — exposures to fluoride that are occurring nationwide via drinking water, processed foods, fluoride pesticide residues and dental care products…For governmental and other organizations to continue to push for more exposure in the face of current levels of over-exposure coupled with an increasing crescendo of adverse toxicity findings is irrational and irresponsible at best.”
“We have also taken a direct step to protect the [EPA] employees we represent from the risks of drinking fluoridated water…the union filed a grievance, asking that EPA provide un-fluoridated drinking water to its employees.”
“The implication for the general public of these calculations is clear. Recent, peer-reviewed toxicity data, when applied to EPA’s standard method for controlling risks from toxic chemicals, require an immediate halt to the use of the nation’s drinking water reservoirs as disposal sites for the toxic waste of the phosphate fertilizer industry.”
That last sentence lets you know where the fluorides are coming from.
So…an employees’ union of scientists within the EPA has made its position clear.
Quite clear.
The mainstream press has refused to cover this story in any significant way for at least 17 years.
In 2013, the EPA denied a petition from Dr. Hirzy calling for the removal of fluorides from water supplies. In a pinch, I guess the Agency can find scientists hanging around bus stations and bars and crack houses and get them to say what they want them to say and stamp it official.
—Scientists who’ve been guzzling fluoridated water themselves and thus have microscopic IQs.
Link:
http://www.activistpost.com/2016/04/fluoride-wars-loving-cancer-loving-lower-iq.html
It all used to be so simple...
Where to Go to the Bathroom: An Opinion
Michael S. Rozeff
It all used to be so simple. If you are a man, you go to the men’s room. Woman? Go to the women’s room. I recommend keeping it simple. How? First, don’t go by “gender identity”. “Gender identity is defined as a personal conception of oneself as male or female (or rarely, both or neither).” Personal conception is burdensome for outsiders to detect and determine. It is subjective. It can be faked by those who wish to take sexual advantage. For these 3 reasons, it’s asking for trouble to have rules that allow persons to use whatever restroom facilities they want to use based upon their personal conceptions of themselves. The costs of such rules will be way too high. These will come in the form of disputes, court cases, penalties, enforcement costs, unhappiness of some or many, explosions of violence, anger, and penalties.
The alternative is to go by the person’s actual bodily sexual functions and makeup. This is an easily determined objective criterion in most cases. If you have male organs, you go to the men’s room. If you’ve become a man (woman) physically after being a woman (man), you go to the men’s (women’s) room. If you are homosexual, you go to the room consistent with your physical makeup, not your sexual preference, which, like gender identity opens up troubling and costly difficulties if it’s used as a criterion. If you are bisexual, you go to the restroom consistent with your sex organs. Transgender people, in my view, go to the bathroom consistent with their sex organs, not their gender identities or sexual preferences.
This is not a libertarian issue until aggression and punishments come to be used to change social customs and enforce patterns of behavior that deviate from what’s generally accepted, which is separate restrooms based on sex; and the latter means sex organs, in my view, not gender identity or sex preference.
Restrooms are provided to the public by many business and other establishments that are private but which government regulates as semi-public. It’s a big mistake if government (or a business) decides to regulate who can go to which restroom based upon subjective criteria like gender identity and sexual preferences. There is no odious or insufferable or hurtful discrimination if people are asked to go to a bathroom according to their sex organs. The reasons for this discrimination are social. We separate the sexes to allow privacy, to hold down sexual predation, to hold down sexual arousal, to prevent sexual confusion, and because certain functions are unique to each sex. There may be other subtle reasons that have led to this customary distinction and practice; so that it would be imprudent to alter it for the sake of grievances that a minority of the population feels or imagines. Bathroom discrimination is not like skin color discrimination, and it’s a mistake to equate the two.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/go-bathroom-opinion/
Michael S. Rozeff
It all used to be so simple. If you are a man, you go to the men’s room. Woman? Go to the women’s room. I recommend keeping it simple. How? First, don’t go by “gender identity”. “Gender identity is defined as a personal conception of oneself as male or female (or rarely, both or neither).” Personal conception is burdensome for outsiders to detect and determine. It is subjective. It can be faked by those who wish to take sexual advantage. For these 3 reasons, it’s asking for trouble to have rules that allow persons to use whatever restroom facilities they want to use based upon their personal conceptions of themselves. The costs of such rules will be way too high. These will come in the form of disputes, court cases, penalties, enforcement costs, unhappiness of some or many, explosions of violence, anger, and penalties.
The alternative is to go by the person’s actual bodily sexual functions and makeup. This is an easily determined objective criterion in most cases. If you have male organs, you go to the men’s room. If you’ve become a man (woman) physically after being a woman (man), you go to the men’s (women’s) room. If you are homosexual, you go to the room consistent with your physical makeup, not your sexual preference, which, like gender identity opens up troubling and costly difficulties if it’s used as a criterion. If you are bisexual, you go to the restroom consistent with your sex organs. Transgender people, in my view, go to the bathroom consistent with their sex organs, not their gender identities or sexual preferences.
This is not a libertarian issue until aggression and punishments come to be used to change social customs and enforce patterns of behavior that deviate from what’s generally accepted, which is separate restrooms based on sex; and the latter means sex organs, in my view, not gender identity or sex preference.
Restrooms are provided to the public by many business and other establishments that are private but which government regulates as semi-public. It’s a big mistake if government (or a business) decides to regulate who can go to which restroom based upon subjective criteria like gender identity and sexual preferences. There is no odious or insufferable or hurtful discrimination if people are asked to go to a bathroom according to their sex organs. The reasons for this discrimination are social. We separate the sexes to allow privacy, to hold down sexual predation, to hold down sexual arousal, to prevent sexual confusion, and because certain functions are unique to each sex. There may be other subtle reasons that have led to this customary distinction and practice; so that it would be imprudent to alter it for the sake of grievances that a minority of the population feels or imagines. Bathroom discrimination is not like skin color discrimination, and it’s a mistake to equate the two.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/go-bathroom-opinion/
Social Justtice Warriors are insane...
UMass Amherst Students Throw Temper Tantrum at Conservative Event on Campus
Robert Wenzel
Protesters shouted obscenities in an effort to silence Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopulous, and Steven Crowder, who were invited to speak on the campus of UMass Amherst.
Campus Refrom reports one of the protesters took it upon herself to pass out literature expressing her concern for the “triggering” event, claiming the speakers “all demonstrate either that you don’t give a shit about people’s trauma and pain and think it’s funny to thrust people into states of panic and distress OR that you fundamentally do not understand what a trigger is, what it means to be triggered, and what a trigger warning is meant to prevent.”
The insane lefties fear discussion and debate.
Link:
http://www.targetliberty.com/2016/04/umass-amherst-students-throw-temper.html
Robert Wenzel
Protesters shouted obscenities in an effort to silence Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopulous, and Steven Crowder, who were invited to speak on the campus of UMass Amherst.
Campus Refrom reports one of the protesters took it upon herself to pass out literature expressing her concern for the “triggering” event, claiming the speakers “all demonstrate either that you don’t give a shit about people’s trauma and pain and think it’s funny to thrust people into states of panic and distress OR that you fundamentally do not understand what a trigger is, what it means to be triggered, and what a trigger warning is meant to prevent.”
The insane lefties fear discussion and debate.
Link:
http://www.targetliberty.com/2016/04/umass-amherst-students-throw-temper.html
A matter of time...
World War III Has Begun
By Paul Craig Roberts
The Third World War is currently being fought. How long before it moves into its hot stage?
Washington is currently conducting economic and propaganda warfare against four members of the five block group of countries known as BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Brazil and South Africa are being destabilized with fabricated political scandals. Both countries are rife with Washington-financed politicians and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Washington concocts a scandal, sends its political agents into action demanding action against the government and its NGOs into the streets in protests.
Washington tried this against China with the orchestrated Hong Kong “student protest.” Washington hoped that the protest would spread into China, but the scheme failed. Washington tried this against Russia with the orchestrated protests against Putin’s reelection and failed again.
To destabilize Russia, Washington needs a firmer hold inside Russia. In order to gain a firmer hold, Washington worked with the New York mega-banks and the Saudis to drive down the oil price from over $100 per barrel to $30. This has put pressure on Russian finances and the rubla. In response to Russia’s budgetary needs, Washington’s allies inside Russia are pushing President Putin to privatize important Russian economic sectors in order to raise foreign capital to cover the budget deficit and support the ruble. If Putin gives in, important Russian assets will move from Russian control to Washington’s control.
In my opinion, those who are pushing privatization are either traitors or completely stupid. Whichever it is, they are a danger to Russia’s independence.
Eric Draitser provides some details of Washington’s assault on Russia:
of Washington’s attack on South Africa:
and of Washington’s attack on Brazil:
For my column on Washington’s attack on Latin American independence, see here.
As I have often pointed out, the neoconservatives have been driven insane by their arrogance and hubris. In their pursuit of American hegemony over the world, they have cast aside all caution in their determination to destabilize Russia and China.
By implementing neoliberal economic policies urged on them by their economists trained in the Western neoliberal tradition, the Russian and Chinese governments are setting themselves up for Washington. By swallowing the “globalism” line, using the US dollar, participating in the Western payments system, opening themselves to destabilization by foreign capital inflows and outflows, hosting American banks, and permitting foreign ownership, the Russian and Chinese governments have made themselves ripe for destabilization.
If Russia and China do not disengage from the Western system and exile their neoliberal economists, they will have to go to war in order to defend their sovereignty.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/paul-craig-roberts/world-war-iii-begun/
By Paul Craig Roberts
The Third World War is currently being fought. How long before it moves into its hot stage?
Washington is currently conducting economic and propaganda warfare against four members of the five block group of countries known as BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Brazil and South Africa are being destabilized with fabricated political scandals. Both countries are rife with Washington-financed politicians and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Washington concocts a scandal, sends its political agents into action demanding action against the government and its NGOs into the streets in protests.
Washington tried this against China with the orchestrated Hong Kong “student protest.” Washington hoped that the protest would spread into China, but the scheme failed. Washington tried this against Russia with the orchestrated protests against Putin’s reelection and failed again.
To destabilize Russia, Washington needs a firmer hold inside Russia. In order to gain a firmer hold, Washington worked with the New York mega-banks and the Saudis to drive down the oil price from over $100 per barrel to $30. This has put pressure on Russian finances and the rubla. In response to Russia’s budgetary needs, Washington’s allies inside Russia are pushing President Putin to privatize important Russian economic sectors in order to raise foreign capital to cover the budget deficit and support the ruble. If Putin gives in, important Russian assets will move from Russian control to Washington’s control.
In my opinion, those who are pushing privatization are either traitors or completely stupid. Whichever it is, they are a danger to Russia’s independence.
Eric Draitser provides some details of Washington’s assault on Russia:
of Washington’s attack on South Africa:
and of Washington’s attack on Brazil:
For my column on Washington’s attack on Latin American independence, see here.
As I have often pointed out, the neoconservatives have been driven insane by their arrogance and hubris. In their pursuit of American hegemony over the world, they have cast aside all caution in their determination to destabilize Russia and China.
By implementing neoliberal economic policies urged on them by their economists trained in the Western neoliberal tradition, the Russian and Chinese governments are setting themselves up for Washington. By swallowing the “globalism” line, using the US dollar, participating in the Western payments system, opening themselves to destabilization by foreign capital inflows and outflows, hosting American banks, and permitting foreign ownership, the Russian and Chinese governments have made themselves ripe for destabilization.
If Russia and China do not disengage from the Western system and exile their neoliberal economists, they will have to go to war in order to defend their sovereignty.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/paul-craig-roberts/world-war-iii-begun/
"If government assumes the job of taking care of us, then Congress can control just about every aspect of our lives. When I was a rebellious teenager, my mother frequently told me, “As long as you’re living in my house and I’m paying the bills, you’re going to do as I say.” That kind of thinking is OK for children, but not for emancipated adults."
A Superior Vision
By Walter E. Williams
Last month, I celebrated the beginning of my 81st year of life. For nearly half that time, I have been writing a nationally syndicated column on many topics generating reader responses that go from supportive to quite ugly. So I thought a column making my vision, values and views explicit might settle some of the controversy.
My initial premise, when looking at all human issues, is that each of us owns himself. I am my private property, and you are your private property. If you agree with that premise, then certain human actions are moral and others immoral. The reason murder is immoral is that it violates private property. Similarly, rape and theft are immoral, for them, too, violate private property. Most Americans will agree that murder and rape violate people’s property rights and are hence immoral. But there may not be so much agreement about theft. Let’s look at it.
Theft is when a person’s property is taken from him — through stealth, force, intimidation, threats or coercion — and given to another to whom it does not belong. If a person took your property — even to help another person who is in need — it would be called theft. Suppose three people agreed to that taking. Would it be deemed theft? What if 100,000 or several hundred million people agreed to do so? Would that be deemed theft? Another way to ask these questions is: Does a consensus establish morality?
Self-ownership can offer solutions to many seemingly moral/ethical dilemmas. One is the sale of human organs. There is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation. Most people in need of an organdie or become very ill while they await an organ donation. Many more organs would become available if there were a market for them. Through the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, Congress has made organ sales illegal. Congress clearly has the power to prevent organ sales, but does it have a right? The answer to that question comes by asking: Who owns your organs? One test of ownership is whether you have the right to sell something. In the case of organs, if it is Congress that owns our organs, then we have no right to sell them. That would be stealing from Congress.
People have the right to take chances with their own lives. People do not have a right to take chances with the lives of others. That is why laws that mandate that cars have brakes are consistent with liberty and seat belt laws are not. You might say, “Aha, Williams, we’ve got you there because if you don’t wear a seatbelt and you have an accident and turn into a vegetable, society is burdened with taking care of you!” That’s not a problem of liberty. It’s a problem of socialism. Nobody should be forced to take care of me for any reason. If government assumes the job of taking care of us, then Congress can control just about every aspect of our lives. When I was a rebellious teenager, my mother frequently told me, “As long as you’re living in my house and I’m paying the bills, you’re going to do as I say.” That kind of thinking is OK for children, but not for emancipated adults.
I have only touched the surface of ideas of self-ownership. The immorality associated with violation of the principle of self-ownership lies at the root of problems that could lead to our doom as a great nation. In fiscal 2015, total government spending — federal, state and local — was about $6.41 trillion. That’s about 36 percent of our gross domestic product. The federal government spent $3.69 trillion. At least two-thirds of that spending can be described as the government’s taking the property of one American and giving it to another. That’s our moral tragedy: We’ve become a nation of people endeavoring to live at the expense of others — in a word, a nation of thieves.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/walter-e-williams/self-ownership-foundation-freedom/
By Walter E. Williams
Last month, I celebrated the beginning of my 81st year of life. For nearly half that time, I have been writing a nationally syndicated column on many topics generating reader responses that go from supportive to quite ugly. So I thought a column making my vision, values and views explicit might settle some of the controversy.
My initial premise, when looking at all human issues, is that each of us owns himself. I am my private property, and you are your private property. If you agree with that premise, then certain human actions are moral and others immoral. The reason murder is immoral is that it violates private property. Similarly, rape and theft are immoral, for them, too, violate private property. Most Americans will agree that murder and rape violate people’s property rights and are hence immoral. But there may not be so much agreement about theft. Let’s look at it.
Theft is when a person’s property is taken from him — through stealth, force, intimidation, threats or coercion — and given to another to whom it does not belong. If a person took your property — even to help another person who is in need — it would be called theft. Suppose three people agreed to that taking. Would it be deemed theft? What if 100,000 or several hundred million people agreed to do so? Would that be deemed theft? Another way to ask these questions is: Does a consensus establish morality?
Self-ownership can offer solutions to many seemingly moral/ethical dilemmas. One is the sale of human organs. There is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation. Most people in need of an organdie or become very ill while they await an organ donation. Many more organs would become available if there were a market for them. Through the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, Congress has made organ sales illegal. Congress clearly has the power to prevent organ sales, but does it have a right? The answer to that question comes by asking: Who owns your organs? One test of ownership is whether you have the right to sell something. In the case of organs, if it is Congress that owns our organs, then we have no right to sell them. That would be stealing from Congress.
People have the right to take chances with their own lives. People do not have a right to take chances with the lives of others. That is why laws that mandate that cars have brakes are consistent with liberty and seat belt laws are not. You might say, “Aha, Williams, we’ve got you there because if you don’t wear a seatbelt and you have an accident and turn into a vegetable, society is burdened with taking care of you!” That’s not a problem of liberty. It’s a problem of socialism. Nobody should be forced to take care of me for any reason. If government assumes the job of taking care of us, then Congress can control just about every aspect of our lives. When I was a rebellious teenager, my mother frequently told me, “As long as you’re living in my house and I’m paying the bills, you’re going to do as I say.” That kind of thinking is OK for children, but not for emancipated adults.
I have only touched the surface of ideas of self-ownership. The immorality associated with violation of the principle of self-ownership lies at the root of problems that could lead to our doom as a great nation. In fiscal 2015, total government spending — federal, state and local — was about $6.41 trillion. That’s about 36 percent of our gross domestic product. The federal government spent $3.69 trillion. At least two-thirds of that spending can be described as the government’s taking the property of one American and giving it to another. That’s our moral tragedy: We’ve become a nation of people endeavoring to live at the expense of others — in a word, a nation of thieves.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/walter-e-williams/self-ownership-foundation-freedom/
Monday, April 25, 2016
"I personally have absolutely no doubts that if Social Security were repealed today, everything would be fine tomorrow. That’s because I know that freedom works. It really does work. It is socialism, fascism, and interventionism that don’t work."
Compassion, Morality, and the Repeal of Social Security
by Future of Freedom
In my last three blog posts ( (here, here, and here), I have shown that Social Security is just another welfare program, no different from all other welfare programs, including food stamps, farm subsidies, aid to the arts, and foreign aid to dictators.
I have also shown the fundamental immorality that Social Security shares with all other socialist programs — it takes money by force from people to whom it belongs and gives it to people to whom it does not belong. When that happens in the private sector, people call it stealing or thievery. When the federal government does the same thing, people call it wonderful and glorious.
The obvious question arises: Given the fundamentally wrongful nature of Social Security, what should be done? I say: When something is wrongful or sinful, the only proper course of action is: End it, immediately.
But supporters of this socialist scheme say that to suddenly terminate Social Security would be unfair and uncaring. After all, they say, “Seniors put it in and therefore they have a right to get it back and many of them have become hopelessly dependent on the money.”
But as I have shown in the last three blog posts, no one has “put anything in.” Everyone has been taxed. No doubt about that. But taxes are not deposits, investments, or insurance premiums. Taxes are monies collected by the government which, upon receipt, are owned by the government. They are also monies that the government spends immediately upon receipt for its wide range of welfare-warfare state programs.
People argue that seniors have less money at their disposal owing to the large amount of taxes that the government took from them during their work lives, including income taxes, FICA taxes, and all the rest.
Granted, but governments have been collecting exorbitant amounts of taxes for centuries from people, leaving many of them impoverished. Does that mean that the people who have been taxed have the right to take away money that rightly belongs to others and appropriate it to their own use?
But many seniors are dependent on their Social Security checks, people say. Wouldn’t it be cruel to suddenly terminate those checks? How would they survive without their dole?
Suppose a company worker has been embezzling funds from his employer for 20 years. During that time, he bought a house on credit. He has grown dependent on the money. If he loses that income stream, he will default on his mortgage and lose his house. He’s 70 years old. He’s finally caught.
Is it fair to terminate his embezzlement? Should it be reduced gradually? Wouldn’t it be compassionate to let him continue receiving at least some of the money so that he doesn’t lose his home?
I think most of us would say: Stop the embezzlement immediately. It’s not his money. It’s his employer’s. If people want to help him out, fine. But he has no right to continue taking what doesn’t belong to him.
Why doesn’t the same principle apply to Social Security? Why should the people from whom the money is being taken be forced to be caring and compassionate? Isn’t it a bit cavalier to say, “We should be caring and compassionate and continue Social Security so long as it’s the young people, many of whom are struggling to get a start in life, who are the ones who are being forced to pay for it”? Isn’t genuine charity supposed to come out of the willing heart of the individual, not at the point of a government gun?
Social Security recipients fall generally into three categories:
1.Those who are sufficiently wealthy and, therefore, don’t need the money. Terminating Social Security isn’t going to affect them in a substantive way.
2.Those who might have to go back to work. What’s wrong with that? I see lots of senior citizens working. It keeps them involved in the mainstream of life rather than sitting in some dark corner of their living room watching television and waiting to die.
3.Those who truly need the money to survive. Why can’t we depend on freedom and voluntary charity to help out this group of people? For one thing, their children and grandchildren will no longer be paying Social Security taxes. That’s a lot of money that is now being left in their paychecks — money that can be used to help out their parents and grandparents. What’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t that type of assistance be much more meaningful than the assistance provided by federal bureaucrats who have stolen the money from young people?
What about people who don’t have children or grandchildren to help them out? That’s where charitable foundations come into play. Undoubtedly, there would be foundations popping up the minute Social Security is abolished that are intended to provide financial assistance to senior citizens who need it. People would donate to those foundations, just as they donate to all sorts of worthy causes today.
Does that take a faith in freedom and free will? Of course it does. And that’s part of the problem we face in this country: The welfare state has caused people to lose their faith in freedom, in themselves, in others, and in God. It has caused them to believe that only Caesar — the organized means of coercion and compulsion — can address the financial concerns of the poor and needy.
That lack of faith in freedom — along with the mindset of dependency that Social Security and other welfare-state programs have inculcated in welfare recipients — is the biggest obstacle we face in ridding our nation of this socialist scourge. That’s what drives liberals to continue embracing Social Security. It’s what drove conservatives to make peace with Social Security and the welfare state. Why, there are even libertarians who are scared to call for the immediate termination of this socialist program and have instead settled for embracing a Social Security system based on the principles of economic fascism.
I personally have absolutely no doubts that if Social Security were repealed today, everything would be fine tomorrow. That’s because I know that freedom works. It really does work. It is socialism, fascism, and interventionism that don’t work.
I like the spirit of one of FFF supporters who wrote me a couple of days ago in response to my series of Social Security articles:
Wonderful column again and even though I have no choice about social security, I have always known what it is. And if it goes away, my son will take care of me because our family still takes care of each other when it is needed.
If we had that spirit of liberty sweep across America, we could end the welfare state today, and, for that matter, the warfare state as well.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/22/compassion-repeal-social-security/
by Future of Freedom
In my last three blog posts ( (here, here, and here), I have shown that Social Security is just another welfare program, no different from all other welfare programs, including food stamps, farm subsidies, aid to the arts, and foreign aid to dictators.
I have also shown the fundamental immorality that Social Security shares with all other socialist programs — it takes money by force from people to whom it belongs and gives it to people to whom it does not belong. When that happens in the private sector, people call it stealing or thievery. When the federal government does the same thing, people call it wonderful and glorious.
The obvious question arises: Given the fundamentally wrongful nature of Social Security, what should be done? I say: When something is wrongful or sinful, the only proper course of action is: End it, immediately.
But supporters of this socialist scheme say that to suddenly terminate Social Security would be unfair and uncaring. After all, they say, “Seniors put it in and therefore they have a right to get it back and many of them have become hopelessly dependent on the money.”
But as I have shown in the last three blog posts, no one has “put anything in.” Everyone has been taxed. No doubt about that. But taxes are not deposits, investments, or insurance premiums. Taxes are monies collected by the government which, upon receipt, are owned by the government. They are also monies that the government spends immediately upon receipt for its wide range of welfare-warfare state programs.
People argue that seniors have less money at their disposal owing to the large amount of taxes that the government took from them during their work lives, including income taxes, FICA taxes, and all the rest.
Granted, but governments have been collecting exorbitant amounts of taxes for centuries from people, leaving many of them impoverished. Does that mean that the people who have been taxed have the right to take away money that rightly belongs to others and appropriate it to their own use?
But many seniors are dependent on their Social Security checks, people say. Wouldn’t it be cruel to suddenly terminate those checks? How would they survive without their dole?
Suppose a company worker has been embezzling funds from his employer for 20 years. During that time, he bought a house on credit. He has grown dependent on the money. If he loses that income stream, he will default on his mortgage and lose his house. He’s 70 years old. He’s finally caught.
Is it fair to terminate his embezzlement? Should it be reduced gradually? Wouldn’t it be compassionate to let him continue receiving at least some of the money so that he doesn’t lose his home?
I think most of us would say: Stop the embezzlement immediately. It’s not his money. It’s his employer’s. If people want to help him out, fine. But he has no right to continue taking what doesn’t belong to him.
Why doesn’t the same principle apply to Social Security? Why should the people from whom the money is being taken be forced to be caring and compassionate? Isn’t it a bit cavalier to say, “We should be caring and compassionate and continue Social Security so long as it’s the young people, many of whom are struggling to get a start in life, who are the ones who are being forced to pay for it”? Isn’t genuine charity supposed to come out of the willing heart of the individual, not at the point of a government gun?
Social Security recipients fall generally into three categories:
1.Those who are sufficiently wealthy and, therefore, don’t need the money. Terminating Social Security isn’t going to affect them in a substantive way.
2.Those who might have to go back to work. What’s wrong with that? I see lots of senior citizens working. It keeps them involved in the mainstream of life rather than sitting in some dark corner of their living room watching television and waiting to die.
3.Those who truly need the money to survive. Why can’t we depend on freedom and voluntary charity to help out this group of people? For one thing, their children and grandchildren will no longer be paying Social Security taxes. That’s a lot of money that is now being left in their paychecks — money that can be used to help out their parents and grandparents. What’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t that type of assistance be much more meaningful than the assistance provided by federal bureaucrats who have stolen the money from young people?
What about people who don’t have children or grandchildren to help them out? That’s where charitable foundations come into play. Undoubtedly, there would be foundations popping up the minute Social Security is abolished that are intended to provide financial assistance to senior citizens who need it. People would donate to those foundations, just as they donate to all sorts of worthy causes today.
Does that take a faith in freedom and free will? Of course it does. And that’s part of the problem we face in this country: The welfare state has caused people to lose their faith in freedom, in themselves, in others, and in God. It has caused them to believe that only Caesar — the organized means of coercion and compulsion — can address the financial concerns of the poor and needy.
That lack of faith in freedom — along with the mindset of dependency that Social Security and other welfare-state programs have inculcated in welfare recipients — is the biggest obstacle we face in ridding our nation of this socialist scourge. That’s what drives liberals to continue embracing Social Security. It’s what drove conservatives to make peace with Social Security and the welfare state. Why, there are even libertarians who are scared to call for the immediate termination of this socialist program and have instead settled for embracing a Social Security system based on the principles of economic fascism.
I personally have absolutely no doubts that if Social Security were repealed today, everything would be fine tomorrow. That’s because I know that freedom works. It really does work. It is socialism, fascism, and interventionism that don’t work.
I like the spirit of one of FFF supporters who wrote me a couple of days ago in response to my series of Social Security articles:
Wonderful column again and even though I have no choice about social security, I have always known what it is. And if it goes away, my son will take care of me because our family still takes care of each other when it is needed.
If we had that spirit of liberty sweep across America, we could end the welfare state today, and, for that matter, the warfare state as well.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/22/compassion-repeal-social-security/
"The presence of profound earth changes appear to be occurring on a global scale, but again these changes may well be part of a larger stellar phenomenon unfolding within our solar system and not due at all to anthropomorphic CO2 levels."
The Global Warming Hoax, Paris Climate Accord and NWO Global Governance
By Joachim Hagopian
“Global warming is the biggest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it.”
Longtime meteorologist and Weather Channel founder John Coleman
With last Friday’s Earth Day marked by the US among 170 nations out of the planet’s 190 nations signing last December’s UN Paris climate change agreement at the United Nations, the topic “global warming/climate change” is once again all abuzz these days. Additionally, in less than a week a documentary entitled “The Climate Hustle” is being released in movie theaters nationwide on May 2nd debunking the notion that humans have caused global warming from the alleged increased CO2 greenhouse effect. This new film arrives as the answered rebuttal exactly a decade after ex-VP Al Gore’s Oscar-winning “Inconvenient Truth” pushed the global warming agenda to unprecedented heights. Gore was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize for his propagandist sci-fi movie. Recall his “true planetary emergency” calling for “drastic measures” to reduce the greenhouse gases before “reaching the point of no return” within ten years. Well, his ten years have come and gone and for all his over-predicting of end-of-the-world crises due to global warming, Gore and his alarmist minions have virtually no evidence of any warming to show for all their doom and gloom catastrophic warnings.
That said, the global warming industry stakes are now worth an annual $1.5 trillion. Yet despite the global elites adapting a climate change agreement, a vast array of critics are blasting their Paris climate accord as merely a $100 billion boondoggle lacking any specific strategies or methods for reducing CO2 levels nor any mandated authority to enforce recommendations hinging on voluntary participation from all nations. Even the father of the global warming movement former NASA climatologist and green activist James Hanson trashes the Paris agreement:
It’s just bullshit for them to say ‘we’ll have a 2 C. warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s worthless words. There is no actions, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.
The earth’s global warming that Al Gore and his movement attribute to humans burning fossil fuels over the last century has absolutely nothing to do with the global warming presently being observed on every planet in our solar system. Scientists are blaming it on solar warming and the sun’s electromagnetic field is becoming more intense. The fact that solar warming is heating up all the planets strongly suggests that global warming on our planet is not being caused by human activity at all.
Few skeptical scientists on global warming deny that human-generated CO2 does not warm the planet. But the amount of heating caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases has never been scientifically determined and is believed to be minuscule. In contrast, in recent years virtually all of Al Gore’s contentions have been refuted and debunked by actual science. Bill Clinton’s Vice President while campaigning for president claimed that he “created the internet” and of course we all know he conveniently stretched the truth on that one. As a lifelong politician raised by another lifelong politician father, his trademark is bending the truth any time he feels the need to impress his audience. Though Al Gore likes to pass himself off as an altruist out to save the world, as a partner in Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that invested a billion dollars in 40 different companies, Gore and his partners stand to hugely profit from cap and trade laws that would make him the first carbon billionaire.
Back in 2008 Al Gore made the bold prediction that all the ice in the Arctic Sea would be completely melted by 2013-2015. It clearly hasn’t. The polar icecap has actually grown thicker in 2015 than it was in 2008. Meanwhile, the climate and ice pack on Antarctica is consistently growing thicker and colder at record levels. These polar discrepancies stand in direct contradiction to the global warming alarmist’s original statements as literally the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Gore’s dire warnings never quite materialize. Hence, in recent years Gore’s political camp quietly and seamlessly renamed their all-important cause from global warming which was disproven to a more benign, less disprovable assertion called climate change.
One of Gore’s “facts” that acts as his basic premise behind his entire theory is the notion that rising CO2 levels cause global warming. This is not true. What scientists do know is for millions of years the earth has taken turns cyclically shifting back and forth between relative short warming periods compared to longer cooling periods. During the last 800 years of a typical 5,000-year ice age, it’s been determined that temperatures rose before CO2 levels did. This lagging anomaly is a scientific fact that disproves climate change contenders’ central tenet that increasing CO2 levels always cause higher temps.
Many scientists maintain that increasing CO2 levels only help to stimulate plant growth since the plant kingdom’s fuel are carbon dioxide.
The clichéd quote so often heard by the alarmists claiming a consensus of 97% of all climate scientists maintain that manmade CO2 levels are causing global warming has also been proven wrong. A closer examination has demonstrated that an extremely minute number of research studies wholeheartedly embrace global warming as fact and that the zealot counting the supposed 12,000 abstracts subjectively misclassified the vast majority as being pro-global warming, in fact, doctoring the results.
On the other hand, 31,487 scientists (over 9,000 with Ph.D.’s) signed a petition confirming that they do not believe that anthropomorphic (human causing) generated CO2 is a valid concern causing any global warming danger. Yet the lies spewing forth from politicized pseudo-science dogma passed all around the world by MSM presstitutes will never admit it.
Falsely inflated high-temperature measurements from urban concrete heat zones in numerous research studies supporting the global warming hoax account for up to 3 degree Celsius difference from readings in rural areas. A couple of favorites used by deceitful alarmists in their desperate PR ploys have pulled on public heartstrings promoting polar bear extinction or dying bleached coral reefs as fearmongering threats.
Early environmentalist scientists spearheaded by founder of the UN Environmental Programme and Canadian billionaire globalist Maurice Strong throughout the 1960’s and 70’s went shopping for research funding that would produce their magic bullet linking CO2 emissions to a disastrous climatic future. In his zealous quest Strong disclosed:
Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
Now you can see how the recent globalist manufactured migration crisis and the Paris climate accord committing $100 billion to “fighting CO2” fits right in with Strong’s mission with billions in carbon tax used to codify world governance laws. In 1993 an even more glaring admission to misuse global warming to further advance the New World Order agenda was explicitly declared by the Club of Rome, an elitist think tank comprised of scientists, economists, business and political leaders that often serve as UN consultants of which Maurice Strong himself was a onetime member:
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention… and thus the real enemy, then, is humanity itself… believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is a real one or… one invented for the purpose.
Thus the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was born, opportunistically latching onto the highly bogus 1998 MBH98 study that included grossly flawed methodology as its smoking gun “proving” global warming with the infamous “hockey stick” CO2 spike pattern used by Al Gore in his acclaimed disinfo propaganda flick. Later researchers debunked the MBH98 findings identifying errors that when corrected to include missing 15th century data showed even higher temperatures than today minus of course any manmade cause back then, thus shattering the myth of human carbon dioxide emissions causing a warmer earth. Additionally, for two straight decades now, satellite derived data records show no statistically significant global warming trend at all. Even surface readings over the last decade have failed to deliver the bad news globalists like Gore were literally banking on. So by default, let’s call it climate change and keep hammering away with more lies until they become accepted science dogma.
The often heard climate change narrative readily cites increasing number of hurricanes and tornadoes as the sought after proof that climate change is real. Yet once again reality fails to back up the claims. For the fourth year in a row, tornadoes fell under the average with 2015 one of the lowest years on record. And regarding killer hurricanes, the US is in the longest drought in its recorded history since records began in 1851. The last category 3 hurricane was Wilma that struck Florida over a decade ago. Furthermore, a University of Colorado study released results last year stressing the need for caution in interpreting extreme weather, warning not to succumb to an obvious temptation to attribute every extreme weather event to global warming. The study concluded that no statistical evidence supports a rise in extreme weather caused directly by global warming or climate change.
In the case of the spike in major earthquakes and active volcanoes (40 now) this year, solar activity, 11-year sun cycles and increased risk of comets and asteroids heading towards the earth are more commonly linked to a potential causal explanation than climate change or global warming. The presence of profound earth changes appear to be occurring on a global scale, but again these changes may well be part of a larger stellar phenomenon unfolding within our solar system and not due at all to anthropomorphic CO2 levels.
Still another controversial and rarely if ever mentioned the factor that is impacting climate and weather events is the widespread geoengineering “chemtrails” that have for decades now been artificially blanketing and poisoning the skies and life on the ground. Chemtrails are likely causing the drought in California. Spraying chemicals have become so pronounced in recent years throughout North America and Europe that in places it has seemingly permanently altered the skyline coloring it a dull whitish grey. A number of heavy toxic metals falling to the ground have been detected including aluminum, barium, strontium, sulfur, all are harmful to human health far more than CO2 emissions. Yet their destruction and increasingly health hazard to animals, humans as well as vegetation (especially scorched trees) intentionally at hidden taxpayer expense is covertly been perpetrated by US and other Western governments.
Temperatures measured at both ground level and lower atmospheric levels are affected by a myriad of factors. Yet the UN agreement and the widespread political dogma masquerading as science that climate change/global warming is indisputably caused by the rise in manmade CO2 levels blindly denies all the other scientifically known factors that influence the planet’s temperatures rendering them all inconsequential. This is totally misleading and downright false. Prevailing global winds, cloud cover, orbital earth changes in tilting of axis, ocean cycles that include growth of microscopic creatures, water vapor, methane gas, volcanic activity, the solar system and the sun all are scientifically-established co-determinants in varying global temps and climate change. It’s an extremely complex interplay of dozens of co-occurring variables that cause climate. Over simplistic analyses based on computer model algorithms insisting that man’s CO2 gases are heating up the planet has been coalesced and co-opted into a unifying political agenda pushed by environmental extremism, the Democratic Party and ultimately globalism and its world governance to use global warming as its prime mover and shaker to bring about the long plotted one world government tyranny.
The bottom line reality to virtually everything today is driven by money, power and control. The climate change issue is no different as it has been politicized to where scientific research funding is predicated on only one thing, producing results that the government desires and demands… be it in the US or research sponsored by the UN’s IPCC. Thus, only researchers that produce the numbers supporting the contention that CO2 is causing rising temps get funded. Honest researching scientists who dare investigate the inconvenient truth simply don’t get financed. And only the pro-global warming scientists are given a credible voice to disseminate their findings through respected journals and mainstream media outlets. Like 9/11 truth-ers and vaccine non-believers, dissenting scientists not bought and paid for by big oil or big government, are typically denigrated and dismissed as fringe conspiracy nuts and crackpots. A global warming skeptic is subject to ridicule, career and reputation assault and harassment threatened with RICO litigation. In other words, science just like mainstream media has become so polluted and prostituted by today’s rampant corruption that it no longer is guided by legitimate scientific inquiry and ethically driven investigation for empirical truth… much like Monsanto and Big Pharma control the FDA and EPA to approve harmful drugs without adequate research trials and/or look the other way with egregious earth degradation and pollution.
But then this is the regressive, Orwellian dark age we’re now living in when dissenting free speech has systematically become criminalized, when our soldiers sent by our government into harm’s way putting their lives on the line come home only to be targeted as the feds’ number one enemy – even more so than the ISIS terrorists the treasonous neocons secretly created and continue supporting, and the mob rule mentality of political correctness that now both trumps and tramples on the constitutional First Amendment. Free intellectual discourse on college campuses has been militantly usurped by angry PC police Nazis acting blindly on emotion to demonize and silence those who dare disagree. If anyone on the planet’s feelings are hurt, PC laws prohibiting free speech are being busily erected to put people exercising their criminalized free speech in jail, be they critics of Islam or so called climate change “deniers.”
The crime cabal government is now an oligarchic fascist totalitarian police state ushering in yet another reign of terror era where truth itself becomes deep state’s enemy. The elite’s covert agenda to misuse and debase the educational system and mass media through pervasive social engineering and mind control designed to diabolically dumb down and brainwash multiple generations into robotically operating completely devoid of any capacity for critical thinking and reasoning, absolutely clueless in discerning truth from 24/7 lies, disinformation and propaganda has been a resounding success. That said, more citizens of the world every single day are ultimately realizing that their own government as the elite’s authoritarian thugs is their true enemy merely carrying out eugenics marching orders amounting to human genocide. Like the sacrificial lambs of the 3000 Americans murdered by the ruling elite on 9/11, we are all targets for extermination, all but a half billion slaves left alive to service the psychopaths in charge.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/joachim-hagopian/global-warming-hoax/
By Joachim Hagopian
“Global warming is the biggest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it.”
Longtime meteorologist and Weather Channel founder John Coleman
With last Friday’s Earth Day marked by the US among 170 nations out of the planet’s 190 nations signing last December’s UN Paris climate change agreement at the United Nations, the topic “global warming/climate change” is once again all abuzz these days. Additionally, in less than a week a documentary entitled “The Climate Hustle” is being released in movie theaters nationwide on May 2nd debunking the notion that humans have caused global warming from the alleged increased CO2 greenhouse effect. This new film arrives as the answered rebuttal exactly a decade after ex-VP Al Gore’s Oscar-winning “Inconvenient Truth” pushed the global warming agenda to unprecedented heights. Gore was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize for his propagandist sci-fi movie. Recall his “true planetary emergency” calling for “drastic measures” to reduce the greenhouse gases before “reaching the point of no return” within ten years. Well, his ten years have come and gone and for all his over-predicting of end-of-the-world crises due to global warming, Gore and his alarmist minions have virtually no evidence of any warming to show for all their doom and gloom catastrophic warnings.
That said, the global warming industry stakes are now worth an annual $1.5 trillion. Yet despite the global elites adapting a climate change agreement, a vast array of critics are blasting their Paris climate accord as merely a $100 billion boondoggle lacking any specific strategies or methods for reducing CO2 levels nor any mandated authority to enforce recommendations hinging on voluntary participation from all nations. Even the father of the global warming movement former NASA climatologist and green activist James Hanson trashes the Paris agreement:
It’s just bullshit for them to say ‘we’ll have a 2 C. warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s worthless words. There is no actions, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.
The earth’s global warming that Al Gore and his movement attribute to humans burning fossil fuels over the last century has absolutely nothing to do with the global warming presently being observed on every planet in our solar system. Scientists are blaming it on solar warming and the sun’s electromagnetic field is becoming more intense. The fact that solar warming is heating up all the planets strongly suggests that global warming on our planet is not being caused by human activity at all.
Few skeptical scientists on global warming deny that human-generated CO2 does not warm the planet. But the amount of heating caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases has never been scientifically determined and is believed to be minuscule. In contrast, in recent years virtually all of Al Gore’s contentions have been refuted and debunked by actual science. Bill Clinton’s Vice President while campaigning for president claimed that he “created the internet” and of course we all know he conveniently stretched the truth on that one. As a lifelong politician raised by another lifelong politician father, his trademark is bending the truth any time he feels the need to impress his audience. Though Al Gore likes to pass himself off as an altruist out to save the world, as a partner in Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that invested a billion dollars in 40 different companies, Gore and his partners stand to hugely profit from cap and trade laws that would make him the first carbon billionaire.
Back in 2008 Al Gore made the bold prediction that all the ice in the Arctic Sea would be completely melted by 2013-2015. It clearly hasn’t. The polar icecap has actually grown thicker in 2015 than it was in 2008. Meanwhile, the climate and ice pack on Antarctica is consistently growing thicker and colder at record levels. These polar discrepancies stand in direct contradiction to the global warming alarmist’s original statements as literally the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Gore’s dire warnings never quite materialize. Hence, in recent years Gore’s political camp quietly and seamlessly renamed their all-important cause from global warming which was disproven to a more benign, less disprovable assertion called climate change.
One of Gore’s “facts” that acts as his basic premise behind his entire theory is the notion that rising CO2 levels cause global warming. This is not true. What scientists do know is for millions of years the earth has taken turns cyclically shifting back and forth between relative short warming periods compared to longer cooling periods. During the last 800 years of a typical 5,000-year ice age, it’s been determined that temperatures rose before CO2 levels did. This lagging anomaly is a scientific fact that disproves climate change contenders’ central tenet that increasing CO2 levels always cause higher temps.
Many scientists maintain that increasing CO2 levels only help to stimulate plant growth since the plant kingdom’s fuel are carbon dioxide.
The clichéd quote so often heard by the alarmists claiming a consensus of 97% of all climate scientists maintain that manmade CO2 levels are causing global warming has also been proven wrong. A closer examination has demonstrated that an extremely minute number of research studies wholeheartedly embrace global warming as fact and that the zealot counting the supposed 12,000 abstracts subjectively misclassified the vast majority as being pro-global warming, in fact, doctoring the results.
On the other hand, 31,487 scientists (over 9,000 with Ph.D.’s) signed a petition confirming that they do not believe that anthropomorphic (human causing) generated CO2 is a valid concern causing any global warming danger. Yet the lies spewing forth from politicized pseudo-science dogma passed all around the world by MSM presstitutes will never admit it.
Falsely inflated high-temperature measurements from urban concrete heat zones in numerous research studies supporting the global warming hoax account for up to 3 degree Celsius difference from readings in rural areas. A couple of favorites used by deceitful alarmists in their desperate PR ploys have pulled on public heartstrings promoting polar bear extinction or dying bleached coral reefs as fearmongering threats.
Early environmentalist scientists spearheaded by founder of the UN Environmental Programme and Canadian billionaire globalist Maurice Strong throughout the 1960’s and 70’s went shopping for research funding that would produce their magic bullet linking CO2 emissions to a disastrous climatic future. In his zealous quest Strong disclosed:
Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
Now you can see how the recent globalist manufactured migration crisis and the Paris climate accord committing $100 billion to “fighting CO2” fits right in with Strong’s mission with billions in carbon tax used to codify world governance laws. In 1993 an even more glaring admission to misuse global warming to further advance the New World Order agenda was explicitly declared by the Club of Rome, an elitist think tank comprised of scientists, economists, business and political leaders that often serve as UN consultants of which Maurice Strong himself was a onetime member:
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention… and thus the real enemy, then, is humanity itself… believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is a real one or… one invented for the purpose.
Thus the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was born, opportunistically latching onto the highly bogus 1998 MBH98 study that included grossly flawed methodology as its smoking gun “proving” global warming with the infamous “hockey stick” CO2 spike pattern used by Al Gore in his acclaimed disinfo propaganda flick. Later researchers debunked the MBH98 findings identifying errors that when corrected to include missing 15th century data showed even higher temperatures than today minus of course any manmade cause back then, thus shattering the myth of human carbon dioxide emissions causing a warmer earth. Additionally, for two straight decades now, satellite derived data records show no statistically significant global warming trend at all. Even surface readings over the last decade have failed to deliver the bad news globalists like Gore were literally banking on. So by default, let’s call it climate change and keep hammering away with more lies until they become accepted science dogma.
The often heard climate change narrative readily cites increasing number of hurricanes and tornadoes as the sought after proof that climate change is real. Yet once again reality fails to back up the claims. For the fourth year in a row, tornadoes fell under the average with 2015 one of the lowest years on record. And regarding killer hurricanes, the US is in the longest drought in its recorded history since records began in 1851. The last category 3 hurricane was Wilma that struck Florida over a decade ago. Furthermore, a University of Colorado study released results last year stressing the need for caution in interpreting extreme weather, warning not to succumb to an obvious temptation to attribute every extreme weather event to global warming. The study concluded that no statistical evidence supports a rise in extreme weather caused directly by global warming or climate change.
In the case of the spike in major earthquakes and active volcanoes (40 now) this year, solar activity, 11-year sun cycles and increased risk of comets and asteroids heading towards the earth are more commonly linked to a potential causal explanation than climate change or global warming. The presence of profound earth changes appear to be occurring on a global scale, but again these changes may well be part of a larger stellar phenomenon unfolding within our solar system and not due at all to anthropomorphic CO2 levels.
Still another controversial and rarely if ever mentioned the factor that is impacting climate and weather events is the widespread geoengineering “chemtrails” that have for decades now been artificially blanketing and poisoning the skies and life on the ground. Chemtrails are likely causing the drought in California. Spraying chemicals have become so pronounced in recent years throughout North America and Europe that in places it has seemingly permanently altered the skyline coloring it a dull whitish grey. A number of heavy toxic metals falling to the ground have been detected including aluminum, barium, strontium, sulfur, all are harmful to human health far more than CO2 emissions. Yet their destruction and increasingly health hazard to animals, humans as well as vegetation (especially scorched trees) intentionally at hidden taxpayer expense is covertly been perpetrated by US and other Western governments.
Temperatures measured at both ground level and lower atmospheric levels are affected by a myriad of factors. Yet the UN agreement and the widespread political dogma masquerading as science that climate change/global warming is indisputably caused by the rise in manmade CO2 levels blindly denies all the other scientifically known factors that influence the planet’s temperatures rendering them all inconsequential. This is totally misleading and downright false. Prevailing global winds, cloud cover, orbital earth changes in tilting of axis, ocean cycles that include growth of microscopic creatures, water vapor, methane gas, volcanic activity, the solar system and the sun all are scientifically-established co-determinants in varying global temps and climate change. It’s an extremely complex interplay of dozens of co-occurring variables that cause climate. Over simplistic analyses based on computer model algorithms insisting that man’s CO2 gases are heating up the planet has been coalesced and co-opted into a unifying political agenda pushed by environmental extremism, the Democratic Party and ultimately globalism and its world governance to use global warming as its prime mover and shaker to bring about the long plotted one world government tyranny.
The bottom line reality to virtually everything today is driven by money, power and control. The climate change issue is no different as it has been politicized to where scientific research funding is predicated on only one thing, producing results that the government desires and demands… be it in the US or research sponsored by the UN’s IPCC. Thus, only researchers that produce the numbers supporting the contention that CO2 is causing rising temps get funded. Honest researching scientists who dare investigate the inconvenient truth simply don’t get financed. And only the pro-global warming scientists are given a credible voice to disseminate their findings through respected journals and mainstream media outlets. Like 9/11 truth-ers and vaccine non-believers, dissenting scientists not bought and paid for by big oil or big government, are typically denigrated and dismissed as fringe conspiracy nuts and crackpots. A global warming skeptic is subject to ridicule, career and reputation assault and harassment threatened with RICO litigation. In other words, science just like mainstream media has become so polluted and prostituted by today’s rampant corruption that it no longer is guided by legitimate scientific inquiry and ethically driven investigation for empirical truth… much like Monsanto and Big Pharma control the FDA and EPA to approve harmful drugs without adequate research trials and/or look the other way with egregious earth degradation and pollution.
But then this is the regressive, Orwellian dark age we’re now living in when dissenting free speech has systematically become criminalized, when our soldiers sent by our government into harm’s way putting their lives on the line come home only to be targeted as the feds’ number one enemy – even more so than the ISIS terrorists the treasonous neocons secretly created and continue supporting, and the mob rule mentality of political correctness that now both trumps and tramples on the constitutional First Amendment. Free intellectual discourse on college campuses has been militantly usurped by angry PC police Nazis acting blindly on emotion to demonize and silence those who dare disagree. If anyone on the planet’s feelings are hurt, PC laws prohibiting free speech are being busily erected to put people exercising their criminalized free speech in jail, be they critics of Islam or so called climate change “deniers.”
The crime cabal government is now an oligarchic fascist totalitarian police state ushering in yet another reign of terror era where truth itself becomes deep state’s enemy. The elite’s covert agenda to misuse and debase the educational system and mass media through pervasive social engineering and mind control designed to diabolically dumb down and brainwash multiple generations into robotically operating completely devoid of any capacity for critical thinking and reasoning, absolutely clueless in discerning truth from 24/7 lies, disinformation and propaganda has been a resounding success. That said, more citizens of the world every single day are ultimately realizing that their own government as the elite’s authoritarian thugs is their true enemy merely carrying out eugenics marching orders amounting to human genocide. Like the sacrificial lambs of the 3000 Americans murdered by the ruling elite on 9/11, we are all targets for extermination, all but a half billion slaves left alive to service the psychopaths in charge.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/joachim-hagopian/global-warming-hoax/
Hitler beat Stalin to the punch by a matter of days in 1941...
Revisiting Suvorov
By Bionic Mosquito
I have written extensively regarding Viktor Suvorov’s book, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. My several posts can be found here.
To make a long story short, Stalin supported and strengthened Hitler, baiting him to start World War II against Britain and France with the anticipation that the western capitalist countries would so weaken themselves that the expansion of Soviet communism would be free to clean up and take over the remains. Just before Stalin was to invade Germany, Hitler struck first. The rest is the history with which we are familiar.
Through either an email or comment (I don’t recall which) I was introduced to the work of Mark Solonin. With his permission, I offer a brief review of one of his posts, entitled Comrade Stalin’s Three Plans.
He begins with a statement that is agreeable to all – whether one believes Suvorov’s account or the more traditional version:
The fact is that Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union at dawn on June 22, 1941 became a horrible surprise for Comrade Stalin.
Germany’s attack astonished the inhabitants of the Kremlin’s offices, stunning them and putting them into a state of shock. That is the fact.
Solonin then introduces the revisionist story – fully consistent with the work of Suvorov:
There is another fact. In May-June of 1941 the Soviet Union’s military forces were in a state of covert strategic deployment. All aspects of strategic deployment (mobilization of reservists, strategic regrouping and concentration of troops, operative deployment of alignments) were carried out in a strict secrecy unheard of even by Stalin’s harsh standards.
As secretly and quietly as can be imagined for such a large movement, Stalin brought to the western borders a significant massing of the Red Army.
Solonin cites Suvorov’s first book on this topic, Icebreaker – written twenty years earlier.
Viktor Suvorov’s hypothesis also bore that main characteristic of the genuine scientific theory, which is this: new facts and documents fit within its boundaries the same way cartridges fit in a pistol clip. New facts fit his theory with precision and clarity, without violating its structure, but rather enhancing its lethal power.
On the other hand, no alternative concepts were formulated in the 20 years after The Icebreaker was published. There was not a single book or a single article.
While many important records and documents remain inaccessible to independent researchers, Solonin goes on to document in a detailed fashion what is known and can be authenticated, what is reasonable with some difficulty to authenticate. He does not apologize for the fact that the Soviets under Stalin were tremendously skilled at hiding the true nature of their plans.
He identifies these plans, plans that changed three times over the course of the several years leading up to war. The first plan is quite clear:
Based on quite authentic documents, we can see that exactly this kind of decision was made. Stalin quite clearly expressed the main goals of his foreign policy all the way back to September 2, 1935, in a letter to Molotov and Kaganovich:
“The old Entente no longer exists. Instead, there are two Ententesemerging: the entente between Italy and France, on the one hand, and the entente between Britain and Germany, on the other. The more violent the fight between the two, the better it is for the USSR. We can sell grain to both of them so they can fight. It is not at all in our benefit if one instantly destroys the other. It’s beneficial for us if their fight is as long-lasting as possible, but without the fast victory of one over the other.”
These countries would so weaken each other that they would be ripe for revolution.
Citing other documents from the time of 1939 and thereafter, it seems clear that Stalin understood that coming to an alliance with Britain would likely stop Hitler from war. This, of course, would not be conducive toward achieving Stalin’s desired outcome.
Plan two was a plan for war against Germany. Plan two can be reconstructed in detail, given documents released in the 1990s.
What conclusions can we draw based on the available documents?
Firstly, an operational plan against Germany did exist, and work on that plan went on for many months – from at least August, 1940, with no consideration of the Non-Aggression Pact.
Secondly, starting in August, 1940 the strategic deployment plans mentioned earlier no longer name Great Britain as a potential enemy of the USSR; Germany is constantly named the main enemy, with potential support to be provided to it by Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Finland.
Thirdly, all of the currently declassified plans for the Red Army’s strategic deployment present practically the same document, which changes slightly from one version to another. At issue is not only the semantic, but also the textual, similarity of all the plans.
The targeted cities and regions were all East Prussian, Polish, and Slovak. A concrete month and year was established – August 1941 – although a concrete date has not been established from available documents.
No one has yet found any other plans for the Red Army’s strategic deployment, except these. With all the Russian archives at their disposal, Suvorov’s opponents have not, in the past 18 years, managed to present to the world a single document in which the beginning (only the beginning!) of the Soviet-German war was being planned in the form of a strategic defensive operation on Soviet territory. (Emphasis in original.)
Plan three differed little from plan two:
Strictly speaking, the new “Stalin’s third plan” did not, from the point of view of operational intent, differ at all from Plan # 2. Large-scale offensive operation was still planned beyond the USSR’s state borders.
In assessing this plan, Solonin focusses on a meeting of May 24 – a meeting with Stalin and to include the senior-most command of the Soviet military. Based on a handwritten note from Marshal Vasilevskiy, Solonin concludes:
…the range of “possible dates” of the beginning of the operation narrows down to two months: from the middle of July through the end of August 1941. (Emphasis in original.)
He goes on to explain how he comes to this conclusion.
After reviewing these three plans, Solonin examines the Soviet troop and equipment movements to the west – done in secret and done in almost the opposite manner than if intended to be defensive.
June 19 is a critical date:
From June 14 through June 19, the border district command received an order to move the Front administration (“Front” was the largest troop formation, the Soviet equivalent of German Armies Group) to the field command post by June 22-23. A June 19 telegram from the Head of the General Staff to the Commander of the forces of the Kiev SMD stated the following: “by 22.06.1941 the administration is ordered to head to Ternopol, leaving in Kiev the district administration subordinate to you ….the apportionment and redeployment of the Front must be kept strictly secret.”
On June 22, Hitler invaded – a most devastating and crushing invasion. Stalin was left with his now worthless plans for a never-to-be offensive operation.
How many days were left between June 19 and the scheduled beginning of the grandiose offensive operation? We will be able to answer this question only after the database available to historians is radically expanded. The most important thing, however, is already known for certain today: neither of Stalin’s three plans was implemented.
Conclusion
If you are familiar with Suvorov’s work, there is little of a surprise here; however the detail provided is invaluable for someone like me who is not doing primary research. Solonin’s work is also valuable in that he demonstrates and corroborates in detail the validity of Suvorov’s work.
Solonin offers dozens of dates and events; all will be incorporated in my Timeline to War (here and here).
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/bionic-mosquito/hitler-stalin-war/
By Bionic Mosquito
I have written extensively regarding Viktor Suvorov’s book, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. My several posts can be found here.
To make a long story short, Stalin supported and strengthened Hitler, baiting him to start World War II against Britain and France with the anticipation that the western capitalist countries would so weaken themselves that the expansion of Soviet communism would be free to clean up and take over the remains. Just before Stalin was to invade Germany, Hitler struck first. The rest is the history with which we are familiar.
Through either an email or comment (I don’t recall which) I was introduced to the work of Mark Solonin. With his permission, I offer a brief review of one of his posts, entitled Comrade Stalin’s Three Plans.
He begins with a statement that is agreeable to all – whether one believes Suvorov’s account or the more traditional version:
The fact is that Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union at dawn on June 22, 1941 became a horrible surprise for Comrade Stalin.
Germany’s attack astonished the inhabitants of the Kremlin’s offices, stunning them and putting them into a state of shock. That is the fact.
Solonin then introduces the revisionist story – fully consistent with the work of Suvorov:
There is another fact. In May-June of 1941 the Soviet Union’s military forces were in a state of covert strategic deployment. All aspects of strategic deployment (mobilization of reservists, strategic regrouping and concentration of troops, operative deployment of alignments) were carried out in a strict secrecy unheard of even by Stalin’s harsh standards.
As secretly and quietly as can be imagined for such a large movement, Stalin brought to the western borders a significant massing of the Red Army.
Solonin cites Suvorov’s first book on this topic, Icebreaker – written twenty years earlier.
Viktor Suvorov’s hypothesis also bore that main characteristic of the genuine scientific theory, which is this: new facts and documents fit within its boundaries the same way cartridges fit in a pistol clip. New facts fit his theory with precision and clarity, without violating its structure, but rather enhancing its lethal power.
On the other hand, no alternative concepts were formulated in the 20 years after The Icebreaker was published. There was not a single book or a single article.
While many important records and documents remain inaccessible to independent researchers, Solonin goes on to document in a detailed fashion what is known and can be authenticated, what is reasonable with some difficulty to authenticate. He does not apologize for the fact that the Soviets under Stalin were tremendously skilled at hiding the true nature of their plans.
He identifies these plans, plans that changed three times over the course of the several years leading up to war. The first plan is quite clear:
Based on quite authentic documents, we can see that exactly this kind of decision was made. Stalin quite clearly expressed the main goals of his foreign policy all the way back to September 2, 1935, in a letter to Molotov and Kaganovich:
“The old Entente no longer exists. Instead, there are two Ententesemerging: the entente between Italy and France, on the one hand, and the entente between Britain and Germany, on the other. The more violent the fight between the two, the better it is for the USSR. We can sell grain to both of them so they can fight. It is not at all in our benefit if one instantly destroys the other. It’s beneficial for us if their fight is as long-lasting as possible, but without the fast victory of one over the other.”
These countries would so weaken each other that they would be ripe for revolution.
Citing other documents from the time of 1939 and thereafter, it seems clear that Stalin understood that coming to an alliance with Britain would likely stop Hitler from war. This, of course, would not be conducive toward achieving Stalin’s desired outcome.
Plan two was a plan for war against Germany. Plan two can be reconstructed in detail, given documents released in the 1990s.
What conclusions can we draw based on the available documents?
Firstly, an operational plan against Germany did exist, and work on that plan went on for many months – from at least August, 1940, with no consideration of the Non-Aggression Pact.
Secondly, starting in August, 1940 the strategic deployment plans mentioned earlier no longer name Great Britain as a potential enemy of the USSR; Germany is constantly named the main enemy, with potential support to be provided to it by Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Finland.
Thirdly, all of the currently declassified plans for the Red Army’s strategic deployment present practically the same document, which changes slightly from one version to another. At issue is not only the semantic, but also the textual, similarity of all the plans.
The targeted cities and regions were all East Prussian, Polish, and Slovak. A concrete month and year was established – August 1941 – although a concrete date has not been established from available documents.
No one has yet found any other plans for the Red Army’s strategic deployment, except these. With all the Russian archives at their disposal, Suvorov’s opponents have not, in the past 18 years, managed to present to the world a single document in which the beginning (only the beginning!) of the Soviet-German war was being planned in the form of a strategic defensive operation on Soviet territory. (Emphasis in original.)
Plan three differed little from plan two:
Strictly speaking, the new “Stalin’s third plan” did not, from the point of view of operational intent, differ at all from Plan # 2. Large-scale offensive operation was still planned beyond the USSR’s state borders.
In assessing this plan, Solonin focusses on a meeting of May 24 – a meeting with Stalin and to include the senior-most command of the Soviet military. Based on a handwritten note from Marshal Vasilevskiy, Solonin concludes:
…the range of “possible dates” of the beginning of the operation narrows down to two months: from the middle of July through the end of August 1941. (Emphasis in original.)
He goes on to explain how he comes to this conclusion.
After reviewing these three plans, Solonin examines the Soviet troop and equipment movements to the west – done in secret and done in almost the opposite manner than if intended to be defensive.
June 19 is a critical date:
From June 14 through June 19, the border district command received an order to move the Front administration (“Front” was the largest troop formation, the Soviet equivalent of German Armies Group) to the field command post by June 22-23. A June 19 telegram from the Head of the General Staff to the Commander of the forces of the Kiev SMD stated the following: “by 22.06.1941 the administration is ordered to head to Ternopol, leaving in Kiev the district administration subordinate to you ….the apportionment and redeployment of the Front must be kept strictly secret.”
On June 22, Hitler invaded – a most devastating and crushing invasion. Stalin was left with his now worthless plans for a never-to-be offensive operation.
How many days were left between June 19 and the scheduled beginning of the grandiose offensive operation? We will be able to answer this question only after the database available to historians is radically expanded. The most important thing, however, is already known for certain today: neither of Stalin’s three plans was implemented.
Conclusion
If you are familiar with Suvorov’s work, there is little of a surprise here; however the detail provided is invaluable for someone like me who is not doing primary research. Solonin’s work is also valuable in that he demonstrates and corroborates in detail the validity of Suvorov’s work.
Solonin offers dozens of dates and events; all will be incorporated in my Timeline to War (here and here).
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/bionic-mosquito/hitler-stalin-war/
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