Wednesday, February 26, 2014
"Mainstream media reporters are, by and large, outrageously ignorant about nutrition, isolated nutrients, whole foods, the games Big Pharma plays, the corruption of the science journals and so on."
Dietary supplement users are more likely to recieve necessary nutrients, make better health decisions
by: PF Louis
Often enough, especially recently, Natural News has been fending off mainstream medical attacks on supplements. The mainstream media supports whatever biased and bogus reports mainstream researchers release, probably because a lot of advertising money comes from Big Pharma and the rest of the Medical Mafia.
And also because of what Mike Adams said in a December 17, 2013, Natural News article: "Mainstream media reporters are, by and large, outrageously ignorant about nutrition, isolated nutrients, whole foods, the games Big Pharma plays, the corruption of the science journals and so on." [1]
The most recent supplement and multivitamin attacks got a lot of favorable press. And they gave the ghoulish Dr. Paul Offit of "babies can tolerate 1,000 vaccinations at the same time" fame another platform for promoting his new book that rails against vitamin and mineral supplements, herbs and Linus Pauling. [2]
Although not with same impact as the attacks on supplements that were featured in several major mainstream outlets, a counterattack has been launched and recently published as a study in the peer-reviewed Nutrition Journal.
Naturally, the lamestream media hasn't run with the story and probably won't even walk with it.
Here's what the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) published
The study was titled "Health Habits and Other Characteristics of Supplement Users."
CRN conducted a mega-study of 20 different peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and found that, "overall, the evidence suggests that users of dietary supplements are seeking wellness and are consciously adopting a variety of lifestyle habits that they consider to contribute to healthy living."
CRN noted that over half of US supplement users were covered in the 20 studies they reviewed. Contrary to the notions spread by supplement naysayers, most of those surveyed used supplement-based strategies to bolster better food choices instead of using supplements to replace the nutritional void from poor food choices and sedentary lifestyles.
In other words, supplement users were not ignoring food for nutrition. The mega-study determined that those who took supplements also made better nutritional choices with foods than their non-supplement consumer counterparts, who usually made poorer food choices.
The study revealed that enriching or fortifying foods helped increase nutritional values, but combining supplements with whole foods had more impact toward increasing nutritional intake. There was no mention of organic food comparisons in the CRN press release. [3]
But the study's bottom line that supplement users were more concerned about taking responsibility for their health and were doing so successfully could be what the medical mafia doesn't want others to know. Ya think?
The most ignored supplements are the most important - minerals
In 1936, journalist Rex Beach covered a maverick MD's agricultural research in a lengthy article published in Cosmopolitan magazine. The MD, Dr. Charles Northen, had turned to soil science, because he realized that nutrition is the basis of health, and our crops, even in 1936, were lacking minerals due to poor top soil mineral balances.
He advocated doing what small organic farmers are discovering now, ways to balance the soil's mineral composition so that synthetic fertilizers and pesticides wouldn't be necessary, and the crop foods would be more nutritious.
"Bear in mind that minerals are vital to human metabolism and health [emphasis added] - and that no plant or animal can appropriate to itself any mineral which is not present in the soil upon which it feeds," asserted Dr. Northen. "Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless." [4]
The article was entered into the U.S. Senate archives as Senate Document 264, 74th Congress, 1936. Of course, it went nowhere. Big Ag flourished with the "Green Revolution" in the mid-1940s, and things only got worse until the organic food movement accelerated after the 1960s.
Minerals are even more important than vitamins. For example, most Americans are magnesium deficient, yet magnesium is involved in over 300 cellular metabolic processes. And vitamins don't perform as well without minerals.
There are macrominerals, measured in milligrams, and trace minerals, measured in micrograms. Both types are essential, because the body doesn't manufacture them. They should be taken from food, but most food coming from depleted top soils are lacking. So mineral supplements are necessary.
Just what types of mineral supplements are most effective is covered very well by the iconoclastic chiropractor Dr. Tim Shea of the Doctor Within. [5]
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/044066_dietary_supplements_nutrients_health_decisions.html#ixzz2uQhc3wqd
by: PF Louis
Often enough, especially recently, Natural News has been fending off mainstream medical attacks on supplements. The mainstream media supports whatever biased and bogus reports mainstream researchers release, probably because a lot of advertising money comes from Big Pharma and the rest of the Medical Mafia.
And also because of what Mike Adams said in a December 17, 2013, Natural News article: "Mainstream media reporters are, by and large, outrageously ignorant about nutrition, isolated nutrients, whole foods, the games Big Pharma plays, the corruption of the science journals and so on." [1]
The most recent supplement and multivitamin attacks got a lot of favorable press. And they gave the ghoulish Dr. Paul Offit of "babies can tolerate 1,000 vaccinations at the same time" fame another platform for promoting his new book that rails against vitamin and mineral supplements, herbs and Linus Pauling. [2]
Although not with same impact as the attacks on supplements that were featured in several major mainstream outlets, a counterattack has been launched and recently published as a study in the peer-reviewed Nutrition Journal.
Naturally, the lamestream media hasn't run with the story and probably won't even walk with it.
Here's what the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) published
The study was titled "Health Habits and Other Characteristics of Supplement Users."
CRN conducted a mega-study of 20 different peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and found that, "overall, the evidence suggests that users of dietary supplements are seeking wellness and are consciously adopting a variety of lifestyle habits that they consider to contribute to healthy living."
CRN noted that over half of US supplement users were covered in the 20 studies they reviewed. Contrary to the notions spread by supplement naysayers, most of those surveyed used supplement-based strategies to bolster better food choices instead of using supplements to replace the nutritional void from poor food choices and sedentary lifestyles.
In other words, supplement users were not ignoring food for nutrition. The mega-study determined that those who took supplements also made better nutritional choices with foods than their non-supplement consumer counterparts, who usually made poorer food choices.
The study revealed that enriching or fortifying foods helped increase nutritional values, but combining supplements with whole foods had more impact toward increasing nutritional intake. There was no mention of organic food comparisons in the CRN press release. [3]
But the study's bottom line that supplement users were more concerned about taking responsibility for their health and were doing so successfully could be what the medical mafia doesn't want others to know. Ya think?
The most ignored supplements are the most important - minerals
In 1936, journalist Rex Beach covered a maverick MD's agricultural research in a lengthy article published in Cosmopolitan magazine. The MD, Dr. Charles Northen, had turned to soil science, because he realized that nutrition is the basis of health, and our crops, even in 1936, were lacking minerals due to poor top soil mineral balances.
He advocated doing what small organic farmers are discovering now, ways to balance the soil's mineral composition so that synthetic fertilizers and pesticides wouldn't be necessary, and the crop foods would be more nutritious.
"Bear in mind that minerals are vital to human metabolism and health [emphasis added] - and that no plant or animal can appropriate to itself any mineral which is not present in the soil upon which it feeds," asserted Dr. Northen. "Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless." [4]
The article was entered into the U.S. Senate archives as Senate Document 264, 74th Congress, 1936. Of course, it went nowhere. Big Ag flourished with the "Green Revolution" in the mid-1940s, and things only got worse until the organic food movement accelerated after the 1960s.
Minerals are even more important than vitamins. For example, most Americans are magnesium deficient, yet magnesium is involved in over 300 cellular metabolic processes. And vitamins don't perform as well without minerals.
There are macrominerals, measured in milligrams, and trace minerals, measured in micrograms. Both types are essential, because the body doesn't manufacture them. They should be taken from food, but most food coming from depleted top soils are lacking. So mineral supplements are necessary.
Just what types of mineral supplements are most effective is covered very well by the iconoclastic chiropractor Dr. Tim Shea of the Doctor Within. [5]
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/044066_dietary_supplements_nutrients_health_decisions.html#ixzz2uQhc3wqd
"Every single one of these Boston doctors who think they know so much and have destroyed this family and probably Justina's life (by withholding critical medical treatment for 13 months from which she will never recover) should be sued into oblivion for malpractice," writes one outraged Huffington Post commenter about the case. "This entire episode is utterly unconscionable."
Massachusetts judge orders sick girl abused by medical system to be taken from family
by: Ethan A. Huff
The medical mafia in Massachusetts has successfully removed a teenage girl from the guardianship of her parents and placed her into the cold arms of the government after first kidnapping and holding the child hostage for more than a year. CBS Boston and others report that 15-year-old Justina Pelletier, who for months has been wasting away in a mental facility upon orders from Boston Children's Hospital (BCH), will now be placed into foster care rather than go home with her parents following an outrageous ruling by a Boston judge.
In case you missed it, young Justina was admitted to BCH back in early 2013 for complications arising from her mitochondrial disease, a rare condition that had previously been diagnosed by doctors at nearby Tufts Medical Center. But when doctors at BCH disagreed with this diagnosis, as well as with Justina's parents' choice of care, the hospital proceeded to illegally assume custody over the child, which has ever since resulted in a nightmarish battle for the Pelletiers to get their daughter back.
Apparently not convinced that Justina has an actual medical condition, even though she was previously in good health under the care of her parents, BCH forcibly withheld Justina on the grounds that she needed psychiatric care rather than medical care. And as she subsequently bounced from the hospital to the mental ward to foster care, Justina's health deteriorated to the point that her father says she had almost died on numerous instances.
"They see their daughter suffering and in pain and they are not able to do something about it so that has obviously taken a toll on the family," stated Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, which recently joined the case, about the horrors of what the Pelletiers have gone through in trying to save their daughter.
Usurpation of parental authority by government is a crime against humanity
After multiple appearances in court for hearings on the matter, the same Massachusetts judge that ordered Justina's transfer to a psychiatric facility several months ago now says she must be placed into foster care on Massachusetts' North Shore. And the Pelletiers are still under a gag order, which means they are legally prohibited from discussing the case with reporters or members of the public.
"At what point did we become so detached that we can let this type of chaos and tragedy ensue for a week, much less for over a year?" asks Cristy Balcells, Executive Director of MitoAction, a mitochondrial disease awareness group lending support to Justina's case, in a recent piece for The Huffington Post. "Where are the people who will stand up and insist 'enough is enough?'"
Keep in mind that, during her stay at BCH and subsequently at the mental hospital, young Justina was forcibly withdrawn from her normal medical treatments and given psychiatric treatment instead, as if she is making up her disease in her head. The ruling elites at BCH have essentially trodden parental rights and committed a major crime against humanity by overriding Justina's earlier diagnosis, which begs the question: how much power have we as Americans permitted the state over our children?
"Every single one of these Boston doctors who think they know so much and have destroyed this family and probably Justina's life (by withholding critical medical treatment for 13 months from which she will never recover) should be sued into oblivion for malpractice," writes one outraged Huffington Post commenter about the case. "This entire episode is utterly unconscionable."
You can read a full background of Justina's case at The Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/044073_sick_girl_Massachusetts_judge_kidnapping.html#ixzz2uQguM36Q
by: Ethan A. Huff
The medical mafia in Massachusetts has successfully removed a teenage girl from the guardianship of her parents and placed her into the cold arms of the government after first kidnapping and holding the child hostage for more than a year. CBS Boston and others report that 15-year-old Justina Pelletier, who for months has been wasting away in a mental facility upon orders from Boston Children's Hospital (BCH), will now be placed into foster care rather than go home with her parents following an outrageous ruling by a Boston judge.
In case you missed it, young Justina was admitted to BCH back in early 2013 for complications arising from her mitochondrial disease, a rare condition that had previously been diagnosed by doctors at nearby Tufts Medical Center. But when doctors at BCH disagreed with this diagnosis, as well as with Justina's parents' choice of care, the hospital proceeded to illegally assume custody over the child, which has ever since resulted in a nightmarish battle for the Pelletiers to get their daughter back.
Apparently not convinced that Justina has an actual medical condition, even though she was previously in good health under the care of her parents, BCH forcibly withheld Justina on the grounds that she needed psychiatric care rather than medical care. And as she subsequently bounced from the hospital to the mental ward to foster care, Justina's health deteriorated to the point that her father says she had almost died on numerous instances.
"They see their daughter suffering and in pain and they are not able to do something about it so that has obviously taken a toll on the family," stated Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, which recently joined the case, about the horrors of what the Pelletiers have gone through in trying to save their daughter.
Usurpation of parental authority by government is a crime against humanity
After multiple appearances in court for hearings on the matter, the same Massachusetts judge that ordered Justina's transfer to a psychiatric facility several months ago now says she must be placed into foster care on Massachusetts' North Shore. And the Pelletiers are still under a gag order, which means they are legally prohibited from discussing the case with reporters or members of the public.
"At what point did we become so detached that we can let this type of chaos and tragedy ensue for a week, much less for over a year?" asks Cristy Balcells, Executive Director of MitoAction, a mitochondrial disease awareness group lending support to Justina's case, in a recent piece for The Huffington Post. "Where are the people who will stand up and insist 'enough is enough?'"
Keep in mind that, during her stay at BCH and subsequently at the mental hospital, young Justina was forcibly withdrawn from her normal medical treatments and given psychiatric treatment instead, as if she is making up her disease in her head. The ruling elites at BCH have essentially trodden parental rights and committed a major crime against humanity by overriding Justina's earlier diagnosis, which begs the question: how much power have we as Americans permitted the state over our children?
"Every single one of these Boston doctors who think they know so much and have destroyed this family and probably Justina's life (by withholding critical medical treatment for 13 months from which she will never recover) should be sued into oblivion for malpractice," writes one outraged Huffington Post commenter about the case. "This entire episode is utterly unconscionable."
You can read a full background of Justina's case at The Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/044073_sick_girl_Massachusetts_judge_kidnapping.html#ixzz2uQguM36Q
Monsanto and Whole Foods...
Jon Rappoport
Is there a Whole Foods-Monsanto connection?
The answer is yes.
But the important question is: what does this connection mean?
What does it imply?
Is it significant?
If you consult open listings (for example, investors.morningstar.com), you can look at the major shareholders of these two publicly traded companies, Monsanto and Whole Foods.
If you read the top 10 shareholders for each company—the holders of the most stock—you’ll see that five out of those ten are the same.
Who are those five?
Don’t prepare to see the names of individuals.
The five are funds. Investment funds.
They are, at the moment: Vanguard Total Stock Mkt. Index; SPDR S&P 500; Vanguard Institutional Index I; Vanguard 500 Index Inv; Harbor Capital Appreciation Instl.
These funds buy stocks in many, many companies.
These funds don’t say, “Well, we’ll buy Monsanto and Whole Foods stock and then exert massive direct control over Whole Foods and make it bow to Monsanto’s agenda.” No. That’s not how it works.
These funds make automatic purchases of stocks, based on computer calculations and based on the S&P rankings of companies.
These investment funds could be sitting on Mars, and their computers would be running numbers and buying and selling stock in Earth companies with no input from the outside.
Unless…something came up. Unless something big came up. Unless a private and elite word went out that Whole Foods was becoming a threat to some entrenched interest, some vital agenda. For example, some Monsanto agenda.
In that case, one of these big shareholders could cast a proxy vote that would go against the aims or plans of Whole Foods.
One of Vanguard’s investment funds is THE top shareholder of Monsanto, and the fourth largest shareholder of Whole Foods. Here, from Vanguard’s website, is a quote from “Vanguard’s proxy voting guidelines.” Read carefully:
“In evaluating proxy proposals, we consider information from many sources, including but not limited to, the investment advisor for the fund, the management or shareholders of a company presenting a proposal, and independent proxy research services. We will give substantial weight to the recommendations of the company’s board, absent guidelines or other specific facts that would support a vote against management. In all cases, however, the ultimate decision [on how to vote] rests with the members of the [Vanguard] Committee, who are accountable to the [Vanguard] fund’s Board.”
The key excerpt from this paragraph is: “We will give substantial weight to the recommendation of the company’s board, absent guidelines or other specific facts that would support a vote AGAINST MANAGEMENT.”
Bottom line, in plain English, it goes this way: “We, as an investment fund, hold a huge number of shares of a company (like Whole Foods). If the company is holding a vote on its future plans and policies, we can, if we decide to, weigh in with our huge voting block and go against the wishes of that company. And win.”
If such a proxy vote came down to favoring the agenda of Monsanto or Whole Foods, and if the situation was crucial enough, who do you think would come out on top? Who would be torpedoed?
Taking this a step further: with Whole Foods’ decision, in January of 1992, to go public, to become a publicly traded company, to sell stock out in the open, it put itself into a world where money talks a language that is no longer simply based on products sold and company profit.
Whole Foods entered a world where billions and trillions of dollars exert influence, where “important people” can “have discussions” with companies and “suggest strategies” and “offer advice” that goes beyond how to run a successful enterprise.
If someone who is tangentially associated with one of Whole Foods’ top shareholders shows up and wants to talk, there are ears ready to listen.
Remember, that top shareholder in Whole Foods is also a top investor in Monsanto. It isn’t hard to figure out which company—Whole Foods or Monsanto—occupies the superior position in that someone’s mind.
The top shareholder in Whole Foods holds a boatload of proxy votes in his back pocket. He can cast them with or against Whole Foods. The possibility is always there.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/top-shareholders-in-whole-foods-and-monsanto-identical.html
OOPS!!!
Greenpeace co-founder: No scientific evidence of man-made global warming
Michael Bastasch
There is no scientific evidence that human activity is causing the planet to warm, according to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who testified in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday.
Moore argued that the current argument that the burning of fossil fuels is driving global warming over the past century lacks scientific evidence. He added that the Earth is in an unusually cold period and some warming would be a good thing.
“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” according to Moore’s prepared testimony. “Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.”
“It is important to recognize, in the face of dire predictions about a [two degrees Celsius] rise in global average temperature, that humans are a tropical species,” Moore said. “We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing.”
Read the rest here:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/25/greenpeace-co-founder-no-scientific-evidence-of-man-made-global-warming/#!
Michael Bastasch
There is no scientific evidence that human activity is causing the planet to warm, according to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who testified in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday.
Moore argued that the current argument that the burning of fossil fuels is driving global warming over the past century lacks scientific evidence. He added that the Earth is in an unusually cold period and some warming would be a good thing.
“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” according to Moore’s prepared testimony. “Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.”
“It is important to recognize, in the face of dire predictions about a [two degrees Celsius] rise in global average temperature, that humans are a tropical species,” Moore said. “We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing.”
Read the rest here:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/25/greenpeace-co-founder-no-scientific-evidence-of-man-made-global-warming/#!
"If government raises the minimum wage again, simple supply & demand economics explain that more dependents will be created. But why should the government care? Those who come to depend on the State, tend to then defend the State."
How The Minimum Wage Helps To Strengthen Government's Grip on Everyone
By, Chris Rossini
In Judge Napolitano's excellent book Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom, the Judge covered Roosevelt & Wilson's flirtations with eugenics and population control. Mixed in, I found a snippet that's very relevant to the minimum wage issue that's being widely discussed today:
Through minimum-wage laws they thrust the "unemployable" out of the labor force.
Who are the "unemployable"? Those who do not have the skills or who aren't productive enough to earn the government-mandated minimum wage. If the min. wage is $10, but you don't have the skills to earn that $10, you are now "unemployable". Government has outlawed you from the labor force. You have been forced into unemployment.
Once you're knocked out of the labor force, the government sticks its fangs in:
Once people are on welfare, family planning becomes the government's burden because children become expenditures of the state. (my emphasis)
You (and your children) are now an expense of the state. What a sad situation, for you would have gladly taken a job below the minimum wage. You'd work for $9, $8...and chances are excellent that there are business owners who would have hired you for the right price. It's not that you don't want to work, you've been forbidden from work by some stupid law.
Now that the government has its fangs in you, and can drip...drip...drip some welfare checks your way, it has added excuse to tighten its grip. Since you (and millions of others) are now expenditures and liabilities to the government, it sees fit to make sure that you don't get even more expensive for them.
The door now opens for all types controls: like what you should eat, the size of your soda cups, how much your cigarettes cost, and where you're allowed to smoke them. You're children are in play too. Here's Michelle Obama now calling for a "summit" of food makers and entertainment companies, so that they may talk about what they're allowed to advertise to your kids.
Here's an important takeaway: While the government has its venomous fangs in you (and the rest who comprise one of the largest Welfare States in the world) the controls are not limited just for you. The controls and regulations are for all Americans.
If government raises the minimum wage again, simple supply & demand economics explain that more dependents will be created. But why should the government care? Those who come to depend on the State, tend to then defend the State.
Government's fangs are ready for some new blood, and there are definitely more controls in the hopper (for all of us) that are sure to follow.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/02/how-minimum-wage-helps-to-strengthen.html
By, Chris Rossini
In Judge Napolitano's excellent book Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom, the Judge covered Roosevelt & Wilson's flirtations with eugenics and population control. Mixed in, I found a snippet that's very relevant to the minimum wage issue that's being widely discussed today:
Through minimum-wage laws they thrust the "unemployable" out of the labor force.
Who are the "unemployable"? Those who do not have the skills or who aren't productive enough to earn the government-mandated minimum wage. If the min. wage is $10, but you don't have the skills to earn that $10, you are now "unemployable". Government has outlawed you from the labor force. You have been forced into unemployment.
Once you're knocked out of the labor force, the government sticks its fangs in:
Once people are on welfare, family planning becomes the government's burden because children become expenditures of the state. (my emphasis)
You (and your children) are now an expense of the state. What a sad situation, for you would have gladly taken a job below the minimum wage. You'd work for $9, $8...and chances are excellent that there are business owners who would have hired you for the right price. It's not that you don't want to work, you've been forbidden from work by some stupid law.
Now that the government has its fangs in you, and can drip...drip...drip some welfare checks your way, it has added excuse to tighten its grip. Since you (and millions of others) are now expenditures and liabilities to the government, it sees fit to make sure that you don't get even more expensive for them.
The door now opens for all types controls: like what you should eat, the size of your soda cups, how much your cigarettes cost, and where you're allowed to smoke them. You're children are in play too. Here's Michelle Obama now calling for a "summit" of food makers and entertainment companies, so that they may talk about what they're allowed to advertise to your kids.
Here's an important takeaway: While the government has its venomous fangs in you (and the rest who comprise one of the largest Welfare States in the world) the controls are not limited just for you. The controls and regulations are for all Americans.
If government raises the minimum wage again, simple supply & demand economics explain that more dependents will be created. But why should the government care? Those who come to depend on the State, tend to then defend the State.
Government's fangs are ready for some new blood, and there are definitely more controls in the hopper (for all of us) that are sure to follow.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/02/how-minimum-wage-helps-to-strengthen.html
California drought caused by government interference and incompetence...
The Horrific California Drought
By Kathryn Muratore
Everyone is well-aware of record snow in the northeast and a drought in the west. I think back to when I was a Philadelphian who had never crossed the Mississippi and realize how foreign the weather of California is to the average east-coaster. In the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley, alike, it does not rain between about April 1st and October 1st. I don’t mean “it doesn’t rain much.” I mean it Does. Not. Rain. At. All.
In the Bay Area, the winters are quite wet, with a light rain falling most days in certain areas (microclimates are another foreign concept to much of the country). In Fresno and the rest of the Central Valley, rainfall totals 6-12 inches on average, with all of that accumulating from October to March. But, we have the Sierra Nevada’s to our east to catch moisture in the form of snow, and store it for the dry season. The snow melts and, historically, flowed through large rivers such as the San Joaquin, to the Pacific. Prior to federal water projects, steam boats came to dock in Fresno. Here’s what the San Joaquin River looks like today. And here it is about 100 years ago (or here’s another before and after comparison). There is a dam right outside of town, built during the New Deal, of course.
Clearly, the state has not been a good steward of the environment. But at least clean water is getting to people who need it, right?
It doesn’t matter what constituency you belong to in California; chances are you are unhappy with your allocation or quality of water. Last week, it was announced that some farmers in the valley are getting cut out in the drought. They think the city folks in San Francisco and Los Angeles are taking more than their fair share. The “city folks” think industrial agriculture is taking more than its fair share. Residents across the state are constantly being admonished to conserve, with rationing of various types taking place. Cambria, a coastal community (where fog is the predominant form of moisture) essentially ran out of water, and that was before the current state-wide drought. Studies of tap water in poor agricultural communities shows alarming levels of toxins. And, of course, environmentalists are concerned about the effect of diverting water to people on wildlife.
None of these special interests are specific to a drought; this is an ongoing battle, even in “wet” years. This year, however, the stakes are raised. Not only is rainfall low, but the snowpack in the Sierras is low. There hasn’t been enough precipitation in the mountains, and when there has been precipitation, it has often been too warm for snow and it has fallen in the form of rain. That gives us some water now, but does not bode well for the long dry season ahead.
Sadly, all eyes have turned to local water officials, Governor Jerry Brown, and, of course, President Barack Obama. Obama recently came to visit the Central Valley for the first time ever for precisely this reason. The same constituencies have the same tired arguments and complaints with no play being given to ideas outside of the box. It is no surprise to anyone who reads the history of the state’s involvement in water issues: the status quo is ingrained and it is extremely difficult to imagine an alternative. A transition out of this mess is even harder to imagine. But once you realize that it is not a question of if the system will fail, but when, you realize it is essential that we de-socialize water in the arid west immediately.
Real water rights
The total privatization of water is the best way to avert disaster in the arid west. The disaster is not necessarily imminent, but it is inevitable because there are no significant incentives to conserve this resource in its current socialized state. Privatization does not mean selling dams and reservoirs and municipal water companies to private investors who are then allowed to operate as protected monopolies. Privatization means that you own the rights of the water on your land, and individuals can own real estate in water (lakes, rivers, oceans). A transition to such a state of affairs is likely to be painful, as 100+ years of damage by socialization of water must be undone. But, I am certain that the process will be relatively quick compared to the long, drawn-out suffering that is in store if water socialism is allowed to continue.
I know that a private water supply would be an improvement over present conditions, but that is neither why I am in favor of it nor likely to persuade the mainstream. For those liberals who see that a free market in water certainly could be no worse than the economic and environmental destruction done by the government monopolies, a disdain for profit and misguided faith in democracy prevents their endorsing privatization. But, the history of the Bureau of Reclamation and the present state of local, state, and federal water ownership shows that water is not controlled by a democratic process. The very existence of several disparate groups, each with their own agendas, has meant that special interests control the water. Western farmers have been receiving water subsidies, paid for by tax-payers, and will continue to receive special water allocation regardless of droughts or environmental lobbying because they currently supply an enormous amount of food to the nation and the world, and constitute a substantial portion of the economy.
Most farmers of the valley, and many residents of the valley cities, vote Republican and espouse free market rhetoric and a more individualistic attitude. Except, of course, when it comes to water subsidies. It is always the Democrats in DC who are at fault when water is tight, but Valley residents seem to be unaware that it was the Progressives of the past who built the dams and aqueducts.
The Progressives’ Bureau of Reclamation
Jim Powell’s Bully Boy brings up an interesting point about the Homestead Act luring poor people to farm the arid lands out west. This had several repercussions: deaths due to harsh winters, a glut of farmers and farmland (later leading to more lobbying by farmers for relief), and a need for irrigation (and distorting the market to invest capital in irrigation technologies). Rather than allow the west to remain unsettled as farmers and irrigation companies died, both figuratively and literally in the former case, Teddy Roosevelt’s bizarre focus on preventing foreign invasion led him to break rank with the Republicans and provide irrigation subsidies to western farmers. Powell adds, “It was curious that Roosevelt, who crusaded against private monopolies, approved of the Reclamation Service [now Bureau of Reclamation] as a dam-building monopoly.”
The Reclamation Act led to another market distortion and, ultimately, corruption. Land speculation took off as investors tried to predict where the feds would build a dam and encourage settlement. The Owens Valley scandal, in which water was unethically diverted from local irrigation to Los Angeles by the Reclamation Service, led to further distortions. The city government acquired the water monopoly and below-market water prices followed, encouraging a further increase in population.
Municipal water monopolies
This story continues to the present day. Until last year, residential water in Fresno (delivered by the municipal water monopoly) was not metered. Residents were charged based on the size of their lot. To encourage conservation, the city enacted rationing laws: you can be fined for watering your garden or lawn on the wrong day and at the wrong time of the day. But the laws are openly ignored because enforcement is too costly. In addition to rationing, my husband tells me that there were public service announcement campaigns when he was growing up describing when one should, and should not, flush their toilet.
In order to get residential metering to be politically palatable, promises were made that average water bills would not be higher, so rates were set low enough to ensure that residents would not face suddenly higher bills. These rates are too low to be sustainable in that water use is continuing to lower the water supply faster than it is replenished by nature. To the shock of no one who is paying attention, after the water meters were approved and installed city-wide, the city notified customers of proposed rate increases over the next several years. Hearings were held, and maybe, one day, water rates will increase, but probably not nearly enough to encourage true conservation. The kind of conservation that occurs when a free market pricing system encourages allocation of scarce resources based on the most pressing needs. As Murray Rothbard wrote in 1977, “If the water industry were free and competitive, the response to a drought would be very simple: water would rise in price.”
We are in a drought and water prices have not increased on paper. The municipal bureaucracies can not react quickly to changing conditions (indeed, one may note that they can only react glacially). Water rates are a political question as much as they are an economic or ecological question.
The Perennial Left-Right “Battle”
But, for some farmers, water prices will increase to infinity in practice: there will be a government-induced shortage and farmers will not be allowed to use more water no matter how much they would be willing to pay. But the solution is not, as the local Tea Party implies, to continue to give farmers below-cost water while cutting off water to the big, liberal cities.
There are parts of the west where farming does make sense and would continue to thrive in a free market water system. But the choice of crops, location of farms, and farming practices would have to be quite different from the average seen today. A distinct benefit of farming in the eastern Central Valley of California – where we can see the snow-pack on the Sierras that ensures some amount of water for irrigation year round and where rivers and streams flowed before various government water projects dried them up – is that the growing seasons are very long and, indeed, some vegetables can be grown year-round. Many vegetables have growing seasons that complement those where winters are harsh; lettuce does not do well in our very hot summers, but thrives from early fall through mid-spring, precisely when it is not growing in the east.
I know of a local organic farm that pumps water from wells on its land and eschews the aqueduct water allotment provided by the taxpayers out of principle. It can be done, but there is no economic incentive for the majority of valley farmers to conserve water and choose crops and farming practices that are a better match for the water supply. Thus the big-city liberals are correct that the valley farming practices are wasteful and it is environmentally harmful to divert ever more water to the farms. The supposedly free-market conservatives in the valley should understand that a socialized water system will lead to waste.
But I wonder if the big-city liberals are aware of the environmental irresponsibility of enforcing city-ownership of reservoirs hundreds of miles away. Returning to Powell’s analysis in Bully Boy, the aims of government control of water are internally at odds with each other.
“[Roosevelt’s Inland Waterways Commission] offered platitudes promising something for everybody: ‘Plans for the improvement of navigation in inland waterways…should take account of the purification of the waters, the development of power, the control of floods, the reclamation of lands by irrigation and drainage, and all other uses of the waters or benefits to be derived from their control.’
“But some of those aims conflicted with others. If the primary purpose of a dam was to produce hydroelectric power, there had to be a reasonably full reservoir behind it. If the primary purpose was flood control, however, a reservoir had to be empty so there would be capacity for floodwater. If a reservoir was empty, or if water was substantially drawn down for irrigation or for industrial or household use, navigation would be impossible.”
And where does environmental stewardship come into play when the city must make sure that residents, tourists and businesses have cheap, running water so they can continue to pay taxes to cover city officials’ salaries?
It is hardly a paradox why the special interests on the left (protect the environment and send water to the cities) and the right (protect the farmers) ignore the history of water in the west and the obvious failings of the present system. “The alternative, of course, is unknown and unseen.” The alternative has certainly never been seen by those currently living in the arid west, and that is a survival tactic for the biggest special water interests of all: the Bureau of Reclamation and the state and city water authorities.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/02/kathryn-muratore/the-horrific-california-drought/
By Kathryn Muratore
Everyone is well-aware of record snow in the northeast and a drought in the west. I think back to when I was a Philadelphian who had never crossed the Mississippi and realize how foreign the weather of California is to the average east-coaster. In the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley, alike, it does not rain between about April 1st and October 1st. I don’t mean “it doesn’t rain much.” I mean it Does. Not. Rain. At. All.
In the Bay Area, the winters are quite wet, with a light rain falling most days in certain areas (microclimates are another foreign concept to much of the country). In Fresno and the rest of the Central Valley, rainfall totals 6-12 inches on average, with all of that accumulating from October to March. But, we have the Sierra Nevada’s to our east to catch moisture in the form of snow, and store it for the dry season. The snow melts and, historically, flowed through large rivers such as the San Joaquin, to the Pacific. Prior to federal water projects, steam boats came to dock in Fresno. Here’s what the San Joaquin River looks like today. And here it is about 100 years ago (or here’s another before and after comparison). There is a dam right outside of town, built during the New Deal, of course.
Clearly, the state has not been a good steward of the environment. But at least clean water is getting to people who need it, right?
It doesn’t matter what constituency you belong to in California; chances are you are unhappy with your allocation or quality of water. Last week, it was announced that some farmers in the valley are getting cut out in the drought. They think the city folks in San Francisco and Los Angeles are taking more than their fair share. The “city folks” think industrial agriculture is taking more than its fair share. Residents across the state are constantly being admonished to conserve, with rationing of various types taking place. Cambria, a coastal community (where fog is the predominant form of moisture) essentially ran out of water, and that was before the current state-wide drought. Studies of tap water in poor agricultural communities shows alarming levels of toxins. And, of course, environmentalists are concerned about the effect of diverting water to people on wildlife.
None of these special interests are specific to a drought; this is an ongoing battle, even in “wet” years. This year, however, the stakes are raised. Not only is rainfall low, but the snowpack in the Sierras is low. There hasn’t been enough precipitation in the mountains, and when there has been precipitation, it has often been too warm for snow and it has fallen in the form of rain. That gives us some water now, but does not bode well for the long dry season ahead.
Sadly, all eyes have turned to local water officials, Governor Jerry Brown, and, of course, President Barack Obama. Obama recently came to visit the Central Valley for the first time ever for precisely this reason. The same constituencies have the same tired arguments and complaints with no play being given to ideas outside of the box. It is no surprise to anyone who reads the history of the state’s involvement in water issues: the status quo is ingrained and it is extremely difficult to imagine an alternative. A transition out of this mess is even harder to imagine. But once you realize that it is not a question of if the system will fail, but when, you realize it is essential that we de-socialize water in the arid west immediately.
Real water rights
The total privatization of water is the best way to avert disaster in the arid west. The disaster is not necessarily imminent, but it is inevitable because there are no significant incentives to conserve this resource in its current socialized state. Privatization does not mean selling dams and reservoirs and municipal water companies to private investors who are then allowed to operate as protected monopolies. Privatization means that you own the rights of the water on your land, and individuals can own real estate in water (lakes, rivers, oceans). A transition to such a state of affairs is likely to be painful, as 100+ years of damage by socialization of water must be undone. But, I am certain that the process will be relatively quick compared to the long, drawn-out suffering that is in store if water socialism is allowed to continue.
I know that a private water supply would be an improvement over present conditions, but that is neither why I am in favor of it nor likely to persuade the mainstream. For those liberals who see that a free market in water certainly could be no worse than the economic and environmental destruction done by the government monopolies, a disdain for profit and misguided faith in democracy prevents their endorsing privatization. But, the history of the Bureau of Reclamation and the present state of local, state, and federal water ownership shows that water is not controlled by a democratic process. The very existence of several disparate groups, each with their own agendas, has meant that special interests control the water. Western farmers have been receiving water subsidies, paid for by tax-payers, and will continue to receive special water allocation regardless of droughts or environmental lobbying because they currently supply an enormous amount of food to the nation and the world, and constitute a substantial portion of the economy.
Most farmers of the valley, and many residents of the valley cities, vote Republican and espouse free market rhetoric and a more individualistic attitude. Except, of course, when it comes to water subsidies. It is always the Democrats in DC who are at fault when water is tight, but Valley residents seem to be unaware that it was the Progressives of the past who built the dams and aqueducts.
The Progressives’ Bureau of Reclamation
Jim Powell’s Bully Boy brings up an interesting point about the Homestead Act luring poor people to farm the arid lands out west. This had several repercussions: deaths due to harsh winters, a glut of farmers and farmland (later leading to more lobbying by farmers for relief), and a need for irrigation (and distorting the market to invest capital in irrigation technologies). Rather than allow the west to remain unsettled as farmers and irrigation companies died, both figuratively and literally in the former case, Teddy Roosevelt’s bizarre focus on preventing foreign invasion led him to break rank with the Republicans and provide irrigation subsidies to western farmers. Powell adds, “It was curious that Roosevelt, who crusaded against private monopolies, approved of the Reclamation Service [now Bureau of Reclamation] as a dam-building monopoly.”
The Reclamation Act led to another market distortion and, ultimately, corruption. Land speculation took off as investors tried to predict where the feds would build a dam and encourage settlement. The Owens Valley scandal, in which water was unethically diverted from local irrigation to Los Angeles by the Reclamation Service, led to further distortions. The city government acquired the water monopoly and below-market water prices followed, encouraging a further increase in population.
Municipal water monopolies
This story continues to the present day. Until last year, residential water in Fresno (delivered by the municipal water monopoly) was not metered. Residents were charged based on the size of their lot. To encourage conservation, the city enacted rationing laws: you can be fined for watering your garden or lawn on the wrong day and at the wrong time of the day. But the laws are openly ignored because enforcement is too costly. In addition to rationing, my husband tells me that there were public service announcement campaigns when he was growing up describing when one should, and should not, flush their toilet.
In order to get residential metering to be politically palatable, promises were made that average water bills would not be higher, so rates were set low enough to ensure that residents would not face suddenly higher bills. These rates are too low to be sustainable in that water use is continuing to lower the water supply faster than it is replenished by nature. To the shock of no one who is paying attention, after the water meters were approved and installed city-wide, the city notified customers of proposed rate increases over the next several years. Hearings were held, and maybe, one day, water rates will increase, but probably not nearly enough to encourage true conservation. The kind of conservation that occurs when a free market pricing system encourages allocation of scarce resources based on the most pressing needs. As Murray Rothbard wrote in 1977, “If the water industry were free and competitive, the response to a drought would be very simple: water would rise in price.”
We are in a drought and water prices have not increased on paper. The municipal bureaucracies can not react quickly to changing conditions (indeed, one may note that they can only react glacially). Water rates are a political question as much as they are an economic or ecological question.
The Perennial Left-Right “Battle”
But, for some farmers, water prices will increase to infinity in practice: there will be a government-induced shortage and farmers will not be allowed to use more water no matter how much they would be willing to pay. But the solution is not, as the local Tea Party implies, to continue to give farmers below-cost water while cutting off water to the big, liberal cities.
There are parts of the west where farming does make sense and would continue to thrive in a free market water system. But the choice of crops, location of farms, and farming practices would have to be quite different from the average seen today. A distinct benefit of farming in the eastern Central Valley of California – where we can see the snow-pack on the Sierras that ensures some amount of water for irrigation year round and where rivers and streams flowed before various government water projects dried them up – is that the growing seasons are very long and, indeed, some vegetables can be grown year-round. Many vegetables have growing seasons that complement those where winters are harsh; lettuce does not do well in our very hot summers, but thrives from early fall through mid-spring, precisely when it is not growing in the east.
I know of a local organic farm that pumps water from wells on its land and eschews the aqueduct water allotment provided by the taxpayers out of principle. It can be done, but there is no economic incentive for the majority of valley farmers to conserve water and choose crops and farming practices that are a better match for the water supply. Thus the big-city liberals are correct that the valley farming practices are wasteful and it is environmentally harmful to divert ever more water to the farms. The supposedly free-market conservatives in the valley should understand that a socialized water system will lead to waste.
But I wonder if the big-city liberals are aware of the environmental irresponsibility of enforcing city-ownership of reservoirs hundreds of miles away. Returning to Powell’s analysis in Bully Boy, the aims of government control of water are internally at odds with each other.
“[Roosevelt’s Inland Waterways Commission] offered platitudes promising something for everybody: ‘Plans for the improvement of navigation in inland waterways…should take account of the purification of the waters, the development of power, the control of floods, the reclamation of lands by irrigation and drainage, and all other uses of the waters or benefits to be derived from their control.’
“But some of those aims conflicted with others. If the primary purpose of a dam was to produce hydroelectric power, there had to be a reasonably full reservoir behind it. If the primary purpose was flood control, however, a reservoir had to be empty so there would be capacity for floodwater. If a reservoir was empty, or if water was substantially drawn down for irrigation or for industrial or household use, navigation would be impossible.”
And where does environmental stewardship come into play when the city must make sure that residents, tourists and businesses have cheap, running water so they can continue to pay taxes to cover city officials’ salaries?
It is hardly a paradox why the special interests on the left (protect the environment and send water to the cities) and the right (protect the farmers) ignore the history of water in the west and the obvious failings of the present system. “The alternative, of course, is unknown and unseen.” The alternative has certainly never been seen by those currently living in the arid west, and that is a survival tactic for the biggest special water interests of all: the Bureau of Reclamation and the state and city water authorities.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/02/kathryn-muratore/the-horrific-california-drought/
Hitler was a socialist...
Leftists Become Incandescent when Reminded of the Socialist Roots of Nazism
By Daniel Hannan
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.
Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.
Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”
Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.
To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way feigned. That’s not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.
The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.
What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.
One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.
In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.
Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.
Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis”.
In those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals, including Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour eugenics, convinced that only religious hang-ups were holding back the development of a healthier species. The unapologetic way in which they spelt out the consequences have, like Hitler’s actual words, been largely edited from our discourse. Here, for example, is George Bernard Shaw in 1933:
Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly… If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the “racial trash” – the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism – something else we have edited from our memory, but which once went without saying. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.
Are contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly anti-Semitic? No, not in the vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists inwardly yearning to put global warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do Keynesians want the whole apparatus of corporatism, expressed by Mussolini as “everything in the state, nothing outside the state”? Again, no. There are idiots who discredit every cause, of course, but most people on the Left are sincere in their stated commitment to human rights, personal dignity and pluralism.
My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing” to mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.
Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.
Link:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100260720/whenever-you-mention-fascisms-socialist-roots-left-wingers-become-incandescent-why/
By Daniel Hannan
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.
Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.
Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”
Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.
To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way feigned. That’s not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.
The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.
What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.
One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.
In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.
Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.
Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis”.
In those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals, including Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour eugenics, convinced that only religious hang-ups were holding back the development of a healthier species. The unapologetic way in which they spelt out the consequences have, like Hitler’s actual words, been largely edited from our discourse. Here, for example, is George Bernard Shaw in 1933:
Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly… If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the “racial trash” – the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism – something else we have edited from our memory, but which once went without saying. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.
Are contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly anti-Semitic? No, not in the vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists inwardly yearning to put global warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do Keynesians want the whole apparatus of corporatism, expressed by Mussolini as “everything in the state, nothing outside the state”? Again, no. There are idiots who discredit every cause, of course, but most people on the Left are sincere in their stated commitment to human rights, personal dignity and pluralism.
My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing” to mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.
Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.
Link:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100260720/whenever-you-mention-fascisms-socialist-roots-left-wingers-become-incandescent-why/
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The Soviet Poverty Law Center...
The $250 Million Racial Racketeering Scam
Thomas DiLorenzo
I speak of course of the Soviet Poverty Law Center, the left-wing hate group that reportedly sits on net assets of a quarter of a billion dollars, some of which, one would think, could alternatively be used to help poor people. But of course it is not. It is essentially a hedge fund for the purpose of paying huge salaries and perks to those who run the racket.
The perpetually constipated-looking Mark Potok of the SPLC recently demonstrated how the scam works, by going on television to announce that “more than half of all white people” hate black people in America today. This of course is absurd, especially considering that “white America” has elected and re-elected a half-black president. The scam is apparently to say such things to the lowest of the low I.Q. liberals and leftists in America, especially poor black people, in order to scare them into sending donations to the SPLC. That’s how they have come to sit on a quarter of a billion dollars.
The, ahem, “methodology” used by the Soviet Poverty Law Center is to assume that: 1) any individual or group that is critical of big, out-of-control government holds such a position for only one reason — racism and hatred of the first half-black president; and then 2) to compile a list of as many advocates of limited government that can be found in America assuming, of course, that not one single black person would ever consider being a member of any such groups; and then 3) proclaiming that the list is “evidence” of racial hatred run amok.
These dishonest antics of the Soviet Poverty Law Center are a textbook example of the attitude of today’s Lunatic Left: They ASSERT that America is a hopelessly racist country and becoming more so, without even attempting to offer proof or argument, and then they FABRICATE “evidence.” This is also why the Lunatic Left concocts outrageous lies and libels about people like Walter Block — to fabricate “evidence” in support of their sick world view. This is also why the left-wing lapdog media accept everything the SPLC says, no matter how nonsensical, outrageous, or libelous (such as claiming that anyone with a Ron Paul bumper sticker should be considered a potential terrorist). The media, with a few exceptions, share the world view of the Soviet Poverty Law Center.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-250-million-racial-racketeering-scam/
Thomas DiLorenzo
I speak of course of the Soviet Poverty Law Center, the left-wing hate group that reportedly sits on net assets of a quarter of a billion dollars, some of which, one would think, could alternatively be used to help poor people. But of course it is not. It is essentially a hedge fund for the purpose of paying huge salaries and perks to those who run the racket.
The perpetually constipated-looking Mark Potok of the SPLC recently demonstrated how the scam works, by going on television to announce that “more than half of all white people” hate black people in America today. This of course is absurd, especially considering that “white America” has elected and re-elected a half-black president. The scam is apparently to say such things to the lowest of the low I.Q. liberals and leftists in America, especially poor black people, in order to scare them into sending donations to the SPLC. That’s how they have come to sit on a quarter of a billion dollars.
The, ahem, “methodology” used by the Soviet Poverty Law Center is to assume that: 1) any individual or group that is critical of big, out-of-control government holds such a position for only one reason — racism and hatred of the first half-black president; and then 2) to compile a list of as many advocates of limited government that can be found in America assuming, of course, that not one single black person would ever consider being a member of any such groups; and then 3) proclaiming that the list is “evidence” of racial hatred run amok.
These dishonest antics of the Soviet Poverty Law Center are a textbook example of the attitude of today’s Lunatic Left: They ASSERT that America is a hopelessly racist country and becoming more so, without even attempting to offer proof or argument, and then they FABRICATE “evidence.” This is also why the Lunatic Left concocts outrageous lies and libels about people like Walter Block — to fabricate “evidence” in support of their sick world view. This is also why the left-wing lapdog media accept everything the SPLC says, no matter how nonsensical, outrageous, or libelous (such as claiming that anyone with a Ron Paul bumper sticker should be considered a potential terrorist). The media, with a few exceptions, share the world view of the Soviet Poverty Law Center.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-250-million-racial-racketeering-scam/
OOPS!!! How it all started...
Global Warming Media Propaganda
By Andrew McKillop
Politically Correct Science
Let’s trace this tragic tale to the beginning. Seemingly decades ago, not 13 years, the UK Independent newspaper started the new century with the goal of becoming a world leader in government-approved, corporate-friendly global warming propaganda. Its chief warmist and green scribe, Charles Onians, fired the first climate salvo in a March 20, 2000, in this leading article:
“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture”.
The Independent was soon followed by other UK papers, US papers, and European papers, and their broadcast media, in a permanent propaganda blitz to take “the warming thing” to the ultimate limits of childlike hysteria and stark distortion using the uncertain science of “the CO2 hypothesis”. The propaganda onslaught was stamped with the “warmist” hallmark of elite condescension and smug conviction that ordinary mortals are much too stupid to understand this “scientifically proven” crisis.
In what would become a typical example of “warmist” genre material, Charles Onians in 2000 cited David Viner, a researcher at the later-infamous climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia – the Home of the Hockey Stick – who told the unscientific masses that very soon “winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event”. And as for homeless sleeping in the gutter, not so many would die in the night – posing an existential crisis for English Middle Class Morality! By 2006, the UK Independent was regularly carrying junk science hysteria from ‘Gaia” author James Lovelock, a key example being his claim that “Billions of persons will die before the end of the century from global warming”. Since 2012, ‘Jim’ Lovelock has completely retracted and denied his warmist convictions, and tiptoed away from the train wreck of elite propaganda.
Always Go Further
Al Gore, chief promoter of the global warming scam with Rajendra Pachauri, always went further. Their propaganda onslaught mixed and mingled pure egoism with a frenetic drive to make millions for themselves and enrich their fellow conspirators, through an ultra-tenacious promotion of any “carbon-linked” cash-grubbing scheme. Showing what the business press calls “initiative and drive”, they promoted anything ranging from investment and trading scams, through government tax and corporate subsidy scams, to lurid books, films and TV documentaries.
Al Gore repeatedly said, in print, “the Arctic will be ice free by 2013”. Gore made this claim in print in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
And it didn’t happen. In fact the Arctic ice cap’s surface area increased by more than 25% in 2012-2013. The much-larger Antarctic ice cap also increased, by about 5% using NASA data. NASA, which is a fully warmist institution peddling the “CO2 hypothesis”, has been forced to admit the Antarctic ice sheet is now at its largest since it started regular satellite monitoring in 1979.
Media spending on the permanent propaganda campaign has been massive, and a fantastic misappropriation of public money where this concerns state-owned media. Obsessionally and expensively filmed summertime-only shots of polar ice melting – which the “climate correct” media has stuffed down our throats for a decade – are however now likely to be retreating to where they belong. To the trashcan of history and to empty film theaters, and late night TV doc boredom for the almost-asleep.
The warmists set up and tirelessly milked the global warming cash cow for all it could yield, but now it is Game Over time. Their great scientific scam may now be what it always scientifically was, a Cuckoo Theory which evicted all other possible theories of why the climate changes.
The Latecomers and Still Hopefuls
As plenty of writers including myself have explained plenty of times, the “CO2 theory” is scientific folk history and was junkscience from the moment it started – in about 1795 with Joseph Priestley and his lurid vision of Phlogiston Terror. To him worse than Al-Qaeda or mustard gas in the trenches of World War I, Priestley thought “phlogiston” could cause a mass dieoff of English industrial workers exposed to woodburning and coalburning fumes! But nobody had to believe it.
Today, only the most primitive minded and witless “warmists” soldier along, spouting idiocies in the hope the under-informed and the lazyminded will continue to buy their junkscience.
If all goes according to plan, Hollywood icon Leonardo DiCaprio will blast into space on the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic “spaceship” this year. Incredibly enough, Messrs. Branson and DiCaprio style themselves as environmentalist celebrities with the elite mission of warning us there is a “coming ecological catastrophe” if we fail to address the carbon crisis.
Simply because they have garnered a large amount of money over the years, one way and another, their “commitment to fighting climate change” is called praiseworthy by brain-dead media, committed to “celeb worship” even as it backs off and away from the Global Warming scam. Richard Branson, despite all his attempts, is still far behind Al Gore in “warmist” cash-grubbing so he is active wherever that might turn a penny.
Branson claims he was “turned on” to Global Warming by ‘Jim’ Lovelock in person – the same Lovelock who has abandoned the scam. Branson is the founder and CEO of the “Carbon War Room”, an outfit advocating punitive-high energy taxes, which therefore has fawning support from Big Energy and Big Government, but his big hope is that “low carbon space travel” can become his new profit center. His one-liner to critics that space travel and carbon hysteria do not seem to mix, is that his brand of space travel is (very) Low Carbon. Cited by Wall Street Journal, 7 January, he has claimed: “We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London”.
As we know, this concerns low-orbital short-period flight in the upper atmosphere, and nothing to do with real space travel, but coming from a “Global Warming ikon” we must accept there is always massive exaggeration and distortion. It is New Normal. On the other hand, we do not need to accept the plain, straight lying.
According to the US FAA-Federal Aviation Administration, also cited by Wall Street Journal, its own environmental assessment of the launch and re-entry of Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft says that one launch-land cycle will emit about 30 tons of carbon dioxide, or about five tons per passenger. That is around five times more than the carbon footprint of a round-trip flight from Singapore to London. When the support and infrastructure energy costs of the entire Virgin Galactic operation are added, including high-atmosphere flights by tracker and support aircraft, the total carbon emissions rise to about seven times more than an average round-trip flight from Singapore to London. The FAA says that for each passenger on a single trip using Virgin Galactic their total energy burn will be at least twice the energy an average American consumes in a year.
When or if Branson’s tacky low-orbital “space” flights backed by the United Arab Emirates and their “low carbon” petrodollars ever get their celebrity cargoes out of the Earth’s gravity field, a trip to Mars will be obligatory. Here, they will find an atmosphere that is about 96% carbon dioxide (or 960 000 parts per million), and they will be able to smugly gurgle, for the short time they can still breathe: “We told you so!”. Back on Earth however, a little modesty, or at least the prospect of lawsuits for open lying – which is cited by observers as one reason ‘Jim’ Lovelock and his namesake James Hansen have backed away from the Warming scam – call on them to give us a rest and to please pipe down.
Keeping The Baboons Warm
Keeping the warmist gravy train rolling – whatever happens in the real world – is rapidly reverting to whence it came. Big Government, the UN system, the nuclear power and alternate energy industry, and financial opportunists always looking for a new scam. To this motley crew, we have two major bit-part players – government-friendly media and Mr and Mrs Average Informed Citizen – so well-informed they are both easy prey for the lying propaganda from the Carbon Purists. But neither, in fact, can be counted on by the warmists, as they will soon find out.
Any kind of historical perspective on atmospheric science and the origins of the “CO2 hypothesis” was until recently deliberately kept out of the media. Any reference to “alternate theories” was trashed by the media as negative, anti-science, badly-intentioned and probably corrupt. Global Warming of the Al Gore variety was to the west what Lysenko was to the USSR of Stalin. Any mention of the relatively large, sometimes outright large changes of world average temperatures over the last 1500 years was derided by warmists – because there was warming in 1980-2000, by a few fractions of 1 degree celsius, we have a crisis. Only “carbon effluent” in the atmosphere could have caused this! What else?
The media, like public opinion is doing what it always does – it moves slowly but surely like a Titanic-crushing iceberg, breaking up as it goes. The media at this moment is packed with scientifically flaky, superficially plausible stories about how global warming causes record cold and massive snowstorms in New York, but also that until the magic date of 2065 global warming will be “net positive” for human beings, while Mr Obama has told us (although we don’t have to believe him) 97 percent of scientists still think crisis-style warming is a reality.
In a late 2013 report, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said that most media coverage of climate change now emphasises uncertainty, and an increasing number (25%) focus on the “positive opportunities” global warming could or might bring. Global cooling, however, remains completely banned from mainstream media, except as freaky tidbit, despite it being at least as possible that we have cooling, as warming, in a time frame stretching to 2065.
Keeping The Baboons Stupid
Admitting that we don’t know what happens in the Earth’s atmosphere, therefore we can’t know how climate changes is affecting global temperature – is the ultimate blog-material. It is the no-no option and “just in case”, or “simply by precaution”, so we have to reject that possibility. Time is limited and Al Gore needs cash. Propaganda overkill arrived. Now Gore’s pews are empty, and we’re left with hit-and-run street preachers.
One key benefit of the comeuppance for global warming, losing its status of “unquestionable” except by misfits, psychotics and the badly-motivated, is that climate change will be able to emerge as the real subject of interest.
We are likely near the point, now, when the blindest and most faithful cult followers of global warming and the “CO2 hypothesis” will have to admit they’ve been sold a pup. The computer-modeled, science-correct, politically-correct theory of man-made CO2 causing global warming, or its second-best rebranded title of “climate change”, or its third-best of “extreme weather”, was a 10-year trip to oblivion along the well-trod path of Dumbing Down. Global Warming was Dumb with a capital D.
Gore-theory proved nothing at all. The sole benefit of the waltz down Propaganda Lane is that we know climate is changing but we don’t know why. Being able to admit that is difficult for high intellect baboons.
Baboons are in fact a lot more results-oriented, and have much less time to waste on trivial pursuits than human beings. For that reason they do not invent new enemies and they make do with ones they always have had and know well. Who are real. The Global Warming crisis movement – an example of mass hysteria – invented an all-new enemy for Mankind, called Mankind.
Also called misanthropy and being more than a little dated, the warmists pushed the misanthropy button so hard we were asked to think “we” are destroying our planet – unlike Al Gore with his personal Gulfstream 5 jet, his expanding waistline and penchant for fillet mignon and massage parlors with happy endings – and unlike Richard Branson and his Virgin jetliners, because average humans use far too much fossil energy, but Branson and his Hollywood playboy pal are apparently “saving the planet” for those of us who don’t own our own island in the Caribbean.
This mental constipation only has one logical readout – that human beings should operate a mass cull or Die Off, to prevent us from killing the planet – which belongs to very nice persons like Gore and Branson. Even low-IQ baboons would reject the embarked logic inside this mental masturbation. They would much prefer serious endeavors like looking for rapidly-cooling potatoes in the snow.
It’s officially an evolutionary crisis when the feral monkeys start looking smarter than our jet-setting monkeys in suits. Maybe it’s time to put the feral baboons in suits and ties, and let them realize their true Darwinian potential in Westminster, Brussels and Washington.
Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/global-warming-media-propaganda/5364444
By Andrew McKillop
Politically Correct Science
Let’s trace this tragic tale to the beginning. Seemingly decades ago, not 13 years, the UK Independent newspaper started the new century with the goal of becoming a world leader in government-approved, corporate-friendly global warming propaganda. Its chief warmist and green scribe, Charles Onians, fired the first climate salvo in a March 20, 2000, in this leading article:
“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture”.
The Independent was soon followed by other UK papers, US papers, and European papers, and their broadcast media, in a permanent propaganda blitz to take “the warming thing” to the ultimate limits of childlike hysteria and stark distortion using the uncertain science of “the CO2 hypothesis”. The propaganda onslaught was stamped with the “warmist” hallmark of elite condescension and smug conviction that ordinary mortals are much too stupid to understand this “scientifically proven” crisis.
In what would become a typical example of “warmist” genre material, Charles Onians in 2000 cited David Viner, a researcher at the later-infamous climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia – the Home of the Hockey Stick – who told the unscientific masses that very soon “winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event”. And as for homeless sleeping in the gutter, not so many would die in the night – posing an existential crisis for English Middle Class Morality! By 2006, the UK Independent was regularly carrying junk science hysteria from ‘Gaia” author James Lovelock, a key example being his claim that “Billions of persons will die before the end of the century from global warming”. Since 2012, ‘Jim’ Lovelock has completely retracted and denied his warmist convictions, and tiptoed away from the train wreck of elite propaganda.
Always Go Further
Al Gore, chief promoter of the global warming scam with Rajendra Pachauri, always went further. Their propaganda onslaught mixed and mingled pure egoism with a frenetic drive to make millions for themselves and enrich their fellow conspirators, through an ultra-tenacious promotion of any “carbon-linked” cash-grubbing scheme. Showing what the business press calls “initiative and drive”, they promoted anything ranging from investment and trading scams, through government tax and corporate subsidy scams, to lurid books, films and TV documentaries.
Al Gore repeatedly said, in print, “the Arctic will be ice free by 2013”. Gore made this claim in print in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
And it didn’t happen. In fact the Arctic ice cap’s surface area increased by more than 25% in 2012-2013. The much-larger Antarctic ice cap also increased, by about 5% using NASA data. NASA, which is a fully warmist institution peddling the “CO2 hypothesis”, has been forced to admit the Antarctic ice sheet is now at its largest since it started regular satellite monitoring in 1979.
Media spending on the permanent propaganda campaign has been massive, and a fantastic misappropriation of public money where this concerns state-owned media. Obsessionally and expensively filmed summertime-only shots of polar ice melting – which the “climate correct” media has stuffed down our throats for a decade – are however now likely to be retreating to where they belong. To the trashcan of history and to empty film theaters, and late night TV doc boredom for the almost-asleep.
The warmists set up and tirelessly milked the global warming cash cow for all it could yield, but now it is Game Over time. Their great scientific scam may now be what it always scientifically was, a Cuckoo Theory which evicted all other possible theories of why the climate changes.
The Latecomers and Still Hopefuls
As plenty of writers including myself have explained plenty of times, the “CO2 theory” is scientific folk history and was junkscience from the moment it started – in about 1795 with Joseph Priestley and his lurid vision of Phlogiston Terror. To him worse than Al-Qaeda or mustard gas in the trenches of World War I, Priestley thought “phlogiston” could cause a mass dieoff of English industrial workers exposed to woodburning and coalburning fumes! But nobody had to believe it.
Today, only the most primitive minded and witless “warmists” soldier along, spouting idiocies in the hope the under-informed and the lazyminded will continue to buy their junkscience.
If all goes according to plan, Hollywood icon Leonardo DiCaprio will blast into space on the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic “spaceship” this year. Incredibly enough, Messrs. Branson and DiCaprio style themselves as environmentalist celebrities with the elite mission of warning us there is a “coming ecological catastrophe” if we fail to address the carbon crisis.
Simply because they have garnered a large amount of money over the years, one way and another, their “commitment to fighting climate change” is called praiseworthy by brain-dead media, committed to “celeb worship” even as it backs off and away from the Global Warming scam. Richard Branson, despite all his attempts, is still far behind Al Gore in “warmist” cash-grubbing so he is active wherever that might turn a penny.
Branson claims he was “turned on” to Global Warming by ‘Jim’ Lovelock in person – the same Lovelock who has abandoned the scam. Branson is the founder and CEO of the “Carbon War Room”, an outfit advocating punitive-high energy taxes, which therefore has fawning support from Big Energy and Big Government, but his big hope is that “low carbon space travel” can become his new profit center. His one-liner to critics that space travel and carbon hysteria do not seem to mix, is that his brand of space travel is (very) Low Carbon. Cited by Wall Street Journal, 7 January, he has claimed: “We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London”.
As we know, this concerns low-orbital short-period flight in the upper atmosphere, and nothing to do with real space travel, but coming from a “Global Warming ikon” we must accept there is always massive exaggeration and distortion. It is New Normal. On the other hand, we do not need to accept the plain, straight lying.
According to the US FAA-Federal Aviation Administration, also cited by Wall Street Journal, its own environmental assessment of the launch and re-entry of Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft says that one launch-land cycle will emit about 30 tons of carbon dioxide, or about five tons per passenger. That is around five times more than the carbon footprint of a round-trip flight from Singapore to London. When the support and infrastructure energy costs of the entire Virgin Galactic operation are added, including high-atmosphere flights by tracker and support aircraft, the total carbon emissions rise to about seven times more than an average round-trip flight from Singapore to London. The FAA says that for each passenger on a single trip using Virgin Galactic their total energy burn will be at least twice the energy an average American consumes in a year.
When or if Branson’s tacky low-orbital “space” flights backed by the United Arab Emirates and their “low carbon” petrodollars ever get their celebrity cargoes out of the Earth’s gravity field, a trip to Mars will be obligatory. Here, they will find an atmosphere that is about 96% carbon dioxide (or 960 000 parts per million), and they will be able to smugly gurgle, for the short time they can still breathe: “We told you so!”. Back on Earth however, a little modesty, or at least the prospect of lawsuits for open lying – which is cited by observers as one reason ‘Jim’ Lovelock and his namesake James Hansen have backed away from the Warming scam – call on them to give us a rest and to please pipe down.
Keeping The Baboons Warm
Keeping the warmist gravy train rolling – whatever happens in the real world – is rapidly reverting to whence it came. Big Government, the UN system, the nuclear power and alternate energy industry, and financial opportunists always looking for a new scam. To this motley crew, we have two major bit-part players – government-friendly media and Mr and Mrs Average Informed Citizen – so well-informed they are both easy prey for the lying propaganda from the Carbon Purists. But neither, in fact, can be counted on by the warmists, as they will soon find out.
Any kind of historical perspective on atmospheric science and the origins of the “CO2 hypothesis” was until recently deliberately kept out of the media. Any reference to “alternate theories” was trashed by the media as negative, anti-science, badly-intentioned and probably corrupt. Global Warming of the Al Gore variety was to the west what Lysenko was to the USSR of Stalin. Any mention of the relatively large, sometimes outright large changes of world average temperatures over the last 1500 years was derided by warmists – because there was warming in 1980-2000, by a few fractions of 1 degree celsius, we have a crisis. Only “carbon effluent” in the atmosphere could have caused this! What else?
The media, like public opinion is doing what it always does – it moves slowly but surely like a Titanic-crushing iceberg, breaking up as it goes. The media at this moment is packed with scientifically flaky, superficially plausible stories about how global warming causes record cold and massive snowstorms in New York, but also that until the magic date of 2065 global warming will be “net positive” for human beings, while Mr Obama has told us (although we don’t have to believe him) 97 percent of scientists still think crisis-style warming is a reality.
In a late 2013 report, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said that most media coverage of climate change now emphasises uncertainty, and an increasing number (25%) focus on the “positive opportunities” global warming could or might bring. Global cooling, however, remains completely banned from mainstream media, except as freaky tidbit, despite it being at least as possible that we have cooling, as warming, in a time frame stretching to 2065.
Keeping The Baboons Stupid
Admitting that we don’t know what happens in the Earth’s atmosphere, therefore we can’t know how climate changes is affecting global temperature – is the ultimate blog-material. It is the no-no option and “just in case”, or “simply by precaution”, so we have to reject that possibility. Time is limited and Al Gore needs cash. Propaganda overkill arrived. Now Gore’s pews are empty, and we’re left with hit-and-run street preachers.
One key benefit of the comeuppance for global warming, losing its status of “unquestionable” except by misfits, psychotics and the badly-motivated, is that climate change will be able to emerge as the real subject of interest.
We are likely near the point, now, when the blindest and most faithful cult followers of global warming and the “CO2 hypothesis” will have to admit they’ve been sold a pup. The computer-modeled, science-correct, politically-correct theory of man-made CO2 causing global warming, or its second-best rebranded title of “climate change”, or its third-best of “extreme weather”, was a 10-year trip to oblivion along the well-trod path of Dumbing Down. Global Warming was Dumb with a capital D.
Gore-theory proved nothing at all. The sole benefit of the waltz down Propaganda Lane is that we know climate is changing but we don’t know why. Being able to admit that is difficult for high intellect baboons.
Baboons are in fact a lot more results-oriented, and have much less time to waste on trivial pursuits than human beings. For that reason they do not invent new enemies and they make do with ones they always have had and know well. Who are real. The Global Warming crisis movement – an example of mass hysteria – invented an all-new enemy for Mankind, called Mankind.
Also called misanthropy and being more than a little dated, the warmists pushed the misanthropy button so hard we were asked to think “we” are destroying our planet – unlike Al Gore with his personal Gulfstream 5 jet, his expanding waistline and penchant for fillet mignon and massage parlors with happy endings – and unlike Richard Branson and his Virgin jetliners, because average humans use far too much fossil energy, but Branson and his Hollywood playboy pal are apparently “saving the planet” for those of us who don’t own our own island in the Caribbean.
This mental constipation only has one logical readout – that human beings should operate a mass cull or Die Off, to prevent us from killing the planet – which belongs to very nice persons like Gore and Branson. Even low-IQ baboons would reject the embarked logic inside this mental masturbation. They would much prefer serious endeavors like looking for rapidly-cooling potatoes in the snow.
It’s officially an evolutionary crisis when the feral monkeys start looking smarter than our jet-setting monkeys in suits. Maybe it’s time to put the feral baboons in suits and ties, and let them realize their true Darwinian potential in Westminster, Brussels and Washington.
Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/global-warming-media-propaganda/5364444
Due Process??? What due process???
The Fifth Amendment Lies in Crumbles
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads in part as follows:
Nor shall any person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The term “due process of law” stretches all the way back to Magna Carta, the great charter extracted from King John in 1215 in which he was forced to acknowledge that his power over the citizenry was not omnipotent. It stated in part:
No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
That phrase — “law of the land” — ultimately evolved into the phrase “due process of law,” the phrase found in the Fifth Amendment.
What does “due process” mean? Over the centuries, it has come to encompass, at the very least, the concepts of notice and hearing.
Thus, before the government can deprive a person of his life, the government must provide him with a formal notice of why the government wishes to kill him.
But that’s still not enough. The person whom the government wishes to kill is also entitled to a hearing or trial before a judge or jury, where the government is required to come forward with relevant and competent evidence to establish that the person being targeted deserves to be killed. If the jury convicts the accused and authorizes the death penalty, then — and only then — can the government kill him.
Why did our American ancestors demand the passage of the Fifth Amendment? Because they knew that without the Fifth Amendment, it was a virtual certainty that the federal government would attract the type of people who would like to kill other people without notice or hearing — that is, without due process of law. The Fifth Amendment was designed to protect people from those types of government officials.
Several days ago President Obama announced that he was contemplating ordering his military and intelligence forces to assassinate yet another American. He didn’t name the proposed victim but apparently he’s an American living in Pakistan.
This unidentified America, of course, wouldn’t be the first American that Obama’s forces have assassinated. They have already assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, both of whom were American citizens.
But let’s back up a moment and notice something important here: By its express terms, the Fifth Amendment does not apply only to American citizens. Its protection against being killed by the U.S. government without due process of law encompasses all people, not just Americans citizens.
It’s not really surprising that President Obama, his army, and his CIA are assassinating people, including Americans. Our American ancestors clearly anticipated such killings, which is precisely why they demanded the Fifth Amendment. They knew that this was the sort of thing that rulers and their standing armies had done throughout the ages. If they didn’t believe that federal officials would move in that direction, they wouldn’t have seen the need to enact the Fifth Amendment.
The real surprise is that the President, the Pentagon, and the CIA have been permitted to get away with their assassination program. After all, there is the Fifth Amendment to contend with. How do they circumvent the express provisions of the Fifth Amendment?
There are two ways they have accomplished this.
The first is that the federal judiciary, whose job it is to enforce the Constitution against the president (and the Congress) has abrogated its responsibility to do what it’s charged with doing. Ever since the advent of the Cold War national-security state, the federal judiciary has deferred to the authority of the president and his military and intelligence forces when it comes to killing people. We witnessed this phenomenon during the Cold War. We’ve witnessed it during the so-called war on terrorism.
The second reason relates to the first. After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush proclaimed that the United States was, once again, at war, this time not against “the communists” but rather against “the terrorists.” In wartime, he said, the government is authorized to kill the enemy, without according him due process of law.
Thus, under the “war on communism,” the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA wielded the omnipotent authority to assassinate people they suspected of being communists. (That’s also the rationale that Chilean military strongman Augusto Pinochet relied upon to justify the assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington, D.C.) Under the war on terrorism, the president and his military and paramilitary forces wield the omnipotent authority to kill people they suspect of being terrorists.
As we learned in the assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki — indeed, as we have learned with the assassinations of countless other people — the judgment of death meted out by the president and his national-security forces will not be second-guessed by the federal judiciary, the Congress, or the mainstream media. With the exception of libertarians and some progressive civil libertarians, everyone has deferred to the authority of the national security state to kill whomever it wants for whatever reason it wants, so long as they label the person a communist or a terrorist.
Just a few days ago criminal-defense lawyers sought a delay in the terrorism trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law. The terrorism trial is scheduled to begin in a U.S. District Court in New York City.
What? How is that possible? What in the world is an accused terrorist doing in a federal court? Don’t federal officials say that they’re waging a “war on terrorism” and that it’s just like any other war? Since when are POWs in a war put on trial for criminal offenses in a U.S. District Court?
The New York City federal court trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, along with so many other federal terrorist cases, exposes the sham of the entire “war on terrorism” rationale that U.S. officials have relied upon to avoid the constraints of the Fifth Amendment that our ancestors placed on federal officials.
The fact is that terrorism is federal crime. It’s listed in the U.S. Code as a criminal offense. It’s always been treated as a federal criminal offense. If terrorism wasn’t a crime, all those federal judges who have presided over federal terrorism prosecutions for the past several decades would have thrown the terrorism cases out of their courts. Instead, those judges ensure that indictments (i.e., notice) are issued as a condition of criminal prosecution, that the feds prove the person’s guilt of that criminal offense beyond a reasonable doubt with relevant and competent evidence (i.e., at a trial). Then, and only then, will the government be permitted to kill its proposed victim and only if the jury and judge have authorized the death penalty to be meted out.
What President Bush did in the fear-ridden environment of 9/11 was pull off a clever sleight of hand, one that the federal judiciary, Congress, and the mainstream press have permitted him (and his successor President Obama) to get away with. Bush simply decreed that he now wielded the power to treat terrorism as either a federal crime or as an act of war. It was now his option, he decreed, to treat anyone he and his army labeled a “terrorist” as either a criminal defendant or an enemy combatant. It is now his option to either honor or ignore the express provisions of the Fifth Amendment, the higher law that we the people have imposed on the president and the rest of the federal government.
Thus, it’s now the president, whoever he or she happens to be, who decides who is accorded the protections of the Fifth Amendment and who isn’t. His judgment is final. Some people are lucky. They get the Fifth Amendment route. Others are not so lucky. They get the assassination route — or the torture route — or the indefinite detention route — or the kangaroo tribunal route.
The constitutional system that our ancestors devised was not a perfect system. But one thing is for sure: For more than two centuries, it prevented federal officials from legally assassinating people, including American citizens, with impunity.
But with the dawn of the national-security state during the Cold War, the Fifth Amendment began to crack with the CIA’s super-secret assassination program against suspected communists. With the 9/11 attacks, the Fifth Amendment shattered in the face of the government’s no-longer-secret assassination program against suspected terrorists. And there the Fifth Amendment lies, in crumbles.
Link:
http://fff.org/2014/02/25/the-sham-of-the-war-on-terrorism/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads in part as follows:
Nor shall any person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The term “due process of law” stretches all the way back to Magna Carta, the great charter extracted from King John in 1215 in which he was forced to acknowledge that his power over the citizenry was not omnipotent. It stated in part:
No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
That phrase — “law of the land” — ultimately evolved into the phrase “due process of law,” the phrase found in the Fifth Amendment.
What does “due process” mean? Over the centuries, it has come to encompass, at the very least, the concepts of notice and hearing.
Thus, before the government can deprive a person of his life, the government must provide him with a formal notice of why the government wishes to kill him.
But that’s still not enough. The person whom the government wishes to kill is also entitled to a hearing or trial before a judge or jury, where the government is required to come forward with relevant and competent evidence to establish that the person being targeted deserves to be killed. If the jury convicts the accused and authorizes the death penalty, then — and only then — can the government kill him.
Why did our American ancestors demand the passage of the Fifth Amendment? Because they knew that without the Fifth Amendment, it was a virtual certainty that the federal government would attract the type of people who would like to kill other people without notice or hearing — that is, without due process of law. The Fifth Amendment was designed to protect people from those types of government officials.
Several days ago President Obama announced that he was contemplating ordering his military and intelligence forces to assassinate yet another American. He didn’t name the proposed victim but apparently he’s an American living in Pakistan.
This unidentified America, of course, wouldn’t be the first American that Obama’s forces have assassinated. They have already assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, both of whom were American citizens.
But let’s back up a moment and notice something important here: By its express terms, the Fifth Amendment does not apply only to American citizens. Its protection against being killed by the U.S. government without due process of law encompasses all people, not just Americans citizens.
It’s not really surprising that President Obama, his army, and his CIA are assassinating people, including Americans. Our American ancestors clearly anticipated such killings, which is precisely why they demanded the Fifth Amendment. They knew that this was the sort of thing that rulers and their standing armies had done throughout the ages. If they didn’t believe that federal officials would move in that direction, they wouldn’t have seen the need to enact the Fifth Amendment.
The real surprise is that the President, the Pentagon, and the CIA have been permitted to get away with their assassination program. After all, there is the Fifth Amendment to contend with. How do they circumvent the express provisions of the Fifth Amendment?
There are two ways they have accomplished this.
The first is that the federal judiciary, whose job it is to enforce the Constitution against the president (and the Congress) has abrogated its responsibility to do what it’s charged with doing. Ever since the advent of the Cold War national-security state, the federal judiciary has deferred to the authority of the president and his military and intelligence forces when it comes to killing people. We witnessed this phenomenon during the Cold War. We’ve witnessed it during the so-called war on terrorism.
The second reason relates to the first. After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush proclaimed that the United States was, once again, at war, this time not against “the communists” but rather against “the terrorists.” In wartime, he said, the government is authorized to kill the enemy, without according him due process of law.
Thus, under the “war on communism,” the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA wielded the omnipotent authority to assassinate people they suspected of being communists. (That’s also the rationale that Chilean military strongman Augusto Pinochet relied upon to justify the assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington, D.C.) Under the war on terrorism, the president and his military and paramilitary forces wield the omnipotent authority to kill people they suspect of being terrorists.
As we learned in the assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki — indeed, as we have learned with the assassinations of countless other people — the judgment of death meted out by the president and his national-security forces will not be second-guessed by the federal judiciary, the Congress, or the mainstream media. With the exception of libertarians and some progressive civil libertarians, everyone has deferred to the authority of the national security state to kill whomever it wants for whatever reason it wants, so long as they label the person a communist or a terrorist.
Just a few days ago criminal-defense lawyers sought a delay in the terrorism trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law. The terrorism trial is scheduled to begin in a U.S. District Court in New York City.
What? How is that possible? What in the world is an accused terrorist doing in a federal court? Don’t federal officials say that they’re waging a “war on terrorism” and that it’s just like any other war? Since when are POWs in a war put on trial for criminal offenses in a U.S. District Court?
The New York City federal court trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, along with so many other federal terrorist cases, exposes the sham of the entire “war on terrorism” rationale that U.S. officials have relied upon to avoid the constraints of the Fifth Amendment that our ancestors placed on federal officials.
The fact is that terrorism is federal crime. It’s listed in the U.S. Code as a criminal offense. It’s always been treated as a federal criminal offense. If terrorism wasn’t a crime, all those federal judges who have presided over federal terrorism prosecutions for the past several decades would have thrown the terrorism cases out of their courts. Instead, those judges ensure that indictments (i.e., notice) are issued as a condition of criminal prosecution, that the feds prove the person’s guilt of that criminal offense beyond a reasonable doubt with relevant and competent evidence (i.e., at a trial). Then, and only then, will the government be permitted to kill its proposed victim and only if the jury and judge have authorized the death penalty to be meted out.
What President Bush did in the fear-ridden environment of 9/11 was pull off a clever sleight of hand, one that the federal judiciary, Congress, and the mainstream press have permitted him (and his successor President Obama) to get away with. Bush simply decreed that he now wielded the power to treat terrorism as either a federal crime or as an act of war. It was now his option, he decreed, to treat anyone he and his army labeled a “terrorist” as either a criminal defendant or an enemy combatant. It is now his option to either honor or ignore the express provisions of the Fifth Amendment, the higher law that we the people have imposed on the president and the rest of the federal government.
Thus, it’s now the president, whoever he or she happens to be, who decides who is accorded the protections of the Fifth Amendment and who isn’t. His judgment is final. Some people are lucky. They get the Fifth Amendment route. Others are not so lucky. They get the assassination route — or the torture route — or the indefinite detention route — or the kangaroo tribunal route.
The constitutional system that our ancestors devised was not a perfect system. But one thing is for sure: For more than two centuries, it prevented federal officials from legally assassinating people, including American citizens, with impunity.
But with the dawn of the national-security state during the Cold War, the Fifth Amendment began to crack with the CIA’s super-secret assassination program against suspected communists. With the 9/11 attacks, the Fifth Amendment shattered in the face of the government’s no-longer-secret assassination program against suspected terrorists. And there the Fifth Amendment lies, in crumbles.
Link:
http://fff.org/2014/02/25/the-sham-of-the-war-on-terrorism/
No longer free...
February 25, 2014 by Bob Livingston
A once free nation’s descent into tyranny occurs one of two ways: either through sudden violent revolution or gradually over decades in fits and starts. America’s has occurred gradually.
Government conquers its citizens with gradualism because few understand it. Gradualism is imperceptible force.
America has evolved into a lawless state. There has been a breakdown of law and order, but only a few can see it. There are many layers of deception and those few who have become alerted see and understand at different levels.
The first trigger of alert is when a few people come to understand that government is organized crime and that government is in all-out war with its own citizens. The central purpose of Personal Liberty Digest™ is to raise the awareness of the people.
The U.S. Congress has, gradually, ceded its authority to the President and to the alphabet soup agencies of government that it created or allowed the President to create. Now the President rewrites laws on a whim, or chooses to not enforce them on a whim. This is the stuff of third-world banana republics. The imperial presidency feared by the Founding Fathers is in full operation. Yet the feckless Congress hardly whimpers about it and the people do little more than shrug their collective shoulders.
Even worse are the regulatory and quasi-military law enforcement agencies. These agencies, staffed by career bureaucrats and headed by statists with “altruistic” motives that always benefit either the cronies and well-connected or the growing government apparatus, create new standards and new regulations and new rules without regard to the Constitution and their effect on the American people.
Often the elites simply do not care how their policies will affect average Americans so long as the fascist system is rewarded or the State is made more powerful. Other times the detrimental effects are simply chalked up as unintended consequences or collateral damage.
Almost any crime can be carried out without overt force or resistance if it is done gradually. Somehow any process of gradualism escapes detection. Gradualism extends false hope and the illusion of reality.
One can poison himself and be dead immediately. On the other hand, we can be poisoned over time with fluoride in our drinking water, by vaccinations and inoculations, by toxins in our foods, and so on ad infinitum.
Gradualism does something else. It confuses cause and effect. As long as a process of currency depreciation is gradual, the people cannot discern the cause nor place the blame on the money printers.
Currency debasement has throughout history always been the method of choice of governments to steal and transfer wealth from the people to the government in subtle and secret ways so that the crowd never catches on.
This is going on now in our lifetime more than at any time in history. Yet there is no revolution. There is no blood in the streets. The propaganda still holds sway. The people still trust the system. The people remain calm.
Not only are the peasants calm, they have been deceived into believing that rising stock markets constitute a sign of prosperity. They can’t conceive that the market is a bubble of fiat currency (nominal dollars) that is in no way reflective of real dollars or real value.
This type of chicanery is a tribute to modern and very sophisticated propaganda that is hiding the destruction of the value of the currency and impoverishing all who hold U.S. dollars as savings and retirement.
There is always a secret and hidden agenda in government finance, now more than ever. The U.S. government has become such a fiat money monster that it has lost control of normal channels of finance. It cannot levy enough taxes for income nor negotiate loans.
The government can least afford to reveal that it is engaged in grand theft by printing money. So it kills the signs and symptoms by suppressing the price of gold and silver and engaging in printing money to fund a government that is essentially out of control.
Time will have its way but at this point it is vital that government mislead and deceive the public in order to continue the present system that could not survive one minute if the people really had a choice by understanding the truth here printed.
The U.S. political system is on a theft binge of consuming the assets of Americans by whatever method it can contrive. It is financial war and the political system is winning, backed by the police power of the State. Any thinking person can clearly see that the U.S. system is collapsing. Better said, it is self destructing in many ways.
The USA Patriot Act was passed without protest because of the people’s fear following the 9/11 attacks on America. The law codified the electronic surveillance and snooping that Edward Snowden’s revelations brought into public light. But the government was already collecting data in a massive operation long before the act was passed.
Once passed, the law was twisted and abused and this abuse sanctioned by the people in all levels of government to the extent that there is no longer any private communication and any communication that is contrary to the government’s message is now considered hate speech or inappropriate speech to be regulated and or persecuted.
The State is currently pushing a homosexual agenda and has the full force of the mainstream media behind it. The message has become so radicalized and nonsensical that an NBC report on an American Olympic skier claimed the athlete lived an “alternative lifestyle” because he had a wife and child, attends church regularly, takes care of his family and goes home at night rather that going partying with friends. In other words, the lifestyle of the majority of Americans is now being cast by the propaganda machine as “alternative” whereas the perverse immoral lifestyle of homosexuality is being cast as the new normal.
The Department of Justice tapped the phone lines and scoured the phone records of reporters and their family members. The IRS stifled the free speech of Tea Party- and Christian-affiliated groups by denying them 501(c)3 status and subjecting them to extra scrutiny not required of other groups—going so far as to seek information on their family members, associations, reading habits and group affiliations.
The Department of Homeland Security has named Tea Party supporters, returning veterans, preppers, and supporters of libertarian candidates as potential terrorists. These messages have trickled down into State and local governments who are now increasingly tightening the screws on American freedoms.
One example is in Campbell, Wis., where, after people across the country began hanging signs from highway overpasses calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama in 2013, the town passed an ordinance prohibiting signs, flags banners pennants and other displays on or within 100 feet of vehicle and pedestrian overpasses.
A couple of weeks after the ordinance was passed, Gregory Luce and a few others appeared on a pedestrian overpass wearing T-shirts that collectively spelled “IMPEACH” on the front side and “OBAMA” on the back. A town police officer ordered them to leave or receive a citation. The group left. Three days later Nicholas Newman appeared on the same overpass carrying an American flag. He was issued a citation for displaying the flag in violation of the new ordinance and fined $139.
The Thomas More Law Center has sued the town on behalf of Luce and Newman. Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, commented, “The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that a bedrock principle of the First Amendment is that government cannot ban the expression of ideas just because some find it offensive. In fact, the Supreme Court has allowed the burning of the American Flag on the grounds that it is matter of free expression. So I’m astonished that the Town of Campbell and the police department think it can ban a citizen from displaying the American Flag.”
While nothing would please the progressive and statist elites more than to see court rulings “legitimizing” their efforts to shut off dissent, remove guns from American homes, relieve Americans of any or all of their God-given rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights or place FCC “monitors” in newsrooms, many of these attacks are just window dressing to conceal their ultimate agenda of destroying the American system for the global elite.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/2014/02/25/a-once-free-nation/
"According to the controversial report produced for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon by a team of establishment “eminent persons,” within the next six years, no realm of the human experience will escape the “profound transformation” toward “a new paradigm” demanded by globalist bureaucrats."
UN Plotting to “Dramatically Alter” Your Views and Behavior
Written by Alex Newman
The United Nations is currently working on a far-reaching plot, developed with radical Obama administration policy architect John Podesta, to “profoundly and dramatically” alter your "worldview" in the name of shackling humanity under a UN-managed “universal sustainable development agenda.” According to the controversial report produced for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon by a team of establishment “eminent persons,” within the next six years, no realm of the human experience will escape the “profound transformation” toward “a new paradigm” demanded by globalist bureaucrats.
The UN document, while packed with contradictory machinations, essentially outlines what establishment proponents of global government have long described as a “New World Order.” In essence, the UN panel called for a top-down restructuring of human civilization under the guise of tackling poverty, “unsustainable” activities, and “climate change.” The international outfit and its mostly dictatorial member regimes will set the agenda, with regional, national, and sub-national governments expected to foist it on humanity.
Literally every person on Earth must submit and contribute, the planetary establishment claimed on multiple occasions in the radical document. It was not immediately clear what would happen with those who refuse.
The report on the “Post-2015 Development Agenda,” dubbed “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development,” was compiled and endorsed by a “High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons.” Under the plan, expected to be discussed later this year at a UN meeting in New York, a planetary treaty on “sustainable development” would drastically transform everything from government and the economy to society and even individuals’ beliefs.
“Perhaps the most important transformative shift is towards a new spirit of solidarity, cooperation, and mutual accountability that must underpin the post-2015 agenda,” the report says. “This partnership should involve governments but also include others: people living in poverty, those with disabilities, women, civil society and indigenous and local communities, traditionally marginalised groups, multilateral institutions, local and national government, the business community, academia and private philanthropy.” In other words, everyone and everything.
Even your own mind and beliefs are in UN crosshairs. “The new global partnership should encourage everyone to alter their worldview, profoundly and dramatically,” the report explains. Fox News editor George Russell, who first reported on the extreme effort, described it as “a colossal and sweeping form of global behavior modification.” In fact, the UN plan, which has been in the pipeline for decades, goes well beyond even what Russell described.
“A renewed global partnership will require a new spirit from national leaders, but also — no less important — it will require many others to adopt new mind-sets and change their behavior,” the report continues, adding that the shift must get all countries to move “willingly” toward the UN’s radical and “universal” agenda. “These changes will not happen overnight. But we must move beyond business-as-usual — and we must start today.”
Among the primary justifications for the radical schemes are fighting “poverty” and so-called “climate change,” which the UN continues to blame on humanity despite the total implosion of its theories and models. On poverty, meanwhile, the UN has openly announced its intentions to reduce standards of living worldwide — along with population levels — and implement totalitarian controls over the economy. Every credible economist knows such anti-market measures will drastically slash material prosperity.
A key section of the report goes under the headline “One World: One Sustainable Development Agenda.” Of course, the terms “sustainable development” and Agenda 21 will be very familiar to readers of The New American. Under the guise of so-called “sustainability” — a perpetually shifting scheme that at its core considers human beings, national sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to be problems in need of solutions — the UN has long been seeking to expand and centralize coercive power at the global level.
As The New American reported from the 2012 UN Rio+20 “Conference on Sustainable Development” in Rio de Janeiro, chaired by a prominent Chinese communist, the real agenda behind “sustainability” is actually fairly transparent. The UN boasts about its plans at its summits and in official documents, and the Rio+20 summit is cited in the latest report as having established the “foundations” for steering the world toward the globalists’ agenda. In essence, the goal is to have an unaccountable planetary authority dictate everything from economic decisions and environmental regulation down to the thoughts of individuals.
Much like Soviet “five-year plans,” the UN document outlines a series of demands to be solidified by 2015, when its previous slate of radical “development goals” runs its course, and implemented by 2020. “In our view, business-as-usual is not an option,” the “eminent persons” decided for you, all Americans, and everybody else around the world. “We concluded that the post-2015 agenda is a universal agenda. It needs to be driven by … big, transformative shifts.”
Wealth redistribution under the guise of fighting “poverty” and “inequality” will be crucial, with Western taxpayers being fleeced to prop up Third World dictatorships and global bureaucracies. “We agreed to push developed countries to fulfill their side of the bargain — by honouring their aid commitments, but also reforming their trade, tax and transparency policies, by paying more attention to better regulating global financial and commodity markets and by leading the way towards sustainable development,” the report states.
The supposed “stresses” of “unsustainable production and consumption patterns,” the globalist document continues, have supposedly become “clear.” To respond to the alleged “stresses,” the UN panel agreed that the UN would have to start calling the shots and attacking freedom and free markets. “We also agreed on the need to manage the world’s consumption and production patterns in more sustainable and equitable ways [emphasis added],” the report says. “Above all, we agreed that a new vision must be universal: offering hope — but also responsibilities — to everyone in the world.”
Did you catch that? It is hardly the only time it is mentioned. “There can be no excuses,” the document adds. “This is a universal agenda, for which everyone must accept their proper share of responsibility.” In case you missed it again, the UN has a plan for your life, whether you agree with it or not. It will not be optional, as the report makes abundantly clear, adding that many of “the world’s largest companies are already leading this transformation to a green economy.” What happens with those who refuse to accept their “proper share of responsibility” remains unclear.
The latest UN report expands on the radical themes unveiled at the Rio+20 summit and plots a way forward for the draconian global transformation. Promising a “profound economic transformation,” for example, the high-level globalist report vows to restructure the world economy, which includes commandeering business to serve the agenda. “This means a rapid shift to sustainable patterns of consumption and production,” the report states. Top UN officials and reports, of course, have already made abundantly clear that American standards of living are not “sustainable” in their view.
Chaired by three foreign leaders, there was just one American on the global outfit’s “high-level panel” — John Podesta. The establishment “progressive” heavyweight, who founded the radical Big Business-funded “Center for American Progress” and served as chief of staff to disgraced former President Bill Clinton, is now considered one of the top players in the Obama administration and its lawless scheme to rule America by decree while subverting U.S. sovereignty.
“The ability of President Obama to accomplish important change through [executive] powers should not be underestimated,” Podesta opined in a 2010 Center for American Progress report calling on the administration to shred what remains of the Constitution and congressional authority. Indeed, Podesta and his cohorts have been among the key drivers behind the increasingly totalitarian executive-branch plot to bypass Congress using Obama’s “pen and phone.”
In recent years, for example, the administration has unilaterally and unconstitutionally foisted radical policies on Americans dealing with everything from “climate change” to gun control. Just last week, The New American reported on how far Obama is willing to go, including the imposition of radical UN “global warming” decrees on America without any sort of congressional approval or Senate ratification. Secretary of State John Kerry even announced a “climate” partnership with the murderous communist regime ruling mainland China, which the UN climate boss praises as a better model than the U.S. Constitution to fight "climate change."
The globalists have fanatical allies in the Obama administration including the president himself, of course, as well as Podesta and countless others. However, the American people have already expressed fierce resistance to the UN’s agenda. In Alabama, for example, the state government passed a law banning the UN Agenda 21 and its “sustainability” plots. Numerous other state legislatures and local bodies have passed similar measures.
As the UN takes off the deceitful mask and tightens the screws, opposition will undoubtedly continue to surge. One surefire way to break the back of the schemers is to elect members of Congress who will support legislation getting the U.S. government to de-fund and withdraw from the dictators’ club known as the United Nations. Whether American resistance to the globalist plot will be enough to stop it, however, depends largely on educating and activating the public.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/17704-un-plotting-to-dramatically-alter-your-views-and-behavior
Written by Alex Newman
The United Nations is currently working on a far-reaching plot, developed with radical Obama administration policy architect John Podesta, to “profoundly and dramatically” alter your "worldview" in the name of shackling humanity under a UN-managed “universal sustainable development agenda.” According to the controversial report produced for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon by a team of establishment “eminent persons,” within the next six years, no realm of the human experience will escape the “profound transformation” toward “a new paradigm” demanded by globalist bureaucrats.
The UN document, while packed with contradictory machinations, essentially outlines what establishment proponents of global government have long described as a “New World Order.” In essence, the UN panel called for a top-down restructuring of human civilization under the guise of tackling poverty, “unsustainable” activities, and “climate change.” The international outfit and its mostly dictatorial member regimes will set the agenda, with regional, national, and sub-national governments expected to foist it on humanity.
Literally every person on Earth must submit and contribute, the planetary establishment claimed on multiple occasions in the radical document. It was not immediately clear what would happen with those who refuse.
The report on the “Post-2015 Development Agenda,” dubbed “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development,” was compiled and endorsed by a “High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons.” Under the plan, expected to be discussed later this year at a UN meeting in New York, a planetary treaty on “sustainable development” would drastically transform everything from government and the economy to society and even individuals’ beliefs.
“Perhaps the most important transformative shift is towards a new spirit of solidarity, cooperation, and mutual accountability that must underpin the post-2015 agenda,” the report says. “This partnership should involve governments but also include others: people living in poverty, those with disabilities, women, civil society and indigenous and local communities, traditionally marginalised groups, multilateral institutions, local and national government, the business community, academia and private philanthropy.” In other words, everyone and everything.
Even your own mind and beliefs are in UN crosshairs. “The new global partnership should encourage everyone to alter their worldview, profoundly and dramatically,” the report explains. Fox News editor George Russell, who first reported on the extreme effort, described it as “a colossal and sweeping form of global behavior modification.” In fact, the UN plan, which has been in the pipeline for decades, goes well beyond even what Russell described.
“A renewed global partnership will require a new spirit from national leaders, but also — no less important — it will require many others to adopt new mind-sets and change their behavior,” the report continues, adding that the shift must get all countries to move “willingly” toward the UN’s radical and “universal” agenda. “These changes will not happen overnight. But we must move beyond business-as-usual — and we must start today.”
Among the primary justifications for the radical schemes are fighting “poverty” and so-called “climate change,” which the UN continues to blame on humanity despite the total implosion of its theories and models. On poverty, meanwhile, the UN has openly announced its intentions to reduce standards of living worldwide — along with population levels — and implement totalitarian controls over the economy. Every credible economist knows such anti-market measures will drastically slash material prosperity.
A key section of the report goes under the headline “One World: One Sustainable Development Agenda.” Of course, the terms “sustainable development” and Agenda 21 will be very familiar to readers of The New American. Under the guise of so-called “sustainability” — a perpetually shifting scheme that at its core considers human beings, national sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to be problems in need of solutions — the UN has long been seeking to expand and centralize coercive power at the global level.
As The New American reported from the 2012 UN Rio+20 “Conference on Sustainable Development” in Rio de Janeiro, chaired by a prominent Chinese communist, the real agenda behind “sustainability” is actually fairly transparent. The UN boasts about its plans at its summits and in official documents, and the Rio+20 summit is cited in the latest report as having established the “foundations” for steering the world toward the globalists’ agenda. In essence, the goal is to have an unaccountable planetary authority dictate everything from economic decisions and environmental regulation down to the thoughts of individuals.
Much like Soviet “five-year plans,” the UN document outlines a series of demands to be solidified by 2015, when its previous slate of radical “development goals” runs its course, and implemented by 2020. “In our view, business-as-usual is not an option,” the “eminent persons” decided for you, all Americans, and everybody else around the world. “We concluded that the post-2015 agenda is a universal agenda. It needs to be driven by … big, transformative shifts.”
Wealth redistribution under the guise of fighting “poverty” and “inequality” will be crucial, with Western taxpayers being fleeced to prop up Third World dictatorships and global bureaucracies. “We agreed to push developed countries to fulfill their side of the bargain — by honouring their aid commitments, but also reforming their trade, tax and transparency policies, by paying more attention to better regulating global financial and commodity markets and by leading the way towards sustainable development,” the report states.
The supposed “stresses” of “unsustainable production and consumption patterns,” the globalist document continues, have supposedly become “clear.” To respond to the alleged “stresses,” the UN panel agreed that the UN would have to start calling the shots and attacking freedom and free markets. “We also agreed on the need to manage the world’s consumption and production patterns in more sustainable and equitable ways [emphasis added],” the report says. “Above all, we agreed that a new vision must be universal: offering hope — but also responsibilities — to everyone in the world.”
Did you catch that? It is hardly the only time it is mentioned. “There can be no excuses,” the document adds. “This is a universal agenda, for which everyone must accept their proper share of responsibility.” In case you missed it again, the UN has a plan for your life, whether you agree with it or not. It will not be optional, as the report makes abundantly clear, adding that many of “the world’s largest companies are already leading this transformation to a green economy.” What happens with those who refuse to accept their “proper share of responsibility” remains unclear.
The latest UN report expands on the radical themes unveiled at the Rio+20 summit and plots a way forward for the draconian global transformation. Promising a “profound economic transformation,” for example, the high-level globalist report vows to restructure the world economy, which includes commandeering business to serve the agenda. “This means a rapid shift to sustainable patterns of consumption and production,” the report states. Top UN officials and reports, of course, have already made abundantly clear that American standards of living are not “sustainable” in their view.
Chaired by three foreign leaders, there was just one American on the global outfit’s “high-level panel” — John Podesta. The establishment “progressive” heavyweight, who founded the radical Big Business-funded “Center for American Progress” and served as chief of staff to disgraced former President Bill Clinton, is now considered one of the top players in the Obama administration and its lawless scheme to rule America by decree while subverting U.S. sovereignty.
“The ability of President Obama to accomplish important change through [executive] powers should not be underestimated,” Podesta opined in a 2010 Center for American Progress report calling on the administration to shred what remains of the Constitution and congressional authority. Indeed, Podesta and his cohorts have been among the key drivers behind the increasingly totalitarian executive-branch plot to bypass Congress using Obama’s “pen and phone.”
In recent years, for example, the administration has unilaterally and unconstitutionally foisted radical policies on Americans dealing with everything from “climate change” to gun control. Just last week, The New American reported on how far Obama is willing to go, including the imposition of radical UN “global warming” decrees on America without any sort of congressional approval or Senate ratification. Secretary of State John Kerry even announced a “climate” partnership with the murderous communist regime ruling mainland China, which the UN climate boss praises as a better model than the U.S. Constitution to fight "climate change."
The globalists have fanatical allies in the Obama administration including the president himself, of course, as well as Podesta and countless others. However, the American people have already expressed fierce resistance to the UN’s agenda. In Alabama, for example, the state government passed a law banning the UN Agenda 21 and its “sustainability” plots. Numerous other state legislatures and local bodies have passed similar measures.
As the UN takes off the deceitful mask and tightens the screws, opposition will undoubtedly continue to surge. One surefire way to break the back of the schemers is to elect members of Congress who will support legislation getting the U.S. government to de-fund and withdraw from the dictators’ club known as the United Nations. Whether American resistance to the globalist plot will be enough to stop it, however, depends largely on educating and activating the public.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/17704-un-plotting-to-dramatically-alter-your-views-and-behavior
Global Warming Nazis...
Climate Scientist: “Global Warming Nazis” Threaten Humanity
Written by Alex Newman
As global-warming alarmists become increasingly deranged in their attacks on experts and critics who reject their controversial and increasingly discredited theory, at least one of the world’s leading climate scientists has finally had enough. Dr. Roy Spencer (shown), who served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, published a scathing rebuke of the alarmists and their “extremist” rhetoric.
Referring to the alarmists as “global warming Nazis,” Dr. Spencer warned that their “pseudo-scientific ramblings” and support for fascist-style “radical policies” literally threaten the lives of millions of people — especially the poor.
What appears to have set off Spencer — a Ph.D. in meteorology and principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville — are the ever-more vicious and absurd tactics of extreme global-warming theorists.
In a February 20 piece on his website headlined “Time to push back against the global warming Nazis,” the climate expert notes that “somebody” pushed his button. “When politicians and scientists started calling people like me ‘deniers,’ they crossed the line,” he wrote.
As countless other experts, scientists, and analysts have also noted, Spencer said that the warmists were trying to equate skeptics of global warming theories — those who do not see climate change as man-made or a serious problem — with those who deny that Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) regime exterminated millions of Jews.
“Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison,” Spencer wrote. “It’s time to push back.”
In response, Spencer said, he is going to start calling them “global warming Nazis.” There are very good reasons for the comparison, too, he added.
“The pseudo-scientific ramblings by their leaders have falsely warned of mass starvation, ecological collapse, agricultural collapse, overpopulation ... all so that the masses would support their radical policies,” he said. “Policies that would not voluntarily be supported by a majority of freedom-loving people.”
According to Dr. Spencer, whose latest post has already attracted the fury of “global warming Nazis,” the alarmists are just as guilty as a person who yells “fire!” in a crowded theater when there is actually no fire. “Except they threaten the lives of millions of people in the process,” he explained.
“Like the Nazis, they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in turn supports their scientific research to support their cause (in the 1930s, it was superiority of the white race),” Spencer added.
The attack on science in the name of dubious global-warming theories, which The New American has described in great detail, also ruffled Dr. Spencer’s feathers. “Dissenting scientific views are now jack-booted through tactics like pressuring scientific journals to not publish papers with which they disagree ... even getting journal editors to resign,” he wrote.
Indeed, as the world learned during ClimateGate and ClimateGate II, leading so-called “climate scientists” were exposed in leaked e-mails doing precisely what Spencer describes — and more. In addition to being caught trying to silence scientific viewpoints, the warmists, many of whom contributed to the United Nations’ alarmist and discredited reports, were exposed fudging data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures and even conspiring to break the law.
There are many more reasons why the vicious warming-theorists resemble the National Socialists, too. “Like the Nazis, they are anti-capitalist,” Spencer said. “They are willing to sacrifice millions of lives of poor people at the altar of radical environmentalism, advocating expensive energy policies that increase poverty. And if there is a historically demonstrable threat to humanity, it is poverty.”
As many publications and analysts have documented, the warmists’ hatred of energy and prosperity is deeply ingrained.
Spencer made clear that those who believe in finding new forms of energy are not the problem. “I’m instead talking about the extremists. They are the ones who are sure they are right, and who are bent on forcing their views upon everyone else,” he said. “Unfortunately, the extremists are usually the only ones you hear from in the media, because they scream the loudest and make the most outrageous claims.”
As countless real scientists and experts have also done, Spencer blasted the bogus invocation of “consensus” in the debate. “This authoritarianism tends to happen with an over-educated elite class,” he added. “I have read that Nazi Germany had more PhDs per capita than any other country. I’m not against education, but it seems like some of the stupidest people are also the most educated.”
Spencer, who pointed out that he did not start the fight, concluded by saying that as long as the warming-theorist extremists continue to call those who disagree with their theory “deniers,” he will keep calling them “global warming Nazis.”
In the comments of his blog, several people wondered whether the term Nazi might be over the top. In a follow-up note, he disagreed. “Considering the fact that these people are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did — all in the name of what they consider to be a righteous cause — I think it is very appropriate,” Spencer said. “Again, I didn’t start the name-calling.”
As The New American reported just this week, the climate alarmists are now, in fact, openly advocating murderous totalitarianism as a way to fight “global warming” (which, of course, has been on “pause” for 17 years and counting).
Even as many experts are forecasting global cooling, real scientists and people everywhere must continue to reject tyranny and pseudo-science. Spencer deserves credit for fighting back.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/17685-climate-scientist-global-warming-nazis-threaten-humanity
Written by Alex Newman
As global-warming alarmists become increasingly deranged in their attacks on experts and critics who reject their controversial and increasingly discredited theory, at least one of the world’s leading climate scientists has finally had enough. Dr. Roy Spencer (shown), who served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, published a scathing rebuke of the alarmists and their “extremist” rhetoric.
Referring to the alarmists as “global warming Nazis,” Dr. Spencer warned that their “pseudo-scientific ramblings” and support for fascist-style “radical policies” literally threaten the lives of millions of people — especially the poor.
What appears to have set off Spencer — a Ph.D. in meteorology and principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville — are the ever-more vicious and absurd tactics of extreme global-warming theorists.
In a February 20 piece on his website headlined “Time to push back against the global warming Nazis,” the climate expert notes that “somebody” pushed his button. “When politicians and scientists started calling people like me ‘deniers,’ they crossed the line,” he wrote.
As countless other experts, scientists, and analysts have also noted, Spencer said that the warmists were trying to equate skeptics of global warming theories — those who do not see climate change as man-made or a serious problem — with those who deny that Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) regime exterminated millions of Jews.
“Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison,” Spencer wrote. “It’s time to push back.”
In response, Spencer said, he is going to start calling them “global warming Nazis.” There are very good reasons for the comparison, too, he added.
“The pseudo-scientific ramblings by their leaders have falsely warned of mass starvation, ecological collapse, agricultural collapse, overpopulation ... all so that the masses would support their radical policies,” he said. “Policies that would not voluntarily be supported by a majority of freedom-loving people.”
According to Dr. Spencer, whose latest post has already attracted the fury of “global warming Nazis,” the alarmists are just as guilty as a person who yells “fire!” in a crowded theater when there is actually no fire. “Except they threaten the lives of millions of people in the process,” he explained.
“Like the Nazis, they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in turn supports their scientific research to support their cause (in the 1930s, it was superiority of the white race),” Spencer added.
The attack on science in the name of dubious global-warming theories, which The New American has described in great detail, also ruffled Dr. Spencer’s feathers. “Dissenting scientific views are now jack-booted through tactics like pressuring scientific journals to not publish papers with which they disagree ... even getting journal editors to resign,” he wrote.
Indeed, as the world learned during ClimateGate and ClimateGate II, leading so-called “climate scientists” were exposed in leaked e-mails doing precisely what Spencer describes — and more. In addition to being caught trying to silence scientific viewpoints, the warmists, many of whom contributed to the United Nations’ alarmist and discredited reports, were exposed fudging data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures and even conspiring to break the law.
There are many more reasons why the vicious warming-theorists resemble the National Socialists, too. “Like the Nazis, they are anti-capitalist,” Spencer said. “They are willing to sacrifice millions of lives of poor people at the altar of radical environmentalism, advocating expensive energy policies that increase poverty. And if there is a historically demonstrable threat to humanity, it is poverty.”
As many publications and analysts have documented, the warmists’ hatred of energy and prosperity is deeply ingrained.
Spencer made clear that those who believe in finding new forms of energy are not the problem. “I’m instead talking about the extremists. They are the ones who are sure they are right, and who are bent on forcing their views upon everyone else,” he said. “Unfortunately, the extremists are usually the only ones you hear from in the media, because they scream the loudest and make the most outrageous claims.”
As countless real scientists and experts have also done, Spencer blasted the bogus invocation of “consensus” in the debate. “This authoritarianism tends to happen with an over-educated elite class,” he added. “I have read that Nazi Germany had more PhDs per capita than any other country. I’m not against education, but it seems like some of the stupidest people are also the most educated.”
Spencer, who pointed out that he did not start the fight, concluded by saying that as long as the warming-theorist extremists continue to call those who disagree with their theory “deniers,” he will keep calling them “global warming Nazis.”
In the comments of his blog, several people wondered whether the term Nazi might be over the top. In a follow-up note, he disagreed. “Considering the fact that these people are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did — all in the name of what they consider to be a righteous cause — I think it is very appropriate,” Spencer said. “Again, I didn’t start the name-calling.”
As The New American reported just this week, the climate alarmists are now, in fact, openly advocating murderous totalitarianism as a way to fight “global warming” (which, of course, has been on “pause” for 17 years and counting).
Even as many experts are forecasting global cooling, real scientists and people everywhere must continue to reject tyranny and pseudo-science. Spencer deserves credit for fighting back.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/17685-climate-scientist-global-warming-nazis-threaten-humanity
"The totalitarian leftists in academe, among the absolute worst of which are the Jesuits who run institutions like Loyola University, just cannot stand the fact that there is one single person among them who is effective at explaining to students the advantages of freedom and prosperity over socialism and tyranny (referred to as “social justice” by the Loyola administration)."
The Truth Seeps Out About Walter Block
By Thomas DiLorenzo
Every time the totalitarian leftists in academe orchestrate one of their libelous PC explosions of character assassination their real motives eventually seep out. They usually begin with a spasm of name calling — racist, homophobe, hater of the poor, bla, bla, bla, bla. But then one or more of them eventually slips and lets the cat out of the bag. Which brings us to the case of the recent libeling of Walter Block by the NY Times and the mannerless boob who is the president of Loyola University New Orleans, one “Father” Kevin Wildes. There are now over 50 comments following Wildes’ libelous smear in his university’s newspaper, The Maroon. Only one or two of the campus leftists have had the courage to answer the dozens of critics of Wildes (who himself has not answered them either), despite the fact that they are free to enter the fray anonymously. One in particular revealed the real purpose of the libel: Walter opposes the minimum wage (!!!!!) and myriad other economic interventions, even including socialized medicine (!!!!!!!!). Worse yet, he sounds like a “TEA Party” person. Someone call the Gestapo, quick!
This has happened over and over again in academe. The totalitarian leftists in academe, among the absolute worst of which are the Jesuits who run institutions like Loyola University, just cannot stand the fact that there is one single person among them who is effective at explaining to students the advantages of freedom and prosperity over socialism and tyranny (referred to as “social justice” by the Loyola administration). Walter Block has been very effective at this for many decades, which is why they consider him to be Public Enemy Number One. They will tell any lie, assassinate anyone’s character, and generally conduct themselves like totalitarian-minded thugs in their crusades to crush all diverse opinions on campuses. And they do it while wearing priests’ collars at Loyola University New Orleans.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/02/the-truth-seeps-out-about-walter-block.html
By Thomas DiLorenzo
Every time the totalitarian leftists in academe orchestrate one of their libelous PC explosions of character assassination their real motives eventually seep out. They usually begin with a spasm of name calling — racist, homophobe, hater of the poor, bla, bla, bla, bla. But then one or more of them eventually slips and lets the cat out of the bag. Which brings us to the case of the recent libeling of Walter Block by the NY Times and the mannerless boob who is the president of Loyola University New Orleans, one “Father” Kevin Wildes. There are now over 50 comments following Wildes’ libelous smear in his university’s newspaper, The Maroon. Only one or two of the campus leftists have had the courage to answer the dozens of critics of Wildes (who himself has not answered them either), despite the fact that they are free to enter the fray anonymously. One in particular revealed the real purpose of the libel: Walter opposes the minimum wage (!!!!!) and myriad other economic interventions, even including socialized medicine (!!!!!!!!). Worse yet, he sounds like a “TEA Party” person. Someone call the Gestapo, quick!
This has happened over and over again in academe. The totalitarian leftists in academe, among the absolute worst of which are the Jesuits who run institutions like Loyola University, just cannot stand the fact that there is one single person among them who is effective at explaining to students the advantages of freedom and prosperity over socialism and tyranny (referred to as “social justice” by the Loyola administration). Walter Block has been very effective at this for many decades, which is why they consider him to be Public Enemy Number One. They will tell any lie, assassinate anyone’s character, and generally conduct themselves like totalitarian-minded thugs in their crusades to crush all diverse opinions on campuses. And they do it while wearing priests’ collars at Loyola University New Orleans.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/02/the-truth-seeps-out-about-walter-block.html
"The American media is a useless news source. It serves as a Ministry for Government Lies. The corrupt propagandists are portraying the undemocratic removal of Yanukovich as a victory for freedom and democracy. When it begins to leak out that everything has gone wrong, the presstitutes will blame it all on Russia and Putin. The Western media is a plague upon humanity."
Democracy Murdered By Protest
Ukraine Falls To Intrigue and violence
Paul Craig Roberts
Who’s in charge? Certainly not the bought-and-paid-for-moderates that Washington and the EU hoped to install as the new government of Ukraine. The agreement that the Washington and EU supported opposition concluded with President Yanukovich to end the crisis did not last an hour. Even the former boxing champion, Vitaly Klitschko, who was riding high as an opposition leader until a few hours ago has been booed by the rioters and shoved aside. The newly appointed president by what is perhaps an irrelevant parliament, Oleksandr Turchynov, has no support base among those who overthrew the government. As the BBC reports, “like all of the mainstream opposition politicians, Mr. Turchynov is not entirely trusted or respected by the protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square.”
In western Ukraine the only organized and armed force is the ultra-nationalist Right Sector. From the way this group’s leaders speak, they assume that they are in charge. One of the group’s leaders, Aleksandr Muzychko, has pledged to fight against “Jews and Russians until I die.” Asserting the Right Sector’s authority over the situation, Muzychko declared that now that the democratically elected government has been overthrown, “there will be order and discipline” or “Right Sector squads will shoot the bastards on the spot.”
The bastards are any protesters who dare to protest the Right Sector’s control.
Muzychko declared, “The next president of Ukraine will be from Right Sector.”
Another Right Sector leader, Dmitry Yarosh, declared: “the Right Sector will not lay down its arms.” He declared the deal made between the opposition and the President to be “unacceptable” and demanded the liquidation of President Yanukovich’s political party.
The Right Sector’s roots go back to the Ukrainians who fought for Adolf Hitler against the Soviet Union during World War 2. It was the Right Sector that introduced armed fighters and turned the tide of the protests in Kiev from peaceful protests in favor of joining the EU to violent attacks on police with the view of overthrowing the democratically elected government, which the Right Sector succeeded in doing.
The Right Sector did not overthrow the Ukraine government in order to deliver it into the hands of the Washington and EU paid “opposition.”
There is a tendency to discount the Right Sector as a small fringe group, but the Right Sector not only took control of the protests away from the Western supported moderates, as moderate leaders themselves admitted, but also the Right Sector has enough public support to destroy the national monument to the Red Army soldiers who died liberating Ukraine from Nazi Germany.
Unlike the US orchestrated toppling of the stature of Saddam Hussein, which was a PR event for the presstitutes in which Iraqis themselves were not involved, Ukrainian rightists’ destruction of the monument commemorating the Red Army’s liberation of the Ukraine had public support. If the Right Sector hates Russians for defeating the Nazis, the Right Sector also hates the US, France, and England for the same reason. The Right Sector is an unlikely political party to take Ukraine into the EU.
The Russian parts of Ukraine clearly understand that the Right Sector’s destruction of the monument commemorating the stand of the Red Army against the German troops is a threat against the Russian population of Ukraine. Provincial governments in eastern and southern Ukraine that formerly were part of Russia are organizing militias against the ultra-nationalist threat unleashed by Washington’s stupidity and incompetence and by the naive and gullible Kiev protesters.
Having interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs and lost control, Washington is now issuing ultimatums to Russia not to interfere in Ukraine. Does the idiot Susan Rice, Obama’s neoconservative National Security Advisor, think Putin is going to pay any attention to her ultimatums or to any instruction from a government so militarily incompetent that it was unable to successfully occupy Baghdad after 8 years or to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban after 12 years? In only took a few hours for Russian troops to destroy the American and Israeli trained and armed Georgian army that Washington sent to invade South Ossetia.
Where does Obama find morons like Susan Rice and Victoria Nuland? These two belong in a kindergarten for mentally handicapped children, not in the government of a superpower where their ignorance and arrogance can start World War 3.
Ukraine is far more important to Russia than it is to the US or EU. If the situation in Ukraine spirals out of control and right-wing extremists seize control, Russian intervention is certain. The arrogant and stupid Obama regime has carelessly and recklessly created a direct strategic threat to the existence of Russia.
According to the Moscow Times, this is what a senior Russian official has to say: “If Ukraine breaks apart, it will trigger a war.” Ukraine “will lose Crimera first,” because Russia “will go in just as we did in Georgia.” Another Russian official said: “ We will not allow Europe and the US to take Ukraine from us. The states of the former Soviet Union, we are one family. They think Russia is still as weak as in the early 1990s but we are not.”
The Ukrainian right-wing is in a stronger position than Washington’s paid Ukrainian puppets, essentially weak and irrelevant persons who sold out their country for Washington’s money. The Right Sector is organized. It is armed. It is indigenous. It is not dependent on money funneled in from Washington and EU financed NGOs. It has an ideology, and it is focused. The Right Sector doesn’t have to pay its protesters to take to the streets like Washington had to do.
Most importantly, well-meaning but stupid protesters–especially the Kiev students–and an Ukrainian parliament playing to the protesters destroyed Ukrainian democracy. The opposition controlled parliament removed an elected president from office without an election, an obvious illegal and undemocratic action. The opposition controlled parliament issued illegal arrest warrants for members of the president’s government. The opposition controlled parliament illegally released criminals from prison. As the opposition has created a regime of illegality in place of law and constitutional procedures, the field is wide open for the Right Sector. Expect everything the opposition did to Yanukovich to be done to them by the Right Sector. By their own illegal and unconstitutional actions, the opposition has set the precedent for their own demise.
Just as the February 1917 revolution against the Russian Tsar set the stage for the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, surprising the stupid “reformers,” the overthrow of the Ukrainian political order has set the stage for the Right Sector. We can only hope that the Right Sector blows its chance.
The American media is a useless news source. It serves as a Ministry for Government Lies. The corrupt propagandists are portraying the undemocratic removal of Yanukovich as a victory for freedom and democracy. When it begins to leak out that everything has gone wrong, the presstitutes will blame it all on Russia and Putin. The Western media is a plague upon humanity.
Americans have no idea that the neoconservative regime of the White House Fool is leading them into a Great Power Confrontation that could end in destruction of life on earth.
Ironic, isn’t it. America’s “first black president,” the person liberals thought would restore justice, morality, and reason to Western civilization, is instead now positioned as the person who will have to accept humiliating defeat or risk the destruction of life on earth.
Link:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/02/23/democracy-murdered-protest-ukraine-falls-intrigue-violence/
Ukraine Falls To Intrigue and violence
Paul Craig Roberts
Who’s in charge? Certainly not the bought-and-paid-for-moderates that Washington and the EU hoped to install as the new government of Ukraine. The agreement that the Washington and EU supported opposition concluded with President Yanukovich to end the crisis did not last an hour. Even the former boxing champion, Vitaly Klitschko, who was riding high as an opposition leader until a few hours ago has been booed by the rioters and shoved aside. The newly appointed president by what is perhaps an irrelevant parliament, Oleksandr Turchynov, has no support base among those who overthrew the government. As the BBC reports, “like all of the mainstream opposition politicians, Mr. Turchynov is not entirely trusted or respected by the protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square.”
In western Ukraine the only organized and armed force is the ultra-nationalist Right Sector. From the way this group’s leaders speak, they assume that they are in charge. One of the group’s leaders, Aleksandr Muzychko, has pledged to fight against “Jews and Russians until I die.” Asserting the Right Sector’s authority over the situation, Muzychko declared that now that the democratically elected government has been overthrown, “there will be order and discipline” or “Right Sector squads will shoot the bastards on the spot.”
The bastards are any protesters who dare to protest the Right Sector’s control.
Muzychko declared, “The next president of Ukraine will be from Right Sector.”
Another Right Sector leader, Dmitry Yarosh, declared: “the Right Sector will not lay down its arms.” He declared the deal made between the opposition and the President to be “unacceptable” and demanded the liquidation of President Yanukovich’s political party.
The Right Sector’s roots go back to the Ukrainians who fought for Adolf Hitler against the Soviet Union during World War 2. It was the Right Sector that introduced armed fighters and turned the tide of the protests in Kiev from peaceful protests in favor of joining the EU to violent attacks on police with the view of overthrowing the democratically elected government, which the Right Sector succeeded in doing.
The Right Sector did not overthrow the Ukraine government in order to deliver it into the hands of the Washington and EU paid “opposition.”
There is a tendency to discount the Right Sector as a small fringe group, but the Right Sector not only took control of the protests away from the Western supported moderates, as moderate leaders themselves admitted, but also the Right Sector has enough public support to destroy the national monument to the Red Army soldiers who died liberating Ukraine from Nazi Germany.
Unlike the US orchestrated toppling of the stature of Saddam Hussein, which was a PR event for the presstitutes in which Iraqis themselves were not involved, Ukrainian rightists’ destruction of the monument commemorating the Red Army’s liberation of the Ukraine had public support. If the Right Sector hates Russians for defeating the Nazis, the Right Sector also hates the US, France, and England for the same reason. The Right Sector is an unlikely political party to take Ukraine into the EU.
The Russian parts of Ukraine clearly understand that the Right Sector’s destruction of the monument commemorating the stand of the Red Army against the German troops is a threat against the Russian population of Ukraine. Provincial governments in eastern and southern Ukraine that formerly were part of Russia are organizing militias against the ultra-nationalist threat unleashed by Washington’s stupidity and incompetence and by the naive and gullible Kiev protesters.
Having interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs and lost control, Washington is now issuing ultimatums to Russia not to interfere in Ukraine. Does the idiot Susan Rice, Obama’s neoconservative National Security Advisor, think Putin is going to pay any attention to her ultimatums or to any instruction from a government so militarily incompetent that it was unable to successfully occupy Baghdad after 8 years or to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban after 12 years? In only took a few hours for Russian troops to destroy the American and Israeli trained and armed Georgian army that Washington sent to invade South Ossetia.
Where does Obama find morons like Susan Rice and Victoria Nuland? These two belong in a kindergarten for mentally handicapped children, not in the government of a superpower where their ignorance and arrogance can start World War 3.
Ukraine is far more important to Russia than it is to the US or EU. If the situation in Ukraine spirals out of control and right-wing extremists seize control, Russian intervention is certain. The arrogant and stupid Obama regime has carelessly and recklessly created a direct strategic threat to the existence of Russia.
According to the Moscow Times, this is what a senior Russian official has to say: “If Ukraine breaks apart, it will trigger a war.” Ukraine “will lose Crimera first,” because Russia “will go in just as we did in Georgia.” Another Russian official said: “ We will not allow Europe and the US to take Ukraine from us. The states of the former Soviet Union, we are one family. They think Russia is still as weak as in the early 1990s but we are not.”
The Ukrainian right-wing is in a stronger position than Washington’s paid Ukrainian puppets, essentially weak and irrelevant persons who sold out their country for Washington’s money. The Right Sector is organized. It is armed. It is indigenous. It is not dependent on money funneled in from Washington and EU financed NGOs. It has an ideology, and it is focused. The Right Sector doesn’t have to pay its protesters to take to the streets like Washington had to do.
Most importantly, well-meaning but stupid protesters–especially the Kiev students–and an Ukrainian parliament playing to the protesters destroyed Ukrainian democracy. The opposition controlled parliament removed an elected president from office without an election, an obvious illegal and undemocratic action. The opposition controlled parliament issued illegal arrest warrants for members of the president’s government. The opposition controlled parliament illegally released criminals from prison. As the opposition has created a regime of illegality in place of law and constitutional procedures, the field is wide open for the Right Sector. Expect everything the opposition did to Yanukovich to be done to them by the Right Sector. By their own illegal and unconstitutional actions, the opposition has set the precedent for their own demise.
Just as the February 1917 revolution against the Russian Tsar set the stage for the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, surprising the stupid “reformers,” the overthrow of the Ukrainian political order has set the stage for the Right Sector. We can only hope that the Right Sector blows its chance.
The American media is a useless news source. It serves as a Ministry for Government Lies. The corrupt propagandists are portraying the undemocratic removal of Yanukovich as a victory for freedom and democracy. When it begins to leak out that everything has gone wrong, the presstitutes will blame it all on Russia and Putin. The Western media is a plague upon humanity.
Americans have no idea that the neoconservative regime of the White House Fool is leading them into a Great Power Confrontation that could end in destruction of life on earth.
Ironic, isn’t it. America’s “first black president,” the person liberals thought would restore justice, morality, and reason to Western civilization, is instead now positioned as the person who will have to accept humiliating defeat or risk the destruction of life on earth.
Link:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/02/23/democracy-murdered-protest-ukraine-falls-intrigue-violence/
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