Thursday, August 22, 2013

President Obama Defends Black Racist Shooting Of White Australian

Why Doesn't President Obama claim these two black teenagers could be his son like Trayvon Martin

Remember how the media, celebrities, politicians and black activists falsely portrayed the shooting in self defence of Trayvon Martin by Latino George Zimmerman as a white-on-black hate crime?




CRIPS AND BLOOD

Tim Blair – Thursday, August 22, 2013 (3:11am)

Gang signals from Chancey Luna and James Edwards, the two tough guys who are alleged to have killed Australian Christopher Lane by shooting him in the back while he was jogging: 

image 

Luna, alleged to be the trigger man, is a black power enthusiast. Luna, Edwards and co-accused Michael Jones are shown here and here in various pathetic poses, including this Facebook image of Edwards: 

image 

His future hopefully involves potassium chloride. Jim Treacher observes
It’s being treated as national news in Australia, but of course it’s being framed as a gun control issue. What are the odds that these, ahem, children used a legally obtained and licensed firearm? Any chance they’re members of the NRA? 


UPDATE. Iowahawk
I’m guessing the president won’t be commenting on their hypothetical resemblance to his hypothetical sons. 
UPDATE II. Jennifer Luna, mother of the accused killer, says that she ”wouldn’t be a good parent” if she didn’t worry about her son being executed or sent to jail for murder. Parenting is hard.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Capitalism: The Cure, Not The Problem

Capitalism: The Cure, Not The Problem

Image source
James McKibbin
Activist Post

The political climate of this country is full of tension and anger. Whether one considers themselves to be on the left, right, or something else altogether, they are undoubtedly fed up with this current system. There is no better display of these emotions than the current Occupy movement, now spreading across the country and the whole world. This Saturday was the kickoff of Occupy Pittsburgh.

Being that I count myself among the fed up, I wanted to attend. The political ideologies represented at the Pittsburgh rallies and marches on Saturday were varied. Most people participating no longer trust either political party to represent them anymore. There was popular sentiment that corporations have now bought the vast majority of politicians and that corporate money needs to be barred from flowing into the campaign coffers of these politicians.

The above message I can agree with, but it is the other solutions that many Occupiers advocate that I strongly disagree with. It was my impression that a good majority of the protesters wanted higher taxes for the “rich”, more regulation of the economy with special emphasis on the banking sector, and more socialized programs like universal healthcare.

“The rich are hoarding all the wealth and must be forced to give it up and pay their fair share.” “Government needs to crack down on the banks and regulate them more because they are now allowed to gamble away peoples’ savings in the derivatives market with impunity.” “The greedy healthcare companies are raising the cost of healthcare and forcing the poor to go without, therefore they must be restrained or the government should provide all medical care.” Many of these same people were calling for an end to capitalism altogether.

But how do these individuals define capitalism? Most point to the current form of a state-regulated market economy and say that it does not work. They say capitalism has failed the average person and enriched the top 1%. Millions are unemployed, millions are on government assistance programs, and banks get bailed out while the people are sold out. Those that do have work are paid scraps while the “capitalist class” siphons off the surplus value they create for themselves.

If this is one’s view of capitalism then I cannot blame them for hating it. I hate it as well. But I would not call our current system capitalism. Quite the contrary; what we have now is a situation where the corporate and political power structures are so intertwined that they cannot survive without each other. However, this system is more accurately termed corporatism, mercantilism, or fascism.

In this system, the corporations get the regulations they want by buying off politicians with what are essentially bribes in the form of campaign contributions. Bureaucrats and politicians alike are given high paying jobs as rewards with the same corporations that they pushed the regulations through for.

A great example of this is Michael Taylor, the current Food Safety Czar under the Obama Administration. In the 1980s-90s, Taylor was a corporate lawyer and lobbyist for Monsanto, the notorious bio-tech giant responsible for Agent Orange, Roundup, most of the questionable genetically modified crops (GMO) in America, as well as the dangerous rBGH growth hormone given to cows to increase their milk output. He moved in and out of the FDA every few years pushing through necessary regulations to allow GMOs onto the market without any safety standards at all. He then became Monsanto’s vice president on public policy in 1998. Now he heads up food “safety.”

This guy epitomizes the revolving door of government and industry, which is the same no matter the department. The people in the regulatory agencies today are the executives of the corporations tomorrow. The Occupiers who naively want to give more power to these regulatory agencies are asking for the top 1% to further press the boot down on their necks.

Real capitalism would free the 99% from the authoritarian controls of the top 1%. In a free market, big companies would not give millions of dollars to politicians because there would be no benefit. The no-bid contracts, favorable regulations, tax loopholes, and subsidies that give big business the advantage over competitors would all disappear. There would finally be a level playing field so that small and medium sized businesses could compete more effectively, thus bringing better services overall to us, the consumers.

In the market, profits come from providing high quality goods and services at low prices, not from bribing the controllers of the public trough. The consumer is king and decides where their voting dollars will go. Reputation matters and companies will do what they can to keep them spotless. Innovation and creativity are unleashed for the benefit of all.

Capitalism is responsible for the relatively easy lifestyles we live today. Corporations, government, and the Federal Reserve have been ruining capitalism for generations and things have finally come to their inevitable destructive end. The choice now is not to overthrow “capitalism” and embrace socialism. The choice is to overthrow the corporatist/mercantilist/fascist system and embrace true free market capitalism where people are free to pursue prosperity and happiness in peaceful competition and cooperation.

This article first appeared at the Publius Foundation for 'Young People Advancing Individual Liberty.'

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The Age Of Global Warming: A History

Review by Martin Hutchinson from Good Reads

Errors have been key to global warming’s trajectory. Rupert Darwall’s book “The Age of Global Warming” shows how politicians locked us into global warming belief before scientists had credible evidence for it. Then a self-perpetuating U.N. bureaucracy and conflicted scientists manufactured evidence to order. The result has been toxic both for the modestly warming globe and for its economy.

The first study explaining how carbon dioxide emissions might produce global warming was published by the British meteorologist Guy Callendar in 1938, following a temperature upswing in the first third of the century. The unfortunate Callendar spent the rest of his life losing confidence in his theory as global temperatures declined, his last years coinciding with the sharp British winters of 1961-63.

Warming temperatures in the 1970s and 1980s gave new credibility to the Callendar Effect, but the breakthrough for atmospheric environmentalism was the three treaties on chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) agreed between 1987 and 1990. All production was eliminated by 2000 at a moderate cost on the global economy.

The political success of this effort helped launch global warming as a political issue. The United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, after the topic been discussed earlier in the year at a G7 meeting, presented to the U.S. Senate by James Hansen, a leading scientist, and promoted by Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister. The 1992 Rio Declaration included a commitment by governments to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, although no legally binding targets were set.

Once governments were committed and a U.N. bureaucracy was bent on self-perpetuation, production of the necessary evidence by the scientific community was all but inevitable. Although Darwall does not draw the analogy, financially aware readers will think of banks’ Value at Risk models, which were designed to minimize apparent risk to top management and regulators. Global warming computer models were likewise custom-built for their purpose. Most notorious was Michael Mann’s 1998 Hockey Stick graph, purporting to show that the 20th century’s rise in global temperature was far in excess of fluctuations of the preceding millennium.

Darwall goes painstakingly through the conceptual errors of this paper, notably the use of an algorithm that would produce a hockey-stick shape from almost anything. He tells of its rapturous acceptance by the Third IPCC Report in 2001 and its gradual debunking, against fierce opposition from the scientific establishment, in subsequent years. Even the IPCC was compelled to largely disown it in its 2007 Fourth Report.

Darwall shows how the traditional scientific method was abandoned by scientists who were rewarded for the promotion of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. He criticizes the confident promotion as undoubted fact a thesis which cannot be falsified for a century. He also makes good points about the failings of a peer-review system in which the peers’ livelihood depends on the scientific points being asserted.

His description of the politics of climate change is compelling, from the 1998 Kyoto conference to the abject failure at Copenhagen in 2009. The lesson is that after Copenhagen, both a global agreement on hard targets for emissions’ reduction and a watertight permit trading system to achieve such a reduction were chimeras.

Darwall rejects the more extreme claims of the global warming scientists, but appears agnostic as to whether human activity is actually warming the atmosphere. That is probably enough doubt to cause climate change believers to reject the book out of hand. To a less biased reader, it appears well-written, fair and even-toned.


After reading “The Age of Global Warming”, this reviewer would favor a modest carbon tax, adopted country by country, to encourage research and investment in lower-carbon technologies. The more urgent lesson, however, is the need to dismantle the birds’ nest of trading schemes, subsidies, crony capitalist contracts and regulations which have slowed global economic growth without doing much to slow whatever global warming actually exists.