Political Class Dismissed

The next time one of these phony anti-crony capitalism lefties complain about crony capitalists and the need to regulate them, they should be reminded that they voted not audit the source of all crony capitalism.

Here’s one member of the left who for once did a fine job along with his visual aids showing what kind of evil the FED is up too.

The only 100% truthful analysis I’ve heard all night about the latest socio-fascist abomination by the native criminal class.

Their authoritarian Utopian present and our future.
Some progressives believe we should adopt the British political system. Why? “the party in power having the ability and right to enact its agenda”
Here in the U.S. the cry of the progressives is that winning an election is a mandate from the people (as long as progressives are in power), that the party in power has the right to enact their agenda. Here we can see from Sean Gabb what the perversion of the law and custom into a divine right of the majority party has done to the UK.

I was born in a free country. People could speak as they pleased and live without constant supervision. If a policeman knocked on my parents’ front door, their only worry was that he might have bad news.

I now live in a police state. Recent legal reforms have completely displaced common law protections and all offenses are now arrestable. If I am accused of so much as dropping a sweet [VDARE.COM: U.S. = candy] wrapping on the ground, I can be arrested and taken to a police station. There, I shall have my fingerprints and a DNA sample taken. Even if I am released without charge, these records will be kept indefinitely. They will also be shared with several dozen foreign governments, who will often regard presence on a DNA database as evidence of a criminal record.

The natural response is that sensible men do all that is needed to avoid any police attention. That means prompt obedience to commands that may have no legal basis. And what is that but a police state?

I now live in a country where I have to be aware that private meetings and even private conversations are subject to paid informers and can lead to prosecution and professional ruin.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AT VDARE.COM

With the number of government-sponsored events, legislative agendas, and international treaty negotiations regarding climate change climbing, the political debate regarding the environment grows ever hotter – far faster than the climate itself. That’s a bit of a wonder given a rather amazing discovery this past month in England.

The University of East Anglia (UK) hosts one of the world’s foremost respected climatology research centers, so the discovery of massive scientific fraud by climate scientists at that institution should have thrown a cold dose of reality onto the debate.

Surprisingly, it did not.

The daily onslaught of global warming propaganda continues unabated. Neither the media, politicians, popular celebrities, the educational establishment, or global warming “scientists” appear to be the least bit interested with the issue of corrupted data. The truth, it seems, is irrelevant. Scientific integrity, a quaint anachronism, is to be likewise discarded.

If we need evidence of the degree to which environmentalism has become a religion, here we have it.

So the public debate on global warming continues, in barbershops, beauty salons, cafés and kitchens, all across America, indeed across the globe, based on significant amounts of false information.

Worse yet, educational standards in most of the West are now so low as to render sensible debate on the subject pointless, even if the data were reputable. But let’s set that lamentable fact aside. Let’s assume we are all geniuses from Punahou or Andover. There is still a critical problem in addressing the issue: We are a society of specialists.

Since the industrial revolution very few of us know much about anything in great detail, except for the professional specialty in which we majored in college, if we attended college. The Renaissance man (with pardons to Christine de Pizan) went out with, well, with the Renaissance. Sure, there are a few autodidacts of great knowledge still lingering about, who managed to slip though the system, their minds undimmed, but they are the exception, not the rule.

With that in consideration, wouldn’t it be in everyone’s best interest to recognize that most of us are NOT qualified to intelligibly discuss the finer points of climatology, but to also recognize that we ARE being stampeded into doing so?

Those who will benefit through the political process of climate change legislation, and the economic adjustments that would follow, have much to gain in manipulating our fears. We must then assume they are doing so. To do otherwise would be to ignore an inconvenient truth: power corrupts and it even corrupts environmentalists. That corruption will grow far worse once they become carbon billionaires.

Should we not be asking ourselves, are we to be as cattle stampeded over a cliff by unknown forces, or are we to stand as men and women and rationally determine our own course through informed assessment of credible data? Are we truly willing to lay aside all that we have gained since the Enlightenment to return to a Dark Age where superstition and fear trumps science and reason, or are we willing to fight for an Enlightened future based on reason and verifiable evidence?

Global weather patterns are immeasurably complex, so much so that chaos theory suggests that we cannot yet begin to understand them accurately. This is why the weather forecasts are so often wrong. It becomes hubris then to presume that any one species (i.e. Man) can impact such a complex system in a way that the system cannot adequately mediate. The biosphere has been mediating the eruption of super volcanoes and the impact of massive meteors for as long as there has been an atmosphere to support life – and yet life has survived.

So, admittedly, there is much we do not know, perhaps cannot know.

The hysteria of the climate change fear mongers is all based on this lack of knowledge, not on knowledge itself. Many of them will even admit to this, rationalizing their position as, “it is better to be safe than sorry.” That can be translated as, “it is better to stay in bed than to risk getting hit by an asteroid if you go outside.”

Nonetheless, there are a few simple things that we do know.

All historical evidence regarding climatology indicates that long-term warming and cooling periods are normal cyclical events that have occurred regularly throughout earth’s history – and that they occur over periods of millennia (not decades, or even centuries). For those who say, “I remember winters were colder when I was a kid, that is confabulation – which is another natural phenomenon, of the psycho-physiological variety.”

Historical evidence also demonstrates periods where the climate has changed radically in one direction or another for short periods, sometimes due to volcanic activity, possibly due to sunspots, and in many cases for reasons unknown.

But here is the critical point: These short-term and long-term shifts have been occurring in the historical record long before the arrival of the industrial revolution – which is what the folks at East Anglia were trying to hide. In short, while the evidence that we are in a period of global warming is fairly incontrovertible, the evidence that it is caused by man (is anthropogenic) is rather less clear – some would argue without support at all. More investigation is clearly needed, and it needs to be conducted with more scrutiny, in an environment of scientific integrity.

Sadly, the East Anglia incident isn’t even the first of its kind. Similar discoveries regarding fraudulent temperature and sea-level data were discovered as early as 2006. Those incidents failed to gain traction as the result of a coordinated counterattack by the climate-change industry on the scientists who questioned the validity of the data. Now, however, thanks to the efforts of some socially responsible hackers – who were clever enough to upload the East Anglia evidence simultaneously to multiple public servers beyond the jurisdiction of American and European law enforcement – clear evidence of premeditated climate-change fraud is finally being brought to light in a manner which doesn’t allow for the vested interests to cover it up.

Somehow, I suspect that wasn’t the kind of transparency that President Obama was expecting when he was preaching transparency on the campaign trail. It may be the kind of transparency we need though.

The ethical issue of “transparency sourcing” aside, here is the crucial point to be learned from the East Anglia incident: many scientists are no longer scientists. The easy spoils of government funding has turned far too many scientists into activists; activists who are all too willing to abandon scientific method in order to guarantee next year’s round of government funding.

As long as political popularity is distorting the scientific process in this manner, we must recognize that we have no reliable way to know whether there is long-term global warming, or not, and whether it is anthropogenic, or not. As well, we have no way to assess whether any warming process might even be beneficial – something that everyone appears to assume to be untrue simply because they cannot imagine positive change (more evidence of an approaching Dark Age). That is something that no real scientist would accept as a given.

Life is changing, and life is adapting. It is almost impossible to define life without those qualities. Changing and adapting is what man has been doing on this planet since long before we crawled out of the oceans and later swung down from the trees – both of which occurred in a world that was rather hotter than the one we know today.

It is at the point when we stop changing, when we stop adapting, that we should begin to worry. It is at the point when our environment stops challenging us to change that we should begin to fear.

Stasis is what we should be afraid of, not change. Change is what keeps us alive. It is what defined us as we are now, and it will define what we become in the future – if we let it. The alternative is every bit as unthinkable as would have been choosing to stay in the caves.

The lesson has yet to be grasped by Washington D.C., Albany and Wall Street, who prefer to be parasites on the backs of the industrious.

The Great Thanksgiving Hoax
Mises Daily: Saturday, November 20, 1999 by Richard J. Maybury

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

READ ON AT MISES.ORG

In short, Faustian bargains with the demons of D.C.

The Lords of Entitlement
Every medical insurance decision will be subject to rationing by politics.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied policy logic and public opinion late Saturday night, ramming through the House a nearly 2,000-page health-care leviathan that counts as the biggest expansion of the federal government since the New Deal. As President Obama likes to say, this was a “teachable moment” about our current government.

The vote was 220 to 215, with 39 House Democrats joining all but one Republican in opposition. Mrs. Pelosi had to cajole and bribe her way to the magic 218, and the list of her promises must be stacked to the ceiling.

READ ON

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there’s little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Read Elites and Tyrants

Totalitarianism in 4 easy steps.
Sounds real familiar.

Soak-The-Rich Strategies Backfire In State After Deficit-Ridden State
By STEVEN MALANGA
Posted 10/07/2009 06:13 PM ET

When David Paterson became governor of New York after Eliot Spitzer’s hooker escapades, the former state senator from Harlem shocked New Yorkers by declaring that taxes were too high and that he had many friends who had left the state because there were better opportunities elsewhere.

New York had to grab control of its spending rather than continue raising taxes, said the former state senator with a long tax-and-spend track record, in what amounted to the equivalent of ideological heresy.

Still, as a political lightweight and accidental governor, Paterson quickly got rolled by the big-government wing of his own party, which passed a budget for this year with $6.1 billion in projected new taxes and fees, led by sharply higher rates starting for those earning more than $200,000 a year.

Asked if the budget made sense in the recession, an outgunned Paterson said: “None of this makes sense.”

READ ON

It’s interesting how modern day redistributionist social justice demagogues sound so similar to Huey Long.

Diagnosis: Massive growth of socialism and interventionism.

Therein lies the root cause of America’s health-care crisis. Thus, the prescription is obvious: radical surgery by removing all of this cancerous material from the body politic. No reform. Simply an immediately repeal of Medicare, Medicaid, health-care and insurance regulations, and medical licensure. End all government involvement in health care. Given the positive power of the free market and the enormous resiliency of human beings, the body politic will immediately begin recovering.

Jacob Hornberger at Campaign for Liberty

Michael W. Covel watched Michael Moore’s new anti-capitalism film “Capitalism: A Love Story” so you don’t have too. Mr. Covel got too see it for free. Free is good.
Personally I wouldn’t pay to see it because that would support Moore’s capitalist venture, which would be bad because that would be so much money that I wouldn’t have and more the money that the baseball capped limousine liberal Moore would have. Liberals, you can consider that to be my contribution to anti-capitalism.
Doesn’t sound like much of a thinking man’s movie on capitalism anyway (like no big surprise there, it’s a Michael Moore documentary), deserving of a parental rating of KA (Kool-Aid).

Read Michael Moore Kills Capitalism with Kool-Aid at mises.org

He has turned against the Neocons and they can’t stand it.

Obama bans candy cigarettes — and it only took 8 months to accomplish. Wow, change and efficiency in one fell swoop!

He’s really a rich liberal, bleeding heart and all, concerned about the little folks you know.
Scanning the progressive media’s response to O’Reilly’s endorsement of big government paternalism,. it looks like they have a new found respect for Bill.
I admit I have never liked the bombastic neocon, he has set off my libertarian B.S. detector regularly.

Louis Slaughter attacks Debra J.M. Smith who called into a liberal Rochester radio show to voice her opposition to the Obama healthcare bill. Debra states her opposition on Constitutional grounds, that the U.S. Constitution does not grant the federal government the power to provide for the general welfare, which she is correct. Slaughter goes bat-shit off the deep end at such right wing extremist talk and launches a gratuitous attack on Debra, saying:

“I know who you are. I know exactly who you are. You are the woman, too, who believes that everyone with AIDS should be put on an island to die.”

That was embarrassing Louise. Tsk Tsk

The talk show host also thinks the preamble, which he reads out loud is some kind of grant of federal authority. Were all liberals cheated by government schools? Michael Boldin explained the preamble very succinctly and correctly on September 5th right here on PCD in his post Misunderstanding the Preamble:

“The preamble lays out the intentions or the reasons for the Constitution. It does not grant one ounce of power to the federal government.”

Slaughter also thinks the oath of office she took to “to protect and defend the Constitution” also included “to provide for the public welfare, and common defense”. Talk about making stuff up! Actually Louise that wasn’t in your oath, not by a long shot, but in Section 8 - Powers of Congress it does state that the Congressional powers include “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”. Got it Louise? Comprehension of the English language may not have been your strong point in school but “general Welfare of the United States” is not the same thing as your imaginary socialist power “provide for the public welfare”.

Debra has the audio of her confrontation with Louise Slaughter and the equally not very bright talk show host on her web site at debrajmsmith.com.

Where did it start?

It started with the White House breaking the federal CAN-SPAM law in order to fill our e-mail inboxes with their health care agenda propaganda. It is one thing to have some fly-by-night shyster spamming you with medical nostrums and shady, too-good-to-be true financial deals; it is quite another to have the President of the United States spamming you with his equally questionable schemes. The spamming eventually blew up in the Obama Administration’s face and finally, after months of public controversy, the program was stopped.

Or did it?

Now the White House is skipping the home and going straight to the schools, to the impressionable, easily led astray minds of children.

This Tuesday, President Barack Obama is planning to broadcast a message directly into schools in order to sway the next generation to his Progressive agenda. [To be fair, it needs to be noted that President George H.W. Bush abused his position in a similar fashion back in 1991.] Ostensibly, Obama’s message will be about volunteerism, which any descent person supports, but as anyone who has seen the video that will accompany the President’s message knows, it is volunteerism with a twist – a twist of the arm that is.

Although the video if front-loaded with lots of benign statements and even noble sentiment, as it advances it descends into an appeal for far more than volunteerism. This is not a public service announcement; this is bald-faced propaganda. Except for the use of English and the lack of Brown Shirts, the video could easily have been produced in 1930’s Germany. If you are not convinced, go watch it.

The video is available on You Tube, the on-line video sharing service, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqcPA1ysSbw

Read more »

For the federal debt ceiling that is…

The Ever Increasing Debt Ceiling

Sadly, Geithner’s entire argument is that the only thing preventing the U.S. from meeting its obligations is a statutory limit arbitrarily set by Congress. If only things were that simple. There is much more involved in maintaining the solvency of the U.S., and very little of that has to do with the debt ceiling. The so-called debt ceiling was enacted when Congress passed the Second Liberty Bond act in 1917. It has since been raised repeatedly to accommodate Washington’s profligate spending. Constitutionalists hear such things and ask themselves “what does the Constitution have to say?” More…

The following interview on the BBC shows the true nature of the global warming crowd.  The global warming talking head is the retiring leader of Greenpeace, Gerd Leipold.

Further in the interview comes this information:

Although he admitted Greenpeace had released inaccurate but alarming information, Leipold defended the organization’s practice of "emotionalizing issues" in order to bring the public around to its way of thinking and alter public opinion.

Leipold said later in the BBC interview that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate.

"We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model," Leipold said. "If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary."

 

Leipold apparently has found an ally in Barack Obama.  The bailouts, stimuli and proposed health care overall are killing the economy and any chance for economic growth.

This proves you cannot have a rational debate with robots.