Political Class Dismissed

Court rooms are unwieldy devices. They often let truths emerge that are inconvenient. This seems to have been the case in the trial this month (April 2010) of Najibullah Zazi, who admitted to dumping his likely ineffectual bomb-making materials (made from beauty salon products) after he changed his mind about bombing the NYC subway system. He then flew home to Denver.

Zazi is a citizen of Afghanistan, but a legal permanent resident of the United States, who is accused of planning to commit suicide with a bomb in a crowded train. His arrest was famously broadcast with video footage of him buying hydrogen peroxide in a Denver beauty supply store. He has plead guilting to planning the crime. What is at issue is the fact that he chose not to commit the crime.

So, what does this mean to jurisprudence in America? It means that the government is now arresting people, not for something they actually did, or even for things they were actively planning to do, but for things that they formerly considered doing, but decided not to. This is alarming enough in itself, but more frightening still is the likelihood that this is only a tiny step away from arresting people for things they might do — given their ethnicities, cultures, religion, personal histories, and personality traits.

While this scenario may sounds like a bad mashup of 1984 and Minority Report, it is, unfortunately, fast becoming the reality of the present-day justice system in post 9/11 America. Only this month (April, 2010), it was reported that the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has begun using software from a private company, IBM, to do predictive modeling of whom is most likely to commit a crime. Citizens of Florida, be very afraid.* Citizens of Missouri should likewise be worried. Even though it was withdrawn following controversy, the Missouri Fusion Center MIAC report classified entire categories of Americans as potential terrorists. Actually, citizens of the whole country should be alarmed. A report from the Department of Homeland Security also identified whole classes of citizens, as disparate as returning veterans, Ron Paul supporters, and born-again Christians, as potential terrorists. Phillip K. Dick’s nightmares are fast becoming our daily realities.

For decades now, scientists have been failing in efforts to use computers to model the behavior of the economy and the weather — both of which are far less complex than the human mind. Using such modeling tools, both the SEC and Federal Reserve put our economy exactly where it is today — mostly broke, and broken. When the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) models get it wrong, the consequences can be even worse. The list of disasters resulting from bad weather predictions is simply too long to enumerate. In either case though, a person — you — can’t end up in jail as the result of a missing variable or a computer bug.

All this technology aside, there is an even more basic, and far larger problem with the concept of pre-emptive prosecution: it undermines civil society. Where is the motive, under such a system, for people to reconsider the consequences of their actions if they can be held equally accountable for committing or not committing the crime? By the same standard being pursued in trying Mr. Zazi, a good percentage of all people are guilty of some crime or another — whether that be having thought of jaywalking or of having considered eliminating their mother-in-law. Predictive prosecution is’t a recipe for a safer society, it is a recipe for turning half the country into a detention camp and the other half into mindless, soulless, unquestioning automatons of the state whose highest common denominator matches the lowest common denominator of the committee of unelected bureaucrats who dictated the parameters of a computer program.

We should not forget that Mr. Zazi was previous investigated and cleared as a threat by the F.B.I. It was only after the Obama administration felt the need to demonstrate a political victory in the war on terror that the case was reevaluated and a plea agreement was extorted out of Mr. Zazi by the Justice Department’s threat of charging his relatives with miscellaneous charges of dubious credibility. As a result, he has plead guilty to charges of having aiding al-Qaeda. Of course, the truth of any matter can never be known with any degree of certainty in plea arrangement situations, which are notoriously abused by overzealous prosecutors.

President Obama where is the change? Under your guidance, America is now not only putting people on trial for “thought crimes,” it is now  extending that abuse of justice to putting them on trial for “past thought” crimes — and that puts us on the slippery slope to far worse: pre-emptive prosecution. Is an Obama Doctrine of Predictive Prosecution, to match the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War, really the legacy you want to leave America? Is it not crystal clear to you that African-Americans and other minorities will most certainly be disproportionately victimized by such a system?

This is not quite the change we were expecting.

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

President Obama and congressional leaders raced Friday to strike a compromise on far-reaching health legislation, hoping to settle lingering disputes before Tuesday, when a special election in Massachusetts could hand Republicans their 41st vote in the Senate and the power to defeat Obama’s top domestic initiative.

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.

Cubans now have the freedom to buy as much potatoes and peas as they wish. Not everybody is happy about a free market in potatoes and peas though, just like their leftist comrades in the U.S. feel about healthcare, some Cubans think free markets inevitably create shortages and higher prices. Pretty stupid, I know.

It’s not that the Communist government of Cuba is making a bold step toward a real free market with this little experiment, like the government of the United States they believe that they need to stimulate production by redistributing wealth (subsidies) instead of letting natural market forces stimulate competition and production and let prices find their natural level.

Regarding President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Time magazine reports Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow for Non-proliferation at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, as commenting, “…it will be unhelpful in the domestic milieu.”

Now there is wry dry wit worthy of admiration.

Sadly it isn’t a joke.

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…

Libertarian cartoonist Kevin Tuma nails it.
More of Kevin’s work at Liberty For All

What it means to be Swedish in 2009. Can’t you smell the freedom in the country where everything is cradle to grave free? The egregious taxes to support such a government must have been worth it.

As if the military-industrial-complex wasn’t enough of a threat to peace and prosperity, the Big Government Problem Solvers are busy working to create a new special interest that will be even more dangerous to our future.

David Theroux exposes The Climate-Industrial-Complex:

Many have forgotten that it was no less than Enron that was the biggest backer of the Kyoto Protocol for the simple reason that as a major natural gas producer, Enron stood to make billions of dollars from a system of mandated emission credits.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, “If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory business.”

In addition to Duke Energy, among the firms pushing for mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions are General Electric, Shell, British Petroleum, Ford, ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Alcoa, American Electric Power, Caterpillar, John Deere, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, PNM, Siemens, Xerox, IBM, PG&E, News Corp., PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Nike.

Yet, this obvious interest-group component of the stampede to adopt extremely costly (and pointless, as Lomborg himself has shown) regulations of such non-pollutants as carbon dioxide appears to matter little in the major media or among most environmental groups. Indeed, there is no outcry! While true-believing climate alarmists have sought to smear and dismiss legitimate, scientific questions raised by scholars and organizations that receive funding from businesses opposed to climate controls, claiming that they are simply stooges for corporate interests, pro-alarmist groups supported by firms having an obvious interest in the adoption of climate statism are somehow enlightened, objective, incisive, and reliable. Why the double standard? The answer is that the climate alarmist view has far more to do with power politics, the shallowness of “elite” culture, and the fact that global warming is largely about environmental religion, not science.

For more about the manufactured lies behind global warming alarmism and special interests hoping to manipulate your fear of it for their personal gain, check out The Heartland Institute.

For the last however many years, Liberals have been screaming to the high heavens about transparency and rendition and abused detainees — and they were right to do so. But suddenly it is their man who is pulling the strings, rather than a conservative Republican, and guess what, he’s doing the same thing: continuing the same closed system, continuing rendition, and now continuing to not release photos of abused prisoners.

Today’s “Quick Vote” poll on the über-liberal CNN reveals the hypocrisy of Liberals. The question: “Do you think the government should release all photos of alleged abuse detainees?” The results so far? Yes - 20% (19434 votes); No - (an appalling) 80% (75426).

CNN Poll Results on Abuse Photos

How much do you want to bet that most of the 20% consists of Ron Paul Republicans, capital “L,” party-member Libertarians and garden variety, small “l” libertarians (civil and/or economic)? With Liberals like we have in America, who needs Fascists? (Of course, with Conservatives like we have in American, who needs Communists?)

Since war is just another big government program, you can’t trust liberals, who are big government enthusiasts, to end it. This is what happens when you expect progressives to end war … they escalate it.

US AIR STRIKES IN AFGHANISTAN ‘KILLED DOZENS’

Afghan officials say the US military killed up to 120 people in the bombing on Monday evening.

A Red Cross team travelled to Bala Baluk district in Farah yesterday, where they described “dozens of bodies in each of the two locations” they visited.

Spokeswoman Jessica Barry said: “There were bodies, there were graves and there were people burying bodies when we were there.

“We do confirm women and children. There were women and children.”

Trusting a progressive liberal like Obama to bring peace is like trusting an alcoholic to tend bar. It will get worse for everyone involved.

Latest episode of the Constitutional Coalition.

Available for download here and archive is here.

A United State president, who ironically was born in the same year that the Berlin Wall was constructed, yesterday proposed the construction of a financial “Berlin Wall” around America.

No, of course, he didn’t use those terms, or outline the goals in that fashion, but that is exactly the end result of President Obama’s goals. (Granted, I don’t believe for a moment that Obama himself comes up with this stuff. Read his resume. He doesn’t have the skill set. He is merely saying what he has been told to say.)

This follows calls last fall for limits on the amount of money American emigrants could take with them. That occurred after the brain drain from the U.S. started to become noticeable.

Amerikans, you vill bekome the da property of da state. Da produkts of your labor belong to us. You kan leave, of kourse, thes is a free kountry afterall, you just kan’t take your money vith you. It is nicht our problem das no other kountry will allow ein man entry vithout money in der pocket.

It will be interesting, a year or two from now, to see which is greater, the amount of illegal drugs being smuggled into the country, or the amount of U.S. Dollars being smuggled out of the country. (Actually, as it was with South Africa under Apartheid, it’s more likely to be diamonds and gold being smuggled out in piano legs and colons than it is to be actual currency.)

A drug dealer facing the death penalty is raped and becomes pregnant while being held in a foreign prison. Oh dear, what should the pro-interventionist, anti-abortion, pro-death penalty crowd do? Clearly America must invade Laos so as to prevent this humanitarian tragedy. After we’ve brought the poor girl home and she’s had the baby, then we can kill her.

Nothing clarifies political inconsistency like having real life force on you the hypotheticals you refused to consider because they were too absurd.

The topic will be on the neocon infestation of the right and the liberal warmongers behind Obama. (Basically, when it comes to foreign policy, the two parties are identical because they’re both controlled by globalists*.) This is my second broadcast on the Sentinel Radio network. You can call in live at (646) 727-2652 at 7:00 PM eastern time on 5/5/09. We will be webcast live from Sentinel Radio.

Archive is available here.

*Globalists are the people all too willing to “Use America First!”

Simple formula: (American Empire + Military Industrial Complex + Political Posturing) * Globalism

Explained in depth at Slate:

While America’s embrace of Israel is partially motivated both by shared values and by the lobbying power of an influential minority group, neither Israel’s creaky democratic polity nor the hidden persuasive powers of AIPAC can claim much credit for the billions of dollars in American military credits that Israel enjoys—a vast corporate welfare program that benefits Pentagon defense contractors as much as it benefits Israel’s military.

Read more »

Download here.

Here’s a great 1 hour documentary about the unconstitutional Federal Reserve.