Sunday, February 28, 2016

Conman Blair's cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules: Explosive new biography lays ex-PM's betrayal bare
Tom Bower's new book Broken Vows: Tony Blair - The Tragedy of Power lays bare how PM presided over a silent conspiracy to change face of UK
Book reveals how Blair instructed ministers to wave tens of thousands of asylum seekers into the UK under cover of their being ‘economic migrants’
Also sheds light on his shocking dealings with some of the world's worst dictators, his relationship with Wendi Deng and Cherie's jealousy

Tony Blair presided over a silent conspiracy to change the face of Britain for ever with mass immigration, an explosive book reveals.

He ordered his Labour government never to discuss in public the supposed ‘advantages’ of the unprecedented influx.

But behind the scenes ministers were instructed to wave tens of thousands of asylum seekers into the UK under cover of their being ‘economic migrants’. Astonishingly, the minister Mr Blair put in charge of borders ruled against deporting failed claimants because it would be too ‘emotional’.

The main aim of allowing in millions of people was to make the country ‘see the benefit of a multicultural society’. The Blair government did not see its job as being to ‘control immigration’. The policy is revealed today in a Daily Mail serialisation of an authoritative biography of the former prime minister by Tom Bower, an internationally-acclaimed investigative journalist....

Labour's 'secret plan' to lure migrants
The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s “social objectives”.

The paper said migration would “enhance economic growth” and made clear that trying to halt or reverse it could be “economically damaging”. But it also stated that immigration had general “benefits” and that a new policy framework was needed to “maximise” the contribution of migration to the Government’s wider social aims. ...

Police conspired to protect Rotherham child sex abusers
Corrupt police and an influential politician fuelled a culture of impunity that allowed three brothers to “own” the town of Rotherham and abuse children until their crimes were exposed by The Times.

One officer had sex with under-age girls, passed drugs to the sex-grooming gang and tipped them off when colleagues were searching for missing children, a court was told.

Another helped to broker a deal in which one brother returned an abused girl to police after receiving an assurance that he “wouldn't get done”...

‘I loved her, I wanted children. Then she started reading the Koran’: Cuckolded husband of female prison guard on the run with migrant who raped 15-year-old girl fears they are going to Syria
Hassan Kiko has escaped from jail after seducing a female prison guard
The 27-year-old was serving a sentence for raping a 15-year-old schoolgirl
He received asylum in Switzerland in 2010 after fleeing his native Syria
Police are now hunting for Kiko as well as prison officer Angela Magdici
Husband says she was fascinated with Syria and fears the pair will go there

The husband of a female prison guard who has gone on the run with with a Syrian rapist fears they will go to Syria.

Vasili Magdici, 25, has revealed how his estranged wife, Swiss prison officer Angela Magdici became fascinated with Syria and started reading the Koran before helping her asylum seeker lover break out of jail.

Police say 32-year-old Mrs Magdici freed Hassan Kiko, a Syrian migrant jailed for raping a schoolgirl, from Limmattal jail in Dietikon, Zurich, this week.

Kiko is a serial sex offender who was jailed for raping a 15-year-old schoolgirl and the attempted rape and sexual assault of a 19-year-old woman, MailOnline can reveal. ...
Mrs. Clinton’s Ode to Serfdom
...Terry Shumaker, former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad (I wonder what that gig cost him) and current abject minion in the service of Mrs. Clinton, quotes Herself telling an audience in New Hampshire: “Service is the rent we pay for living in this great country.”

There is a very old English word for people who are required to perform service as a rent for their existence, and that word is serf. Serfdom is a form of bondage.

Americans are not serfs. We are not sharecroppers on Herself’s farm or in vassalage to that smear of thieving nincompoopery in Washington that purports to rule us.

We don’t owe you any damned rent.

The American proposition is precisely the opposite of what Herself imagines: The U.S. government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around....

...Herself’s invocation of serfdom is the logical extension of “You Didn’t Build That”-ism, the backward philosophy under which the free citizen is obliged to justify his life and his prosperity to the state, in order to satisfy the economic self-interest, status-seeking, and power-lust of such lamentable specimens as Elizabeth Warren, a ridiculous little scold who has never done a single useful thing in her entire public life. The American model is precisely the opposite: Government has to justify itself to us. The states created the federal government, not the other way around, and the citizens created the states, not the other way around.

We don’t owe these jackasses any service. They owe us service: services they routinely fail to perform....

These Are Not the Good Guys
...Is it really so difficult to believe that there is widespread wrongdoing, and widespread lying about it, among U.S. law-enforcement agencies, particularly those in big, Democrat-run cities infamous for the corruption of their other municipal institutions? Why do conservatives find it so plausible — obvious, even — that the IRS and the EPA and the Atlanta public schools are corrupt and self-serving, but somehow believe that the Baltimore police department isn’t?...

...There are a great many investigations of police misconduct in Baltimore, where the local police behave more like the militia of a third-world warlord than a police agency. The results of those investigations are kept secret, even from city prosecutors. (Odd, no?) Three police officers have just been suspended on allegations of felony child abuse — and the inevitable subsequent perjury — in the matter of an underage suspect who was assaulted by police while in custody. The city has paid out millions of dollars in police-brutality and civil-rights settlements in recent years....

...Why conservatives and Republicans should be defensive about the fact that Baltimore, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Honolulu are misgoverned to various degrees of criminality is a mystery. Conservatives with real political power in those cities are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Could it really be something so simple as the fact that we do not feel comfortable standing on the same side of a bright red line as the malefactors in Ferguson and such opportunists as DeRay Mckesson, now a Baltimore mayoral candidate, and Al Sharpton? Sharpton is a grotesque and one of the most dishonest men in American public life, but that does not mean that the people running Baltimore and its police department aren’t also crooked. Some police officers are indeed heroes. Some are villains. Most are ordinary, time-serving municipal employees like any other, and telling ourselves otherwise is sentimental rubbish....
Shouldn’t Bernie Sanders Want to Underpay Teachers?
...Take public education. There is essentially a “single payer” for education within school districts. The teachers, principals, custodians, textbooks, and school buildings are all paid for by the government. Yet Bernie Sanders would never argue that the government should use its near-monopoly to push teacher salaries below market levels. In fact, raising teacher pay to be on par with the salaries of other college graduates is a perennial goal of progressives. Americans “must do everything we can to support our educators,” Sanders says on his website. “Something is very wrong when, last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned more than the combined income of 425,000 public school teachers.” But by Sanders’ own cost-cutting standard for single-payer systems, the supposedly low pay of teachers should be celebrated as a major success of public education!

To see the inconsistency another way, imagine Republicans trying to portray a cut in education spending as merely “savings” generated by “limiting reimbursements to education providers.” Sanders would have an arm-waving fit, warning that education quality would suffer. Somehow he has no similar concern when doctors are the ones being squeezed. So here is a question for a reporter to ask: “Senator Sanders, given the benefits of single-payer systems you’ve described, shouldn’t you want to underpay not only doctors, but teachers as well?”

Sunday, February 07, 2016

The illegal implementation of Obamacare
...Note that by “administrative delays” Bagley is actually referring to multiple decisions made over many months, including the multiple delays of the employer mandate and the so-called “if you like it you can keep it” fix. Characterizing all of these delays as a single episode — one of the eight he examines — seems to stack the deck a little bit. Nonetheless, Bagley’s candor about the paltry legal justification for these actions is refreshing, even if he insists on stressing that there are still lots of legal rules the administration hasn’t violated. (As Mike Stern quipped, “Think of all the buildings Nixon didn’t break into.”)

Where Bagley finds admirable restraint, I suspect calculation. It seems to me the administration has strayed from the ACA’s text law when and where it thinks it’s difficult for critics to obtain judicial review, though other explanations are possible, too. In any event, the paper helps further a discussion about the appropriateness of what some consider administrative “self-help.” This is not the first administration to take liberties with a statute when Congress refused to cooperate (see, e.g., what the Bush administration did with the Clean Air Act), and it won’t be the last.

A real question is whether the Obama administration’s actions with regard to the ACA are an augur of what is to come in the future. I hope not, but there are reasons for concern. As Bagley notes in the paper, it is increasingly rare for legal commentators to flag the legal violations of those on their own “side,” and that’s a problem....

Aetna CEO Has `Serious Concerns' About Obamacare Sustainability
The head of the third-biggest U.S. health insurer said he has “serious concerns” about whether or not Obamacare’s new markets are sustainable, echoing criticism from other top for-profit insurers. “We continue to have serious concerns about the sustainability of the public exchanges,” Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini said on a call Monday while discussing the company’s fourth-quarter results. “We remain concerned about the overall stability of the risk pool.”...
Researcher Says Women's Initiation of Domestic Violence Predicts Risk to Women
How can we prevent Intimate Partner Violence and injury to women? IPV researcher Deborah Capaldi, Ph.D., a social scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center, finds that the best way for women to be safe is to not initiate violence against their male partners. According to Dr. Capaldi, "The question of initiation of violence is a crucial one... much IPV is mutual, and initiations -- even that seem minor -- may lead to escalation."...

...Dr. Capaldi's research examined the different relationship violence scenarios -- violence by him only, violence by her only, violence by both with him initiating, and violence by both with her initiating. Of these, the most likely to result in future injury to women is when she initiates violence against him and he responds, although both mutually aggressive groups were close in danger levels.

Dr. Capaldi notes that in a study of women who were in a battered women's shelter, "67% of the women reported severe violence toward their partner in the past year." ...

...The study found that a young woman's IPV was just as predictive of her male partner's future IPV as the man's own past IPV. In other words, whereas we often think of men as the only abusers and also as serial abusers, the OYS found that a woman's violence against her man was as predictive of his violence to her as his own history of violence....
Guvmint Is Not Done Screwing Over Flint Water Victims Yet
...The main reason why Flint residents won't get more is that, unlike private companies, they can't sue the government, thanks to the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which protects government from tort lawsuits. In fact, prestigious law firms that are representing victims of the recent California gas leak in a class action lawsuit against Southern California Gas Co., owned by the non-governmental Sempra Energy, are so far declining to help Flint victims because the odds that they will succeed against the government are low to zero....

The Flint Water Crisis Is the Result of a Stimulus Project Gone Wrong
...Snyder's office did not return my call, but sources close to the situation at the time tell me that it was essentially because Genesee County and Flint authorities saw the new water treatment as a public infrastructure project to create jobs in an area that has never recovered after Michigan's auto industry fled to sunnier business climes elsewhere. And neither Snyder nor his Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz nor the state treasurer Andy Dillon had the heart to say "no," especially since to hand Flint to DWSD would have made the whole project less viable. What's more, they felt that just as Detroit was receiving an infrastructure boost post-bankruptcy (with the state-backed $650 million ice-hockey-arena-cum-entertainment center that I wrote about here) it was only fair that Flint get one too.

All of this shows two things:

One, the Flint water crisis is the result of a Keynesian stimulus project gone wrong....

Liberals Still Say Austerity Poisoned the Water in Flint, Damn the Evidence
...As Reason’s Shikha Dalmia reported on Monday, sources told her that the state-appointed emergency manager went along with the plan because “Genesee County and Flint authorities saw the new water treatment as a public infrastructure project to create jobs in an area that has never recovered after Michigan's auto industry fled to sunnier business climes elsewhere.”...

...But Flint’s principal problem—one that pre-dates the water crisis by decades—is that its economically-underprivileged taxpayers can’t afford to pay the pensions of retired city workers. Excess government spending landed Flint in its current, sorry state, not austerity. Likewise, the disastrous decision to go with a more expensive water option was not austerity, but government-sponsored stimulus gone (predictably) wrong....

Walmart, Other Corporations Are Donating Water Bottles to Flint: Guess Who Can’t Stand That
...Let me get this straight: when corporations put profits first, they are accused of undermining social institutions with their greed—when they unquestionable put people first… they are also accused of undermining social institutions!

In any case, it’s worth asking whether the private sector supplanting government functions is actually a bad thing. Despite what liberals like Dana Milbank and Katrina vanden Heuvel think, privatization and austerity are not the causes of the Flint water crisis: government mismanagement, regulatory failure, and Keynesian fiscal stimulus are. If the private sector can deliver affordable, clean water to Flint, why shouldn’t people prefer it? Is government-managed delivery of public goods really an absolute moral necessity, even if the government is bad at delivering said public goods?

Michael Moore: Don't Send Bottled Water to Flint
...Amen! If you want to help, he says, be a part of the “revolt” that will help overhaul a broken water system, and hold the people who did this accountable.

Moore outlines a detailed plan that includes a call to arrest Governor Rick Snyder and put the federal government in charge, echoing support for the NRDC lawsuit filed today which requested that a federal court force Flint to replace all lead service lines immediately....

Stop Drinking Bottled Water
...Drinking municipal tap water means connecting yourself to your local water system, where the goals are to think holistically about the conservation of natural resources, replenish local aquifers, and build a resilient infrastructure to distribute water to the public.

Drinking bottled water means colluding with a corporation which is not required to release any public information about how it plans to cut costs, exploit workers, dig wells, or employ a fossil-fueled supply chain in its quest to get a bottle of overpriced water into your hands....
Feds Cover Up Numbers On Fake Science
...The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards about $7 billion for research annually, but an agency report on the foundation’s merit review process doesn’t mention “plagiarism” or “misconduct” – problems that have increased tenfold since 2004, according to NSF’s inspector general.

“NSF declines approximately 37,000 – 40,000 proposals per year,” according the report.

“You will need to submit a FOIA request for more specific information than what’s contained there,” NSF spokeswoman Jessica Arriens told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Such information is critical since NSF’s watchdog estimates that 1,200 proposals contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according to the IG’s semiannual report.

NSF grants account “for about one-fourth of federal support to academic institutions for basic research,” Arriens previously told TheDCNF. The foundation awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions, according to the IG....

Scientist Ruthlessly Debunks One Of NOAA’s Central Climate Claims
...Christy recently co-authored a study with veteran meteorologist Anthony Watts that found the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was basing its temperature adjustments on “compromised” temperature data.

The study found most of NOAA’s 1,218 thermometers were sited near artificial surfaces and heat sources like concrete, asphalt, and air conditioner exhausts that were causing more warming to show in the U.S. temperature record than was present at weather stations that were well-sited.

Christy and Watts surmised NOAA was basing its temperature adjustments (efforts made to get “biases” out of the temperature record) on bad data....

EMT 2/5/16 The First World edition.
...Forty-five years. It has been forty since the last time a human being (Harrison Schmitt) has set foot on any rock other than Earth.

Forty years in the past, the first world was the place where miracles of science coupled with indomitable spirit to do the impossible lifted the hopes and dreams of the human race.

Forty years ago, the apolitical scientific method for empirical studies of chemistry, physics & math based on actual data still trumped the politicized sciency-tific madness of psychology & climatology & math based on fabricated data.

Now we spend our resources chasing rainbows and unicorns, and man's sole mission to escape this rock Earth that will otherwise ultimately be our tombstone has been sacrificed to the gods of progressivism.

Because the First World is no longer interested in science, or the survival of the survival of its long-distant progeny....
Germany Considers $5,450 Limit on Cash Transactions
BERLIN — The German government is considering introducing a limit of 5,000 euros ($5,450) on cash transactions in an effort to combat money laundering and financing of terrorism....
Five migrants among seven young men who 'laughed, danced and sang in Arabic as they gang raped unconscious girl of 17'
HORRIFIC footage has emerged of a group of young men, including five migrants, laughing, dancing and singing in Arabic as they gang rape an unconscious 17-year-old girl.

It is believed the attack happened after the girl passed out after drinking at a party.

One of the rapists later told police: "She can't complain. Women must obey men."...

Iraqi migrant rapes a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Vienna and tells police it was a 'sexual emergency' because he hadn't had sex in months
Migrant, 20, arrived in Austria via Balkans in September and was taxi driver
Raped boy in cubicle of Resienbad pool - then had fun on the diving board
Told police he knew it was wrong - but he had not had sex for four months
Said that he was not 'always sick' as he has a wife and a child back in Iraq

German feminist welcomes refugees: ‘Better rapists than racists’
A Facebook page for the radical left in Germany had a message for young women: “diversity is more important than your security.”

Rote Antifa posted a picture of young feminist on Thursday, holding a sign that stated she preferred rapists from Syria and North Africa over nationalists in Germany who have demanded Chancellor Angela Merkel stop taking in more refugees.

“Prefer sexually active fugitive as German racists,” was featured as the pictures caption....

Former German Broadcaster Admits State-Operated News Organization ZDF Takes Marching Orders from the Government
I guess this is sort of a no-brainer, but it's useful to know for certain.

Here's a story I assume ZDF won't be publishing. At a town hall in a town called Bad Schlema, some citizens complained of "harassment" of young schoolgirls by migrants, as those girls passed the hostels and buildings the migrants were housed in.

He asked, what will happen in the summer, when the girls wear less clothing?

The mayor said, "That is simple to solve, just don't walk by those places."...

6′ tall “unaccompanied minor” refugee in Sweden raises questions
...Just how old do you think these migrant ‘children’ are? Alarming pictures of refugees – including ‘the fastest 14-year-old in Sweden’ – that shed light on a growing scandal amid Europe’s asylum crisis.

Ahmad [Farid] appears to have hair on his chin, and his powerful physique can be seen under his shirt.

The second is of Saad Alsaud, reported to have been the fastest 14-year-old in Sweden, dwarfing schoolboys and girls as they join him for a run.

He looks old enough to be the father of the children he is jogging with.

The other shows a Somalian named Youssaf Khaliif Nuur who claims he is 15 though he is 6ft tall and, according to one unconfirmed source, shaves his beard and moustache....
Serfs up with California's new feudalism
...Rather than a land of opportunity, our “new” California increasingly resembles a class-bound medieval society. The proportion of aggregate income taken by the top 1 percent is greatest in a couple of Californian metros, San Francisco and San Jose, as well as New York. California is the most unequal state when it comes to well-being, according to the report by Measure of America, which is a project of the Social Science Research Council....

...This inequality is being justified – and made worse – by attempts to turn California into a mecca for the most extreme measures to reduce greenhouse gases. Like a good medievalist, Brown blames this one phenomenon for virtually everything, from wildfires to the drought and mass migrations. Like a medieval cleric railing against sin, Brown seems somewhat unconcerned that his beloved “coercive power of the state” is also largely responsible for California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values and the highest oil prices in the continental United States....