El Chapo found with Fast and Furious .50 caliber as exec-privilege claim quashed
...A .50-caliber rifle found at Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s hideout in Mexico was funneled through the gun-smuggling investigation known as Fast and Furious, sources confirmed Tuesday to Fox News.
A .50-caliber is a massive rifle that can stop a car, or as it was intended, take down a helicopter. …
When agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives checked serial numbers of the eight weapons found in his possession, they found one of the two .50-caliber weapons traced back to the ATF program, sources said....
...Emails released in 2011 revealed that ATF big shots wanted to use the illegal gun sales in operation Fast and Furious to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. The new rule would require U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” The fancy name, Demand Letter 3 comes from the fact that it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information. If that’s how then name projects, why didn’t they name Fast and Furious, “Asinine Project 1?”
Fast and Furious was a sick attempt to deprive Americans of their Second Amendment rights by selling guns to Mexican Gun cartels. The program was a train wreck whose effects are still being discovered....
Australia’s Gun 'Buyback' Created a Violent Firearms Black Market. Why Should the U.S. Do the Same
...As a result, concluded one academic assessment, "Suicide rates did not fall, though there was a shift toward less use of guns, continuing a very long-term decline. Homicides continued a modest decline; taking into account the one-time effect of the Port Arthur massacre itself, the share of murders committed with firearms declined sharply. Other violent crime, such as armed robbery, continued to increase, but again with fewer incidents that involved firearms."
A largely peaceful country remained peaceful, with alternative weapons sometimes adopted in place of guns by those who weren't so well-intentioned....
...In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia estimates compliance with the "buyback" at 19 percent.
...Other researchers agree. In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, gives examples of large-scale non-compliance with the ban. He points out, "In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities."...
Much as the Mafia and other organized criminal outfits rose to power, wealth, and prominence by supplying illegal liquor during Prohibition in the United States, outlaw motorcycle gangs in Australia appear to be building international connections and making money by supplying guns to willing buyers.
It's as if Australian politicians looked at America's experience and said: what the land down under really needs is its own Al Capone—but Mad Max-style, with leather and a hog....
...By contrast, without Australia's confiscation policy, the United States has seen its murder (including nonnegligent manslaughter) rate drop from 9.3 homicides per 100,000 U.S. residents in 1992 to 4.7 in 2011 and decline further, to 4.5 per 100,000 in 2014, the last year for which full data is available. During this time, the number of firearms in civilian hands increased by roughly 50 percent, to an estimated 300 million....
Saturday, March 26, 2016
‘Propaganda’: Top MIT Climate Scientist Trashes ‘97% Consensus’ Claim
...Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.
A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent...
...A 2013 study by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found that Cook had to cast a wide net to cram scientists into his so-called consensus. To be part of Cook’s consensus, a scientific study only needed to agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet “to some unspecified extent” — both of which are uncontroversial points....
...He said it’s part of a political machine that’s used by scientists and politicians to direct more taxpayer dollars to pet projects. “If you can make an ambiguous remark and you have people who will amplify it ‘they said it not me’ and he response of the political system is to increase your funding, what’s not to like?” Lindzen said...
NOAA Radiosonde Data Shows No Warming For 58 Years
In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included this graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.
Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming....
...Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.
A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent...
...A 2013 study by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found that Cook had to cast a wide net to cram scientists into his so-called consensus. To be part of Cook’s consensus, a scientific study only needed to agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet “to some unspecified extent” — both of which are uncontroversial points....
...He said it’s part of a political machine that’s used by scientists and politicians to direct more taxpayer dollars to pet projects. “If you can make an ambiguous remark and you have people who will amplify it ‘they said it not me’ and he response of the political system is to increase your funding, what’s not to like?” Lindzen said...
NOAA Radiosonde Data Shows No Warming For 58 Years
In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included this graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.
Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming....
HALF of women have a fall-back partner on standby who has always fancied them, in case their current relationship turns sour
...The survey of 1,000 women also found Plan B is also likely to be someone whom she has known for around seven years, who will be 'ready and waiting' because of 'unfinished business'....
...Furthermore, around one in ten women said their Plan B had already confessed his undying love, while one in five said they were confident he would 'drop everything' for her, if she asked him to.
Slightly more than four in ten said they had got to know the man whilst they were with their partner, while a similar percentage said he was 'on the scene' long before.
Around one in four women who have a back-up plan have feelings as strong for him as they do for their other half.
Incredibly, 12 per cent went as far as to admit their feelings were 'stronger' for Plan B, and close to seven in ten admitted they are currently in contact with him.
But despite the secrecy involved in having a close friend or ex to turn to, around half of the women who took part in the poll said their other half was aware of the 'third party'.
Of those, one in five said they were able to joke about it, but one in three said their man was 'uncomfortable' discussing him.
One in four admitted their current partner had met their Plan B, while one in five admitted he was a friend of the man in her life....
Why do women age so fast in their fifties? FEMAIL investigates why gender age gap problems increase the older you get
...He was 49 and I was 54 at the time.
I've always looked young for my age and when we met I didn't look five years older than my partner. However, as the years slipped by, well, I did.
And then, as time seemed to slow down for him, it somehow sped up for me. The truth is I suddenly feel as if I'm ageing faster than my partner and now that age gap shows.
We met through online dating. He was one of the few men in my age group who deigned to go out with me. Most of the fiftysomethings, even those with comb-overs and anoraks, were looking for bendy 35-year-olds willing to squander the last of their good years on an over-the-hill couch potato...
‘Our teenage daughter dumped her boyfriend - and we’re heartbroken’
The last time I sat across a kitchen table from a heartbroken teenage boy, I was just a girl myself, and I was the one doing the heart-breaking. Thirty years on, I find myself in the same situation – only this time the distraught boy in question is in love with my 18-year-old daughter Katie*, who has decided she doesn’t want to be with him any more.
Over the last year, I’ve grown to love this boy – who sits before me now with his head in his hands, looking for advice as to how to win her back – as a son. My husband feels the same way. Alex*, also 18, is kind, hard-working, respectful and good-looking. He adores our daughter and wants to keep her happy and safe.
What more could you want for your girl? But for Katie, what he offers isn’t enough. Safe is for later. For now she wants excitement and freedom. However much we adore him, for her he isn’t ‘The One’....
This University of Oregon Study on Feminizing Glaciers Might Make You Root for Trump
...Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions. ...
...The survey of 1,000 women also found Plan B is also likely to be someone whom she has known for around seven years, who will be 'ready and waiting' because of 'unfinished business'....
...Furthermore, around one in ten women said their Plan B had already confessed his undying love, while one in five said they were confident he would 'drop everything' for her, if she asked him to.
Slightly more than four in ten said they had got to know the man whilst they were with their partner, while a similar percentage said he was 'on the scene' long before.
Around one in four women who have a back-up plan have feelings as strong for him as they do for their other half.
Incredibly, 12 per cent went as far as to admit their feelings were 'stronger' for Plan B, and close to seven in ten admitted they are currently in contact with him.
But despite the secrecy involved in having a close friend or ex to turn to, around half of the women who took part in the poll said their other half was aware of the 'third party'.
Of those, one in five said they were able to joke about it, but one in three said their man was 'uncomfortable' discussing him.
One in four admitted their current partner had met their Plan B, while one in five admitted he was a friend of the man in her life....
Why do women age so fast in their fifties? FEMAIL investigates why gender age gap problems increase the older you get
...He was 49 and I was 54 at the time.
I've always looked young for my age and when we met I didn't look five years older than my partner. However, as the years slipped by, well, I did.
And then, as time seemed to slow down for him, it somehow sped up for me. The truth is I suddenly feel as if I'm ageing faster than my partner and now that age gap shows.
We met through online dating. He was one of the few men in my age group who deigned to go out with me. Most of the fiftysomethings, even those with comb-overs and anoraks, were looking for bendy 35-year-olds willing to squander the last of their good years on an over-the-hill couch potato...
‘Our teenage daughter dumped her boyfriend - and we’re heartbroken’
The last time I sat across a kitchen table from a heartbroken teenage boy, I was just a girl myself, and I was the one doing the heart-breaking. Thirty years on, I find myself in the same situation – only this time the distraught boy in question is in love with my 18-year-old daughter Katie*, who has decided she doesn’t want to be with him any more.
Over the last year, I’ve grown to love this boy – who sits before me now with his head in his hands, looking for advice as to how to win her back – as a son. My husband feels the same way. Alex*, also 18, is kind, hard-working, respectful and good-looking. He adores our daughter and wants to keep her happy and safe.
What more could you want for your girl? But for Katie, what he offers isn’t enough. Safe is for later. For now she wants excitement and freedom. However much we adore him, for her he isn’t ‘The One’....
This University of Oregon Study on Feminizing Glaciers Might Make You Root for Trump
...Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions. ...
Winter 2000: The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being....
... Ignoring the sweeping transformation of the banking industry since the CRA was passed, the Clinton Treasury Department's 1995 regulations made getting a satisfactory CRA rating much harder. The new regulations de-emphasized subjective assessment measures in favor of strictly numerical ones. Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race, to rate banks on performance. There would be no more A's for effort. Only results—specific loans, specific levels of service—would count. Where and to whom have home loans been made? Have banks invested in all neighborhoods within their assessment area? Do they operate branches in those neighborhoods?
Crucially, the new CRA regulations also instructed bank examiners to take into account how well banks responded to complaints. The old CRA evaluation process had allowed advocacy groups a chance to express their views on individual banks, and publicly available data on the lending patterns of individual banks allowed activist groups to target institutions considered vulnerable to protest. But for advocacy groups that were in the complaint business, the Clinton administration regulations offered a formal invitation. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition—a foundation-funded umbrella group for community activist groups that profit from the CRA—issued a clarion call to its members in a leaflet entitled "The New CRA Regulations: How Community Groups Can Get Involved." "Timely comments," the NCRC observed with a certain understatement, "can have a strong influence on a bank's CRA rating."...
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being....
... Ignoring the sweeping transformation of the banking industry since the CRA was passed, the Clinton Treasury Department's 1995 regulations made getting a satisfactory CRA rating much harder. The new regulations de-emphasized subjective assessment measures in favor of strictly numerical ones. Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race, to rate banks on performance. There would be no more A's for effort. Only results—specific loans, specific levels of service—would count. Where and to whom have home loans been made? Have banks invested in all neighborhoods within their assessment area? Do they operate branches in those neighborhoods?
Crucially, the new CRA regulations also instructed bank examiners to take into account how well banks responded to complaints. The old CRA evaluation process had allowed advocacy groups a chance to express their views on individual banks, and publicly available data on the lending patterns of individual banks allowed activist groups to target institutions considered vulnerable to protest. But for advocacy groups that were in the complaint business, the Clinton administration regulations offered a formal invitation. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition—a foundation-funded umbrella group for community activist groups that profit from the CRA—issued a clarion call to its members in a leaflet entitled "The New CRA Regulations: How Community Groups Can Get Involved." "Timely comments," the NCRC observed with a certain understatement, "can have a strong influence on a bank's CRA rating."...
Liberals Are Simple-Minded
...The more interesting and telling results were found when comparing the liberal and conservative results derived from the environmentalism and religion dogmatism scales. The researchers report, "Conservatives are indeed more dogmatic on the religious domain; but liberals are more dogmatic on the environmental domain." In fact, they note that "the highest score for simplicity was for liberals"...
CHINA FORCES ITS POLITICAL PRISONERS TO SELL BODY PARTS
It sounds too unbelievable to be true, but dozens of highly respected investigators, scholars and government officials around the world claim the Chinese government is harvesting organs from groups considered to be political or cultural enemies of the regime currently in power.
It’s no secret that there is a shortage of desperately needed organs in China (and around the world), and with tens of thousands of healthy Chinese prisoners locked away for all sorts of absurdities, experts say the government has secretly turned to the prison population as its source to fill the growing demand for organs and to provide “organ tourists” from Western nations with potentially life-saving treatments.
It’s been widely known the Chinese government has been allowing what they call “organ donations” from prisoners, especially those prisoners on death row, for many years. Leaders in the international medical community, government officials and organizations have actively protested against this practice, arguing prisoners locked away in a government’s prison don’t actually have the true “freedom” necessary to “donate” anything....
SOCIALISM, THE NIGHTMARE THAT NEVER DIES
...The United States within nearly a century of its founding became the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. It accomplished this without an income tax, free university tuition, universal health care, or even Social Security. In Bernie Sanders’ lifetime, he witnessed the fall of National Socialists, Soviet Socialists, and more benign iterations of the collectivist ideology. But he imagines the command economy, rather than the free market, as our savior....
...“The struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort,” a dejected J.A. Wayland — who first serialized The Jungle, once provided winter lodging for Mother Jones, and transformed Girard, Kansas, into America’s unlikely Socialist Mecca — wrote five days after his friend Eugene Debs’ six percent finish in 1912. “Let it pass.” The publisher of one of America’s most-widely read weeklies then wrapped a bedsheet around his rifle, and let loose a muffled shot that ended his life...
Eugenics: The Progressive Race Policy
...Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America’s poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and "mental defectives," whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity....
...A legal minimum wage, applied to immigrants and those already working in America, ensured that only the productive workers were employed. The economically unproductive, those whose labor was worth less than the legal minimum, would be denied entry, or, if already employed, would be idled. For economic reformers who regarded inferior workers as a threat, the minimum wage provided an invaluable service. It identified inferior workers by idling them. So identified, they could be dealt with. The unemployable would be removed to institutions, or to celibate labor colonies. The inferior immigrant would be removed back to the old country or to retirement. The woman would be removed to the home, where she could meet her obligations to family and race....
Socialism Has Created a Humanitarian Disaster in Venezuela
Venezuela’s accelerating economic meltdown is rapidly turning into a full-fledged humanitarian crisis. For too many in that country, the pervasive shortages of food, medicine, electricity, and other basic goods are making everyday life a nightmare. It is Venezuela’s version of the “winter of discontent,” except that it has been brewing for much longer and its unfolding consequences are far more frightening.
Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that the problem with socialists is that “they always run out of other people’s money” faced a unique challenge in Venezuela: during the course of a decade and a half, the government received nearly $1 trillion in oil revenues— the equivalent in today’s money of more than seven Marshall Plans. This was enough to mask the effect of hundreds of expropriations, stifling economic controls, and otherwise running the private economy into the ground....
...Not long ago Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, and other Labour bigwigs were praising this Bolivarian revolution. Sycophantic Hollywood stars, such as Sean Penn and Oliver Stone, flocked to Caracas to voice their admiration for its socialist policies. The lovefest continued even when many of the aforementioned problems were becoming apparent. Today, all we hear from them regarding Venezuela is deafening silence.
...The more interesting and telling results were found when comparing the liberal and conservative results derived from the environmentalism and religion dogmatism scales. The researchers report, "Conservatives are indeed more dogmatic on the religious domain; but liberals are more dogmatic on the environmental domain." In fact, they note that "the highest score for simplicity was for liberals"...
CHINA FORCES ITS POLITICAL PRISONERS TO SELL BODY PARTS
It sounds too unbelievable to be true, but dozens of highly respected investigators, scholars and government officials around the world claim the Chinese government is harvesting organs from groups considered to be political or cultural enemies of the regime currently in power.
It’s no secret that there is a shortage of desperately needed organs in China (and around the world), and with tens of thousands of healthy Chinese prisoners locked away for all sorts of absurdities, experts say the government has secretly turned to the prison population as its source to fill the growing demand for organs and to provide “organ tourists” from Western nations with potentially life-saving treatments.
It’s been widely known the Chinese government has been allowing what they call “organ donations” from prisoners, especially those prisoners on death row, for many years. Leaders in the international medical community, government officials and organizations have actively protested against this practice, arguing prisoners locked away in a government’s prison don’t actually have the true “freedom” necessary to “donate” anything....
SOCIALISM, THE NIGHTMARE THAT NEVER DIES
...The United States within nearly a century of its founding became the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. It accomplished this without an income tax, free university tuition, universal health care, or even Social Security. In Bernie Sanders’ lifetime, he witnessed the fall of National Socialists, Soviet Socialists, and more benign iterations of the collectivist ideology. But he imagines the command economy, rather than the free market, as our savior....
...“The struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort,” a dejected J.A. Wayland — who first serialized The Jungle, once provided winter lodging for Mother Jones, and transformed Girard, Kansas, into America’s unlikely Socialist Mecca — wrote five days after his friend Eugene Debs’ six percent finish in 1912. “Let it pass.” The publisher of one of America’s most-widely read weeklies then wrapped a bedsheet around his rifle, and let loose a muffled shot that ended his life...
Eugenics: The Progressive Race Policy
...Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America’s poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and "mental defectives," whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity....
...A legal minimum wage, applied to immigrants and those already working in America, ensured that only the productive workers were employed. The economically unproductive, those whose labor was worth less than the legal minimum, would be denied entry, or, if already employed, would be idled. For economic reformers who regarded inferior workers as a threat, the minimum wage provided an invaluable service. It identified inferior workers by idling them. So identified, they could be dealt with. The unemployable would be removed to institutions, or to celibate labor colonies. The inferior immigrant would be removed back to the old country or to retirement. The woman would be removed to the home, where she could meet her obligations to family and race....
Socialism Has Created a Humanitarian Disaster in Venezuela
Venezuela’s accelerating economic meltdown is rapidly turning into a full-fledged humanitarian crisis. For too many in that country, the pervasive shortages of food, medicine, electricity, and other basic goods are making everyday life a nightmare. It is Venezuela’s version of the “winter of discontent,” except that it has been brewing for much longer and its unfolding consequences are far more frightening.
Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that the problem with socialists is that “they always run out of other people’s money” faced a unique challenge in Venezuela: during the course of a decade and a half, the government received nearly $1 trillion in oil revenues— the equivalent in today’s money of more than seven Marshall Plans. This was enough to mask the effect of hundreds of expropriations, stifling economic controls, and otherwise running the private economy into the ground....
...Not long ago Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, and other Labour bigwigs were praising this Bolivarian revolution. Sycophantic Hollywood stars, such as Sean Penn and Oliver Stone, flocked to Caracas to voice their admiration for its socialist policies. The lovefest continued even when many of the aforementioned problems were becoming apparent. Today, all we hear from them regarding Venezuela is deafening silence.
#DemDebate preview: Michael Moore (!) reminds us who was in charge of Flint for ‘84 straight years’
Flint has voted for Dems for 84 straight yrs. What did it get us? For 18 months Dems remained silent &ignored pleas while Flint was poisoned
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) March 6, 2016
The Nation: Note to Hillary: Clintonomics Was a Disaster for Most Americans
...How could Clinton have undergone such a lightening-fast reversal? The answer is straightforward, and explained with candor by Robert Rubin, who had been co-chair of Goldman Sachs before becoming Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Even before the inauguration, Rubin explained to more populist members of the incoming administration that the rich “are running the economy and make the decisions about the economy.”
Wall Street certainly flourished under Clinton. By 1999, the average price of stocks had risen to 44 times these companies’ earnings. Historically, stock prices had averaged about 14 times more than earnings. Even during the 1920s bubble, stock prices rose only to 33 times earnings right before the 1929 crash....
...What was Clinton’s overall record with respect to improving living standards for working people and the poor? During the eight full years of Clinton’s presidency, the average real wage for non-supervisory workers, at $13.60 an hour (in 2001 dollars), was 2 percent lower than the average under Reagan and Bush and nearly 10 percent less than under Jimmy Carter’s “years of malaise.” The average individual poverty rate under Clinton, at 13.2 percent of the population, was modestly better than the 14 percent rate under Reagan and Bush. But it was worse than the 11.9 percent figure that was maintained, on average, under Nixon and Ford, as well as Carter....
Obama orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent | New York Post
...Surely if you inject $4.5 trillion into the economy, you will get economic growth. You will get a 4% to 5% increase in Gross Domestic Product for at least a year or two.
Yet the Obama administration is the first two-term presidency that has not posted a 3% GDP growth on an annualized basis for 8 years. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt posted 3% growth year during the Great Depression.
That’s because the $4.5 trillion was not given to any infrastructure program — it was given to banks, under the misguided notion that they needed the money to remain solvent. The banks promptly invested this money, which kept the stock market humming, but did nothing for jobs, wages or the GDP.
This was by design. The Fed could not allow the bank’s largesse to be circulated into the public for fear of rapid inflation.
The banks also funded company mergers, company debt offerings and stock buybacks. This activity kept the money sequestered and allowed a greater return for the banks. After all, they were getting free money to invest — there was no way to lose.
Who did this help? The 1%, and pretty much only the 1%.
These actions are the reasons the American middle class has been decimated and no longer makes up the majority of the population.
If liberals are angry about inequality, they should look no further than President Obama. He has done more to contribute to the gap between rich and poor than anyone....
Bubba bashes Obama's 'pretty picture' economy, says millions left behind
Former President Bill Clinton rapped President Obama's "pretty picture" of economic recovery, claiming in a campaign stop for his wife Monday that millions of Americans have been left behind.
He referred to Obama's State of the Union address and his claims of economic prosperity as a "pretty picture" most haven't experienced.
"Millions and millions and millions and millions of people look at that pretty picture of America he painted and they cannot find themselves in it to save their lives," he said in Raleigh, N.C....
Bernie Sanders: ‘Real unemployment’ rate under Obama is 10.5 percent
Sen. Bernie Sanders said Monday that the Obama administration is not being forthright with the American people about the real unemployment rate.
The Vermont senator told a Portland, Maine, audience of 7,500 that the Labor Department’s 5.3 percent unemployment rate is a ruse.
“There is another set of government statistics,” the independent senator said, The Daily Caller reported, “and that real unemployment if you include those people who have given up looking for work and the millions of others who are working part-time 20, 25 hours a week when they want to work full-time, when you put all of that together, real unemployment is 10.5 percent.”...
Bernie Supporters’ Hatred Of Work Is Why Trump Supporters Are So Mad
...But if there’s another piece of advice here that absolutely disqualifies Clinton for the presidency, it’s “do what you love.” The truth is, that is simply not an option for most people. When it’s 39 degrees and raining in February, do you think the guy who picks up your trash is staring at your acrid, bacteria-laden refuse at 6 a.m. and saying, “Thank God, I love what I do”?
Indeed, it is precisely this cultural disconnect about the value of work that explains why there’s an open revolt in both parties and the future seems so uncertain....
...Many Portlanders like their lives that don’t contribute much, and if they could just get free health care—the governor who created the failed Oregon Health Plan and screwed up the state’s Obamacare exchange to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars was just run out of office on corruption charges in his fourth term—and erase their absurd college debt, they could afford the harissa-spiced Bloody Marys at the trendy new brunch spot and slide by selling colorful hemp guitar straps on Etsy without having to make any difficult or unselfish choices....
Don’t Tell Bernie, But Capitalism Has Made Human Life Fantastically Better
...5) Finally technology has lowered the cost of essentials, raising disposable incomes and creating new demand and jobs. In 1871, there was one hairdresser for every 1,793 English and Welsh citizens; now there is one for every 287. In 1948, a Freed-Eiseman 16-inch TV cost $795 in the US, roughly a quarter of the average annual salary, or roughly $12,000 today. A top of the range TV can be bought today for less than $1,000. On a quality-adjusted basis, the decline in prices is even more pronounced. US CPI data show that the price of a TV has fallen by 98% since 1950....
Mark Zuckerberg And The New Progressive Plutocrats.
...But tyrannizing his employees isn’t the worst thing Zuckerberg’s done.
That would be his Orwellian pandering to the German government, whose disastrous immigration policies he recently praised as “inspiring.” Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Facebook has become Germany’s lapdog, acting as the terrifying new Stasi of Angela Merkel, who is desperate to contain her citizens’ anger at her failed immigration policies. Facebook has promised to work with her government to monitor “anti-migrant hate speech” on the platform, which is another way of telling ordinary Germans that, once again, someone will be looking over your shoulder if your conversation gets too politically inconvenient.
Here’s what’s more troubling: Zuckerberg isn’t just doing this to appease an overbearing government: he wants to do it....
When Bernie Sanders Thought Castro and the Sandinistas Could Teach America a Lesson
...In the 1980s, any Bernie Sanders event or interview inevitably wended toward a denunciation of Washington’s Central America policy, typically punctuated with a full-throated defense of the dictatorship in Nicaragua. As one sympathetic biographer wrote in 1991, Sanders “probably has done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support the Sandinistas and their revolution.” Reflecting on a Potemkin tour of revolutionary Nicaragua he took in 1985, Sanders marveled that he was, “believe it or not, the highest ranking American official” to attend a parade celebrating the Sandinista seizure of power....
...But despite its aversion to elections, brutal suppression of dissent, hideous mistreatment of indigenous Nicaraguans, and rejection of basic democratic norms, Sanders thought Managua’s Marxist-Leninist clique had much to teach Burlington: “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”...
Flint has voted for Dems for 84 straight yrs. What did it get us? For 18 months Dems remained silent &ignored pleas while Flint was poisoned
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) March 6, 2016
The Nation: Note to Hillary: Clintonomics Was a Disaster for Most Americans
...How could Clinton have undergone such a lightening-fast reversal? The answer is straightforward, and explained with candor by Robert Rubin, who had been co-chair of Goldman Sachs before becoming Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Even before the inauguration, Rubin explained to more populist members of the incoming administration that the rich “are running the economy and make the decisions about the economy.”
Wall Street certainly flourished under Clinton. By 1999, the average price of stocks had risen to 44 times these companies’ earnings. Historically, stock prices had averaged about 14 times more than earnings. Even during the 1920s bubble, stock prices rose only to 33 times earnings right before the 1929 crash....
...What was Clinton’s overall record with respect to improving living standards for working people and the poor? During the eight full years of Clinton’s presidency, the average real wage for non-supervisory workers, at $13.60 an hour (in 2001 dollars), was 2 percent lower than the average under Reagan and Bush and nearly 10 percent less than under Jimmy Carter’s “years of malaise.” The average individual poverty rate under Clinton, at 13.2 percent of the population, was modestly better than the 14 percent rate under Reagan and Bush. But it was worse than the 11.9 percent figure that was maintained, on average, under Nixon and Ford, as well as Carter....
Obama orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent | New York Post
...Surely if you inject $4.5 trillion into the economy, you will get economic growth. You will get a 4% to 5% increase in Gross Domestic Product for at least a year or two.
Yet the Obama administration is the first two-term presidency that has not posted a 3% GDP growth on an annualized basis for 8 years. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt posted 3% growth year during the Great Depression.
That’s because the $4.5 trillion was not given to any infrastructure program — it was given to banks, under the misguided notion that they needed the money to remain solvent. The banks promptly invested this money, which kept the stock market humming, but did nothing for jobs, wages or the GDP.
This was by design. The Fed could not allow the bank’s largesse to be circulated into the public for fear of rapid inflation.
The banks also funded company mergers, company debt offerings and stock buybacks. This activity kept the money sequestered and allowed a greater return for the banks. After all, they were getting free money to invest — there was no way to lose.
Who did this help? The 1%, and pretty much only the 1%.
These actions are the reasons the American middle class has been decimated and no longer makes up the majority of the population.
If liberals are angry about inequality, they should look no further than President Obama. He has done more to contribute to the gap between rich and poor than anyone....
Bubba bashes Obama's 'pretty picture' economy, says millions left behind
Former President Bill Clinton rapped President Obama's "pretty picture" of economic recovery, claiming in a campaign stop for his wife Monday that millions of Americans have been left behind.
He referred to Obama's State of the Union address and his claims of economic prosperity as a "pretty picture" most haven't experienced.
"Millions and millions and millions and millions of people look at that pretty picture of America he painted and they cannot find themselves in it to save their lives," he said in Raleigh, N.C....
Bernie Sanders: ‘Real unemployment’ rate under Obama is 10.5 percent
Sen. Bernie Sanders said Monday that the Obama administration is not being forthright with the American people about the real unemployment rate.
The Vermont senator told a Portland, Maine, audience of 7,500 that the Labor Department’s 5.3 percent unemployment rate is a ruse.
“There is another set of government statistics,” the independent senator said, The Daily Caller reported, “and that real unemployment if you include those people who have given up looking for work and the millions of others who are working part-time 20, 25 hours a week when they want to work full-time, when you put all of that together, real unemployment is 10.5 percent.”...
Bernie Supporters’ Hatred Of Work Is Why Trump Supporters Are So Mad
...But if there’s another piece of advice here that absolutely disqualifies Clinton for the presidency, it’s “do what you love.” The truth is, that is simply not an option for most people. When it’s 39 degrees and raining in February, do you think the guy who picks up your trash is staring at your acrid, bacteria-laden refuse at 6 a.m. and saying, “Thank God, I love what I do”?
Indeed, it is precisely this cultural disconnect about the value of work that explains why there’s an open revolt in both parties and the future seems so uncertain....
...Many Portlanders like their lives that don’t contribute much, and if they could just get free health care—the governor who created the failed Oregon Health Plan and screwed up the state’s Obamacare exchange to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars was just run out of office on corruption charges in his fourth term—and erase their absurd college debt, they could afford the harissa-spiced Bloody Marys at the trendy new brunch spot and slide by selling colorful hemp guitar straps on Etsy without having to make any difficult or unselfish choices....
Don’t Tell Bernie, But Capitalism Has Made Human Life Fantastically Better
...5) Finally technology has lowered the cost of essentials, raising disposable incomes and creating new demand and jobs. In 1871, there was one hairdresser for every 1,793 English and Welsh citizens; now there is one for every 287. In 1948, a Freed-Eiseman 16-inch TV cost $795 in the US, roughly a quarter of the average annual salary, or roughly $12,000 today. A top of the range TV can be bought today for less than $1,000. On a quality-adjusted basis, the decline in prices is even more pronounced. US CPI data show that the price of a TV has fallen by 98% since 1950....
Mark Zuckerberg And The New Progressive Plutocrats.
...But tyrannizing his employees isn’t the worst thing Zuckerberg’s done.
That would be his Orwellian pandering to the German government, whose disastrous immigration policies he recently praised as “inspiring.” Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Facebook has become Germany’s lapdog, acting as the terrifying new Stasi of Angela Merkel, who is desperate to contain her citizens’ anger at her failed immigration policies. Facebook has promised to work with her government to monitor “anti-migrant hate speech” on the platform, which is another way of telling ordinary Germans that, once again, someone will be looking over your shoulder if your conversation gets too politically inconvenient.
Here’s what’s more troubling: Zuckerberg isn’t just doing this to appease an overbearing government: he wants to do it....
When Bernie Sanders Thought Castro and the Sandinistas Could Teach America a Lesson
...In the 1980s, any Bernie Sanders event or interview inevitably wended toward a denunciation of Washington’s Central America policy, typically punctuated with a full-throated defense of the dictatorship in Nicaragua. As one sympathetic biographer wrote in 1991, Sanders “probably has done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support the Sandinistas and their revolution.” Reflecting on a Potemkin tour of revolutionary Nicaragua he took in 1985, Sanders marveled that he was, “believe it or not, the highest ranking American official” to attend a parade celebrating the Sandinista seizure of power....
...But despite its aversion to elections, brutal suppression of dissent, hideous mistreatment of indigenous Nicaraguans, and rejection of basic democratic norms, Sanders thought Managua’s Marxist-Leninist clique had much to teach Burlington: “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”...
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. ...
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....
...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?”
...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.”...
...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....
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....
...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....
...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....
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....
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....
...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....
Friday, January 29, 2016
Do 'experts' believe their own predictions?
...So to probe the seriousness of these economic experts' stated beliefs about the impending consequences of climate change, it's fair to ask if they personally put their own money where their mouths are. How many of these economists are, for example:
• Buying land in the upper Midwest and inland Canada (the price of which will rise significantly if global temperatures make much of the South, as well as coastal areas, quite unpleasant places to live)?
• Investing in pharmaceutical companies that own patents that extend beyond 2025 on medicines to treat illnesses that are especially prevalent in the tropics and subtropics?
• Shorting shares of companies that specialize in attracting tourists to subtropical and tropical destinations, especially those on or near seacoasts?...
If ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
...If the ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
In response to the recent fanatical post by a global warming drone who fears that the rising tides will drown mankind, let him take solace in the fact that his climate guru, Al Gore, recently bought a $9 million beach front home in Montecito. Guess Al is not really afraid of sinking into the sea....
2006: Al Gore Does Sundance, January 26, 2006
...And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said....
Fraud Detected In Science Research That Suggested GMO Crops Were Harmful
...Three science papers that had suggested that genetically modified crops were harmful to animals and have been used by activist groups to argue for their ban have been found to contain manipulated and possibly falsified data. Nature reports: "Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says that there is no substance to this claim. The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites — and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops. 'The case is very important also because these papers have been used politically in the debate on GM crops,' says Italian senator Elena Cattaneo, a neuroscientist at the University of Milan whose concerns about the work triggered the investigation....
Stunning Rejection of Scientific Values of Transparency and Skepticism at New England Journal of Medicine
The headline is taken from a dismayed tweet from prominent open science advocate Brian Nosek. University of Virginia psychologist Nosek is the co-founder of the Center for Open Science. He was also the team leader for the massive project that sought to replicate 100 psychological studies taken from leading journals. The researchers reported in Science that only about one-third of the results from the selected studies could be reproduced....
...Evidently, Drazen hasn't changed his mind even as evidence has continued to pile up over the past 10 years that researchers are massively producing and publishing false positives.
If NEJM's editors are afraid that other researchers won't understand the choices, procedures, and parameters made by the original researchers, Nosek's Center for Open Science has a solution—use its Open Science Framework.
The Open Science Framework is organized around a free, open-source Web platform that supports research project management, collaboration, and the permanent archiving of scientific workflow and output. The OSF makes it easier to replicate studies because outside researchers can see and retrace the steps taken by the original scientific team.
It should go without saying that "research parasitism" is wrong. Researchers who use the results produced by other investigators should fully acknowledge that fact and give them credit when they publish their additional findings. But the lack of replication and the proliferation of false results in the scientific literature is a far bigger problem than "research parasitism."...
Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years' Temperatures With "Adjustments" While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year "The Hottest"?
...But now they may have gone too far -- in order to declare 2015 the "hottest on record," they apparently had to revise and "adjust" the previously declared all-time "hottest on record," 1997.
Because 1997 was more than three and half degrees warmer than 2015 -- going by NOAA's published data.
If they've now adjusted 1997's temperature down by three and a half degrees or more -- thus making the former All Time Hottest Year On Record not particularly hot -- this should be the lead, no?...
Feds Give Billions To Research Based On ‘Falsified Or Fabricated Data’
National Science Foundation officials award $7 billion in grants annually based on funding proposals the agency’s watchdog estimates have hundreds of examples of plagiarism and “falsified or fabricated data.”
The federal science research agency awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions annually, but Allison Lerner, the agency’s inspector general, only oversees about 1 percent of those recipients.
Researcher misconduct has drastically increased over the past decade, meaning millions of tax dollars go to fraudsters, according to Lerner.
The watchdog estimated that around 1,200 proposals for funding could contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according the IG’s semiannual report....
...So to probe the seriousness of these economic experts' stated beliefs about the impending consequences of climate change, it's fair to ask if they personally put their own money where their mouths are. How many of these economists are, for example:
• Buying land in the upper Midwest and inland Canada (the price of which will rise significantly if global temperatures make much of the South, as well as coastal areas, quite unpleasant places to live)?
• Investing in pharmaceutical companies that own patents that extend beyond 2025 on medicines to treat illnesses that are especially prevalent in the tropics and subtropics?
• Shorting shares of companies that specialize in attracting tourists to subtropical and tropical destinations, especially those on or near seacoasts?...
If ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
...If the ocean’s rising, why is Al Gore in Montecito?
In response to the recent fanatical post by a global warming drone who fears that the rising tides will drown mankind, let him take solace in the fact that his climate guru, Al Gore, recently bought a $9 million beach front home in Montecito. Guess Al is not really afraid of sinking into the sea....
2006: Al Gore Does Sundance, January 26, 2006
...And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said....
Fraud Detected In Science Research That Suggested GMO Crops Were Harmful
...Three science papers that had suggested that genetically modified crops were harmful to animals and have been used by activist groups to argue for their ban have been found to contain manipulated and possibly falsified data. Nature reports: "Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says that there is no substance to this claim. The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites — and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops. 'The case is very important also because these papers have been used politically in the debate on GM crops,' says Italian senator Elena Cattaneo, a neuroscientist at the University of Milan whose concerns about the work triggered the investigation....
Stunning Rejection of Scientific Values of Transparency and Skepticism at New England Journal of Medicine
The headline is taken from a dismayed tweet from prominent open science advocate Brian Nosek. University of Virginia psychologist Nosek is the co-founder of the Center for Open Science. He was also the team leader for the massive project that sought to replicate 100 psychological studies taken from leading journals. The researchers reported in Science that only about one-third of the results from the selected studies could be reproduced....
...Evidently, Drazen hasn't changed his mind even as evidence has continued to pile up over the past 10 years that researchers are massively producing and publishing false positives.
If NEJM's editors are afraid that other researchers won't understand the choices, procedures, and parameters made by the original researchers, Nosek's Center for Open Science has a solution—use its Open Science Framework.
The Open Science Framework is organized around a free, open-source Web platform that supports research project management, collaboration, and the permanent archiving of scientific workflow and output. The OSF makes it easier to replicate studies because outside researchers can see and retrace the steps taken by the original scientific team.
It should go without saying that "research parasitism" is wrong. Researchers who use the results produced by other investigators should fully acknowledge that fact and give them credit when they publish their additional findings. But the lack of replication and the proliferation of false results in the scientific literature is a far bigger problem than "research parasitism."...
Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years' Temperatures With "Adjustments" While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year "The Hottest"?
...But now they may have gone too far -- in order to declare 2015 the "hottest on record," they apparently had to revise and "adjust" the previously declared all-time "hottest on record," 1997.
Because 1997 was more than three and half degrees warmer than 2015 -- going by NOAA's published data.
If they've now adjusted 1997's temperature down by three and a half degrees or more -- thus making the former All Time Hottest Year On Record not particularly hot -- this should be the lead, no?...
Feds Give Billions To Research Based On ‘Falsified Or Fabricated Data’
National Science Foundation officials award $7 billion in grants annually based on funding proposals the agency’s watchdog estimates have hundreds of examples of plagiarism and “falsified or fabricated data.”
The federal science research agency awards 11,000 grants to 2,000 research institutions annually, but Allison Lerner, the agency’s inspector general, only oversees about 1 percent of those recipients.
Researcher misconduct has drastically increased over the past decade, meaning millions of tax dollars go to fraudsters, according to Lerner.
The watchdog estimated that around 1,200 proposals for funding could contain plagiarism and another 800 proposals or results include “falsified or fabricated data,” according the IG’s semiannual report....
Muslim migrants not as stupid and simple as politically-correct Europeans seem to believe
...It strikes me that the really stupid, naive, unsophisticated people here are the Europeans who actually believe that this anti-social Muslim behavior comes about because Muslims are primitive people who are, for the first time, confronting an advanced society. To hold this position, Europeans must be willfully blind. Didn’t any of them notice the number of migrants who showed up with smart phones intact?...
...Here’s what I think is going on: The refugees are acting as they are, not because they see themselves as charity cases, but because they see themselves as conquerors. They know perfectly well that one doesn’t defecate in a pool in which people (especially children) are swimming. They’re doing it because they are performing the literal equivalent of the expression “I don’t give a shit about you.” They know you’re not supposed to rape women . . . that is, unless those women are the products of conquest, in which case raping them is one of Mohamed’s commandments....
Muslims are not like us, race equality chief says
Muslim communities are unlike others in Britain and the country should accept that they will not integrate in the same way, the former head of the equalities watchdog has said.
Trevor Phillips said that it was disrespectful to suppose that Muslim communities would change, claiming that we should accept that they “see the world differently from the rest of us”.
“Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect,” he told a meeting at the Policy Exchange think tank on Monday night. ...
'Who knows what horrors he has been through?' Swedish police chief sparks anger by SYMPATHISING with Somali boy, 15, charged with social worker's murder
The head of the Swedish police has sparked outrage by expressing sympathy with the teenage asylum seeker accused of murdering social worker Alexander Mezher.
National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson, who has already admitted police cannot cope with the wave of migrant crime, said he has concerns about the ‘horrors’ and trauma the accused murderer may have witnessed.
He said he was ‘distraught’ on behalf of Miss Mezher’s family but also for the killer, saying: ‘What has that person been through? Under what circumstances has he grown up? What is the trauma he carries?’...
...It strikes me that the really stupid, naive, unsophisticated people here are the Europeans who actually believe that this anti-social Muslim behavior comes about because Muslims are primitive people who are, for the first time, confronting an advanced society. To hold this position, Europeans must be willfully blind. Didn’t any of them notice the number of migrants who showed up with smart phones intact?...
...Here’s what I think is going on: The refugees are acting as they are, not because they see themselves as charity cases, but because they see themselves as conquerors. They know perfectly well that one doesn’t defecate in a pool in which people (especially children) are swimming. They’re doing it because they are performing the literal equivalent of the expression “I don’t give a shit about you.” They know you’re not supposed to rape women . . . that is, unless those women are the products of conquest, in which case raping them is one of Mohamed’s commandments....
Muslims are not like us, race equality chief says
Muslim communities are unlike others in Britain and the country should accept that they will not integrate in the same way, the former head of the equalities watchdog has said.
Trevor Phillips said that it was disrespectful to suppose that Muslim communities would change, claiming that we should accept that they “see the world differently from the rest of us”.
“Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect,” he told a meeting at the Policy Exchange think tank on Monday night. ...
'Who knows what horrors he has been through?' Swedish police chief sparks anger by SYMPATHISING with Somali boy, 15, charged with social worker's murder
The head of the Swedish police has sparked outrage by expressing sympathy with the teenage asylum seeker accused of murdering social worker Alexander Mezher.
National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson, who has already admitted police cannot cope with the wave of migrant crime, said he has concerns about the ‘horrors’ and trauma the accused murderer may have witnessed.
He said he was ‘distraught’ on behalf of Miss Mezher’s family but also for the killer, saying: ‘What has that person been through? Under what circumstances has he grown up? What is the trauma he carries?’...
Saturday, January 09, 2016
Cologne New Year gang assaults: Mayor says women should have code of conduct to prevent future assault
...Mayor Henriette Reker attended an emergency meeting with Chief of Police Wolfgang Albers and Wolfgang Wurm to discuss how to deal with the attack, where dozens of women were repeatedly touched and groped, with one case of alleged rape in the center of town.
“It is important to prevent such incidents from ever happening again,” said Mayor Reker, as reported in German by RP Online. “We have heard by now that they [the attacks] have occurred in other cities. This of course is not comforting to us.” ...
...The attackers were described as North African and Arab appearance by the police. The Mayor has said that not all of the attackers were newly-arrived refugees and had already been known to the police, as reported by The Local....
Incendiary Correctness
...The most shocking element of the stories is not their content but the fact that they were not made public until several days after the assaults. The Cologne police appear to have lied to downplay incidents they knew would be politically explosive, reporting on New Year's morning that the celebrations had been "largely peaceful." But the newsweekly Die Zeit reported on January 7 that the police had detained 70 men that night, many of whom could speak no German at all, and let them go. One can accept the Cologne police chief's account of his men's thinking: Where officers are overwhelmed by the size of a crowd — a thousand or so versus a couple dozen — the wise tactic is to clear the area rather than try to make arrests. But one cannot understand how the police expected their account to stand up when iPhone videos proving the contrary were lighting up German social media sites and getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
A scandalous political correctness has descended on Germany. Cologne's mayor Henriette Reker, who became an object of national sympathy when she was stabbed during the mayoral campaign last year, has in recent days been ridiculed for saying that any woman who wants can keep an importunate man at "arm's length." Thomas de Maizière, Chancellor Angela Merkel's interior minister, has criticized those who leap to the conclusion that the attackers had an Arab background. Such rumors can indeed spark baseless hatred, and are not to be indulged uncritically. But in the age of the Internet, it doesn't require a months-long investigation to figure out the truth. Go to YouTube, tap in "Köln" and "Silvester" (German for New Year's Eve), and you will discover a great big crowd of men of Mediterranean background milling about the Domplatz....
...No doubt there is a danger of incendiary reactions when people hear of mobs of Muslim foreigners groping young women in front of the country's most recognizable Christian landmark. But any government attempt to minimize or ignore such events would be a terrible mistake. It would be more likely to whip tempers up than to calm them down.
Police in Germany are covering up the extent of crime committed by migrants, claim Bild... as country is revealed to have taken in 1.1 MILLION people during 2015
Asylum seekers are being recruited as cheap drug dealers and traffickers as well as petty thieves, Bild newspaper claims
But police have apparently been ordered to cover up extent of crimes so as not to fuel 'right wing extremist debate'
Shocking claim comes as Germany registered over one million migrants in 2015 - five times last year's total
Germany has taken more refugees from the Middle East and Africa than any other EU state
The country is a magnet for migrants partly because of its generous social benefits
Two More Major German Cities Report New Year’s Sexual Assaults By ‘North African Groups’
...The news of the mass sexual assaults by “North African groups” of around 1,000 people didn’t break until Monday afternoon when Cologne’s police chief Wolfgang Albers called it a “completely new dimension of crime.” The number of total assaults has since grown from 60 to more than 100, spanning over three cities.
Similar incidents as the ones in Cologne took place in Stuttgart and Hamburg, with two and nine incidents, respectively. All three cities report the same profile of large groups groping women to distract them in order to steal their purses, but police say there are no indications of the events being related....
Cover-up claim over NYE mass sexual assaults
...Many people accused the national media of engaging in a cover-up due to the ethnic background of the criminals, with many pointing to the fact that it took days before the details of the story reached national attention.
One commentator wrote sarcastically that “it is fascinating that the event in Cologne on New Year made it through the media censorship.”..
...Writing for the Huffington Post Deutschland, Anabel Schunke accused the police of covering up details about the suspected criminals in order to protect public order.
Questioning why no details were given on the appearance of the suspects when police called for witnesses, despite plentiful CCTV footage, Schunke suggested that police chose to leave important details out so that the public would not make a connection between the crime and refugees....
Overwhelmed by 'Migrants,' Sweden Throws in the Towel as Europe Faces 'General, Permanent Terror Threat'
...But Sweden’s abrupt reversal is potentially far more consequential. Across Europe this year, two countries have stood out for their uncommonly generous reception policies: Sweden and Germany.
Now, Sweden is actively trying to keep people out, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure from critics within her own center-right coalition to do the same after the country welcomed a record 1 million asylum seekers this year. During her Christian Democratic Party conference in December, she bowed to those critics, at least in part, saying that Germany needed to “palpably reduce” its refugee numbers....
Man charged with setting Houston mosque fire was a devout attendee
...According to a charging instrument released by the Harris County District Clerk, Moore told investigators at the scene that he has attended the mosque for five years, coming five times per day to pray seven days per week.
Moore told investigators he had been at the mosque earlier on Dec. 25 to pray, and had left at about 2 p.m. to go home. Moore told investigators he was the last person to leave the mosque and saw no smoke or other signs of fire when he left. He had returned to the scene after hearing about the fire from a friend....
Teenage wife of Bataclan killer brags about her 'great life' in Iraq and how 'proud and happy' she is he helped murder 90 people
Wife of Samy Amimour wrote an email to a friend in days after Paris attacks
She boasted of how proud and happy that her husband killed 90 people
Bragged about how life in the ISIS stronghold of Mosul, Iraq was great
Amimour was one of 3 killers who gunned down music fans at the Bataclan music hall
Mother was mutilated and murdered by ISIS for breastfeeding her baby in public after another woman spotted the child under her burkha in Syria
Mother caught breastfeeding in Raqqa by ISIS's all-female police
Despite holding son under her burqa, al-Khansaa Brigade objected
Woman was mutilated before she was killed by al-Khansaa 'officers'
ISIS-linked social media sites said she had 'violated public decency'
A group of asylum-seekers and refugees staying at Hope Farm in South Africa threatened owners Andrew and Rae Wartnaby.
...In July, the headline read “Meet the angels who opened their hearts and home to 143 lost strangers,” and the left was drooling over the couple who followed their socialist values to the letter. Andrew and Rae Wartnaby opened up their 50-acre farmland to over 100 Muslim refugees who were reportedly displaced during “xenophobic attacks,” according to News 24.
After escaping Islamic brutality in the Central African Republic, the Muslim migrants traveled to South Africa, where they were again set upon by South African natives in black-on-black attacks. So, the good-natured yet naive white couple welcomed the refugee families to their land, which included Obama’s favored “widows and orphans.”
However, after only a few months of graciously allowing the Muslim migrants to live for free on their property, the loving couple soon found that they would actually be the refugees. The Wartnabys were threatened with slaughter by the same people they were helping escape brutality....
A Failure by Germany’s Elite
...The police failed to protect its citizens, the press dawdled in holding anyone to account (and see, too, those unanswered questions just above), and at least one politician even now seems to struggle to address the issue without suggesting that young women must somehow accommodate the possibility of assaults and “confusion.”
This all carries echoes of the Rotherham scandal, in which British authorities had for years turned a blind eye to a child abuse ring among Pakistani men in the north of England, seemingly at least in part for fear of looking racist. By the time anyone put a stop to it, an estimated 1,400 kids had been abused, often horrifically. Like the German police and politicians in this case—albeit on a much longer and larger scale—the British authorities may have put the need to appear sensitive over the need to enforce core values and basic human rights....
Suspects in Cologne sex attacks 'claimed to be Syrian refugees'
...But the leaked police report, published in Bild newspaper and Spiegel, a news magazine, claims that one of those involved told officers: “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.”
Another tore up his residence permit before the eyes of police, and told them: “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow.”...
...Mayor Henriette Reker attended an emergency meeting with Chief of Police Wolfgang Albers and Wolfgang Wurm to discuss how to deal with the attack, where dozens of women were repeatedly touched and groped, with one case of alleged rape in the center of town.
“It is important to prevent such incidents from ever happening again,” said Mayor Reker, as reported in German by RP Online. “We have heard by now that they [the attacks] have occurred in other cities. This of course is not comforting to us.” ...
...The attackers were described as North African and Arab appearance by the police. The Mayor has said that not all of the attackers were newly-arrived refugees and had already been known to the police, as reported by The Local....
Incendiary Correctness
...The most shocking element of the stories is not their content but the fact that they were not made public until several days after the assaults. The Cologne police appear to have lied to downplay incidents they knew would be politically explosive, reporting on New Year's morning that the celebrations had been "largely peaceful." But the newsweekly Die Zeit reported on January 7 that the police had detained 70 men that night, many of whom could speak no German at all, and let them go. One can accept the Cologne police chief's account of his men's thinking: Where officers are overwhelmed by the size of a crowd — a thousand or so versus a couple dozen — the wise tactic is to clear the area rather than try to make arrests. But one cannot understand how the police expected their account to stand up when iPhone videos proving the contrary were lighting up German social media sites and getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
A scandalous political correctness has descended on Germany. Cologne's mayor Henriette Reker, who became an object of national sympathy when she was stabbed during the mayoral campaign last year, has in recent days been ridiculed for saying that any woman who wants can keep an importunate man at "arm's length." Thomas de Maizière, Chancellor Angela Merkel's interior minister, has criticized those who leap to the conclusion that the attackers had an Arab background. Such rumors can indeed spark baseless hatred, and are not to be indulged uncritically. But in the age of the Internet, it doesn't require a months-long investigation to figure out the truth. Go to YouTube, tap in "Köln" and "Silvester" (German for New Year's Eve), and you will discover a great big crowd of men of Mediterranean background milling about the Domplatz....
...No doubt there is a danger of incendiary reactions when people hear of mobs of Muslim foreigners groping young women in front of the country's most recognizable Christian landmark. But any government attempt to minimize or ignore such events would be a terrible mistake. It would be more likely to whip tempers up than to calm them down.
Police in Germany are covering up the extent of crime committed by migrants, claim Bild... as country is revealed to have taken in 1.1 MILLION people during 2015
Asylum seekers are being recruited as cheap drug dealers and traffickers as well as petty thieves, Bild newspaper claims
But police have apparently been ordered to cover up extent of crimes so as not to fuel 'right wing extremist debate'
Shocking claim comes as Germany registered over one million migrants in 2015 - five times last year's total
Germany has taken more refugees from the Middle East and Africa than any other EU state
The country is a magnet for migrants partly because of its generous social benefits
Two More Major German Cities Report New Year’s Sexual Assaults By ‘North African Groups’
...The news of the mass sexual assaults by “North African groups” of around 1,000 people didn’t break until Monday afternoon when Cologne’s police chief Wolfgang Albers called it a “completely new dimension of crime.” The number of total assaults has since grown from 60 to more than 100, spanning over three cities.
Similar incidents as the ones in Cologne took place in Stuttgart and Hamburg, with two and nine incidents, respectively. All three cities report the same profile of large groups groping women to distract them in order to steal their purses, but police say there are no indications of the events being related....
Cover-up claim over NYE mass sexual assaults
...Many people accused the national media of engaging in a cover-up due to the ethnic background of the criminals, with many pointing to the fact that it took days before the details of the story reached national attention.
One commentator wrote sarcastically that “it is fascinating that the event in Cologne on New Year made it through the media censorship.”..
...Writing for the Huffington Post Deutschland, Anabel Schunke accused the police of covering up details about the suspected criminals in order to protect public order.
Questioning why no details were given on the appearance of the suspects when police called for witnesses, despite plentiful CCTV footage, Schunke suggested that police chose to leave important details out so that the public would not make a connection between the crime and refugees....
Overwhelmed by 'Migrants,' Sweden Throws in the Towel as Europe Faces 'General, Permanent Terror Threat'
...But Sweden’s abrupt reversal is potentially far more consequential. Across Europe this year, two countries have stood out for their uncommonly generous reception policies: Sweden and Germany.
Now, Sweden is actively trying to keep people out, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure from critics within her own center-right coalition to do the same after the country welcomed a record 1 million asylum seekers this year. During her Christian Democratic Party conference in December, she bowed to those critics, at least in part, saying that Germany needed to “palpably reduce” its refugee numbers....
Man charged with setting Houston mosque fire was a devout attendee
...According to a charging instrument released by the Harris County District Clerk, Moore told investigators at the scene that he has attended the mosque for five years, coming five times per day to pray seven days per week.
Moore told investigators he had been at the mosque earlier on Dec. 25 to pray, and had left at about 2 p.m. to go home. Moore told investigators he was the last person to leave the mosque and saw no smoke or other signs of fire when he left. He had returned to the scene after hearing about the fire from a friend....
Teenage wife of Bataclan killer brags about her 'great life' in Iraq and how 'proud and happy' she is he helped murder 90 people
Wife of Samy Amimour wrote an email to a friend in days after Paris attacks
She boasted of how proud and happy that her husband killed 90 people
Bragged about how life in the ISIS stronghold of Mosul, Iraq was great
Amimour was one of 3 killers who gunned down music fans at the Bataclan music hall
Mother was mutilated and murdered by ISIS for breastfeeding her baby in public after another woman spotted the child under her burkha in Syria
Mother caught breastfeeding in Raqqa by ISIS's all-female police
Despite holding son under her burqa, al-Khansaa Brigade objected
Woman was mutilated before she was killed by al-Khansaa 'officers'
ISIS-linked social media sites said she had 'violated public decency'
A group of asylum-seekers and refugees staying at Hope Farm in South Africa threatened owners Andrew and Rae Wartnaby.
...In July, the headline read “Meet the angels who opened their hearts and home to 143 lost strangers,” and the left was drooling over the couple who followed their socialist values to the letter. Andrew and Rae Wartnaby opened up their 50-acre farmland to over 100 Muslim refugees who were reportedly displaced during “xenophobic attacks,” according to News 24.
After escaping Islamic brutality in the Central African Republic, the Muslim migrants traveled to South Africa, where they were again set upon by South African natives in black-on-black attacks. So, the good-natured yet naive white couple welcomed the refugee families to their land, which included Obama’s favored “widows and orphans.”
However, after only a few months of graciously allowing the Muslim migrants to live for free on their property, the loving couple soon found that they would actually be the refugees. The Wartnabys were threatened with slaughter by the same people they were helping escape brutality....
A Failure by Germany’s Elite
...The police failed to protect its citizens, the press dawdled in holding anyone to account (and see, too, those unanswered questions just above), and at least one politician even now seems to struggle to address the issue without suggesting that young women must somehow accommodate the possibility of assaults and “confusion.”
This all carries echoes of the Rotherham scandal, in which British authorities had for years turned a blind eye to a child abuse ring among Pakistani men in the north of England, seemingly at least in part for fear of looking racist. By the time anyone put a stop to it, an estimated 1,400 kids had been abused, often horrifically. Like the German police and politicians in this case—albeit on a much longer and larger scale—the British authorities may have put the need to appear sensitive over the need to enforce core values and basic human rights....
Suspects in Cologne sex attacks 'claimed to be Syrian refugees'
...But the leaked police report, published in Bild newspaper and Spiegel, a news magazine, claims that one of those involved told officers: “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.”
Another tore up his residence permit before the eyes of police, and told them: “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow.”...
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Communism Killed 94M in 20th Century, Feels Need to Kill Again
According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.
During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million....
According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.
During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million....
Venezuela announces new 'people's parliament' as the country's elite face mounting drug charges
Venezuela’s government has found an ingenious way to cling on to power in their rapidly-unravelling state: announcing the creation of a new, parallel parliament which will run as a “people’s assembly,” beside the National Assembly they no longer control....
...Reports in America in the early hours of Wednesday suggested that a New York prosecutor was preparing to charge the head of the country’s border agency with drug trafficking – a highly significant move, which would be the first time a sitting official has been charged on narcotics offences. Nestor Reverol, a high-ranking ally of the late president Hugo Chavez and head of the National Guard, has used his social media account to champion his team’s work in detecting drug shipments from Colombia. But he and his deputy are likely to face charges later this month of collusion with cartels....
Venezuela’s government has found an ingenious way to cling on to power in their rapidly-unravelling state: announcing the creation of a new, parallel parliament which will run as a “people’s assembly,” beside the National Assembly they no longer control....
...Reports in America in the early hours of Wednesday suggested that a New York prosecutor was preparing to charge the head of the country’s border agency with drug trafficking – a highly significant move, which would be the first time a sitting official has been charged on narcotics offences. Nestor Reverol, a high-ranking ally of the late president Hugo Chavez and head of the National Guard, has used his social media account to champion his team’s work in detecting drug shipments from Colombia. But he and his deputy are likely to face charges later this month of collusion with cartels....
NOAA Fiddles With Climate Data To Erase The 15-Year Global Warming ‘Hiatus’
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year “pause” in global warming: They “adjusted” the hiatus in warming out of the temperature record.
New climate data by NOAA scientists doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting pre-hiatus temperatures downward and inflating temperatures in more recent years.
“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,'” wrote NOAA scientists in their study presenting newly adjusted climate data....
...To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well....
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year “pause” in global warming: They “adjusted” the hiatus in warming out of the temperature record.
New climate data by NOAA scientists doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting pre-hiatus temperatures downward and inflating temperatures in more recent years.
“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,'” wrote NOAA scientists in their study presenting newly adjusted climate data....
...To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well....
NBC News: Obama administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years. [This article was written in 2013]
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC News that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered....
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years. [This article was written in 2013]
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC News that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered....
The Democrats’ Theme for 2016 Is Totalitarianism
The Democrats’ Theme for 2016 Is Totalitarianism Hillary Clinton and John Kerry share a laugh in September 2014. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty) SHARE ARTICLE ON FACEBOOKSHARE TWEET ARTICLETWEET PLUS ONE ARTICLE ON GOOGLE PLUS+1At the beginning of December, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Charles and David Koch, two libertarian political activists, should be considered — his remarkable words — “an enemy of the state.” He posed the same question about Exxon, and John Kerry, who could have been president of these United States, said that he looked forward to the seizure of Exxon’s assets for the crime of “proselytizing” impermissibly about the question of global warming.
An enemy of the state? That’s the Democrats’ theme for the New Year: totalitarianism.
Donald Trump may talk like a brownshirt, but the Democrats mean business. For those of you keeping track, the Democrats and their allies on the left have now: voted in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, proposed imprisoning people for holding the wrong views on global warming, sought to prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton, proposed banning politically unpopular academic research, demanded that funding politically unpopular organizations and causes be made a crime and that the RICO organized-crime statute be used as a weapon against targeted political groups. They have filed felony charges against a Republican governor for vetoing a piece of legislation, engaged in naked political persecutions of members of Congress, and used the IRS and the ATF as weapons against political critics....
Jerry Brown Touts 'Coercive Power of the State' on Climate Change
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) raised some eyebrows while attending the United Nations Climate Summit in Paris, proclaiming the "coercive power of the central state" is needed to promote good public policy, specifically when it comes to a cleaner environment.
Taking part in an onstage presentation with billionaire and climate activist Tom Steyer, Brown said government regulations force companies to adopt clean technologies.
After Steyer mentioned business frameworks, Brown said, "Tom, you used the phrase 'policy.' Good policy. But I want to unpack that term a little bit. Inside the policy, you need a law. You need a rule. You need the coercive power of government to say, 'Do this.' ...
The Democrats’ Theme for 2016 Is Totalitarianism Hillary Clinton and John Kerry share a laugh in September 2014. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty) SHARE ARTICLE ON FACEBOOKSHARE TWEET ARTICLETWEET PLUS ONE ARTICLE ON GOOGLE PLUS+1At the beginning of December, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Charles and David Koch, two libertarian political activists, should be considered — his remarkable words — “an enemy of the state.” He posed the same question about Exxon, and John Kerry, who could have been president of these United States, said that he looked forward to the seizure of Exxon’s assets for the crime of “proselytizing” impermissibly about the question of global warming.
An enemy of the state? That’s the Democrats’ theme for the New Year: totalitarianism.
Donald Trump may talk like a brownshirt, but the Democrats mean business. For those of you keeping track, the Democrats and their allies on the left have now: voted in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, proposed imprisoning people for holding the wrong views on global warming, sought to prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton, proposed banning politically unpopular academic research, demanded that funding politically unpopular organizations and causes be made a crime and that the RICO organized-crime statute be used as a weapon against targeted political groups. They have filed felony charges against a Republican governor for vetoing a piece of legislation, engaged in naked political persecutions of members of Congress, and used the IRS and the ATF as weapons against political critics....
Jerry Brown Touts 'Coercive Power of the State' on Climate Change
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) raised some eyebrows while attending the United Nations Climate Summit in Paris, proclaiming the "coercive power of the central state" is needed to promote good public policy, specifically when it comes to a cleaner environment.
Taking part in an onstage presentation with billionaire and climate activist Tom Steyer, Brown said government regulations force companies to adopt clean technologies.
After Steyer mentioned business frameworks, Brown said, "Tom, you used the phrase 'policy.' Good policy. But I want to unpack that term a little bit. Inside the policy, you need a law. You need a rule. You need the coercive power of government to say, 'Do this.' ...
Denmark defends plans to strip migrants of their jewellery and valuables after comparisons to Nazi Germany, saying: 'You must pay for yourself before you get benefits'
New policies to search newly arrived refugees for valuables criticised
International outrage saw Denmark compared to Nazi Germany
Government defends policy, saying it's same rules for refugees and Danes
Unemployed Danes must sell valuables above £976 to get social benefits
Fights, fury and the Ku Klux Klan: Finland faces wave of vigilante mobs targeting migrants as arrest of an Afghan asylum seeker for rape of 14-year-old schoolgirl pushes one town to the brink
...In Kempele, the rape of the schoolgirl, just a fortnight after the centre for young migrants opened, sent shockwaves through the community.
Rumours quickly spread around the town that two asylum seekers from Afghanistan had been arrested over the assault.
It has since emerged that police have arrested a 17-year-old boy at the centre, who is in custody awaiting trial.
It was the spark needed for those who had opposed the centre in the first place to take to the streets - as hundreds turned out for a protest march demanding it be closed immediately.
'Finland for the Finns! Close down the centre!’ they chanted....
...The day after the schoolgirl sex attack in Kempele, another 14-year-old girl was attacked in the southern town of Raisio. This time, the man arrested was a 19-year-old asylum seeker.
Two days later, Afghan Ramin Azimi was jailed for life for raping a 17-year-old Finnish girl from Pori and burning her alive....
'I was gang-raped by ISIS thugs until I blacked out': Yazidi woman held as sex slave for three months breaks down during speech at UN as she begs world leaders to wipe out the Islamist group
21-year-old Yazidi woman described three months of torture as ISIS victim
She was abducted from her home in Iraq by ISIS militants last August
She described being held in a fighter's home, being raped until she fainted
ISIS trades women and children from minority Yazidi people as 'war booty'
UN described ISIS's treatment of the Yazidi people as a possible genocide
Norway now offering formal instruction to refugees that rape is wrong
...A course manual sets out a simple rule that all asylum seekers need to learn and follow: “To force someone into sex is not permitted in Norway, even when you are married to that person.”…
The first such program to teach immigrants about local norms and how to avoid misreading social signals was initiated in Stavanger, the center of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for migrants, after a series of rapes from 2009 to 2011.
Henry Ove Berg, who was Stavanger’s police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants sex education because “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa.” When they get to Norway, he added, “something happens in their heads.”…
“Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” [Muslim refugee Abdu Osman] Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police....
Riot police fire warning shots as THOUSANDS of protesters storm the site of a planned asylum centre for 1,500 migrants in Holland
Demonstrators went on the rampage in town of Geldermalsen last night
They smashed through fence surrounding asylum camp, attacked police
The angry crowd yelled 'No n****** here!' and 'foreign scum keep away'
Town hall left looking like a 'battlefield' and councillors were forced to flee
At least 14 people were arrested, several policemen were injured in melee
...A planned discussion about the imminent arrival of the migrants, staged by the town council, was abandoned in the chaos as the mob outside tried to storm the building. Councillors were forced to flee out of rear exits into police vans....
Rotherham Witness Says Police Covered Up Child Abuse By Muslim Men
...In February, the then Communities Secretary Eric Pickles sent a team of five commissioners to take over the executive functions of Rotherham Borough Council, saying it was suffering from “institutionalised political correctness”.
In August last year, the Jay Report found that 1,400 children had been groomed, trafficked and raped by Asian men in the town but police had failed to intervene due to fears of appearing racist....
...A member of staff gave Mr Hussain permission to take the girls away in his car as long as they were back by 11pm. He took them to a restaurant and then on the drive back pulled over and made her “perform a sex act” on him and his friends....
...She said she first met the men when she was living at a children’s home and had informed staff of their behaviour but, as with the first woman, “they just didn’t seem to want to know.”...
New policies to search newly arrived refugees for valuables criticised
International outrage saw Denmark compared to Nazi Germany
Government defends policy, saying it's same rules for refugees and Danes
Unemployed Danes must sell valuables above £976 to get social benefits
Fights, fury and the Ku Klux Klan: Finland faces wave of vigilante mobs targeting migrants as arrest of an Afghan asylum seeker for rape of 14-year-old schoolgirl pushes one town to the brink
...In Kempele, the rape of the schoolgirl, just a fortnight after the centre for young migrants opened, sent shockwaves through the community.
Rumours quickly spread around the town that two asylum seekers from Afghanistan had been arrested over the assault.
It has since emerged that police have arrested a 17-year-old boy at the centre, who is in custody awaiting trial.
It was the spark needed for those who had opposed the centre in the first place to take to the streets - as hundreds turned out for a protest march demanding it be closed immediately.
'Finland for the Finns! Close down the centre!’ they chanted....
...The day after the schoolgirl sex attack in Kempele, another 14-year-old girl was attacked in the southern town of Raisio. This time, the man arrested was a 19-year-old asylum seeker.
Two days later, Afghan Ramin Azimi was jailed for life for raping a 17-year-old Finnish girl from Pori and burning her alive....
'I was gang-raped by ISIS thugs until I blacked out': Yazidi woman held as sex slave for three months breaks down during speech at UN as she begs world leaders to wipe out the Islamist group
21-year-old Yazidi woman described three months of torture as ISIS victim
She was abducted from her home in Iraq by ISIS militants last August
She described being held in a fighter's home, being raped until she fainted
ISIS trades women and children from minority Yazidi people as 'war booty'
UN described ISIS's treatment of the Yazidi people as a possible genocide
Norway now offering formal instruction to refugees that rape is wrong
...A course manual sets out a simple rule that all asylum seekers need to learn and follow: “To force someone into sex is not permitted in Norway, even when you are married to that person.”…
The first such program to teach immigrants about local norms and how to avoid misreading social signals was initiated in Stavanger, the center of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for migrants, after a series of rapes from 2009 to 2011.
Henry Ove Berg, who was Stavanger’s police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants sex education because “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa.” When they get to Norway, he added, “something happens in their heads.”…
“Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” [Muslim refugee Abdu Osman] Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police....
Riot police fire warning shots as THOUSANDS of protesters storm the site of a planned asylum centre for 1,500 migrants in Holland
Demonstrators went on the rampage in town of Geldermalsen last night
They smashed through fence surrounding asylum camp, attacked police
The angry crowd yelled 'No n****** here!' and 'foreign scum keep away'
Town hall left looking like a 'battlefield' and councillors were forced to flee
At least 14 people were arrested, several policemen were injured in melee
...A planned discussion about the imminent arrival of the migrants, staged by the town council, was abandoned in the chaos as the mob outside tried to storm the building. Councillors were forced to flee out of rear exits into police vans....
Rotherham Witness Says Police Covered Up Child Abuse By Muslim Men
...In February, the then Communities Secretary Eric Pickles sent a team of five commissioners to take over the executive functions of Rotherham Borough Council, saying it was suffering from “institutionalised political correctness”.
In August last year, the Jay Report found that 1,400 children had been groomed, trafficked and raped by Asian men in the town but police had failed to intervene due to fears of appearing racist....
...A member of staff gave Mr Hussain permission to take the girls away in his car as long as they were back by 11pm. He took them to a restaurant and then on the drive back pulled over and made her “perform a sex act” on him and his friends....
...She said she first met the men when she was living at a children’s home and had informed staff of their behaviour but, as with the first woman, “they just didn’t seem to want to know.”...
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Hillary Clinton Knew All Along Benghazi Attack Had "Nothing To Do With The Film," Documents Reveal
According to documents revealed as part of the ongoing Congressional hearings on Benghazi, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil in a phone call the day after the attack on the U.S. consulate, "We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest."
The film Clinton refers to is the 10 minute Youtube trailer for the ultra-low budget anti-Islam movie "Innocence of Muslims," which she and other senior Obama administration officials, including President Obama himself, almost immediately began casting as a scapegoat for the attacks. Those attacks, however, were already understood by senior administration officials to be a planned and coordinated attack, and very much not what then-ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice called a "a spontaneous reaction to a video."
Clinton also reportedly emailed her daughter Chelsea, who used the pseudonym Diane Reynolds when communicating with her mother via her private email account, on the night of the attacks, telling her that the consulate had been attacked by an "Al Queda-like group." (sic)...
According to documents revealed as part of the ongoing Congressional hearings on Benghazi, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil in a phone call the day after the attack on the U.S. consulate, "We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest."
The film Clinton refers to is the 10 minute Youtube trailer for the ultra-low budget anti-Islam movie "Innocence of Muslims," which she and other senior Obama administration officials, including President Obama himself, almost immediately began casting as a scapegoat for the attacks. Those attacks, however, were already understood by senior administration officials to be a planned and coordinated attack, and very much not what then-ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice called a "a spontaneous reaction to a video."
Clinton also reportedly emailed her daughter Chelsea, who used the pseudonym Diane Reynolds when communicating with her mother via her private email account, on the night of the attacks, telling her that the consulate had been attacked by an "Al Queda-like group." (sic)...
The Certainty of Uncertainty
"A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science
Nine years ago self-proclaimed "climate hawk" David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.
But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he's singing a rather different tune:
Basically, it's difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There's no fixed point of reference....
"A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science
Nine years ago self-proclaimed "climate hawk" David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.
But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he's singing a rather different tune:
Basically, it's difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There's no fixed point of reference....
EXCLUSIVE: Authorities Ignored Woman’s Rape Allegations Against Illegal Immigrant Who Later Raped Her Again
Authorities didn’t act on a woman’s rape allegations against a Honduran man in the U.S. illegally until after he came back months later to kidnap and rape her again in front of their 2-year-old child.
Jose Amaya-Vasquez, a Honduran man that has entered the U.S. three times illegally, was scheduled to appear in court Monday after allegedly kidnapping and raping his ex-girlfriend during a four-day drive in May from Kansas City, Mo., to Camden, N.J....
Authorities didn’t act on a woman’s rape allegations against a Honduran man in the U.S. illegally until after he came back months later to kidnap and rape her again in front of their 2-year-old child.
Jose Amaya-Vasquez, a Honduran man that has entered the U.S. three times illegally, was scheduled to appear in court Monday after allegedly kidnapping and raping his ex-girlfriend during a four-day drive in May from Kansas City, Mo., to Camden, N.J....
The Big Three Villains — Laziness, Stupidity, Corruption — and the Gun-Control Debate
...The Democratic party’s dramatic slide into naked authoritarianism — voting in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, trying to lock up governors for vetoing legislation, and seeking to jail political opponents for holding unpopular views on global warming, etc. — has been both worrisome and dramatic. The Democrats even have a new position on the ancient civil-rights issue of due process, and that position is: “F— you.”...
The purpose of a list is, lest we forget, to be cleared. If Jim Bob is on your list of terrorist suspects, what do you do? Just sit on the list forever and think up new things that Jim Bob should not be allowed to do. (Exercise his First Amendment rights? Protest? Write a letter to the editor? Go to church?) No. You can: 1) Investigate until you have evidence of a crime and hand down an indictment; 2) clear him from the list after investigation; 3) come up with a specific rationale for continued surveillance. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just making eternal lists, which the Democrats intend to use for eternal harassment of their political rivals. It hasn’t occurred to them to wonder what a President Cruz or, God save the Republic, a President Trump might do with the sort of executive power they contemplate....
...Conservatives are naturally inclined to indulge the police, but the fact is that the run of them are specimens of what you get when you take the same lazy unionized public-teat-suckling lumps over at the DMV and put guns on their hips and tell them that they are “at war” with the people they serve. Our intelligence guys aren’t in the main Blackford Oakes or James Bond: They’re drones compiling Excel reports until their pensions kick in. That cow-eyed young TSA gate agent with the “GANGSTER” neck tattoo grabbing your nozzle at the airport isn’t the best and brightest, and the guy he works for only has to be one step up. The distance between the guy staring dumbly into your traveler-sized tube of shaving cream and the guy making policy about staring dumbly into traveler-sized tubes of shaving cream is about 300 points on the SAT....
...It is time for Americans to grow up and to sober up. It may push your soy-latte buttons every time Bubba down in Muleshoe, Texas, buys a scary-looking black gun and declares war upon a row of defenseless Budweiser cans, but inconveniencing Bubba isn’t going to get the job done. Laziness, stupidity, corruption: The U.S. government exists for the sole purpose of protecting the rights of U.S. citizens, but somehow the fine minds at the New York Times conclude that the federal government should do more to burden the citizens to whom it owes every duty than, say, so-called refugees from Syria to whom the U.S. government has no duty whatsoever. Why? Because the alternative is expecting the employees of our federal, state, and local governments to do their duties, and that is just too much work.
...The Democratic party’s dramatic slide into naked authoritarianism — voting in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, trying to lock up governors for vetoing legislation, and seeking to jail political opponents for holding unpopular views on global warming, etc. — has been both worrisome and dramatic. The Democrats even have a new position on the ancient civil-rights issue of due process, and that position is: “F— you.”...
The purpose of a list is, lest we forget, to be cleared. If Jim Bob is on your list of terrorist suspects, what do you do? Just sit on the list forever and think up new things that Jim Bob should not be allowed to do. (Exercise his First Amendment rights? Protest? Write a letter to the editor? Go to church?) No. You can: 1) Investigate until you have evidence of a crime and hand down an indictment; 2) clear him from the list after investigation; 3) come up with a specific rationale for continued surveillance. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just making eternal lists, which the Democrats intend to use for eternal harassment of their political rivals. It hasn’t occurred to them to wonder what a President Cruz or, God save the Republic, a President Trump might do with the sort of executive power they contemplate....
...Conservatives are naturally inclined to indulge the police, but the fact is that the run of them are specimens of what you get when you take the same lazy unionized public-teat-suckling lumps over at the DMV and put guns on their hips and tell them that they are “at war” with the people they serve. Our intelligence guys aren’t in the main Blackford Oakes or James Bond: They’re drones compiling Excel reports until their pensions kick in. That cow-eyed young TSA gate agent with the “GANGSTER” neck tattoo grabbing your nozzle at the airport isn’t the best and brightest, and the guy he works for only has to be one step up. The distance between the guy staring dumbly into your traveler-sized tube of shaving cream and the guy making policy about staring dumbly into traveler-sized tubes of shaving cream is about 300 points on the SAT....
...It is time for Americans to grow up and to sober up. It may push your soy-latte buttons every time Bubba down in Muleshoe, Texas, buys a scary-looking black gun and declares war upon a row of defenseless Budweiser cans, but inconveniencing Bubba isn’t going to get the job done. Laziness, stupidity, corruption: The U.S. government exists for the sole purpose of protecting the rights of U.S. citizens, but somehow the fine minds at the New York Times conclude that the federal government should do more to burden the citizens to whom it owes every duty than, say, so-called refugees from Syria to whom the U.S. government has no duty whatsoever. Why? Because the alternative is expecting the employees of our federal, state, and local governments to do their duties, and that is just too much work.
The Bipartisan Push Back Against Obama’s Retirement Attack
...The coalition is being led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The goal is to stop what is known as the fiduciary rule implemented by the Obama administration. The rule restricts investment choices for retirement and savings plans. The Department of Labor (DOL) says most Americans are just not knowledgeable enough to make good investments. Arguing it hurts retirement planning and liberty, the coalition letter is urging Congress to defund the rule.
“Under the fiduciary rule, the DOL claims authority never granted by Congress to greatly restrict investment choices for 401(k)s, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and other saving vehicles,” the letter states. “The DOL doesn’t even bother to hide its contempt for the intelligence of American savers.”...
...The coalition is being led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The goal is to stop what is known as the fiduciary rule implemented by the Obama administration. The rule restricts investment choices for retirement and savings plans. The Department of Labor (DOL) says most Americans are just not knowledgeable enough to make good investments. Arguing it hurts retirement planning and liberty, the coalition letter is urging Congress to defund the rule.
“Under the fiduciary rule, the DOL claims authority never granted by Congress to greatly restrict investment choices for 401(k)s, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and other saving vehicles,” the letter states. “The DOL doesn’t even bother to hide its contempt for the intelligence of American savers.”...
Meet The Mizzou Media Professor Who’s Trying To Ban Media Coverage
...“You need to get out, you need to get out,” Melissa Click demanded of the person filming the protest. “You need to get out,” she continued before trying to grab the camera out of the videographer’s hands.
“I actually don’t,” the journalist told Click.
“Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here,” the media professor then hysterically exclaimed to the assembled mob. “I need some muscle over here!”...
Unsafe space: Fascist Missouri protesters physically remove reporter from public demonstrations
The woman who tells cameraman he can’t be there & asks for “muscle” to remove him is Mizzou Assistant Professor of Mass Media @melissaclick
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) November 10, 2015
Meet The Sick Mizzou Media Professor Who Threatened A Reporter With MOB VIOLENCE
...Her current research includes studying readers of the tour de smut “50 [sic] Shades of Grey.” She also studies Lady Gaga, “class and food in reality television programming” and “messages about work in children’s television programs.”
Critics of Click have taken to Rate My Professors today to portray as “an insufferable human being” and in other negative ways.
The last time Click was published in any serious academic publication was in 2013. The topic was Lady Gaga....
...“You need to get out, you need to get out,” Melissa Click demanded of the person filming the protest. “You need to get out,” she continued before trying to grab the camera out of the videographer’s hands.
“I actually don’t,” the journalist told Click.
“Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here,” the media professor then hysterically exclaimed to the assembled mob. “I need some muscle over here!”...
Unsafe space: Fascist Missouri protesters physically remove reporter from public demonstrations
The woman who tells cameraman he can’t be there & asks for “muscle” to remove him is Mizzou Assistant Professor of Mass Media @melissaclick
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) November 10, 2015
Meet The Sick Mizzou Media Professor Who Threatened A Reporter With MOB VIOLENCE
...Her current research includes studying readers of the tour de smut “50 [sic] Shades of Grey.” She also studies Lady Gaga, “class and food in reality television programming” and “messages about work in children’s television programs.”
Critics of Click have taken to Rate My Professors today to portray as “an insufferable human being” and in other negative ways.
The last time Click was published in any serious academic publication was in 2013. The topic was Lady Gaga....
New report: In tough times, police start seizing a lot more stuff from people
In tough times, police start seizing a lot more stuff from people
One possible explanation for the recent rise is that "the years 2008 to 2014 were some lean economic years," said report co-author Dick Carpenter in an interview. "Forfeiture is an attractive way to keep revenue streams flowing when budgets are tight."
Law enforcement officers generally acknowledged this factor, according a Washington Post investigation last year: "All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book in 2011.
Critics of the system also say that the increase in forfeiture activity is due largely to the profit motive created by laws which allow police to keep some or all of the assets they seize.
In tough times, police start seizing a lot more stuff from people
One possible explanation for the recent rise is that "the years 2008 to 2014 were some lean economic years," said report co-author Dick Carpenter in an interview. "Forfeiture is an attractive way to keep revenue streams flowing when budgets are tight."
Law enforcement officers generally acknowledged this factor, according a Washington Post investigation last year: "All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book in 2011.
Critics of the system also say that the increase in forfeiture activity is due largely to the profit motive created by laws which allow police to keep some or all of the assets they seize.
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