This is not a question of American citizens’ rights, this is a question of the US government purposely arming narcoterrorists in order to have this talking point, claiming the 90% lie over and over.
I can’t think of many things more insulting or downright foul to hear from our President other than his own crimes being blamed on our rights – as was intended. He is now going international with the demand that our rights go away because he committed crimes… to deny us those rights.
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This is like a rapist saying “not only did she deserve it when I did it to her, but that proves my point, we have to keep the world safe from women like her who cause rape”.
We have held fast to the principles at our country’s core: service and citizenship; courage and the common good; liberty, equality, and justice for all.
This is our Nation’s heritage, and it is what we remember on Loyalty Day. It is an occasion that asks something of us as a people: to rediscover those ageless truths our Founders held to be self-evident, and to renew them in our own time. We look back to Americans who did the same, from generation to generation — citizens who strengthened our democracy, organizers who made it broader, service members who gave everything to protect it. These patriots and pioneers remind us that while our path to a more perfect Union is unending, with hope and hard work, we can move forward together.
Yes, the common good, democracy (mob rule, not a republic), and organizers who broadened democracy and reduced the republic, all us moving forward together. These are things the pioneers worked for.
Just different pioneers.
In order to recognize the American spirit of loyalty and the sacrifices that so many have made for our Nation, the Congress, by Public Law 85-529 as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as “Loyalty Day.”
There is no “unauthorized”, there is illegal. That’s like saying “unauthorized sexual partner” for rapist, or “unauthorized euthanasia provider” for murderer.
These are illegal aliens, in the country illegally. They are criminals.
The “these are civil rights” argument is nonsense. It’s collectivism stealing words from righteous causes. This is amnesty for barbarism.
The person who is accepted into your family, works to join your house because he wants to be a part of it, works to contribute to your property, asks for your daughters’ hand, and sleeps in a bed in your house with your daughter because he’s a member of your family is now being replaced by the barbarian who invades your home. Holder speaks in collectivist bullshit, wherein everyone in the world who can break into your house now somehow has a right to your property, has a right to what you worked for, has a right to eat your food and rape your children – and because they’ve done so, is now a member of your house.
This is leftist collectivist redistribution of property, wealth, and national identity by declaring that what the US has created isn’t ours, and is the property of anyone who can take it. This amnesty is the legal framework for justifying complete obliteration of the nation – because now they have a “civil right” to what’s yours.
Their might, their decision to break the law, their decision to invade, now grants them a “civil right” to everything you have and have worked for.
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As for how he treats his actual “friends and neighbors”, he sent guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels to kill Mexican citizens. Those who want to better their own country were his target.
Before the Boston Marathon bombings, the Obama administration argued for years that there is a big difference between terrorists and the tenets of Islam.
A senior White House aide in 2009 publicly urged Washington to cease using the term “jihadist” — asserting that terrorists are simply extremists. Two years later, the White House ordered a cleansing of training materials that Islamic groups deemed offensive.
Now, some analysts are asking whether the 2009 edict and others that followed have dampened law enforcement’s appetite to thoroughly investigate terrorism suspects for fear of offending higher-ups or the American Muslim lobby.
It’s not just suspected. The most recent fedgov-sponsored anti-terrorism course I took spent the first few hours going over the SPLC’s laundry list of evil white terrorist organizations that to any sane person, aren’t more than a footnote.
In October 2011, 57 Islamic groups wrote a letter to John O. Brennan, now CIA director, but then President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser.
Citing news reports, the groups complained of “biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam” inside the federal government’s instructional halls.
“While recent news reports have highlighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army,” the letter read.
Muslims objected to several training guides, such as a 2009 report produced at the Army Command and General Staff at the Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies.
“Moderate Muslims are not exercising moderation; they are simply applying other means to accomplish the same goal of establishing global Islamic dominance,” it quoted the report as saying.
At least two of the 57 groups were listed by the Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators and as being connected to the Muslim Brotherhood in the prosecution of a Texas charity for funding Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The groups are the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America.
The organizations’ letter demanded that biased trainers be disciplined, that all instructors undergo retraining and that materials deemed offensive by Muslim activists be purged.
Want to know why we can’t effectively fight jihadi terrorists? Why we keep having Fort Hoods and Bostons?
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu’s reflections on the Obama administration would probably be something like: “If you deny yourself knowledge of the enemy and even deny the enemy’s existence because you don’t want to offend the enemy, you have already been defeated.“
John Guandolo, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, has spent years studying the global Muslim Brotherhood movement and its links to American Islamic groups. The FBI relies on some of them to guide its training. The political left has branded Mr. Guandolo an “Islamophobe.”
“There is no strategy in the FBI,” he told The Times. “At FBI headquarters, it is a daily fire drill. The threats come in, and they run around to deal with them and run them down. But because none of it can have anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood’s movement in the U.S. or Islam, they never address the root cause and common investigative realities.”
Mr. Emerson, who maintains back-channel ties to law enforcement, said any slide presentation on Islamic extremism now has to be submitted to a special Justice Department panel.
He said one slide that was required to be omitted showed the famous photo of captured Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The photo of a disheveled and unshaven Mohammed was deemed “offensive to Islam,” Mr. Emerson said.
There is a strategy in the FBI. It’s a strategy of concession and defeat.
… the president does not “see this challenge as a fight against ‘jihadists.’ Describing terrorists in this way — using a legitimate term, jihad, meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal — risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.”
Some analysts disagree with that interpretation, saying the Koran clearly states that jihad is a “holy war.”
Jihad is war.
Denying it and pretending that it’s simply “internal jihad” denies reality. The struggle in Islam is further submission to the will of Allah – Islam means submission. Salaam and the peace of Allah is all about submission to Allah’s will. People with an internal “my struggle” tend to be types who are worth keeping an eye on anyway.
Beyond that point, it doesn’t actually matter what the US says. Contrary to American popular belief, the world does not actually revolve around us. The right knows we’re big and important and we have an important role to play, but we’re ultimately not everything; the left mocks our actual importance, but then thinks every evil in the world is caused by our interference and instead blames America for everything as though we are the cause of all evil in the world – a far more powerful egocentric belief.
Jihadis who are willing to kill themselves to strike a blow against the West in a desire to further the plans for the caliphate do not care what you or I think of them. The US saying “Islamic jihadi terrorists are Islamic jihadi terrorists” doesn’t change much.
They don’t need our opinion to make themselves legitimate. They are, by their own actions, legitimating themselves. They strike terror against the west and they prove they are jihadis. The US understanding and saying “they’re jihadis” does not magically make them jihadis. That they are blowing themselves up for jihad makes them jihadis. This is a question of acknowledging reality. They aren’t seeking our approval to make them jihadis.
For your nation to protect itself does demand that it acknowledge what it is fighting.
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”
- Osama bin Laden
Frankly, when we’re acting befuddled because we can’t understand jihad, it doesn’t make us the strong horse. When our government, filled with mush-brained liberals at best; and jihad-allies leftists as well, tells you with their rose-colored glasses and romantic worldview (or straight up leftist redistributive propaganda) that these are a peaceful, peaceable, highly spiritual wise people with a history that goes back thousands of years, wise exotic mystics who travel the deserts and kept alive the knowledge that racist bigoted white European Christians threw away, and then were attacked by ruthless murderous Christian fundamentalist Crusaders who sought to kill them for some reason… it sets up a ridiculous worldview.
The leftist worldview doesn’t allow for acknowledging who the enemy is.
“They say our enemy is violent extremism,” Mr. Lieberman said. “It’s not. It’s not animal rights extremists or white supremacy extremists. It’s Islamic extremism.”
Lieberman’s one redeeming virtue is that he somewhat understands this. At the same time, it’s not extremism.
This is extremism:
Rubio also has part of the problem recognized, but this is still a problem:
Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, told Fox News this week that the administration will not recognize the terrorists for what they are — radicalized Islamists.
These are radical muslims:
Notably, those muslim snowboarders aren’t jihadis. Or at least, probably not (Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a Golden Gloves boxer, after all).
“My problem with this administration is they refuse to acknowledge the existence of this kind of terrorism,” Mr. Rubio said.
He noted that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic complex in Benghazi, Libya, the White House refused to call it terrorism and blamed it on everyday demonstrators.
To really explain that further, the White House’s so-called “demonstrators” brought mortars. The White House story is that they brought fire support to yell about a video that no one had ever seen.
You don’t bring indirect fire area-effect weapons to a protest.
I voice my continued objection to the new zoning regulations! No new strip centers!
This is a Second Amendment protest – a protest about guns and the right of the people too keep and bear arms in order to throw off oppression – up to and including possibly overthrowing a corrupt government:
And they didn’t bring any artillery. They also aren’t jihadis.
Update: It also looks like the Tsarnaevs’ bombs required some additional training and expertise to make, as though they might not be a “lone wolf” operation as the administration claims, as though there might actually be some kind of global movement that’s doing this bombing extremist stuff (for no discernable reason)… like there’s maybe a group of people who believe in the same thing (extremism and radicalness, sayeth the administration) and are out to spread terrorism for the sake of terrorism. Whoa. (How you can have two people working together and still call them a “lone” wolf ignores what the word “lone” means, but I digress.)
WASHINGTON — The terrorist organization al-Qaida is telling its followers to exploit the so-called “gun-show loophole” to buy semi-automatic weapons that could be used to kill Americans, Vice President Joe Biden warned in an interview with Hearst Newspapers.
Biden, the quarterback of the Obama administration’s anti-gun-violence campaign, said the classified presidential daily intelligence brief that was delivered to President Barack Obama and him last Thursday described “an al-Qaida principal” declaring on an al-Qaida website that supporters ought to “go to Washington and go to a gun show” because a fair portion of gun show sales bypass background checks.
For those who’ve never been to a gunshow, let me give you some idea the kinds of bumper stickers that are sold there amidst the guns and ammo and camo and beef jerky and militaria and holsters:
The people who frequent gun shows are people who are into gun culture. American gun culture celebrates the United States, the Second Amendment, the US military, and does not, contrary to leftist belief, hate the country. Nor are people at gun shows (often disproportionately veterans; and almost always Country Class folk) the kind of people to have any tolerance for terrorists.
“You can buy a semi-automatic weapon,” Biden characterized the al-Qaida official as saying. “It’s your obligation to do Jihad, and kill people, kill Americans. In other words, you radicals, what’s so gol’darn hard here? Just go to America and buy a gun.”
Joe Biden has clearly never been to a gun show, and understands neither American gun culture nor Al Qaeda.
At a couple gun shows I’ve been to, I’ve seen straw purchasers and illegal purchasers arrested and walked off by the police. At all the gun shows I’ve been to, I’ve seen a crowd that’s predominantly of a conservative mindset, slightly older, mostly responsible, and regardless of who they seem they’d be politically based on gender or ethnicity or orientation – again generally more conservative and patriotic. In the last few years, ethnic groups have become even more diverse (especially regionally), but in general, elements that are criminal or suspicious are turned away.
Gun people don’t want to sell to dangerous people – period. Gun show clientele, especially the stereotypical “bitter clingers” do not truck with Al Qaeda. Many of them have actively fought Al Qaeda, or have friends or family serving in the fight against Al Qaeda and in conflict generated by Al Qaeda. US gun culture and Al Qaeda are diametrically opposed forces. Biden and the left don’t get that.
Those who support stricter gun control fear that the passage of time since the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School will result in further watering-down of measures. They should not, however, discount the risk that attempts to shave a few weeks or months off the usual legislative process will result in bad laws, with unintended and lasting consequences.
Pretty much all gun control laws are bad laws. Ones made in the rush to dance in the blood of children are made according to Rahm Emanuel’s maxim of “Never let a good crisis go to waste” and “you can do things you normally couldn’t” in the wake of a crisis. They are pushing for bad laws, and the families are pushing for bad laws. Nothing in the laws they push will help anyone except criminals and would-be tyrants.
While pro-gun forces may overstate the case against expanded background checks — they are not, for example, a prelude to disarming the citizenry — President Obama and his allies have understated the difficult legal questions posed by extending the background-check system to cover more sales and transfers.
Wrong.
Expanded background checks, and the necessary registry to ensure compliance with background checks, are a prelude to disarming citizenry. The included background checks as well as any other barriers to entry (taxes on ammo, guns, legislation restriction bearing and use of arms) are all there to prevent people from getting involved in exercising their Second Amendment rights. The issue is that not only is it an attempt to track gun owners for later confiscation, it’s also a cultural attack by keeping people from ever owning guns by making it more difficult to do so.
Australians who used to be gun owners, or who try to still be gun owners, discuss how they have to have their rifles locked up at their club, have to have licenses, inspections, and have to comply with a myriad of laws in order to exercise what is a denied right that only still exists as a shadow in the form of a severely regulated hobby.
Given the time and attention that they deserve, these issues could be addressed. But artificial deadlines and an undue sense of urgency guarantee worse results and continued mistrust on both sides of this debate.
There is no surrender of rights. Period.
There is no mistrust. The political left and those who favor gun control want to deny rights. They say so. Thus there is no compromise with denial of rights. They are pushing to keep a crisis going in order to erase rights. That’s all. There is no debate to be had – there is an assault on rights.
It sounds absolutist, and it is. They aren’t looking at how to deal with the murderer, they’re looking at how to target people who they think shouldn’t own firearms because to some degree Mao was right about the origins of political power. Because the left mistrusts and loathes the American people as stupid people who need to be controlled, they want us all disarmed – you and me and your family and your friends – all “for our own good”. I trust them to continue to assault our rights – they’ve stated it’s their intention.
Even before his most ambitious gun-control proposals were falling by the wayside, President Obama was turning for help to the United Nations. On April 2, the United States led 154 nations to approve the Arms Trade Treaty in the U.N. General Assembly. While much of the treaty governs the international sale of conventional weapons, its regulation of small arms would provide American gun-control advocates with a new tool for restricting rights. Yet because the Constitution requires that two-thirds of the Senate give its advice and consent to any treaty, Second Amendment supporters still have a political route to stop the administration.
…the new treaty also demands domestic regulation of “small arms and light weapons.” The treaty’s Article 5 requires nations to “establish and maintain a national control system,” including a “national control list.” Article 10 requires signatories “to regulate brokering” of conventional arms. The treaty offers no guarantee for individual rights, but instead only declares it is “mindful” of the “legitimate trade and lawful ownership” of arms for”recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities.” Not a word about the right to possess guns for a broader individual right of self-defense. Gun-control advocates will use these provisions to argue that the U.S. must enact measures such as a national gun registry, licenses for guns and ammunition sales, universal background checks, and even a ban of certain weapons. The treaty thus provides the Obama administration with an end-run around Congress to reach these gun-control holy grails.
…The attempt to advance gun control through the Arms Trade Treaty might surprise average Americans, but not liberals, who have been long frustrated by the Constitution’s limits on government. Gun-control statutes, like any others, have to survive both the House and the Senate, then win presidential approval. It is far easier to advance an agenda through treaties, unwritten international law and even “norms” delivered by an amorphous “international community.”
Yup, because they can’t get in through the front because you’ll oppose it, they’ll try to side with a collection of dictators-for-life and tyrants in the UN so they can take your rights. If you’re armed, you’re still a free man, and the global elite don’t like that (sounds tin foily but it’s not if you look at what they want). There simply are international institutions dedicated to removing your rights, and that’s just what they do. You’re the last obstacle in “civilizing” the world; and then they can use force to make people do what’s best.
The draft of S. 649 that provides the framework for the legislative arguments that lie ahead contains an item that could prove highly controversial, even though no one has, until now*, recognized it, let alone raised it as an issue. …
“[I]t shall be unlawful for any person who is not licensed under this chapter to transfer a firearm to any other person who is not licensed under this chapter, unless a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, or licensed dealer has first taken possession of the firearm for the purpose of complying with subsection (s),” the section on Firearms Transfers states. “Upon taking possession of the firearm, the licensee shall comply with all requirements of this chapter as if the licensee were transferring the firearm from the licensee’s inventory to the unlicensed transferee.”
But this “shall not apply,” the section continues, “to … bona fide gifts between spouses, between parents and their children, between siblings, or between grandparents and their grandchildren.”
The issue? Absent a change in federal law, 1 USC § 7 – Definition of “marriage” and “spouse”
Basically, if you have a gay marriage or civil union, you’re not exempted. Thus, if you’re gay, you’re denied Second Amendment rights because of the definition of marriage (though at this point they’ve been reduced to privileges).
While marriage as an institution is one man and one woman; this law by recognizing marriage for 2A purposes and not recognizing gay unionsdoes deny gay partners to enjoy their Second Amendment rights between each other without asking government permission.
Solution? Don’t pass the stupid law that discriminates against gays and lesbians by requiring government-sanctioned marriage. And as Andrew Wilkow notes, you can solve the whole marriage issue by finding where in the Constitution it says the government can regulate marriage… and since it doesn’t, you just hand it all back to individual churches (or states) to decide. That way if the Reformed New New Reformed Church of Vermont wants to marry gays, they can – and it doesn’t infringe on their beliefs; and if the Al-Mohammed Al-Akbar Mosque of California doesn’t want to, they aren’t forced by government to marry gays – and it doesn’t infringe on their beliefs.
You leave them alone to live how they like, and you leave them alone to defend themselves how they like. Armed gays don’t get bashed. (And insert joke here about right to arm bears.)
The dirty little secret is that gun control laws do not actually control guns. They disarm law-abiding citizens, making them more vulnerable to criminals, who remain armed in disregard of such laws.
In England, armed crimes skyrocketed as legal gun ownership almost vanished under increasingly severe gun control laws in the late 20th century. (See the book “Guns and Violence” by Joyce Lee Malcolm). But gun control has become one of those fact-free crusades, based on assumptions, emotions and rhetoric.
What almost no one talks about is that guns are used to defend lives as well as to take lives. In fact, many of the horrific killings that we see in the media were brought to an end when someone else with a gun showed up and put a stop to the slaughter.
The Cato Institute estimates upwards of 100,000 defensive uses of guns per year. Preventing law-abiding citizens from defending themselves can cost far more lives than are lost in the shooting episodes that the media publicize. The lives saved by guns are no less precious, just because the media pay no attention to them.
It’s the Broken Window Fallacy as related to public policy. You can’t see the benefits of the gun – just as you don’t see the baker’s new suit. You have to look for the hidden costs and benefits. You see the broken window and its replacement just as you see the new gun control law “doing something”. Most people don’t see the loss of safety through disarmament – at least not until it’s too late.
Restricting the magazine capacity available to law-abiding citizens will not restrict the magazine capacity of people who are not law-abiding citizens. Such restrictions just mean that the law-abiding citizen is likely to run out of ammunition first.
Eloquent and to the point. Classic Sowell.
Some people may think that “assault weapons” means automatic weapons. But automatic weapons were banned decades ago. Banning ugly-looking “assault weapons” may have aesthetic benefits, but it does not reduce the dangers to human life in the slightest. You are just as dead when killed by a very plain-looking gun.
And they will come for those next.
Photo by Oleg Volk.
One of the dangerous inconsistencies of many, if not most, gun control crusaders is that those who are most zealous to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens are often not nearly as concerned about keeping violent criminals behind bars.
Leniency toward criminals has long been part of the pattern of gun control zealots on both sides of the Atlantic. When the insatiable desire to crack down on law-abiding citizens with guns is combined with an attitude of leniency toward criminals, it can hardly be surprising when tighter gun control laws are accompanied by rising rates of crime, including murders.
WASHINGTON — It’s been a long and arduous journey from Guatemala to the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol, but Mayra Ragon says the trip was well worth taking.
Ragon is among thousands of immigrants and their supporters who gathered under a hot sun Wednesday to show support for proposals that would grant a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants.
Ragon, 30, and her husband, Saul Lopez, 35, live and work in Maryland. Both are in the country illegally.
Both are violating the law, and while still actively violating the law, are protesting demanding that they, illegal aliens, foreigners who came to the country illegally in total disregard for the law, be given the right to cut in line ahead of someone who worked hard to get here.
Ragon says she and Lopez want to “get papers to be legal, but nobody is helping.”
If she wanted to get papers to be legal, she would’ve gotten them before she came. She’s breaking the law and asking for amnesty. She kicked in your house door, camped out on the couch, and now wants you to invite her to stay because she thinks she’s entitled to your house.
The 28 Catholics from St. Mary’s Student Parish in Ann Arbor Mich., road a bus for 10 hours to attend the rally and to support the Hispanic community in their congregation. Deportation is a “very real problem in our community” said Father Dan Reim, a Jesuit priest at St.Mary’s.
Deportation in the “Catholic hispanic community” isn’t a real problem. The problem is that they harbor illegal aliens who by their first step in the country are breaking the law. The problem is their criminal acts.
That’s like the same Jesuit priest saying “incarceration is a very real problem in our priest community”. No, the problem is you molest little boys. The problem is the criminal acts.
The effect of criminal behavior is being felt because there is a criminal act being conducted. Hispanics aren’t being deported. Illegal aliens are being deported.
The gun grabbing tactics used in Argentina are similar in many ways to those used in USA. Namely a very strong anti-gun media campaign, on all levels. In Argentina the slogan shoved down people’s throat was “if you have a gun, you have a problem”. It was pretty effective too, catchy. My wife used to make fun of me whenever we saw it on TV, “You heard that? We have a lot of problems!” We already had mandatory gun registration (try to avoid having that in USA!) and people were harassed regarding how many guns they had and the conditions they were stored in. The anti-gun campaign was strongly supported by so called NGOs that sympathized with the government and were funded by them.
Buybacks took place on several occasions, and these presented a series of problems.
I’ll direct you to FerFAL’s site to read those – he lists some major, major problems even if one were incredibly naiive and inclined to believe gun buybacks were in any way useful against crime (and not against citizens).
In the last years the controls for getting a firearm license and renewing it had increased considerably. The psychological test was increasingly difficult and without an explanation a lot of people were failing it, in some cases people I knew pretty well and clearly didn’t have any condition that should stop them from owning guns.
This is where the tyranny of “experts” comes into play. They make a new set of rules that there is no way to pass, then the authoritarian tyrants simply take every means of resistance away. The state declares the desire to own a gun an indicator of mental illness, and suddenly you can’t own one (not to sound like Tom Cruise with regards to shrinks, but remember that homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in the DSM-II until 1974). Calling your opponents crazy is a common tactic. Very self-serving, very tyrannical, very effective.
To the low-information citizen, the government’s accusations of anyone who desires resistance to government as being a wacko completely obfuscates the facts and changes an incident to a “narrative” – that is, a story that the government tells. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve already seen some massive examples of government telling a story that doesn’t jive with the facts, but that creates a popular perception among the uninformed – Fast and Furious and Benghazi are just the two most recent examples.
WASHINGTON — President Obama made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address, setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition.
“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”
This is laughable.
Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.
The “overwhelming judgement of science” ignores the scientific method. Science is about hypothesis, observation, analysis of results, and conclusions based on what theory seems to fit with the hypothesis and data. Sometimes hypotheses are proven wrong. Other times, people like the East Anglia Climate Research Unit simply fabricate observation data to confirm their hypothesis, since they already know the conclusion they want. So the “overwhelming judgement of science” is a complete fabrication.
Now, as to the second part, that “none can avoid” the devastation of nature. This sounds like some primitive culture fearful of the sky gods.
The witch doctor “scientist” tells the ignorant tribesmen that they must bring him virgins and make him chief of the tribe so that he can prevent those raging fires and powerful storms. Only he has the power to stop these – and you must stop eating of the fruit that grows by the river – only the medicine man may eat those sweet fruits because they give him strength to fight the storms! For you, the pitiful tribesman, it would harm you – but for him, it gives him the power he needs! So bring him those fruits! And bring him those virgins that he needs to keep his strength as well. Only he has the power – he, with overwhelming judgement of the sky gods – can protect you! Only he can protect you from the monster that comes in on those storms – the monster – OF MANBEARPIG!
Every time the storms are worse, it’s because the tribe hasn’t given him the power to fight manbearpig. Every time the fires are worse, it’s because they kept one of their daughters away from him, and he could not absorb her virgin powers and so he did not have the strength to do battle with manbearpig. Every time they keep some of the sweet river fruit to themselves – that’s why the drought came – because they were greedy and kept it from the shaman. Every time the ignorant tribesmen don’t do exactly as the medicine man commands, that’s why manbearpig will attack them.
For all the leftist accusations of fearmongering, this is probably one of the worst examples. They tell you that you’re responsible for the planet dying – if you don’t give them enough power to fight it. Since there’s never enough power to fight the weather, they just need more. And just like the small-scale tyrant shaman in our story holding the tribe in terror, so to do these global coolingglobal warming climate change fearmongers today try to hold us in terror.
One article in particular from Micha Tomkiewicz, who is himself a holocaust survivor, has earned the ire of climate denialists around the web because in addition to the comparison of the tactics of global warming denialists and holocaust deniers, he additionally creates a moral comparison. While not saying it’s as bad a holocaust denial, Tomkiewicz does suggest they might be denying the possibility of a future holocaust:
I make my “climate change denier” claim for one reason. It’s easy today to teach students to condemn the Holocaust, but it’s much more difficult to teach them how to try to prevent future genocides. There are different kinds of genocides and they don’t repeat themselves; they come to us in different ways. I am not suggesting that the Holocaust is just like climate change. But what I am suggesting is that even though it’s hard to see a genocide – any genocide – coming. The future is hard to predict, but we can see this one coming. This genocide is of our own making, and it will effect everyone, not just one group or country.
Not to walk back to another topic too much, but the Holocaust was done by armed tyrants against unarmed men. The Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, and numerous other genocides have been perpetrated by armed groups in power through various means against unarmed, subjugated groups. Relatively easy to understand. It’s actually easy to prevent future genocides – if people have the tools to resist, they can fight back. (That’s why the JPFO exists – to make sure of “Never Again”.)
With climate change, we have scientists who have equated their fight against Manbearpig to fighting against the Holocaust. They have declared “consensus” and that “the science is settled”. They invoke the murder of millions to shame into submission those who would oppose them. Any who would question their global coolingglobal warming climate change conclusions are considered vile, genocidal scum like the Nazis, worthy only of derision, ridicule, and considered subhuman trash who need to be exterminated themselves before they kill the planet.
That’s not how science works.
Science is a process of creating theories based on repeated observations. Science is not demonizing those who question. Science itself is questioning.
Alinskyite politics, where all the angels are on one side and all the devils are on the other, are like what current global coolingglobal warming climate changers are about.
If one were to look at this from an anthropological point of view, this would be a transparent power play, and every bit as clear as the tyrannical shaman. If one looks at it from a modern political point of view, one sees that this is watermelon environmentalism. That is, it’s green on the outside, red on the inside; environmentalism surrounding collectivism/socialism/communism. For some reason, the solutions to global coolingglobal warming climate change have always been the same.
I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:
• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:
- Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
- Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
- Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
- Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
- In general embrace all environmental causes.
You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.
It’s a rather interesting book:
Oh noes, we’re all going to die!
Even the BBC agrees.
Zombie writes:
Interestingly, the “Impact Team” also gives space to the other faction of climatologists — whom they dub the “hot-earth men,” a primitive term for “Global Warmists.” The hot-earth men are the mortal enemies of the “cool-earth men,” i.e. the ice age predictors, who are obviously more correct and who are therefore given the soapbox throughout the book. What we see here in 1977 is an interesting historical pivot point: The crisis-mongers needed an ecological disaster to hype, and at that moment in history there were two factions battling for the microphone, each trumpeting the exact opposite scenario: the “hot-earth men” and the “cool-earth men.” The media weighed the two views, decided that the cool-earth men had more evidence, more team members and a better argument, and so ran with the “new ice age” story. When that didn’t pan out, they later dumped the cool-earth men and embraced their rivals.
And there’s the rub. We’ve been told all this stuff before. The solutions, as noted, are always the same – we as individuals have to give up our liberty to some governing body that will “save” us from ourselves; whether it be the weather shaman who demands the best food and our daughters, or whether it be the global coolingglobal warming climate change fearmongers today.
Climate change denialism shares all of these features. Denialists like Inhofe (Morano’s boss) allege a global warming “hoax”. This conspiracy theory suggests that thousands of scientists worldwide are all operating from the same playbook (the Protocols of the Al Gore), falsifying data for the purpose of creating regulations to restrict business, and secretly working to create one world government. Or that somehow peer-review and grant rewards only go to those who back the consensus, the classic “grantsmanship” conspiracy theory that is contradicted by the fact that scientists encourage and reward revolutionary results as long as they are well-grounded in data. It sounds ridiculous, but these are their arguments. How one could possibly manage to make thousands of people fabricate evidence for peer reviewed journals all to say the same thing and not be detected is beyond belief. And before the cranks show up and suggest the East Anglia emails are of any significance, let’s move on to number two:
The cherry picking of papers, often from journals that are overrun by cranks like Energy and Environment, and even the cherry-picking of individual data points or time periods is rampant. The theft of the East Anglia emails, which were then cherry-picked and quoted out of context to create the false appearance of deception on the part of scientists is another excellent example.
First off:
Second, like all big political movements with bigger objectives, these Manbearpig-worshipers may not realize what they’re doing. The Manbearpigger goes on to say that the East Anglia emails are meaningless because a bunch of other scientists who agree with Manbearpig agreed that they were meaningless. And anyone who questions them isn’t an expert, so they don’t realize how stupid they are and can’t make decisions (Dunning-Kruger).
Now, I may not know everything about climate science, but I subscribed to Science News for nearly a decade when they were in their weekly format. I cancelled when they went to bi-weekly and they added an editorial page. One of the first editorials they did was on the need for “advocacy science” to save us from Manbearpig. Suddenly, there was a political objective to science; there was a pressing political and emotional need that demanded that they find the “right conclusions” and make the “right policies”. That’s not science. That’s advocacy journalism at best, propaganda at worst – the gatekeeper to information makes the decision on what you need to know and what you don’t.
Just like I’m mocking global coolingglobal warming Manbearpig, so too is the Manbearpig worshiper mocking those who question his “settled” science, calling them cranks, quacks, and idiots who engage in cognative biases that make them think they know something, when only he, holy defender of the Codex of Science Truth Fact of Manbearpig can know the Righteous Word Of Manbearpig. Of course, I’m mocking him for his defense of rigid orthodoxy and Manbearpig zealotry. He’s going the Godwin’s law route because SHUT UP!
I think that’s pretty cool, but it’s very sciency in a department I know little about. Just tossing it out there because it shows how little we as humankind still know, and how our understanding of the world is still yielding new discoveries.
But I know politicians, and I know people, and I know political swindlers who create crises to exploit. Human nature hasn’t changed.
To dissect the Manbearpig worshiper’s denial of any questioning his orthodoxy, there are many scientists taught by other scientists who are taught what has become politically unquestionable. Those who teach the teachers will dictate how the students learn. This is why they have lectures on subversion. Whether as overt as that or more subtle, it’s how people interact. Those who create bogus data, falsify it, or otherwise taint it with the conclusion they know they should reach aren’t necessarily doing so because their marching orders from Al Gore (who just sold his TV station to petro-barons in Qatar) – they’re doing so because that’s what they’ve been told to believe, whether or not it’s true. “Grantsmanship” also stem from the fact that the people handing out grants, the people involved in these circles, are mostly of the same mindset. They have the belief that they’re saving the world, and anyone who questions that is the devil. They don’t need marching orders – they’re individually capable of acting on their ideology, and the ideological guidance they’ve been given drives them. Thousands of people aren’t necessarily on some list of conspirators that parrot the party line, but they’re ideological clones – believing in the same thing. They are missionaries of Manbearpig, and no matter their sins, they are here to save you from yourself – and if you oppose them, you support the Holocaust.
Just to contrast, my ideological compass gears me towards the maximum amount of liberty for the maximum amount of people with the minimum of coercion. Individuals know what’s best for them in their own life. Those who make bad choices typically learn from experience and stop making those bad choices. Those who don’t live with the consequences of their actions – and that teaches them, too. With plenty of good examples, people can see what works and what doesn’t, and absent any enabling of bad choices, people will mostly make good ones for themselves. As individuals mature, they’ll see that protecting the freedom of others and helping to ensure the same choices they had are still around can lead to better lives for everyone, and they’ll raise their children up to make good decisions, or if they choose not to have children, they’ll still act as examples for others to follow or avoid, for good or ill.
Through that prism, I can see the same lists of demands from global cooling nuts in the 1970s as from global warming nuts in the 1990s as from “climate change” nuts today. They have the same ends, with their means only being separated by whether it’s hot or cold or just “different” outside.
Now, were I to do a apply the scientific method to this, I could do it this way:
Question: Is climate change valid? Observation: Australia’s going through a hot summer, last summer where I live was hot. Maybe. But the backers for it aren’t acting very sciency. Hypothesis: Climate change is a political tool. Test the Hypothesis: We can observe trial & error in the news anyway, so I’ll run with that for now. We can see that those who defend climate change have changed their own positions from global cooling to global warming to now the non-substantive “change”. Further observation shows that those who support climate change have seemingly always demanded more control over the individual in order to fight climate change. Actions of climate change supporters mirror those of the political left. Data is all included in the above blog entry. Analysis, Interpretation & Conclusion: Climate change mirrors politics on the left in a lot of ways. Whether it’s the left hijacking science or simply riding its coattails is unknown, but not necessarily important, either. The results of changes that climate change supporters wish to push are the same as Malthusians and those who believe in both people overpopulation and consumption overpopulation believe. No one is exempt from control by either the political or scientific entities if they were to get their way. Climate science itself might not be a political tool, and would be an interesting science to study, but it certainly is not settled in the least. There are those using it as a political cudgel to fabricate a crisis in order to push for demands they were making before they settled on the reason of “climate change”. Those who are on the receiving end of “climate change” are expected to change their living standards, while those who are dictating that “climate change” is a threat stand to benefit from it and gain power, like the primitive shaman. This hurts the majority of individuals while favoring a few.
For all the Manbearpig worshiper claims that “evil energy corporations are behind it” and other such accusations, the problem with that is that those same “evil energy corporations” have investments in so-called green energy. GE has made huge amounts of money by claiming to be green, while scamming the taxpayer – all by getting Manbearpig worshipers to tilt at windmills. Petrochemical dictators in the Middle East have been funding leftist environmentalist propaganda in the US in order to protect their own bottom lines.
So, to sum up – Manbearpig is a scam. It’s a power play. We’ve been told it’s going to be hot, it’s going to be cold, it’s going to be different and everything else. Global cooling/warming/climate change is a political tool right now to push an agenda. It is watermelon environmentalism, with collectivism at its core, with reduction of the individual at its core. The science really doesn’t matter, because the means to that power, whether it be cooling/warming/change don’t matter. It’s a politically fabricated crisis that can be always on the horizon, a crisis that has never materialized and doesn’t ever have to materialize, but a crisis that demands immediate action. It’s an ongoing constant threat that means those who are politically correct need more power from you the invididual, and they can always demand you do something “for the children”.
From the 10 10 Campaign, which wanted people to cut their carbon emissions by 10%. If you haven’t seen it, you should really watch it – it gives you some idea of how these people think:
It’s amazing how much the left loves the blood of children to try to force you to do things.
Manbearpig remains a fictional fear-mongering tool used as a means to an end – power. And despite being a giant fraud, Manbearpig is back for 2013.
The French politician who said Indian steel company ArcelorMittal should leave the country has told CNBC that his government is only acting like U.S. President Barack Obama.
Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg, a member of the governing Socialist party, caused controversy last week when he said that the Indian company, which employs close to 20,000 people in France, should leave after it said it would have to close down a factory.
The French government announced on Thursday that it could nationalize the factory in question, with backing from an unnamed businessman.
The news raised the specter of the nationalizations of the early 1980s, which were instigated by Hollande’s predecessor Francois Mitterrand.
Montebourg told CNBC after a meeting with trade unions in Paris: “Barack Obama’s nationalized. The Germans are nationalizing. All countries are nationalizing. I’ve also noticed the British nationalized 6 banks.”
Montebourg is believed to be referring to the takeover of struggling automakers by the U.S. government earlier in the financial crisis.
Y’know, when socialists justify their actions by saying the US president is a socialist and he’s nationalizing industries, that’s bad.
Well, any normal individual understands that as true but liberalism is a psychosis . O’bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like “fast and furious” and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.
Normally it’d be so easy to say “it’s Pravda, synonymous with anti-American lies”, but when international socialists are using Obama as an example of how their nationalizing policies should expand… well… if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and has advisors who are self-avowed ducks, cabinet members that consider ducks their favorite philosophers, and it was raised by ducks, it stands a pretty good chance of being a duck… especially when other ducks are saying “he’s a duck”.
Drudge linked to this Pravda story yesterday, and some talk radio guys brought it up today as a very telling point.
Putin in 2009 outlined his strategy for economic success. Alas, poor Obama did the opposite but nevertheless was re-elected. Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.
After Obama was elected in his first term as president the then Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2009. Ignored by the West as usual, Putin gave insightful and helpful advice to help the world economy and saying the world should avoid the Soviet mistake.
Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.
Now, it’s important to point out that this is Pravda, which dishes out just slightly less propaganda than MSNBC, and that they’d be saying something derogatory along some lines no matter who the President was. Unless it was Putin.
But it’s very much worth noting that Pravda is hyping Russia’s successes by Putin taking their economy away from Soviet policies rather than towards them. Putin is a ruthless strongman, but he’s neither stupid nor infected with stupid ideologies. He knows how power works, but he also knows how the Soviet economic system didn’t work. The man is not a fool.
Pravda’s condemnation of the US as an illiterate society is one that’s a very sharp criticism, though, and one that isn’t without merit. Consider the Curley Effect (HT/Andrew Wilkow), from Mark Hendrickson at Forbes earlier this year:
It’s hard to think of anything more perverse in American politics than the Curley effect. The Curley effect historically has been an urban phenomenon, but President Obama seems bent on taking the entire country down this wretched path.
As defined by Harvard scholars Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer in a famous 2002 article, the Curley effect (named after its prototype, James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20th century) is a political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Translation: A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.
Here’s an example of how the Curley effect works: Let’s say a mayor advocates and adopts policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the not-so-prosperous by bestowing generous tax-financed favors on unions, the public sector in general, and select corporations. These beneficiaries become economically dependent on their political patrons, so they give them their undivided electoral support—e.g., votes, campaign contributions, and get-out-the-vote drives.
Meanwhile, the anti-rich rhetoric of these clever demagogues, combined with higher taxes to fund the political favors, triggers a flight of tax refugees from the cities to the suburbs. This reduces the number of political opponents on the city’s voter registration rolls, thereby consolidating an electoral majority for the anti-wealth party. It also shrinks the tax base of the city, even as the city’s budget swells. The inevitable bankruptcy that results from expanding expenditures while diminishing revenues can be postponed for decades with the help of state and federal subsidies (“stimulus” in the Obama vernacular) and creative financing, but eventually you end up with cities like Detroit—called by Glaeser and Shleifer “the first major Third World city in the United States.”
The Curley Effect is a vile strategy to destroy populations in order to rule them. Like Obama’s former chief of staff and current dictator-for-life of Chicago famously said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The Curley Effect is to create the crisis in order to profit from it. That anyone could consider a crisis “good” speaks volumes by itself, but this is more about the practical and less about the downright morally villainous.
Putin doesn’t have to use the Curley Effect to gain power. He has it already.
Obama and the Democrat party are using the destructive Curley Effect to increase his own power nationwide.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
- Attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville
Obama’s operation is to create and exploit that crisis and ride it down as he becomes the new socialist leader, the indispensible man with the cult of personality surrounding him. He’s already Jamie Foxx’s god, lord and savior. Obama and his acolytes are believers in their own ideology, that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, and at best their idealistic naivity will lead them down a road to hell, at worst, and most likely, as they aren’t all fools, they intend it. Again, consider that someone can find a crisis, in which there is human suffering, a “good thing” that shouldn’t be passed up as an opportunity to be exploited for further expansion of political power.
This isn’t “never let a mistake by a totalitarian regime that can be exploited to preserve or restore individual freedom go to waste”. A lot of people could get on board with that one. Probably not Putin or Obama. though.
In the past, I’ve referred to leftists as inflicting suffering on the public like Munchausen by proxy. Ideologically, the do-gooder planner types who are true believers in leftist causes are so deluded they can’t see what they’re working towards. They can’t see that they’re making people dependent through welfare or handouts or bailouts, and they refuse to believe it. They can understand why the Forest Service says “don’t feed the bears”. They can’t understand why making people dependent on others is a bad thing, though.
Thomas Sowell has written extensively on how the black community went from improving and doing well into a hellish spiral of failure especially because of LBJ’s “Great Society” that incentivized self-destructive behaviors. LBJ understood the Curley Effect, and used it to great effect.
“I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” — Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One according Ronald Kessler’s Book, “Inside The White House”
LBJ was promising other people’s money, LBJ did plenty of downright reprehensible things while he was in the White House, and all of those are looked at as “good things”, though they so often had the exact opposite effect of what they were sold as. They hurt people, but they elevated the redistributor in government to that of indispensible hero to the lower classes (and there became a greater distinction, and more people in the lower classes as well.)
More from the Forbes piece:
Everything Obama has done has been designed to strengthen Democratic constituencies (e.g., stimulus spending steered predominantly toward unions and strategically allied state and municipal entities; waivers from Obamacare for unions; a hefty 23 percent increase in the Index of Dependence on Government during Obama’s first two years) and to weaken Republican constituencies (e.g., making small business formation more difficult by impeding venture capitalists; refusing to amend Sarbanes-Oxley; using Dodd-Frank regulations to discourage loans; fewer waivers from Obamacare; proposing lower tax rates for large corporations, but not on the “S” corporations that are the preferred choice of small business owners; constant efforts to raise taxes on the “rich”—which means, as we’ve seen in Detroit, California, and other Curley effect victims, higher taxes on the middle class).
Obama’s smash-mouth, Curley-like politics is all about choosing winners and losers. Reread his State of the Union address from January, and you see a parade of proposals to take from A to give to B, to encourage businesses to do C and discourage them from doing D. Indeed, Obama seems incapable of suggesting a single economic policy that does not redistribute wealth from his political opponents to his political allies. The message is clear: He wants Americans to be dependent on the government; consequently, he is hostile to the private sector, because a vibrant private sector enhances economic independence and self-reliance.
The idea of a multi-tiered class system is almost wholly communist as well, as communism needs class warfare to exist. America is supposed to be a classless society. We don’t need more upper, middle, or lower class people. Americans are given the freedom to choose where they want to be in life. Vicissitudes of life often mean that one starts off worse off, or one may have worse luck, or one may have better luck or simply work harder and make their way better – but the fundamental difference is that everyone gets a shot, and gets to work to where they want to be – and where they want to be is dependent only on how hard they work and how intelligently they work towards where they want to be.
The idea of income redistribution in order to create “a level playing field” or to make sure the rich have “skin in the game” is wholly unAmerican. The rich, as well as those with middle incomes, already have a lot of taxes paid in, and therefore have “skin in the game”. The poor who receive government handouts, don’t have skin in the game. They’re simply mooching, and using their need and communist rhetoric to demand more. “Leveling the playing field” and such nonsense is possibly even more destructive than simple redistribution. The idea of raising taxes on high income earners is a political winner because those who’ve earned their priviledge are viewed through communist lenses as worthy of scorn and persecution.
But what it really does, especially when parroted by dirtbags like “the sage of Omaha” Warren Buffet, is to crush those coming up. It’s a barrier to entry for small businesses by taxing them higher, so it protects big businesses. It’s a class barrier against new people who are improving their lot, and it crushes the small businesses that pay the wages and salaries of those who are middle and lower income earners who are working their way up.
This is very similar to how the Congress and Senate often come up with new investment laws and “windfall profit” taxes after they’ve made their money in a given industry (CA Senator Boxer is known for her oil investments, for example).
All of it leads to a permanence of class – the socialist redistributor upper class with their favored businesses, the “middle class” serf who works to pay the socialist, and the serf who lives on handouts taken from the “middle class” serf and redistributed by the indispensable socialist.
ShortTimer
JBH
