Nuke It

Friday 25 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Nuke it from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.

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The Forgotten Tyrant

Thursday 24 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Our tyrant has been fetishized by progressives despite having shredded the Constitution, while historians and the media have continuously provided cover. Adam Blacksburg at the Humane Condition:

The world experienced a wave of totalitarianism in the early 20th century. The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Mussolini was elected in 1922, and Hitler disbanded the Wiemar Republic in 1933. Unfortunately, these extremist totalitarian regimes draw attention away from one of the darkest decades of United States history. Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin, and Adolf Hitler were so horrifyingly powerful that people often overlook an American tyrant’s rise to power, which began with the election of 1932. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is mistakenly championed as an American hero who ran a benevolent regime that had the interest of the American People at its heart. In reality, only neoconservatives and faux progressives could adore the most totalitarian president of the 20th century. Roosevelt’s atrocities can and have filled entire books. For the sake of brevity, this article will concern itself with two specific executive orders; one issued in peace time and one issued during war time.

Forced theft of vast sums of wealth from millions of Americans under the color of law and threat of punishment, and the indefinite detention of hundreds of thousands of Japanese during WW2 are just two of the more public atrocities committed in the name of “the greater good.” FDR was a sociopath and power hungry maniac. He should be treated as such by history.

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“Disaster”

Friday 18 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

There are real disasters, and then there are “disasters” created by the media. Dr. Kelvin Kemm:

Firstly let us get something clear. There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster. Total number of people killed by nuclear radiation at Fukushima was zero. Total injured by radiation was zero. Total private property damaged by radiation….zero. There was no nuclear disaster. What there was, was a major media feeding frenzy fuelled by the rather remote possibility that there may have been a major radiation leak.

At the time, there was media frenzy that “reactors at Fukushima may suffer a core meltdown.” Dire warnings were issued. Well the reactors did suffer a core meltdown. What happened? Nothing.

Nuclear power is clean, abundant, and safe, yet a small faction of environmental zealots have made it virtually impossible to pursue. It’s the greatest source of energy humanity has ever known, and it’s being blocked. These people are troglodytes, and should be shunned at all cost.

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A Demonstration

Thursday 17 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

A demonstration of both the bias and the power of the media. In an interview of Daniel M. Kahan, a Yale professor who published a study showing that those who identify as Tea Party members generally have a higher level of “science comprehension” than those who don’t identify as Tea Party supporters, he notes,

While noting that this relationship is “trivially small,” Kahan wrote: “I’ve got to confess. I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension.”

“But then again,” he admitted, “I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party. All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the “paper” (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico).” (Emphasis added)

In addition to the media having the ability to completely and single-handedly form an opinion for an allegedly highly intelligent member of the intelligentsia concerning a large swath of people, I’d argue that Kahan’s memory recall abilities are lacking, if he indeed reads the New York Times everyday, considering that the Gray Lady published a story over 3 years ago showing those who identify as Tea Party supporters are generally higher educated than the general public. It should be no surprise that those who are higher educated would also have a higher level of science literacy.

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Expectations

Thursday 17 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

“Of course, I want people to have health care[.] I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.“

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The Rhetoric of the Righteous

Thursday 17 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Pascal Bruckner on the rhetoric and religious symbolism of environmental apocalypticism:

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world’s human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery. No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning.

How did this change happen? Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world’s woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, “Third World” ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West, supposedly the inventor of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the earth. Indeed, environmentalism sees itself as the fulfillment of all earlier critiques. “There are only two solutions,” Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. “Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies.”

So the planet has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation—if necessary, by reducing the number of human beings, as oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said in 1991. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group of people who have decided not to reproduce, has announced: “Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory.” The British environmentalist James Lovelock, a chemist by training, regards Earth as a living organism and human beings as an infection within it, proliferating at the expense of the whole, which tries to reject and expel them. Journalist Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World Without Us envisions in detail a planet from which humanity has disappeared. In France, a Green politician, Yves Cochet, has proposed a “womb strike,” which would be reinforced by penalties against couples who conceive a third child, since each child means, in terms of pollution, the equivalent of 620 round trips between Paris and New York.

[. . .]

One could go on citing such quotations forever, given the spread of the cliché-ridden apocalyptic literature. Environmentalism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence—not merely modes of production but ways of life as well. We rediscover in it the whole range of Marxist rhetoric, now applied to the environment: ubiquitous scientism, horrifying visions of reality, even admonitions to the guilty parties who misunderstand those who wish them well. Authors, journalists, politicians, and scientists compete in the portrayal of abomination and claim for themselves a hyper-lucidity: they alone see clearly while others vegetate in the darkness.

[. . .]

One consequence of this certainty is that we begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to warn us so much as to condemn us. In classical Judaism, the prophet sought to give new life to God’s cause against kings and the powerful. In Christianity, millenarian movements embodied a hope for justice against a Church wallowing in luxury and vice. But in a secular society, a prophet has no function other than indignation. So it happens that he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no basis, calling down the destruction that he pretends to warn against. You’ll get what you’ve got coming!—that is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema.

Another result of the doomsayers’ certainty is that their preaching, by inoculating us against the poison of terror, brings about petrification. The trembling that they want to inculcate falls flat. Anxiety has the last word. We were supposed to be alerted; instead, we are disarmed. This may even be the goal of the noisy panic: to dazzle us in order to make us docile. Instead of encouraging resistance, it propagates discouragement and despair. The ideology of catastrophe becomes an instrument of political and philosophical resignation.

What is surprising is that the mood of catastrophe prevails especially in the West, as if it were particular to privileged peoples. Despite the economic crises of the last few years, people live better in Europe and the United States than anywhere else, which is why migrants the world over want to come to those places. Yet never have we been so inclined to condemn our societies.

Perhaps the new Green puritanism is nothing but the reaction of a West deprived of its supreme competence, the last avatar of an unhappy neocolonialism that preaches to other cultures a wisdom that it has never practiced. For the last 20 years, non-European peoples have become masters of their own futures and have stopped regarding us as infallible models. They are likely to receive our professions of environmentalist faith with polite indifference. Billions of people look to economic growth, with all the pollution that accompanies it, to improve their condition. Who are we to refuse it to them?

The environmental apocalypticism surrounding and driving climate change activists and their rhetoric is rooted in Marxist principles, and practiced using the ways of religious zealots predicting the end of man because we have committed a great crime. A righteous indignation of others, sure that what “deniers” are heaping upon them is the equivalent of exposing them to Nazi death camps or subjecting them to inhumane racism and slavery, brought about by our capitalist exploitations. They are a new proletariat, victimized by those who refuse to listen to their warnings. They are the victim in a world in which they are the largest beneficiaries of human progress; the first to condemn the progress, particularly the energy use that has fueled said progress, that allows them sit atop their ideological perch.

But despite being among the biggest winners in modern history, living lives of relative privilege amidst a culture which enjoys the highest standard of living that the world has ever seen, the proselytizers of environmentalism have claimed the mantle of the oppressed because being a part of an oppressed class, even if that class is entirely ideological and defined by them, (as opposed to a specific physical or cultural marker that is targeted), lends legitimacy in academic discourse. Stanley Kurtz:

And why should the privileged wish to become victims? To alleviate guilt and to appropriate the victim’s superior prestige. In the neo-Marxist dispensation now regnant on our college campuses, after all, the advantaged are ignorant and guilty while the oppressed are innocent and wise. The initial solution to this problem was for the privileged to identify with “struggling groups” by wearing, say, a Palestinian keffiyeh. Yet better than merely empathizing with the oppressed is to be oppressed. This is the climate movement’s signal innovation.

[. . .]

Wen Stephenson, a contributing writer at The Nation and an enthusiastic supporter of McKibben’s anti-fossil-fuel crusade, is one of the sharpest observers of the climate movement. In March, Stephenson published a profile of some of the student climate protesters he’d gotten to know best. Their stories look very much like McKibben’s description of his own past.

Stephenson’s thesis is that, despite vast differences between the upper-middle-class college students who make up much of today’s climate movement and southern blacks living under segregation in the 1950s, climate activists think of themselves on the model of the early civil-rights protesters. When climate activists court arrest through civil disobedience, they imagine themselves to be reliving the struggles of persecuted African Americans staging lunch-counter sit-ins at risk of their lives. Today’s climate protesters, Stephenson writes,“feel themselves oppressed by powerful, corrupt forces beyond their control.” And they fight “not only for people in faraway places but, increasingly, for themselves.”

One young activist, a sophomore at Harvard, told Stephenson that she grew up “privileged in a poor rural town.” Inspired by the civil-rights movement, her early climate activism was undertaken “in solidarity” with Third World peoples: “I saw climate change as this huge human rights abuse against people who are already disadvantaged in our global society. . . . I knew theoretically there could be impacts on the U.S. But I thought, I’m from a rich, developed country, my parents are well-off, I know I’m going to college, and it’s not going to make a difference to my life. But especially over this past year, I’ve learned that climate change is a threat to me.” When one of her fellow protesters said: “You know, I think I could die of climate change. That could be the way I go,”^[1] the thought stuck with her. “You always learn about marginalized groups in society, and think about how their voices don’t have as much power, and then suddenly you’re like, ‘Wait, that’s exactly what I am, with climate change.’”

The remaining biographical accounts in Stephenson’s piece repeat these themes. Climate activists see themselves as privileged, are deeply influenced by courses on climate change and by “marginalized” groups they’ve been exposed to in high school and college, and treat the climate apocalypse as their personal admissions pass to the sacred circle of the oppressed.

[. . .]

Last academic year, the National Association of Scholars released a widely discussed report called “What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students.” The report chronicles what I’ve called a “reverse island” effect. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the classic liberal-arts curriculum first came under challenge, courses in ethnic and gender studies were like tiny islands in a sea of traditionalism. Politicized in ways that were incompatible with liberal education, these ideologically based “studies” programs were generally dismissed as necessary concessions to the nascent multicultural zeitgeist.

Today the situation is reversed. Not only have the ideologically driven “studies” programs taken over a large share of the college curriculum, but many courses in conventional departments reflect the underlying assumptions of the various minority-studies concentrations. Today, classic liberal-arts courses have themselves been turned into tiny besieged islands, while the study of alleged oppression represents the leading approach at America’s colleges and universities.

In this atmosphere, students cannot help wishing to see themselves as members of a persecuted group. Climate activism answers their existential challenges and gives them a sense of crusading purpose in a lonely secular world. The planet, as Bruckner would have it, is the new proletariat. Yet substitute “upper-middle-class” for “planet,” and the progression of victimhood is explained. Global warming allows the upper-middle-class to join the proletariat, cloaking erstwhile oppressors in the mantle of righteous victimhood.

And once you’re in the place of the oppressed class, a victim of a force beyond your control, the righteousness you’ve assumed because of your perceived status as victim, any meaningful discussion is made impossible. Kurtz continues,

The religious character of the climate-change crusade chokes off serious discussion. It stigmatizes reasonable skepticism about climate catastrophism (which is different from questioning the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide’s effect on the atmosphere). Climate apocalypticism drags what ought to be careful consideration of the costs and benefits of various policy options into the fraught world of identity politics. The wish to be oppressed turns into the wish to be morally superior, which turns into the pleasure of silencing alleged oppressors, which turns into its own sort of hatred and oppression. (Emphasis added)

By being perceived as a member of an oppressed class, climate activists legitimize for themselves the ability to oppress others as a matter of survival. They are fighting for their lives against a suffocating class. If they don’t exert their will on their oppressors, death is as sure as it was for the Jews as they were ferried to death camps; subjugation is as sure as that experienced by blacks denied equality in society; exploitation is as sure and harsh as it was for those who suffered at the hand of the various robber barons in history.

And they relish in their perceived status as one of the oppressed. Not only does it afford them moral cover for whatever they may do or say, but the intellectual legitimacy demanded in an ideological system that prioritizes principals over principles. They no longer have to identify with some oppressed class; they finally are one.

_______________
1. This is perhaps the dumbest thing ever uttered by anyone ever.

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Relief

Wednesday 16 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

There’s no way that taking away one of the few forms of stress relief that soldiers in a war zone have could produce unintended consequences.

An image making the rounds on Facebook gave us a chuckle — it’s a notice posted in a port-a-potty on Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province, Afghanistan, and it sends a clear message to the troops deployed there:

Stop playing with yourself, or else.

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Health Insurance v Health Care

Friday 11 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

No. They are not the same thing. Cathy Reisenwitz at Forbes on why Millenials are being fucked by the big fat dick known as Obamacare:

Another math lesson seems to be needed here: Insurance is only a good deal when it actually works like insurance. Using insurance to pay for routine care and predictable healthcare needs makes it no longer insurance, but cost pooling.

Using insurance to pay for routine healthcare services distorts price signals and increases costs through layers of administration. ObamaCare’s requirements that insurance pay for even more routine care than before codifies the fundamental flaw in the “insurance” (actually cost-pooling) “market” that we have today.

The only solution to achieving access to affordable catastrophic coverage for young people and affordable healthcare services for older people is an actual market in health insurance and in healthcare services. Young people need access to actual insurance, something that ObamaCare actually outlaws. And older people need an undistorted price system in healthcare.

Bingo. Obamacare does the opposite. It further distorts health care costs by placing intermediaries amidst the transaction, and outlaws true insurance. In short, Obamacare is a clusterfuck.

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Political Theater

Thursday 10 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Michael Lofti at The Liberty Paper on the antics of the president thrusted on the people:

Anyone who can’t see that the shutdown is little more than theater simply isn’t paying attention. If the above examples aren’t enough for you then look no further than to President Obama’s favorite golf course, which remains open. President Obama frequents Andrew’s Air Force Base Golf Course, which boasts three 18-hole courses. It is located on prime Washington D.C. property.

According to the PGA the US government spends an average of $384,000 – $1,000,000 per year on every golf course it owns. The federal government operates some 234 golf courses around the world. Combined, that’s a total of about $140 million per year on golf courses.

The course remains open. Officials cite that the course receives payments from private individuals on snacks and course fees, but it is clear that the courses still run on tax payer dollars. Many federal golf courses are also national parks, such as Yosemite National Park Golf Course.

Even so, how is that any different than the privately owned Mt. Vernon, or the WWII memorial, which has zero staff or operational costs. How is it different than the privately funded Air Force, Navy athletics departments? Why block people from taking pictures of a rock more than a mile away from the actual entrance?

The difference is that the other cases wouldn’t affect Obama and his pals directly. They only affect “we the people”.

Bingo. The only reason why people are feeling anything because of the “shutdown” is because Obama is going out of his way to make sure that we do. Old people being evicted from their home of 40 years? Sure, no problem. Closing your favorite golf course? No. Fucking. Way.

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Evicted

Thursday 10 October 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

This is just plain fucking evil.

Last Thursday park rangers arrived at the elderly couple’s home and forced them to leave. Their home sits on federal lands. Even though the Spencer’s have owned their home for more than 4 decades, the park ranger told them they could not return until a budget was passed.

Obama is obviously going out of his way to ensure that people feel the government “shutdown.” Consider this: the government has shut down 17 times during the time that the Spencers have owned their house, and never once have they been evicted, or even felt a ripple as a result of any one of them. But now they are kicked out. Obama is obviously trying to conflate public land with government owned land, giving himself the right to close off access to public property. Public property belongs to every American. We have an absolute right to go on public property at any point. The government is simply the manager of said property, not the owner. And the arrogance required to believe that he can keep Americans from visiting publicly owned property, including parts which have been legally leased by private citizens, is astounding.

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