Libertarian Reddit has been having a great time with Barack's NSA/Domestic Spying scandal.
(For those living overseas, it seems that some of Barack's Boyz have been tracking phone calls, looking at emails, and doing other stuff contrary to the letter and spirit of our 4th Amendment.)
This will be out of date by the time some of you read it, but you can go here to read some of the in-depth links and articles. Good stuff. And gloriously ironic when you consider that The Teleprompter Jesus supposedly taught Constitutional Law.
This one does make you wonder which enemies they're tracking, doesn't it??
Yeah. Turn over all your emails.
For the remaining few loyalists who still think there's little difference between GWB and BHO....
Heh....
My online buddy Dan McCall came up with this parody of the NSA logo, and it's a good one.
AND THEN HE GOT A CEASE AND DESIST LETTER FROM NSA ATTORNEYS!! The dumbasses don't know that parodies are a legally protected form of speech.
Amazing. Truly amazing.
If you care about liberty, freedom of speech, and privacy, you'll post this thing on Facebook, your website, or print off copies to give out at work. Lord have mercy, what a bunch of tone-deaf, bureaucratic, statist munchkins.
I often find myself surfing the net, reading magazines, listening to the radio, and (when drunk) watching television, and wondering about people.
Yeah, people.
I wonder about all the people who think that our government should "do something". Take charge. Regulate. Otherwise, the big corporations will have their way with us. Businessmen are only in it for the money, you know....
There are actually people, living, breathing humans, people who can feed themselves with a knife and fork, yet believe that governments should own all of the oil companies. They believe that our government should set all wages and set price margins. It really is astounding.
Here's a crusty old exchange between Phil Donahue and Milton Friedman. I've probably watched the YouTube a dozen times, but this guy blessed us with a transcript.
Enjoy. And just for grins, I followed it with Wikipedia's links to every Federal-level political scandal going all the way back to the founding of the republic. Politicians and bureaucrats don't become economic eunuchs when they go in and out Obama's door from business to government. They're just like you and just like me - providing for themselves and their families first, and then their supporters. Any other considerations are waaaaaay down the line.
Phil Donahue: When you see around the globe, the mal-distribution of wealth, a desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries. When you see so few “haves” and so many “have-nots.” When you see the greed and the concentration of power. Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed is a good idea to run on?
Milton Friedman: Well first of all tell me is there some society you know that doesn’t run on Greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who is greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.
The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.
In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about – the only cases in recorded history – are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade.
If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
Donahue: But it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system…
Friedman: And what does reward virtue? You think the Communist commissar rewarded virtue? You think a Hitler rewarded virtue? You think – excuse me – if you’ll pardon me – do you think American Presidents reward virtue ?
Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout ?
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest ? You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us ? Well, I don’t even trust you to do that.
I had this idea 3 weeks ago, but I've been too busy at work to devote any real time to the research.
There's a researcher at Penn State named Michael Mann who was implicated in a lot of the ClimateGate emails. The emails hint that Mann over-massaged the climate data to give the impression that there really was a massive "blade" on the Climate Change hockey stick. (There isn't one. They made it up. Time will tell, won't it?)
Penn State's faculty, the same group of government Teat-Suckers who let Jerry Sandusky rape little boys for a few decades, they did an "investigation" of Mann and declared his actions to be acceptable.
I was going to post a bunch of Penn State logos scattered throughout a straightforward defense of Michael Mann. Go here for the defense I would've used. The Canadians, Israelis, Aussies who visit this site would've been totally lost. The Americans, with the Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno/Penn State coverup in their media every day, would've gotten the joke.
But dammit, dammit, dammit, I've waited too long.
Go here to read the guy who beat me to it. It's greatness.
Dammit.
BTW, It's been hot in the northeast United States but so far the Texas summer has been relatively mild.
These guys invented global warming. They just sat around made up some data, and scared the living shit out of everybody with it. Now they can't find it. They are cornered.
They simply made it up. Billions and billions have been spent on this scam.
They made it up. It really is that simple.
If you're not totally sickened yet, go here. Or you can go here. This one won't tell you anything you don't already know, but is a nice summary of the Return Of The Son Of Climategate emails.
Remember when skepticism was seen by most scientists as a virtue and not a vice? If you value Free Inquiry, I defy you to read these articles without crying.
A government organization recently created a media firestorm when it allowed one of its ex-employees, a known pedophile, to continue using the government's facilities and bring young boys into its showers and dressing rooms.
One government employee attempted to report that he'd seen this ex-employee raping a 10-year-old in the workplace shower. This witness went to his supervisor, who went to his supervisor to report the crime. No actions were ever taken to intervene or protect the child.
The only law enforcement involved were the government organization's in-house security. No one in the organization spoke out.
There were other incidents with young children involving the organization's in-house security officers. Officers made recordings of the pedophile employee apologizing to the mother of one of the boys that he molested.
No one pressed charges for years, and other government employees took great pains to cover up the incidents and protect the reputation of the government institution.
It appears that 9 young boys were molested in some way. Some of them were raped.
If this had happened at a private institution, would our government allow it to remain open for business for another 15 minutes?
Would politicians be rushing to sponsor something called the "Victims Of Paterno's Coverup Bill of 2011"?
Would Nancy Pelosi be standing in front of cameras, pontificating about the need for more regulation and oversight of the education industry?
Ok, unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard something about this video.
James O'Keefe posed as a potential NPR donor, and extracted the following from Ron Schiller (then president of the NPR Foundation and senior vice president of development):
The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian. I wouldn't even call it Christian; it's this weird evangelical kind of move.
The current Republican Party is not really the Republican Party, it’s been hijacked by this group; that is, not just Islamaphobic but really xenophobic. I mean, basically, they are, they believe in sort of white, middle American, gun toting — I mean, it's scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.
Besides bashing the Tea Party movement, Schiller also advanced the bigoted stereotype that the media is Jewish-owned and/or has a pro-Israel bias. He and Betsy Liley, another NPR executive at the lunch, both reveled over the joke that NPR stands for “National Palestinian Radio.”
Oh, I forgot to mention....O'Keefe was posing as a donor from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ok, all of this skullduggery merely confirms what anyone with one eye and half-sense already knows. NPR is a seriously biased news organization. Big deal. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, and the Sunflower County News are all seriously biased news organizations. Bias is what happens when you sit down and start typing. That's why governments should never be allowed to fund journalism.
The point of all this is to get the Republicans to defund NPR. NPR recently fired their only remotely "conservative" commentator, Juan Williams. One of the money shots from the O'Keefe video is when Schiller affirms that NPR would be better off without government funding.
NPR has totally crapped in the punch bowl. They are the leading Statist propaganda tool.
And the Republican Party will NOT defund them. Republicans don't cut programs. They just talk about it.
I repeat....The Republican Party is going to continue funding NPR. I'm betting $20.00 to the first commenter that NPR will still be getting government funds until the 2012 elections.
I don't know how I missed this, but Joe Biden, using his own lips, teeth, tongue and throat, under his own free will, made the following statement a few weeks ago:
“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,” he said. “In the middle of the Civil War you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. … No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years.”
You can go here to experience a joyous rebuttal from The Cato Institute:
Early American railroads were built almost entirely with private funds. These railroads provided such superior transportation that by 1850 they had put most toll roads and canals out of business. Individual states still competed with one another for business—and may have offered various favors to the railroads serving those states…. For the most part, however, no federal and few state subsidies went to railroads in the eastern United States.
But what about other areas?
Whenever politicians interfered in the railroad business, however, corruption and inefficiency inevitably occurred.....There was no money to be made from operating a railroad through a desolate wasteland, yet the federal government rewarded railroad contractors with big subsidies: a thirty-year loan at below market interest rates; twenty sections (12,800 acres) of government-owned land for every mile of track; and an additional subsidy of $48,000 for every mile of track laid in mountainous regions.
Thomas Durant, Oakes Ames, and other officers of the Union Pacific Railroad, which went a thousand miles west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, started the Credit Mobilier company in 1867 and retained it to do the construction. Credit Mobilier distributed to shareholders profits estimated at between $7 million and $23 million, depleting the Union Pacific’s resources. In an effort to stop congressional investigations, the officers bribed Speaker of the House James G. Blaine and other congressmen with Credit Mobilier stock. Seldom modest about their thievery, congressmen voted themselves a 50 percent pay raise. The Union Pacific Railroad fell deep into debt, without enough revenue from passengers or shippers, and went bankrupt in 1893.
1872: The New York Sun exposes the Credit Mobilier scandal, perhaps the largest business subsidy scandal of the 19th century.8 Credit Mobilier is a construction company financially controlled by the leaders of the Union Pacific Railroad that makes huge profits at taxpayer expense. Congressman Oakes Ames (R-MA), who is an agent of Credit Mobilier and part-owner, distributes shares of the firm's stock to members of Congress at a discounted value. In return, those members treat Credit Mobilier favorably in a variety of ways, such as by voting to appropriate funds for the firm. The scandal illustrates the corruption that usually results when the government intervenes in the economy and subsidizes businesses.
If that's not enough, George Will opens a great column with Biden's quote. In this case, its about our next transportation-subsidy-scandal-waiting-to-happen....The Chevy Volt. You might think that you've never purchased a Chevy Volt. But you have. Yes, you have.
The federal government, although waist-deep in red ink, offers another bribe: Any purchaser can get a tax credit of up to 50 percent of the cost (up to $2,000) of an extra-powerful (240-volt) charger. California, although so strapped it recently issued IOUs to vendors, offers a $5,000 cash rebate for which Volt buyers are not eligible but purchasers of Nissan's electric Leaf are. Go figure.
In April, in a television commercial and a Wall Street Journal column headlined "The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full," GM's then-CEO Ed Whitacre said "we have repaid our government loan, in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule." Rubbish.
GM, which has received almost $50 billion in government subventions, repaid a $6.7 billion loan using other federal funds, a TARP-funded escrow account. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) called this a "TARP money shuffle." A commentator compared it to "paying off your Visa credit card with your MasterCard."
Meretricious accounting and deceptive marketing are inevitable when government and its misnamed "private sector" accomplices foist state capitalism on an appalled country. But those who thought the ethanol debacle defined outer limits of government foolishness pertaining to automobiles were, alas, mistaken.
And finally, Reason magazine jumps on the dogpile with this:
Though Biden is generally not to be taken seriously, the government-centrism of his comments are an accurate reflection of his boss, and part of the reason why next Tuesday is going to be an awkward day
of work at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
As it turns out, last Tuesday was an awkward day of work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately, Democrats were replaced by Republicans. Republicans who favor many of the same economic interventions but for different industries. Bummer.
Oh well. Joe Biden really did make that statement. No eggs were thrown and no one laughed because it went largely unreported and unanalyzed in The Mainstream Media. Go here to read about The Mainstream Media's quest for a journalism subsidy.
Here's Politico, reporting on some good news about the Climate Bill, also known as "the convenient excuse for a tax increase and a massive power grab":
The Senate climate bill has been at death’s door several times over the past year. But with the days before the August recess quickly slipping away, the case may truly be terminal now.
Hit the link to read the whole thing. And then from The Washington Examiner, here's a post-mortem on the whitewash of the Climategate scandal:
When the Climategate e-mails were released last year, the evidence of misconduct by the scientists involved was so strong that the climate establishment was forced to commission a series of tribunals. Yet the conclusions of those inquiries are as specious as the science they were supposed to investigate. By asking the wrong questions -- or not asking them at all -- they have failed to advance the climate debate one iota.
....This panel did not examine the other e-mails on the CRU server, as it was supposed to do. It cleared the scientists of perverting the peer review process simply because their efforts did not succeed, thereby ignoring their clear intent as expressed in the e-mails.
Further, the inquiry failed to ask the most basic questions of the CRU scientists, such as whether Professor Phil Jones had actually deleted inconvenient e-mails. Britain's freedom of information office said that the Cimategate e-mails provided the most cogent evidence imaginable that there had been efforts to avoid FOI requirements, yet the Muir Russell review did not investigate this appropriately.
Even this inadequate investigation, however, found that the way the hockey stick graph was handled was misleading. Imagine what it -- and the parliamentary committee -- would have found if there had been some witnesses for the prosecution.
Those who hope that these inquiries exonerate global warming science are engaging in wishful thinking. The Climategate e-mails are still there for all to read and the questions they raise remain unanswered. Until there are answers, Climategate rolls on.
From the Catholic News Agency. This did not come from The Onion, National Lampoon, or some other parody site. It came from the Catholic News Agency, in the year 2010, about 300 years after Isaac Newton came up with the Laws Of Motion and 40 years after we put a man on the moon. We stopped treating people for demonic possession about 250 years ago, and I think we're better people for it.
Rome, Italy, Mar 31, 2010 / 11:47 am (CNA).- Noted Italian exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, commented this week that the recent defamatory reporting on Pope Benedict XVI, especially by the New York Times, was “prompted by the devil.”
That would explain soooo many things about The New York Times, wouldn't it?
Speaking to News Mediaset in Italy, the 85-year-old exorcist noted that the devil is behind “the recent attacks on Pope Benedict XVI regarding some pedophilia cases.”
The devil is not behind the attacks. Priests got behind some 12-year-olds. The Pope got behind the cover-up. There's your problem, Gabriele.
“There is no doubt about it. Because he is a marvelous Pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the devil wants to ‘grab hold’ of him.”
I'm not going to make any bad jokes about priests who "grab hold" hold of little boys. But think of how many centuries this has been going on, and what happened when kids complained about things like this in the past.
Father Amorth added that in instances of sexual abuse committed by some members of the clergy, the devil “uses” priests in order to cast blame upon the entire Church: “The devil wants the death of the Church because she is the mother of all the saints.”
Well, when an organization demands both celibacy and chastity from its all-male leadership, what do they expect? Seriously, can there ever be good results from that policy (which, as far as I can tell, was a fairly late development in the Catholic Church)? Has it ever been different than this? Was there ever a Golden Age of priestly good conduct?
“He combats the Church through the men of the Church, but he can do nothing to the Church.”
The exorcist went on to note that Satan tempts holy men, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too … fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”
Ditto for Presidents, Popes, City Councilmen, and Prime Ministers. Therefore, we should be wary of giving them any more power and control over our lives than absolutely necessary, right?
Here's Jonathan Adler, in National Review's "The Corner" blog:
Time to Change the Subject? Let's see now. Deficit projections are once again on the rise as Obama's approval rating falls. Health-care reform is faltering, climate-change legislation is stalled, and David Axlerod is under fire for his conflicts of interest. Seems like a good time to change the subject. Contents of the CIA inspector general's report on harsh interrogation methods have already leaked, so it won't do the trick. If I were a betting man, I'd expect something else to drop Monday or Tuesday.
I agree. I visit Talking Points Memo almost every day (they're one of the biggest Democrat clearinghouses for leftover Bush scandals), and they've had the same headline for about 48 hours. I'll bet a scandal from the Bush boom is exposed sometime before lunch on Monday.
