Apr 12

Another Prominent Voice Calls for Imprisonment of Climate-Change “Deniers”

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As previously reported, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology has openly argued that those who disagree with the government regarding catastrophic-manmade-CO2-driven-global-warming should be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned.

Now another prominent manmade-climate-change alarmist is calling for prosecution and imprisonment of (what he calls) climate-change “denialists.”

Adam Weinstein, former editor of MOTHER JONES and now a senior writer at Gawker, says those who disagree with the government must be punished.

In a column entitled, “Arrest Climate-Change Deniers,” Weinstein states that some “denialists should face jail. They should face fines.”

Weinstein claims he is “not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right,” but about arresting Rush Limbaugh himself: “I’m talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I’m talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable.”

“Those malcontents must be punished and stopped,” Weinstein continues.

According to Weinstein, the First Amendment should not pose a barrier to such punishment. “First Amendment rights have never been absolute,” he writes. The tragic irony of Weinstein’s position seems lost on him; in another time, Weinstein and other socialists were themselves targeted for their views.

Eric Worrall, a skeptic who might face jail if Weinstein’s regime is ever imposed, writes that Weinstein’s assumptions are fundamentally inaccurate:

However, [Weinstein’s] claim simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Even the IPCC has failed to establish a link between CO2 and extreme weather. In addition, the rise in CO2 has so far been strongly beneficial for crop yields – satellites have detected a substantial greening of the planet, thanks largely to the fertilisation effect of the rise in atmospheric CO2.

Apr 10

Pro-Government Extremists Calling For Government Takeover of Agriculture in Response to California Drought

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Socialist writer Lindsay Abrams again trumpets central planning and government supremacy in a recent column. California’s long drought, Abrams writes, justifies a total government takeover of agriculture by the State of California, if not the U.S. government.:

But then in the long term, the state has to rethink agriculture, basically. The problem is that that’s thinking so big. We’re a country that’s based on freedom and the ability to develop or to have any kind of business you want. So to tell farmers how they can do their business goes against everything that’s American, in a way. But they really are going to have to because it just wastes so much water. And I don’t think that they should stop farming in California — I’m actually afraid that might happen, because as they run out of water people are going to start going for the farmers more — but if the farmers stop farming there, then you have Central Valley turning into a dust bowl. That’s not good, we don’t need more of that

Abrams seems to avoid using the word “drought,” preferring to describe California’s situation as a “water crisis” and “climate catastrophe.” Perhaps she is aware of recent studies showing that droughts have become LESS OF A PROBLEM worldwide than they were in the past, and are now accounting FOR AN ALL-TIME LOW amount of worldwide damage as a percentage of GDP.

Apr 10

University disciplinary proceedings have become “snakepits of injustice”

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“Conservative” columnist Matt Vespa has written an essay about the sad state of “due process” at many modern government universities. Of course, colleges operated by the government are supposedly bound by basic constitutional rules of procedural fairness. The Constitution forbids stage agencies and enterprises from depriving anyone of “life, liberty or property” without due process.

As Dr. Roots has shown, an adversarial justice system–with judges acting as impartial, unbiased referees, even-handed rules of evidence, opportunities to confront accusers, etc.–is a fundamental part of any free society. However, most governments tend to degenerate into inquisitorial “justice” systems, where judges are partial to governmental powers.

Vespa points to a number of public campus proceedings where students are punished and exiled upon the flimsiest pretenses, where accused people have no right to put on a defense or confront accusers, etc.

Apr 09

Victor Davis Hanson: the modern American University is a Failed State

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Columnist and radio talk show host Victor Davis Hanson has authored an intriguing piece. Hanson writes that historically, colleges and universities were thought to further four (4) primary social goals:
(1) they supposedly taught students how to reason inductively and “imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry”;
(2) “campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression”;
(3) “four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university’s assurance that its degree was a wise career investment”;
and
(4) “universities were not monopolistic price gougers.”

The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.”

Today’s colleges and universities are (1) expensive (2) havens for thought control which (3) fail to educate many or even most students to a level of basic scientific, cultural or informational literacy and which leave many students at a DISADVANTAGE in the cold, cruel world that students find themselves in after college. Many colleges have graduated students who CANNOT READ. Instead of exposing students to new frontiers or innovative ideas, many colleges now shelter students from inconvenient worldviews or unpopular opinions.

And as previously described in this site, today’s PUBLIC colleges have failed even in achieving their very PURPOSE FOR EXISTENCE, the notion that public taxpayers should support them to give the poor access to higher education. Today’s college students are LESS LIKELY than the students of yesteryear to be drawn from the lowest quintiles of the socoeconomy.

Apr 08

Social Security Continues to Impoverish Seniors: 1 in 3 Will Live in Poverty in Response to the Program

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Social Security is a program that takes money from poor people and transfers it to richer people. To the extent that America is defined by class structure (which can be debated), the poor tend to start working earlier in life, to pay into Social Security (and Medicare) longer, and to die younger. The rich tend to start working at older ages, to work fewer years, and to live longer. Thus Social Security is a massive transfer from the poor to the rich.

Additionally, people change their behavior in response to the program. They save less, invest less, work less safe, and retire earlier.

Now we read that 1 in 3 seniors will be living in poverty in the future. The link is here.

The MSN Money article places most of the blame on employers, who have become less likely to offer retirement benefits. U.S. Corporations now face the world’s highest corporate tax rates and additional burdens from the Obamacare program.

Apr 06

New York Times: College tuition costs have skyrocketed in spite of exponential government spending on higher education

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The Easter weekend 2015 New York Times published a daring opinion piece by law professor Paul Campos, “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much.” In the essay, Professor Campos demolishes the official conventional wisdom regarding government funding for higher education:

ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, . . .

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.

In fact, as Campos writes, government funding of higher education has exploded over the past 40 years.

In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.

Apr 06

“A Record of Total Failure”: Government Funding of Universities Has Produced a LOWER Percentage of Poor People in College

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Why are taxpayers forced to OWN universities? Upon what logic do governments claim that owning colleges and universities is necessary? Especially when there are thousands of private-sector colleges and universities?

The only plausible answer is that government-owned or supported colleges meet the needs of the poor in ways that private-sector colleges do not.

But Professor Richard Vedder, writing in the National Review April 2, 2015, writes that government funding of colleges and universities has failed to provide ANY SIGNIFICANT improvement in college access for the poor.

Here, the record is one of total failure: A smaller percentage of recent college graduates come from the bottom quartile of the income distribution today than was the case in 1970, when federal student-assistance programs were in their infancy.

Apr 06

Government Temperature Predictions Are Averaging 2 to 5 Times Greater than Reality

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University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologist John Christy compared 102 government-funded climate model predictions with actual temperature data and found that “their response to CO2 on average is 2 to 5 times greater than reality.” Here is the link.

Apr 03

Pro-Government Extremist Website Outraged That More People Trust Private-Sector Scientists Than Government-Funded Scientists

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Salon.com, a government-cheerleader website that generally offers a steady stream of elitist, socialist, and pro-government extremist content, is shocked and outraged over new polling data that reveals Americans have a healthy skepticism toward government “climate science.” Salon.com staff writer Lyndsey Abrams writes that

Most strange, from these results, is that the largest proportion of respondents — 45 percent — say they trust non-government scientists and educators, while only 13 percent trust the U.S. government.

Abrams finds it shocking that after many centuries of government-imposed genocide, deception, false-flag violence and massacres, people tend to view the governments that purport to rule over them with distrust and skepticism.

Apr 03

Economist Robert Wenzel: Water is Just Like Any other Commodity; If Markets Were Free, Prices Would Quickly Eliminate Scarcity

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Because governments have generally taken over control of water, consumers are confused and often oblivious to the true costs of the commodity. Municipalities sometimes divert BILLIONS OF DOLLARS taken from taxpayers into water delivery systems; yet consumers view their tapwater as “free.”

If private sector entrepreneurs were allowed to provide water in a free market, price adjustments would quickly eliminate episodes of scarcity. And MOST PEOPLE WOULD HAVE ACCESS TO CLEANER, HEALTHIER WATER FOR LESS MONEY THAN THEY PAY NOW. According to noted economist Robert Wenzel:

[W]ater is just like any other commodity, if you price it below market clearing levels, you will have shortages.

If you allow market prices, shortages disappear. When you have market prices, incentive is provided for development of new sources of water and the price acts as a disciplinary force against “waste.”

Robert Wenzel, editor of the Economic Policy Journal, continues:

Yesterday, Brown, as Governor acted, and declared the “first ever statewide mandatory water reductions.” “Hello, Venezuela,” I thought to myself. But when I turned to the governor’s press release, it said this:

“The Governor’s order calls on local water agencies to adjust their rate structures to implement conservation pricing, recognized as an effective way to realize water reductions and discourage water waste.”

Yes, there was a lot of nonsense in the release and the water sector should be privatized, but that said, it is quite impressive that Brown recognizes the problem as a pricing problem.

Jerry Brown for President of Venezuela! I say.