Apr 18

FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all criminal trials — for decades.

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The Washington Post is out with a report that the FBI’s Forensic experts falsely testified in hundreds of criminal trials that hair samples taken from crime scenes matched hair folicles taken from defendants. In every one of these cases, the FBI was lying, exaggerating or overstating the strength of the alleged hair match. In many cases, the alleged hair matches were the only or the primary evidence linking defendants to a crime. Untold dozens if not hundreds of innocent people have been convicted on the basis of the FBI’s false testimony.

Apr 14

Totalitarians Everywhere May Soon Be Panicking: One in Five Millennials Describe Themselves as Libertarian

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Generation after generation of Americans have imposed ever-more burdensome impositions on their neighbors (and themselves). The young people of today live in a virtual prison of rules, regulations and controls. Adolescents are ARRESTED (along with their parents) for merely walking independently in their communities. The control freaks in charge of modern America now surveil and monitor almost all electronic communications. 21st-century America is a land of random police checkpoints, drug-sniffing dogs and SWAT raids.

These policies were imposed by OLD PEOPLE, people from different times. The young people of today seem increasingly to yearn for freedom and independence. Here is a report that polls show 20 percent of all “millennials” describe themselves as “libertarian.” Let’s hope socialists and government trusters are in for a grim future.

Apr 13

When MSN Claims Research Was “Silenced,” This Merely Means That Government Funding Was Cut

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Today’s headline on MSN News reads: “Gun owners face much higher murder risks, researchers said. Then the NRA silenced them.”

Wow. The National Rifle Association “silenced” research. But the article’s details show no support for such a headline.

The story is about governmnt funded “disease research” during the 1990s that pronounced such things as that homes with guns are more likely to experience homicides and suicides by those guns, and that guns in the homes are more likely to kill household residents than to kill home-invasion robbers. Of course, this alleged research was widely discredited. Households without guns tend to be different from households with guns. Retirees in low-crime gated communities, for example, are probably less likely to have guns in their homes. Younger people living in more dangerous or volatile circumstances may be more likely to have guns in their homes. The CDC’s alleged research compared apples to oranges.

And just think about how rare home-invasion robberies really are. Guns in homes almost certainly prevent many such robberies before they are EVER CONTEMPLATED. It is very difficult to measure such phenomena.

And why were the taxpayers of the 1990s made to pay for such anti-gun propaganda (masquerading as research) in the first place? And why on earth did the Centers for Disease Control think its mission included paying for such anti-gun “research”? How does that relate to controlling disease?

The American people–acting through gun-rights organizations and otherwise–demanded that Congress take action to shut off government funds for such propaganda purposes.

In fact, government funding of research rarely accomplishes much of anything except demands for ever-more government. A case can be made that ALL GOVERNMENT FUNDING of research should be stripped and ended immediately. Read this book by Terrence Kealy.

If cutting government funding is “silencing” research, then the government is silencing almost all research that disagrees with its catastrophic climate-change arguments. See here, here, and here.

Apr 13

At Least Two Socialist Regimes Have Sought To Kill All People Wearing Glasses

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by Dr. Roger I. Roots

I previously knew of only one communist regime in world history that had sought to execute all people wearing glasses: the government of communist-era Cambodia. However, I recently read an account by Theodore Dalrymple about his past adventures in Equatorial Guinea.

Dalrymple writes that:

I was thrilled to be told in Equatorial Guinea that if anybody in authority there knew that I was a writer (of sorts) I would be killed, cut up and thrown into the sea: . . . . The first president was known by the title of The Only Miracle, and certainly he had produced startling changes in the country: a third of the population had either been killed or had fled. Among other achievements, he managed to abolish the wearing of glasses, if not the reasons for doing so. He associated glasses with being an intellectual, and intellectuals with danger, having been a failed intellectual himself. The errors in his logic may explain why he failed as one.

The reason that socialists invariably seek to kill or control those with glasses is that they tend to identify glasses-wearing people with literacy, and literacy is viewed as a privilege of an aristocracy. Killing the literate is a type of redistribution of wealth.

Apr 13

State of New York Launches Job Creation Program, Spends Almost $700,000 Per Job “Created”

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In the dreams of socialists everywhere, they wield the wand of government power and their goals are met magically. Consider the constant attempts of government supremacists to launch “job creation” programs by diverting money taken by force from taxpayers into various schemes and agencies.

In New York, the governor launched a “Startup NY” program, providing tax breaks and other incentives to get businesses to partner with the State university system.

The state has spent $697, 368 per job so far.

Apr 12

WORLD AGRICULTURAL OUTPUT CONTINUES TO RISE, EMBARASSING “GLOBAL WARMING” ALARMISTS

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For decades, alarmists have predicted a future of mass starvation, hunger, and disease due to scarcity of commodities, energy and food. In the early 1970s, a professor named Paul Ehrlich authored a bestselling book entitled “The Population Bomb,” forecasting such dire predictions due to increases in global population. More recently, government officials and professors have claimed that manmade global warming—driven by increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—will lead to large-scale crop failures and mass starvation.
But worldwide agricultural output continues to rise faster than population growth. Today’s humans are surrounded by food abundance in ways that the humans of yesteryear were not. There have been 50 years of growth in world outputs of most food grains, according to the USDA.

How can this be? Some research suggests that increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is helping spur plant growth rather than harming plant growth. Dr. Randall Donohue, a scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian science agency, has found that elevated CO2 levels enable leaf photosynthesis because plants are better able to convert sunlight into sugar using less water.
Dr. Donohue notes that growing worldwide leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas.

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.