Monthly Archives: October 2011

Who’s Suing Whom in the Telecom World?

Ideas are not property. They cannot be property.

Patent Litigation Flow Chart in Telecom Industry

open quotehe picture below (from this Flickr feed) illustrates the large number of lawsuits between players in the telecom sector–most seem to be patent infringement suits or suits based on antitrust law, i.e., totally without merit and a complete waste of resources. Without patent and antitrust law, we would have a less wasteful, less litigious, more competitive market. This ain’t the result of capitalism, but of unlibertarian state law. (H/t Jock Coats)close quote (Read more)

Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control

The population control issue is as far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory as I usually go. Generally, I encounter it as a vague desire, usually by environmentalist (environ-fascists) to severely decrease the Earth’s population.

I saw a chart in a National Geographic magazine where “Environmental Impact” was calculated as population, multiplied by prosperity, multiplied by technological advancement. Terrifying! This is precisely a war on people and their well-being.

I prefer to believe these things are dreamed up by people who don’t think through the implications of their statements.

open quote
So exactly what is Agenda 21? The following is how the United Nations defines Agenda 21….

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.

When you start doing deep research into Agenda 21, you will find that describing it as a “comprehensive plan” is an understatement. Virtually all forms of human activity impact the environment. The rabid “environmentalists” behind the green agenda intend to take all human activity and put it into a box called “sustainable development”.

One of the key elements of “sustainable development” is population control. The United Nations (along with radical “environmental” leaders such as Al Gore) actually believes that there are far too many people on earth.

So what is the solution?

Sadly, they actually believe that we need to start reducing the population.

Just this week, Al Gore made the following statement regarding population control….

“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.

You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important – you have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

Do you notice how whenever global leaders talk about “empowering” women these days it always ends up with them having less children?

This population control agenda is also reflected in official UN documents.

The following is language from a UN resolution that was adopted by the UN General Assembly that was designed to further the implementation of Agenda 21….

“….population growth rates have been declining globally, largely as a result of expanded basic education and health care. That trend is projected to lead to a stable world population in the middle of the twenty-first century… The current decline in population growth rates must be further promoted through national and international policies that promote economic development, social development, environmental protection, and poverty eradication, particularly the further expansion of basic education, with full and equal access for girls and women, and health care, including reproductive health care, including both family planning and sexual health, consistent with the report of the International Conference on Population and Development.”

. . . .

The number one commandment of the infamous Georgia Guidestones is this: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

. . . .

the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief begins with the following shocking statement….

What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?

Apparently the poorest nations are the primary target for the population control freaks over at the UN.

This agenda showed up again when the United Nations Population Fund released its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009 entitled “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”.

The following are three quotes that were pulled right out of that document….

1) “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time.”

2) “No human is genuinely “carbon neutral,” especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation. Therefore, everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the solution in some way.”

3) “Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns.”

If no human is “carbon neutral”, then what is the solution?

To those that are obsessed with Agenda 21 and “sustainable development”, the fact that you and I are alive and breathing air is a huge problem.

The population control agenda is also regularly showing up in our newspapers now.

In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled “The Earth Is Full”, Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement….

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century – when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all – and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

But Friedman is quite moderate compared to many of the “eco-prophets” that are running around out there today.

For example, James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, stated in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year that “democracy must be put on hold” if the fight against global warming is going to be successful and that only “a few people with authority” should be permitted to rule the planet until the crisis is solved.

A Finnish environmentalist named Pentti Linkola has gone even farther than that. Linkola is openly calling for climate change deniers to be “re-educated”, for an eco-fascist world government to be established, for humans to be forcibly sterilized and for the majority of humans to be killed. . . .

Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka is a very prominent advocate of radical human population control.

In an article entitled “What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know”, Pianka made the following shocking statements….

*First, and foremost, we must get out of denial and recognize that Earth simply cannot support many billions of people.

*This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage.

*I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us. . . .

The reality is that many of the wealthiest and most prominent people in the world are absolutely obsessed with the green agenda and with population control. Just consider the following quotes….

David Rockefeller: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”

CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

Maurice Strong: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Michael Oppenheimer: “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”

This radical agenda is even represented in the White House.

John P. Holdren, Barack Obama’s top science advisor, co-authored a textbook entitled “Ecoscience” back in 1977 in which he actually advocated mass sterilization, compulsory abortion, a one world government and a global police force to enforce population control.

On page 837 of Ecoscience, a claim is made that compulsory abortion would be perfectly legal under the U.S. Constitution….

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

On pages 942 and 943, a call is made for the creation of a “planetary regime” that would control the global economy and enforce population control measures….

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime – sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

On page 917, the surrender of U.S. national sovereignty to an international organization is advocated….

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

As mentioned earlier, Holdren is the number one science advisor to Barack Obama.close quote (Read more)

Population “Control” by Murray Rothbard

open quoteMost people exhibit a healthy lack of interest in the United Nations and its endless round of activities and conferences, considering them as boring busywork to sustain increasing hordes of tax-exempt bureaucrats, consultants, and pundits.

All that is true. But there is danger in underestimating the malice of UN activities. For underlying all the tedious nonsense is a continuing and permanent drive for international government despotism to be exercised by faceless and arrogant bureaucrats accountable to no one. The Fabian collectivist drive for power by these people remains unrelenting.

The latest exhibit, of course, is the recent Conference on Population, to be followed next year by an equally ominously entitled “Conference on Women.” The television propaganda by the UN for this year’s conference anticipates next year’s as well, best encapsulated in one of the most idiotically true statements made by anyone in decades: “Raising the standard of living for women will raise the standard of living for everyone.” Substitute “men” for “women” in this sentence, and the absurd banality of this statement becomes evident.

. . . .

The solution, then, is the euphemistically named “population control,” which in essence is the use of government power to encourage, or compel, restrictions on the growth, or on the numbers, of people in existence. Logically, of course, the anti-hu-man-being fanatics (for what is “the population” but an array of humans?) should advocate the murder by government planners of large numbers of existing people, especially in the allegedly overpopulated developing world (or, to use older term, Third World) countries. But something seems to hold them back; perhaps the charge of “racism” that might ensue. Their concentra tion, then, is on restricting the number of future births.

. . . the peak of ZPG [Zero Population Growth] hysteria in the U.S. came in the early 1970s, only to be put to rout when the census of 1970 was published, demonstrating that the ZPGers had actually achieved their goal and that the rate of population growth was already turning downward.

Interestingly enough, it took only a moment for the same people to complain that lower rates of population growth mean an aging population, and who or what is going to support the increasing number of the aged? It was at that point that the joys of early and “dignified” death for the elderly began to make its appearance in the doctrines of left-liberalism.

The standard call of the ZPGers was for a compulsory limit of two babies per woman, after which there would be government-forced sterilization or abortion for the offending female. (The Chinese communists, as is their wont, went the ZPGers one better by putting into force in the 1970s a compulsory limit of one baby per woman per lifetime.) . . .

While the population controllers seem to have given up for advanced countries, they are still big on population control for the Third World. It’s true that if you look at these countries, you see a lot of people starving and in bad economic shape. But it is an elementary fallacy to attribute this correlation to numbers of the population as cause.

In fact, population generally follows movement in standards of living; it doesn’t cause them. Population rises when the demand for labor, and living standards rise, and vice versa. A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development. Hong Kong, for example, has one of the densest populations in the world, and yet its standard of living is far higher than the rest of Asia, including, for example, the thinly populated Sinkiang province of China. . . .

The Third World suffers from a lack of economic development due to its lack of rights of private property, its government-imposed production controls, and its acceptance of government foreign aid that squeezes out private investment. The result is too little productive savings, investment, entrepreneurship, and market opportunity. What they desperately need is not more UN controls, whether of population or of anything else, but for international and domestic government to let them alone. Population will adjust on its own. But, of course, economic freedom is the one thing that neither the UN nor any other bureaucratic outfit will bring them.close quote (Read more)

Tax the rich rebuttal

Her:

What sort of person thinks there is nothing wrong with asking the folks tasked with teaching our children to take a 20% cut on a $50,000 annual salary, but think it’s a terrible idea to ask millionaires to pay an additional 3% more in taxes?

Me:

I think taking someones property by threat of force, whether you take 3% or 20%, whether you take from a rich person or a poor person, whether an individual with a gun takes it or a government with a whole police force takes it, is stealing.

I also think the government is grossly incompetent at best, and outright evil at worst, and they don’t need to waste any more of our money.

Her:

I pay taxes willingly, grateful that I am able to band together with others to create something larger than myself. Stealing is when people accept free public education, use it to make something of themselves, and then refuse to help the their neighbors do the same. (This goes for our whole infrastructure.)

Me:

I think your logic breaks down, Carlynn. If I had the choice of not paying taxes and not accepting ANY “public” help. I’d take that deal in a second.

Just because government forces us to all steal from one another, doesn’t make everyone indebted to everybody else.

Inseparable from the idea of liberty is the idea that no one owes anything to his fellow man. The collectivist opponents of this idea often claim the mortal, intellectual, and artistic high ground, which is why I’m eager to site Mario Vargas Llosa and William Faulkner who specifically argued this point here: mises.org/daily/3674

Think of the barbaric implications of your idea. If I steal someone’s money and use a tiny portion of it to buy somebody dinner, is the recipient of that dinner then condemned to have his wealth stolen for the rest of his life?

Her:

I am very familiar with the anti-humanist rhetoric of the libertarians. Every human being begins life at the mercy of others and is sustained by them; grows to maturity and sustains others; grows old and requires care. By virtue of the fact that you have grown to adulthood, you have accepted the care of others. Whether you think this means that you are enslaved to them forever or whether you think this means you are part of an interconnected, sustaining community has to do with your attitude towards life, not with life itself.

Me:

I agree that people require care and mercy. I don’t agree that this justifies mass wealth confiscation by the state.

First of all, welfare for the suffering forms a small percent of the state’s spending. And within welfare programs 80% of the budget goes to sustaining the bureaucracy, not helping the poor.

We disagree and who should help the poor.

To quote Frederic Bastiast’s 1850 essay, The Law:

“Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a think being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state — then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion – then we would have no religion at all . . . . They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.”

Her:

I didn’t steal my parents’ wealth when I was eating their food and living in their house, and I won’t think that they are stealing from me when they need my help in old age. This pattern can be extrapolated out in lessening degrees across a society. Taxes are not the government stealing from the people because in a democracy the government is the embodiment of the people. Taxes are one of the contributions that each of us makes to the common good. I think we all wish they weren’t very high, but I’d rather have high taxes and a successful common sphere than low taxes and a failed common sphere.

Me:

“taxes are one of the contributions that each of us makes to the common good.”

1 – assassinating Americans, invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uganda, Yemen, infecting unsuspecting Guatemalans with syphilis, spying on American, fondling people at airports, bailing out corrupt banks, giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a “green” company owned by Pelosi’s relative, Guantanamo Bay, et. al. do not consitute the “common good.”

2 – How can you call it a “contribution” when people can and do go to jail for failing to make the contribution? How can you not recognize the violence and brute force behind it?

America’s New Racists by Walter E. Williams

open quoteI recall my cousin’s and my being chased out of Fishtown and Grays Ferry, two predominantly Irish Philadelphia neighborhoods, in the 1940s, not stopping until we reached a predominantly black North or South Philly neighborhood.

Today all that has changed. Most racist assaults are committed by blacks. What’s worse is there’re blacks, still alive, who lived through the times of lynching, Jim Crow laws and open racism who remain silent in the face of it.

Last year, four black Skidmore College students yelled racial slurs while they beat up a white man because he was dining with a black man. Skidmore College’s first response was to offer counseling to one of the black students charged with the crime. In 2009, a black Columbia University professor assaulted a white woman during a heated argument about race relations. According to interviews and court records obtained and reported by Denver’s ABC affiliate (12/4/2009), black gangs roamed downtown Denver verbally venting their hatred for white victims before assaulting and robbing them during a four-month crime wave. Earlier this year, two black girls beat a white girl at a McDonald’s, and the victim suffered a seizure. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered an emergency shutdown of the beaches in Chicago because mobs of blacks were terrorizing families. According to the NBC affiliate there (6/8/2011), a gang of black teens stormed a city bus, attacked white victims and ran off with their belongings.

Racist black attacks are not only against whites but also against Asians. In San Francisco, five blacks beat an 83-year-old Chinese man to death. They threw a 57-year-old woman off a train platform. Two black Oakland teenagers assaulted a 59-year-old Chinese man; the punching knocked him to the ground, killing him. At Philly’s South Philadelphia High School, Asian students report that black students routinely pelt them with food and beat, punch and kick them in school hallways and bathrooms as they hurl racial epithets such as “Hey, Chinese!” and “Yo, Dragon Ball!” The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund charged the School District of Philadelphia with “deliberate indifference” toward black victimization of Asian students.

In many of these brutal attacks, the news media make no mention of the race of the perpetrators. If it were white racist gangs randomly attacking blacks, the mainstream media would have no hesitation reporting the race of the perps. Editors for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune admitted to deliberately censoring information about black crime for political reasons. Chicago Tribune Editor Gerould Kern recently said that the paper’s reason for censorship was to “guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion.”

These racist attacks can, at least in part, be attributed to the black elite, who have a vested interest in racial paranoia. And that includes a president who has spent years aligned with people who have promoted racial grievance and polarization and appointed an attorney general who’s accused us of being “a nation of cowards” on matters of race and has refused to prosecute black thugs who gathered at a Philadelphia voting site in blatant violation of federal voter intimidation laws. Tragically, black youngsters – who are seething with resentments, refusing to accept educational and other opportunities unknown to blacks yesteryear – will turn out to be the larger victims in the long run.close quote (Read more)

The Freedom to Buy and Sell Raw Milk — a great overview of the war on food freedom

open quoteThe August 3, 2011, shakedown of the Rawesome food cooperative in Venice, California, in spite of the tragic outcome, has produced one positive result. The ruthless raid on the part of miscellaneous government agencies has sparked a wave of unprecedented discord over the question, How can government dictate what we choose to eat when we each have unique standards for good nutrition?

This federalista blitzkrieg came at a time when raw milk alarmism had reached an all-time high. The folks who wish to banish raw milk can’t leave the issue alone, and instead they have ramped up a cacophonous crusade against one of nature’s glories. Day after day, articles and news bits appear in the mainstream media, full of fear mongering and panic-producing propaganda in regard to the safety of raw milk.

A July 2011 article on Dairyherd.com has some interesting survey results on comparative raw-milk regulations on a state-by-state basis. To summarize, 30 states allow consumers to transact with raw-milk producers while 20 states prohibit that act of freedom. And don’t forget that federal laws prevent the sale of any raw milk over state lines. The federal government’s response to the good white stuff moving over state lines is to send in armed soldiers in full battle gear to seize and destroy.

Thirteen mini-regimes across the United States allow the sale of raw milk on the farm where it was produced, while four of those thirteen allow only “incidental occurrences,” with that being defined as “occasional sales, not as a regular course of business; no advertising.” Surely, the feds can interpret “occasional” and “regular” and “advertising” in a whole host of capricious ways. After all, it is the use of arbitrary laws with a host of potential interpretations that enables the feds to conduct their criminal operations that consist of seizing product and regulating small producers out of business.

Four of those 13 states only allow raw goat milk while Kentucky and Rhode Island — now get this — require a prescription from a physician! Of course, you can interpret that to mean raw milk must be medicinal (ask moms who remedy their child’s allergies with raw milk), but then again, there’s no such thing as a Big Milk Pharma that exists as a corporate arm of the state to keep its products available for the masses. Lastly, 11 states allow raw milk to be sold in retail stores outside of the farm.

. . . .

In a recent edition of the Atlantic, an article was published that does a solid job of covering the Rawesome food-club raid and its aftermath. The Atlantic writer, Ari LeVaux, compares the Rawesome raid by federal and local agencies to the contamination of 36 million pounds of Cargill ground turkey (one tally is 77 known ill people, 1 dead). Rawesome was raided, trashed, and shut down, and meanwhile, Cargill executives were analyzing the costs of a recall vs. the potential for negative publicity from the tainted meat so they could voluntarily decide whether or not to recall the product.

LeVaux went on to say that food freedom in America is vanishing. A quote from the end of the article states the following: “This is the state of food freedom in America today: It’s being sacrificed in the name of food safety.” But this is not about safety. These raids that are hostile to food choice are about

– seizing power, which benefits federal and local governments and provides justification for their continued growth through the looting of taxpayers;
– eliminating the competition for the rent-seeking corporate state, meaning the big business–big government alliance;
– displaying the omnipotent power of the enforcement state (militarized police and federal/state agencies); and
– affirming rejection of any individual’s right to self-ownership, and thus making the case that we are subjects to be ruled, including our behaviors and personal lifestyle choices.

The FDA is, in desperation, trying to influence consumers against raw milk. Even so, sales of raw milk keep increasing and new consumers come into the market. Since the FDA does not have the power to regulate intrastate commerce, it is up to the states to regulate raw milk. The FDA’s job, then, is to apply pressure on states to restrict or ban the sale of raw milk.

The fear mongering over the dangers of raw milk is rooted in government–special interest propaganda with no basis in facts or science. In the interest of alarming the populace, the prohibition campaign has portrayed the decision to drink raw milk as a public danger rather than a personal choice. In response, Ted Beals, MD, delivered a presentation at the Third International Raw Milk Symposium in Bloomington, Minnesota, in May 2011, where he delivered these remarks:

From the perspective of a national public health professional looking at an estimated total of 48 million foodborne illnesses each year; or from the perspective of a healthcare professional looking at a total of 90,771 (data from Healthy People 20204) confirmed bacterial foodborne infections each year (about 0.2 percent), there is no rational justification to focus national attention on raw milk, which may be associated with an average of 42 illnesses maximum among the more than nine million people (about 0.0005 percent) who have chosen to drink milk in its fresh unprocessed form.

Using this average of 42 illnesses per year, we can show, using government figures, that you are about 35,000 times more likely to become ill from other foods than you are from raw milk.

close quote (Read more)

Nobel Prize in Economics — Here We Go Again

open quoteThis year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics goes to two Americans, Thomas Sargent (NYU) and Christopher Sims (Princeton). Officially the award is for “their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.”

. . . . it’s a bit odd for the economics profession right now to be celebrating two scientists for their work in helping policymakers steer the macroeconomy. It would be a bit like awarding Jonas Salk a Nobel Prize in the midst of history’s second-worst polio epidemic.

. . . .

Given that you wanted to approach macroeconomics in the way the mainstream has done it over the past few decades, then yes Sargent and Sims made seminal contributions and should be congratulated for their important work. For example, there is a poll for visitors at the official site, asking, “Did you know that Sargent and Sims’s work is used by policymakers worldwide?”

Yet hold on a second. We ironically seem to be in the midst of one of the causation-correlation traps that I just explained above. Just about everyone is celebrating the work of Sargent and Sims, in effect saying, “Thank goodness you gave policymakers such guidance, especially when they need it now in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s! We can only imagine how awful the world economy would be today, were it not for your seminal papers.”
Aspects of the Pathology of Money

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Yet things might well be just the opposite. The “data” is just as consistent with the opposite conclusion, namely that Sargent and Sims steered the macroeconomics profession along a trajectory that led policymakers to do things that blew up the global financial system, such that we are currently worried about the collapse of an entire continent and its currency. close quote (Read more)

See also:

How to silence a Nobel Prize winning economist: Ask him about the economy.