He is speaking from the perspective that laws are meant for everyone, and people should follow them. The world becomes much clearer once you accept that the laws are written by THEM exclusively for US.
Monthly Archives: October 2012
police persecution of gays in Iraq
A BBC World Service investigation has revealed that law enforcement agencies in Iraq are involved in the ongoing systematic persecution of homosexuals.
Activists say hundreds of gay men, and some women, have died in targeted killings in Iraq in recent years.
These numbers are difficult to verify, but the United Nations confirmed it was extremely concerned about what it called a deadly anti-gay campaign.
(Read more)
Iran’s currency plunges 40 percent, riot police called out
From earlier this month:
Many bazaar merchants had closed their shops the day before and authorities reported arrests amid efforts to clampdown on black market money exchangers, who effectively set the rates around the country. Trash bins were set ablaze during sporadic confrontations with security forces.
The Prosecutor’s Office in Tehran said 16 people have been detained for “disrupting” the currency — an apparent reference to speculators trying to take advantage of the rial’s declining value.
Iran’s rial has lost nearly 40 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar in the past week. The rate Thursday — about 32,000 rials for the dollar — was a bit higher than the record low earlier this week. (Read more)
12-Year-Old Girl Shoots Intruder During Home Invasion In Bryan County
12-year-old girl took matters into her own hands during a home invasion in southeast Oklahoma.
It happened on Wednesday when the girl was home alone. She told police a stranger rang the doorbell, then went around to the back door and kicked it in. She called her mom, Debra St. Clair, who told her to get the family gun, hide in a closet and call 911.
That was when St. Clair dropped what she was doing and raced home.
“I drove home at a really fast pace to try to get to her, and when I got here the police were already here. And they had the suspect,” she said.
During that time, the intruder made his way through the house. St. Clair’s daughter told deputies the man came into the room where she was hiding and began to open up the closet door. That was when the 12 year old had to make a life-saving decision.
“And what we understand right now, he was turning the doorknob when she fired through the door,” said the Bryan County Undersheriff Ken Golden. (Read more)
Home Schools and the Tea Party
I have just read the best article in National Review that I can remember in the last 40 years. Of course, this is not saying a great deal, because I stopped reading National Review about 40 years ago. I used to write for it occasionally. My introduction to the magazine was in the fall of 1959, when I was a freshman at Pomona College. I read it faithfully for about five years, and intermittently until the early 1970s. After that, my interests shifted.
The article I refer to has a great title: “The Last Radicals.” It was written by Kevin D. Williamson. It begins with this paragraph.
There is exactly one authentically radical social movement of any real significance in the United States, and it is not Occupy, the Tea Party, or the Ron Paul faction. It is homeschoolers, who, by the simple act of instructing their children at home, pose an intellectual, moral, and political challenge to the government-monopoly schools, which are one of our most fundamental institutions and one of our most dysfunctional. Like all radical movements, homeschoolers drive the establishment bats.
I think this assessment is correct. Homeschooling now qualifies as a movement. It is certainly radical, in that it has taken a public stand, with money on the line, against the public schools.
It stands against the only American institution that can legitimately claim for itself this unique position: it is the only established church in the nation. It has a self-accredited, self-screened priesthood, as every church must. It has a theology. Its theology is messianic: salvation through knowledge. But this knowledge must be screened and shaped in order to bring forth its socially healing power.
Massachusetts was the last state to abolish tax funding of churches. That was in 1832. In 1837, the state created the nation’s first state board of education. It was run by one of the crucial figures in American history, the Unitarian lawyer Horace Mann. He believed that the public schools should perform much the same function that the established Congregational churches had performed for two centuries in Massachusetts. The schools would produce what the churches had failed to produce, a new humanity. They would transform sin-bound man by means of education. (Read more)
Free Online Education Is Now Illegal in Minnesota (the ban has since been lifted)
UPDATE, Oct. 19, 7:07 p.m.: Common sense has indeed prevailed! Minnesota has decided to stop enforcing an outdated law that had led to Coursera telling the state’s residents they weren’t allowed to take its free online classes. For more, see my follow-up post here.
Original post: Honorable mentions go to New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber’s online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers’ groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal. But the grand prize in this week’s unexpectedly heated competition for most creative use of government to stifle innovation has to go to Minnesota.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the state has decided to crack down on free education, notifying California-based startup Coursera that it is not allowed to offer its online courses to the state’s residents. Coursera, founded by Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, partners with top-tier universities around the world to offer certain classes online for free to anyone who wants to take them. You know, unless they happen to be from Minnesota. (Read more)
Disturbing Video Shows U.S. Defense Contractors Allegedly Drunk and on Drugs in Afghanistan
The two employees, Melson and Kenny Smith, worked as armed security officers in Kabul as part of a $47 million government contract with the Arlington, Virginia-based defense company, which led efforts to train the Afghan National Police in counter-insurgency tactics, according to ABC. They have now filed a lawsuit against Jorge Scientific, alleging widespread misconduct and fraud under the False Claims Act.
Read more: newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/18/disturbing-video-shows-u-s-defense-contractors-drunk-and-on-drugs-in-afghanistan/#ixzz2A3ZOPaxc
(Read more)
Albert Jay Nock on voting
. . . a decent person could find no place in politics, not even the place of an ordinary voter, for the forces of ignorance, brutality and indecency would outnumber him ten to one.
Edmonton teacher who gave 0s for unsubmitted work fired
An Edmonton teacher who refused to go along with his school’s “no-zero” policy has been fired.
Lynden Dorval, a physics teacher at Ross Sheppard High School, was suspended in May for awarding zeros for work that wasn’t handed in or tests not taken, even though it went against the school’s policy of not awarding zeros.
Dorval found out Friday afternoon that he’s been fired.
“I’m not bitter, a little bit angry,” he said. “I was particularly upset with the language in the termination letter.”
In the letter, superintendent Edgar Schmidt described Dorval’s behaviour leading up to his suspension as “repeatedly insubordinate, unprofessional, and in disregard of lawful orders made by the principal.”
“I expected that you would promise to reform your behaviour and apologize to the principal,” he wrote. (Read more)
Suspicion: Settlers attacked cops posing as Palestinian shepherds
Three young Jewish settlers are suspected of attacking undercover police officers who were posing as Palestinian shepherds. One officer was injured in the incident.
According to police, the suspects punched the officers and attacked them with clubs because they assumed they were Arabs approaching the farm they were staying in. The Mount Sinai farm is located in the south Mount Hebron area. (Read more)
EPA’s illegal human experiments: Agency failed to warn tests potentially lethal
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been sued in federal court for allegedly conducting illegal experiments on human beings. The case tests whether a government agency can violate the law and the most sacrosanct ethics of scientific research — and get away scot-free.
Based on thousands of pages of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, since 2004 and continuing through the Obama administration, the EPA intentionally has been exposing dozens, if not hundreds, of human subjects to extraordinarily high levels of air pollutants such as diesel exhaust and fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5. The experiments occurred at an EPA facility located on the campus of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Many of the study subjects were health-impaired — suffering from asthma, metabolic syndrome, old age (up to 75 years) or, worse, combinations of those factors. They were all financially needy, since they enrolled in the experiments for compensation of $12 per hour.
Since 1997, the EPA has regulated PM2.5, which is also a major component of diesel exhaust, on the basis that it kills people. In 2004, the EPA determined that PM2.5 could kill on a short-term basis — i.e., within hours or days of exposure. The EPA also determined in 2004 that there is no safe level of exposure to PM2.5. That is, any inhalation of PM2.5 can kill. EPA says health-impaired people and the elderly are most vulnerable to the effects of PM2.5. EPA also says the evidence is strong that PM2.5 and diesel exhaust cause cancer.
The chairman of EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council, Dr. Jonathan M. Samet, wrote in a 2011 commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine that there is no safe exposure to PM2.5, a view reiterated to House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, in a February 2012 letter by EPA’s air chief, Gina McCarthy.
EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson testified in Congress in September 2011, “Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.” She also testified, “If we could reduce particulate matter to levels that are healthy, we would have an identical impact to finding a cure for cancer.” Cancer kills about 570,000 people in the U.S. annually, according to the American Cancer Society.
EPA does more than just say bad things about PM2.5 and diesel exhaust. It has issued stringent multibillion-dollar regulations that limit emissions. In addition to setting national air quality standards, which EPA is in the process of tightening, the agency has issued many rules during the Obama administration, the two biggest being the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. EPA’s cost-benefit justification for both rules depends entirely on its condemnation of PM2.5 as a killer.
In addition to testing the lethal and cancer-causing PM2.5 and diesel exhaust on frail and needy people, the EPA failed to inform the study subjects that it had determined that those substances were so deadly and toxic.
While EPA repeatedly over many years has told the public and Congress that PM2.5 can kill within hours of exposure, the agency only told the study subjects, for example, “You may experience some minor degree of airway irritation, cough or shortness of breath or wheezing. These symptoms typically disappear two to four hours after exposure, but may last longer for particularly sensitive people.”
One obese woman with a personal and family history of heart disease developed a cardiac arrhythmia during her experiment. She was rushed to the hospital for an overnight stay. The EPA, in a published report, attributed her heart problem to PM2.5, but it then failed to warn subsequent human subjects of the risks of cardiac arrhythmia.
In its lawsuit against the EPA, the nonprofit American Tradition Institute asserts that all this conduct runs afoul of virtually every rule and ethical standard established since World War II and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to protect human study subjects from rogue and abusive scientific research.
In answer to the lawsuit, EPA included a declaration in which the clinical studies coordinator claims to verbally warn study subjects right before experimentation, “There is the possibility you may die from this.” In addition to the shocking nature of this “warning,” even if it were acceptable to risk the lives of human study subjects for the sake of science, such a warning would need to be in writing, according to the Common Rule. (Read more)
Peter Schiff’s 2nd Presidental debate analysis
If the FBI Both Planned and Thwarted a Terrorist Attack, Who’s the Hero?
A 21-year-old Bangladeshi man tried and failed to blow up the Federal Reserve Building in downtown Manhattan on Wednesday, largely thanks to the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That “thanks” ought to be attached both to the “tried” and the “failed” parts of that sentence, since it was the FBI that not only coaxed the suspect, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, into moving forward with the bombing but also supplied him with the means to do so. Don’t worry. The Feds know what they’re doing. They do this all the time. (Read more)
***
Lew Rockwell: “The FBI and NYPD recruited and trained some schnook to fake-bomb the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It’s more of the phony, government-generated “terrorist under the bed” stuff that’s supposed to make us shiver. It may also be an attempt to smear those who intellectually oppose the bankster temple.”
Leaked Debate Agreement Shows Both Obama and Romney are Sniveling Cowards
Time’s Mark Halperin has made himself useful for once by obtaining, and publishing, a copy of the 21-page memorandum of understanding that the Obama and Romney campaigns negotiated with the Commission on Presidential Debates establishing the rules governing this month’s presidential and vice presidential face-offs. The upshot: Both campaigns are terrified at anything even remotely spontaneous happening.
They aren’t permitted to ask each other questions, propose pledges to each other, or walk outside a “predesignated area.” And for the town-hall-style debate tomorrow night, the audience members posing questions aren’t allowed to ask follow-ups (their mics will be cut off as soon as they get their questions out). Nor will moderator Candy Crowley.
Most bizarrely, given the way the debates have played out, the rules actually appear to forbid television coverage from showing reaction shots of the candidates: “To the best of the Commission’s abilities, there will be no TV cut-aways to any candidate who is not responding to a question while another candidate is answering a question or to a candidate who is not giving a closing statement while another candidate is doing so.” (Read more)
Mom arrested for letting her children play outside
A stay-at-home mom from La Porte has filed a lawsuit against the city’s police department, an unknown officer and one of her neighbors.
Tammy Cooper said she was wrongly accused of endangering her children and was even forced to spend the night in jail, all because she let her kids play outside.
She said her children, ages 9 and 6, were riding their motorized scooters in the cul-de-sac where they live while she watched from a lawn chair in her front yard just a few feet away.
“I was out there the entire time,” Cooper said. “I never left that lawn chair the entire time.” (Read more)