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The Pointless Flex – EPautos – Libertarian Car Talk

Posted by M. C. on August 26, 2019

Your rights are to Submit – and Obey.

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2019/08/25/the-pointless-flex/

By

eric

t’s amazing what you can do in a three-row/eight passenger SUV   . . . but not many people do it anymore.

This 2020 Kia Telluride I’m test-driving right now (reviewed here) can hustle through the curves faster and with less effort and much more margin than my ’76 Trans-Am. Which is no small thing because in its day, the Trans-Am was the best-handling high-performance car made in America. It was designed for speed; everything else was secondary. The Kia is a family hauler.

But it hauls better.

 

One hand on the wheel through the esses and not even close to pushing it at speeds that would have the Trans-Am’s rear end slip-sliding and near the break-loose point. Its 15×7 inch BF Goodrich radials as dated as the 8-track in the dashboard.

If something solid – a deer or a slower-moving car – appears in the road ahead of me I might as well turn the 8-track up up (KISS, Destroyer) as apply the brakes, both having about the same effect as far as slowing the car down in time.

That’s how far we’ve come in the intervening nearly 50 years.

But we’ve also gone much farther in the other direction.

People no longer like to drive (much less corner) fast. Or they’re afraid to. Either way, they rarely do so. The Kia is wasted on them. A Corvette is absurd.

The Safety Cult has practically destroyed car culture, but – oddly enough – not cars. Which are much more powerful now than they have ever been. This is an across-the-board truth. Any current family sedan accelerates to 60 faster than almost any ’70s muscle car; runs a quicker quarter mile – and has a much higher top speed.

The family sedan’s brakes (which are four wheel discs) stop the car faster, the tires (which will be 17s or 18s at least and probably rated for 130-plus MPH) are grippier  . . . everything is better. And yet, almost everyone goes slower.

Chiefly because they’re terrified of the consequences.

A brutal regime of speed enforcement – of seatbelt enforcement – has supplanted the old regime of reasonableness or at least not-murderousness that used to exist. Guns were rarely drawn on people merely for driving fast.

Today, they’re drawn on people for talking back. Over broken tail-lights.

There have always been radar traps; now there are checkpoints – manned by body armor-wearing stormtroopers trained to regard the wispiest absence of total deference as a “threat” to their Authority.

80 in a 55 used to be a ticket – and that was it. Sometimes, you could talk your way out of it. You could almost always at least talk it over – on almost equal terms. This will sound unbelievable to those under 30 today but before the sun began to wane in the late ’90s, one generally got out of the car after pulling over and walked over to the cop’s car to discuss the matter.

We weren’t under martial law, then. You had to pull a gun or a knife, at least, before a cop would pull his. It took real effort to get yourself cuffed and stuffed.

Things have, as they say, changed.

Today a pull-over for any reason, even the most trivial and non-moving, can lead to life-ruining and even life-ending consequences. You are at the mercy of armed government workers – there are no cops anymore – who don’t need probable cause to force you out of your car and let themselves into your car. Sure, you can say no – which will delay them for the 10 minutes it takes to summon a four-legged AGW and its handler, who will discover probable cause.

Your rights are to Submit – and Obey.

If they find cash on you – any amount – it’s “forfeit” if the AGWs decide they want it. And good luck getting it back, even if they never give you so much as a ticket.

Even if all you end up with is a ticket, it’s the equivalent, these days, of taking out a payday loan at 32 percent interest – only worse because it’s more than 32 percent interest (factor in the insurance-rape for the next 3-5 years the ticket will be used as the pretext for mulcting you).

And if you don’t pay up – even if you literally can’t pay up –  they’ll do more than ruin your credit.

A Hut! Hut! Hutting! has become a much more realistic threat than angry bedouins.

Best to avoid the pull over.

Thus, people hew to the speed limit, try to blend in. They text and chat and zone out. It’s safer.

People have also been conditioned to fear speed as much as speed enforcement. They accelerate tepidly, usually in a pack – no one pulling ahead. This goes for merging, too. Often, people just stop on the ramp, signal – and expect to be let in.

Traffic creeps along accordingly.

At least two generations now have been taught – it has been hammered into them – that it’s not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe to drive the way people used to drive when cars had half the power and a third the capability that cars have now.

Today’s road speeds are about what they were in 1970 but 2020 cars are much safer at those same speeds and if speed limits were adjusted to jibe with the increase in the capability of today’s cars – of cars made since the ’90s – highway speeds today should be closer to 90 than the 70 that’s typical.

Instead, people in the main drive slower today than they did back in 1970 – in cars with angry faces, screwed up with rage but no outlet for it.

It’s akin to bodybuilding. Lots of flexing of muscles not used for much of anything.

More absurd, actually – because they don’t even flex.

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Rothbard and War – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 26, 2019

First and foremost, war deforms us morally.

War corrupts the culture

War distorts reality itself. 

Be decent. Be human. Do not be deceived by the Joe Bidens, the John McCains, the John Boltons, Hillary Clintons and the whole gang of neocons.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/lew-rockwell/rothbard-on-war/

By

This talk was delivered at the Ron Paul Institute’s Conference on Breaking Washington’s Addiction to War.

Murray Rothbard was the creator of the modern libertarian movement and a close friend of both Ron Paul and me. His legacy was a great one, and at the Mises Institute I try every day to live up to his hopes for us.

One issue was the most important to him, of all the many issues that concerned him. This was the issue of war and peace. Because of his support for a peaceful, noninterventionist foreign policy for America, the CIA agent William F. Buckley blacklisted him from National Review and tried, fortunately without success, to silence his voice.

During the 1950’s, Murray worked for the Volker Fund, and in a letter to Ken Templeton in 1959, he complained about the situation:  “I can think of no other magazine which might publish this, though I might fix it up a bit and try one of the leftist-pacifist publications. The thing is that I am getting more and more convinced that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business, and that we will never get anywhere in this great intellectual counterrevolution (or revolution) unless we can end this . . . cold war-a war for which I believe our tough policy is largely responsible.”

Buckley’s position was that it would be necessary to erect a “totalitarian bureaucracy” within our shores in order to battle communism abroad. The implication was that once the communist menace subsided, this extraordinary effort, domestic and foreign, could likewise diminish.

Since government programs do not have a habit of diminishing but instead seek new justifications when the old ones no longer exist, few of us were surprised when the warfare state, and its right-wing apologists, hummed right along after its initial rationale vanished from history.

As it turns out, by the way, the Soviet threat was grossly exaggerated, as such threats always are. The wickedness of the Soviet regime was never in doubt, but its capabilities and intentions were consistently distorted and overblown.

Despite the dubious foundations on which the hysterical claims behind the alleged “Soviet threat” rested, its existence ossified into one of the unchallengeable orthodoxies of National Review and of the broader conservative movement then being born. When Murray pointed out the silliness of the whole thing, not to mention the counterproductive nature of American military intervention abroad, he quickly became an un-person at National Review, which had published him in its early years.

Well before there was an official “conservative movement,” with its magazines, its crusty orthodoxies, its ineffectual think-tanks (complete with sinecures for ex-politicians) and its craving for respectability, there was a loose, less formal association of writers and intellectuals who opposed Franklin Roosevelt (in both his domestic and foreign policies), a group Murray dubbed the “Old Right.”

There was no party line among these intrepid thinkers because there was nobody to impose one.

Even into the 1950s and the advance of the Cold War, voices of restraint amidst the remnants of the Old Right could still be found. In a 1966 article, Murray points to the right-wing group For America, a political action group whose foreign-policy platform demanded “no conscription” as well as the principle, “Enter no foreign wars unless the safety of the United States is directly threatened.”

Murray likewise pointed to the Jeffersonian novelist Louis Bromfield, who wrote in 1954 that military intervention against the Soviet Union was counterproductive:

One of the great failures of our foreign policy throughout the world arises from the fact that we have permitted ourselves to be identified everywhere with the old, doomed, and rotting colonial-imperialist small European nations which once imposed upon so much of the world the pattern of exploitation and economic and political domination…. None of these rebellious, awakening peoples will…trust us or cooperate in any way so long as we remain identified with the economic colonial system of Europe, which represents, even in its capitalistic pattern, the last remnants of feudalism…. We leave these awakening peoples with no choice but to turn to Russian and communist comfort and promise of Utopia.

Murray likewise made note of a 1953 article by George Morgenstern, editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune, in Human Events (“now become a hack organ for the ‘Conservative Movement,’” Murray lamented in 1966) that deplored the imperialist tradition in American history. Morgenstern ridiculed those who “swoon on very sight of the phrase ‘world leadership,’” and wrote:

An all-pervasive propaganda has established a myth of inevitability in American action: all wars were necessary, all wars were good. The burden of proof rests with those who contend that America is better off, that American security has been enhanced, and that prospects of world peace have been improved by American intervention in four wars in half a century. Intervention began with deceit by McKinley; it ends with deceit by Roosevelt and Truman.

Perhaps we would have a rational foreign policy…if Americans could be brought to realize that the first necessity is the renunciation of the lie as an instrument of foreign policy.

With the advent of National Review, these increasingly isolated voices would be silenced and marginalized. Even the heroic John T. Flynn, whose anti-FDR biography The Roosevelt Myth had reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list, was turned away from National Review when he tried to warn of the dangers of a policy of military interventionism.

Why did Murray oppose war? Here are a few points basic to his thought:…

You will have to see for yourself here…

See through the propaganda. Stop empowering and enriching the state by cheering its wars. Set aside the television talking points. Look at the world anew, without the prejudices of the past, and without favoring your own government’s version of things.

Be decent. Be human. Do not be deceived by the Joe Bidens, the John McCains, the John Boltons, Hillary Clintons and the whole gang of necons. Reject the biggest government program of them all.

Peace builds. War destroys.

Let’s return for a moment to Murray. When he opposed the Vietnam War, he alienated not only National Review, the major right-wing magazine and the most important conservative voice in the country, as well as virtually everyone on the right. He had to write for a small number of newsletter subscribers. By the late 1960s, he told Walter Block there were probably only 25 libertarians in the entire world.

Things are much easier for us today, thanks in large part to Murray’s commitment and Ron Paul’s extraordinary example. There are now millions of people who are resolutely antiwar, and who don’t care which political party the president launching any particular war happens to belong to.

On top of that, it’s encouraging to know that younger people are much less convinced of the need for an interventionist foreign policy. The younger the audience, the less the warmongers’ fact-free exhortations fall on receptive ears.

This in my view is Murray Rothbard’s greatest legacy. It’s up to all of us to help carry it forward.

Be  seeing you

706a7-rothbard2bmurray

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In New “Mind-Blowing” Study, Planting Trees Reduces Carbon Better Than Carbon Taxes | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on August 25, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/new-mind-blowing-study-planting-trees-reduces-carbon-better-carbon-taxes

A recent article in the Guardian trumpeted the findings of a new study published in Science that found massive tree planting would be — by far — the cheapest and most effective approach to mitigating climate change. Ironically, the new thinking shows the pitfalls of political approaches to combating so-called “negative externalities.” The good news about tree planting disrupts the familiar narrative about carbon taxes that even professional economists have been feeding the public for years. The whole episode is an example of what Ronald Coase warned about, in his classic 1960 article showing the danger in the traditional approach of using taxes to fix alleged market failures.

Ronald Coase vs. A. C. Pigou on “Externalities”

Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” is one of the most frequently cited economics articles of all time, but it can be difficult for a newcomer to absorb its lessons. In this revolutionary piece, Coase challenged the standard approach to externalities that had been developed by economist A. C. Pigou.

According to Pigou, the market economy works fine in allocating resources efficiently under most circumstances. However, when third parties experience benefits or harms because of particular market transactions, the Invisible Hand fails. For example, if a factory dumps waste into a river as a by-product of making TVs, then the factory owner is making “too many” TVs because the owner isn’t taking into account the harm his business is imposing on the people living downstream. The profit-and-loss system presumes that consumers and firms are receiving feedback from the impact of their actions, and so (Pigou argued) a case of pollution leads to inefficiency.

Pigou suggested that in a case like this, the government should impose a tax on the TV factory, corresponding to the harm that additional output causes to the people living downstream. The tax would then lead the owner of the factory to scale back production, to the point at which the “marginal” TV produced would bestow roughly equal benefits and costs to society, taking everything into account. (Without the Pigovian tax, the factory owner would produce additional TV sets for which their marginal cost to society exceeded their marginal benefit, meaning society would be worse off because of these additional units.)

For the purpose of this post, I’ll have to be brief, but here is the quick and dirty version of how Ronald Coase came along and completely upended this traditional Pigovian analysis: First, Coase told his readers to stop thinking of these situations in terms of the good guys and bad guys. In my hypothetical TV factory case — which is my example, not Coase’s — we shouldn’t view the factory owner as someone violating the downstream homeowners. Rather, Coase urged his readers to consider, what he called, the “reciprocal nature” of the problem.

Specifically, Coase would say in our example that the real problem is one of scarcity and competing uses for the river water. The factory owner would like to use the river as a place to dump his waste after producing TVs, while the homeowners would like to use the river for their kids to play in or to wash their clothes. The two uses are incompatible, and the issue is: To which party should the use of the river be allocated? Coase warns us that if the government installs a TV tax on the factory, the politicians are simply assuming that the most efficient solution to the conflict is for the factory to scale back TV production.

But we can imagine better outcomes, depending on the specifics. Suppose, for example, that there are only a few households who live downstream from the factory, and are harmed by its waste products. In this situation, rather than the owner greatly scaling back TV production — and depriving consumers around the country of having cheap TVs — maybe the least-cost solution is for the factory owner to buy the properties from the few families and pay them to move somewhere else. Note that we are talking about voluntary exchanges here; the people aren’t being evicted by the sheriff. Rather, just suppose for the sake of argument that for (say) $2 million, the factory owner could buy out the families living downstream, and everybody would be much happier than the outcome that would result under a TV tax.

Now that we’ve worked through this hypothetical example to illustrate the out-of-the-box thinking Coase developed in his 1960 paper, I’ll demonstrate its relevance to the new study about trees and climate change.

Tree Option Might Greatly Reduce the “Social Cost of Carbon”

As the Guardian piece explains, the new study is far more optimistic about the scale of tree planting available on Earth than had been earlier believed. This is why the scientists involved in the study think a massive campaign of planting trees is now the single best approach to mitigating climate change. Here are some key excerpts from the Guardian article:

Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.

As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.

…

“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”

Citing a figure that planting a new tree costs roughly 30 cents, Prof. Crowther remarked that we could plant the target of 1 trillion trees by spending about $300 billion. Sure, that’s a big number, but its nowhere close to the economic cost of imposing a worldwide carbon tax, the “solution” that many economists have been promoting for years as a no-brainer. (William Nordhaus’s model in its 2007 calibration estimated that even his modest carbon tax would cause several trillion dollars [in today’s dollars] in economic compliance costs, while the more aggressive proposals would cause more than $20 trillion in economic costs.)

This episode is a specific example of the type of problem Ronald Coase warned about. Specifically, the carbon tax logic assumed that the problem was, “People are emitting too much carbon dioxide and we need to coerce them into scaling back.” But what if instead the problem was, “People aren’t planting enough trees, and we need to coax them into planting more”?

To give some quick numbers: By some estimates, a single healthy tree can sequester up to a ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old, and we also read that a silver maple tree will absorb 400 pounds of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 25 years old…

Conclusion

New developments in the scientific literature show that tree-planting might be the single best way to reduce the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The whole episode shows the folly of top-down political solutions to social challenges. Even if we stipulate the standard framework of “market failure,” it does not follow that a carbon tax set to the “social cost of carbon” is the way to restore efficiency. The case for a carbon tax is much weaker than the so-called experts have been assuring us.

Originally published at the Institute for Energy Research

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Al Gore: The World’s First 'Carbon Billionaire' by ...

 

 

 

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Facebook Hiring Corporate Media Veterans to Manually Curate ‘News Tab’

Posted by M. C. on August 25, 2019

The majority of stories people will see will appear in the tab via algorithmic selection…

You will see what Facebook deems best for…Facebook.

“Anyone” that uses a single source what goes on in the world gets what they deserve. The problem is that “Anyone” may very well affect you and me.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/08/20/facebook-hiring-corporate-media-veterans-to-manually-curate-news-tab/

by Lucas Nolan

Facebook recently spoke with Axios, revealing a number of plans to promote news outlets on its platform including the creation of a “News Tab” featuring outlets handpicked by Facebook, changing how millions of people receive news.

Axios reports that social media giant Facebook has new plans aimed at helping handpicked news outlets on its platform and will be hiring a number of seasoned journalists to curate a planned “News Tab” feature. The news tab is reportedly an effort by Facebook to restore some credibility to the site’s news feed which it believes has become inundated with fake news and clickbait.

Facebook plans to personalize the News Tab meaning it will require a vast amount of content on a wide range of topics for users. The new venture is reportedly part of a personal project by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to improve the company’s relationship with publishers which have previously accused social media of destroying their business models and stealing content.

Facebook will reportedly be paying dozens of publishers in order to license content for the News Tab and news from many other sources will be included. The largest partners in the project will be paid millions of dollars a year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Facebook representatives have stated that they would be willing to pay as much as $3 million a year to license headlines and article previews from news outlets, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, stated recently that: “Our goal with the News tab is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience … The majority of stories people will see will appear in the tab via algorithmic selection.” The company will reportedly be employing a small team of journalists to curate the Top News section.

Facebook ended its Trending Topics feature last year after being accused of bias, a Facebook executive commented on this stating: “We learned a lot from Trending. This is a completely different product.” The entire Facebook Trending News team was fired in 2016 following an investigation by Breitbart News which revealed an extreme level of bias from members of the team. A former Facebook employee stated that 90 percent of the Trending Topics team was liberal and that Breitbart News received extra scrutiny. The Trending Topics feature continued for some time, run solely by an algorithm.

 

 

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Report: Ties Between Environmentalism and Eugenics ‘Run Deep’

Posted by M. C. on August 25, 2019

The Club of Rome’s 1972 publication The Limits To Growth was a Malthusian blueprint on how the human population needed to be reduced in order to prevent an ecological collapse, which in itself was merely a disguised version of the abhorrent eugenicist ideas that were circulating in the early part of the 20th century and eventually died out with Hitler. The widely discredited population bomb paranoia of the 70′s and 80′s was gradually replaced by the climate change fearmongering that we see the organization pushing today, which again is merely another regurgitation of the eugenics-obsessed policies of the elite.

Prominent members of the Club of Rome include Al Gore and Maurice Strong, both of whom are intimately involved with privately-owned carbon trading groups like the Chicago Climate Exchange, whose multi-million dollar profits are solely reliant on protecting the credibility of the man-made global warming thesis from skeptics who have challenged its legitimacy in light of the Climategate scandal.

CONTROL

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/20/report-ties-between-environmentalism-and-eugenics-run-deep/

by Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

A historical analysis of the environmentalist movement released Monday revealed close ties between radical ecology, population control, and eugenics, which is still evident today in “ecofascism.”

An “ultra-violent strain of white-nationalism also embraces climate science,” states the Canadian activist Cory Doctorow in his piece exploring the racist roots of modern environmentalism.

“Several of the recent white nationalist mass killers have described themselves as ‘ecofascists’ and/or have deployed ecofascist rhetoric in their manifestos,” states Doctorow, which should not surprise anyone familiar with the ecology movement.

Ecofascism is “the belief that our planet has a ‘carrying capacity’ that has been exceeded by the humans alive today and that we must embrace ‘de-growth’ in the form of mass extermination of billions of humans, in order to reduce our population to a ‘sustainable’ level,” he notes, which explains its historic alliance with both eugenics and population control.

While Doctorow fully buys into popular ideas regarding climate change, he insists that the dark side of the environmental movement must be acknowledged, at least for honesty’s sake.

“Ecofascism is a form of nihilism, one that holds that it’s easier to murder half the people on Earth than it is to reform our industrial practices to make our population sustainable,” he states, a position epitomized by the Marvel villain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War (Josh Brolin), the highest-grossing film of 2018, and by Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) in the dark 2014 comedy Kingsmen: The Secret Service.

“Pastoralist and environmental thinking has always harbored a strain of white supremacy,” Doctorow writes, and the “connection between eugenics and environmentalism runs deep.”

“One of the fathers of ecofascist thought is Madison Grant, who worked with Teddy Roosevelt to establish the US system of national parks, and also to establish a whiteness requirement for prospective US immigrants,” he writes.

“This thread of thinking — that there are too many people, and the wrong people are breeding — carries forward with the environmental movement, with figures like John Tanton,” he states, who started his career as a local Sierra Club official and went on to become “the ideological father of the ecofascist movement.”

As the environmentalist movement continues to amp-up its rhetoric to terrify humanity into acting against what it sees as a “climate crisis” or “environmental collapse,” it seems unremarkable that a significant number of true believers will resort to violence to avert the apocalypse.

Be seeing you

Hillary and Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger-Progressive Pioneer

 

 

 

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Airport’s Ban on Plastic Water Bottles a Flight of Fancy | Craig Eyermann

Posted by M. C. on August 24, 2019

Oddly, you can still buy sugary drinks in plastic bottles at SFO; only healthy, calorie-free water is banned in plastic. You can’t make this stuff up.

https://blog.independent.org/2019/08/22/airports-ban-on-plastic-water-bottles-a-flight-of-fancy/

Politicians in California like to show how much they care about making the world a better place by banning things. Making the world a better place isn’t something they seem to care much about, however, because if they did, they would be doing very different things.

As Exhibit A, please consider San Francisco’s new ban on sales of bottled water at the city’s international airport, which just took effect on August 20, 2019. The Wall Street Journal‘s Andy Kessler considers a scenario that may become all too common thanks to the city’s new law aimed at inconveniencing air travelers passing through SFO:

After running late for your flight after a 30-minute security line only to have TSA confiscate your Fiji water bottle, you’ll now have to stop at a crowded water fountain to fill your own metal flask. Or buy an overpriced glass or aluminum bottle at the concession stand, paying another 10 cents for a bag. And your teeth will chatter if you drink through a paper straw. Of course you could risk dehydration instead: Men lose up to a half-gallon of water during a 10-hour flight. Oddly, you can still buy sugary drinks in plastic bottles at SFO; only healthy, calorie-free water is banned in plastic. You can’t make this stuff up.

It’s not that city officials don’t like the idea of people buying overpriced bottled drinks at the city-owned airport. Rather, it’s the idea of people buying water in plastic bottles that upsets them—especially because of what they seem to think happens with all those bottles after air travelers drink the water in them.

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Dustin Gardiner quotes state senator Scott Wiener’s justification for state politicians’ efforts to ban all things plastic in California:

“Plastics are frankly strangling the health of our oceans,” Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said as the Senate debated SB54 last month. “This is a huge problem, and it’s time to move past baby steps to address it.”

A huge problem, indeed. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, over 8 million metric tons of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year. If California’s politicians think they are going to have a meaningful impact in solving that problem with the actions they take, they must also think Californians are major contributors to that problem.

Are they really?

A study by Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research suggests that over 90 percent of all the plastic waste in the ocean flows into it from just 10 rivers. Alex Gray of the World Economic Forum reports:

By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean.

Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.

According to National Geographic, “relatively little plastic waste enters the ocean from North America and Europe because of their more robust waste-management systems.”

Californians may not be as environmentally destructive as state politicians believe.

But perhaps that’s not true in San Francisco, if politicians from that city think their latest ban on sales of water in plastic bottles at the city’s airport will have a noticeable impact on the global problem of plastic waste being dumped in the oceans.

An effective solution to that hypothetical problem wouldn’t be to ban the sale of water in plastic bottles at the airport. It would be to establish and operate an effective waste management system for the city while also banning the city’s employees from dumping empty water bottles into the bay. If they already had done all that, why not focus on making their system work better?

Do you suppose that common sense solution occurred to the politicians? Or do you suppose they cared more about showing how much they care about the environment without really caring enough to do anything to noticeably improve it, regardless of whatever harm and inconvenience they might impose upon the dignity of air travelers passing through the city’s airport?

Be seeing you

This San Francisco Poop Map Proves the City Has a Major ...

SF Poop Map

 

 

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BREAKING – Dr. Tim Ball wins @MichaelEMann lawsuit – Mann has to pay | Watts Up With That?

Posted by M. C. on August 24, 2019

IPCC had diverted almost all climate research funding and scientific investigation to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This meant that there was virtually no advance in the wider understanding of climate and climate change.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/22/breaking-dr-tim-ball-wins-michaelemann-lawsuit-mann-has-to-pay/

Readers surely recall that the easily offended Dr. Michael Mann launched a court case for defamation against climate skeptic Dr. Tim Ball of Canada.

In Feburary 2018 there was a complete dismissal in the lawsuit brought against Dr. Ball by Andrew Weaver of Canada, also for “defamation”.

The Weaver defamation case involved an article Ball wrote saying that the IPCC had diverted almost all climate research funding and scientific investigation to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This meant that there was virtually no advance in the wider understanding of climate and climate change. Ball referenced an interview with Weaver and attempts by a student to arrange a debate. Ball made some comments that were not fully substantiated, so they became the base of the defamation lawsuit.

That case was completely dismissed, you can read more here.

Now in the Mann case, which goes back to 2011, there’s also a complete dismissal. Ball wrote to me less than an hour ago, asking me to announce it here.

He writes:

Hi Anthony

Michael Mann’s case against me was dismissed this morning by the BC Supreme Court and they awarded me [court] costs.

Tim Ball

This is a developing story, I’ll add more as we know more.

Be seeing you

The RoanokeSlant: Man-made Global Warming AGW-Skepticism ...

 

 

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The Irresponsibility of Small Nations – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on August 24, 2019

That Washington intends to put missiles on Russia’s border and pulled out of the INF Treaty for this sole purpose is now obvious.

No one is capable of coming to Romania and Poland’s aid even if anyone was so inclined. NATO is a joke. It wouldn’t last one day in a battle with Russia. Does anyone think the United States is going to commit suicide for Romania and Poland?

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/08/23/the-irresponsibility-of-small-nations/

Paul Craig Roberts

After falsely accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Washington unilaterally repudiated the treaty. Thus did the US military/security complex rid itself of the landmark agreement achieved by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that defused the Cold War.

The INF Treaty was perhaps the most important of all of the arms control agreements achieved by American 20th century presidents and now abandoned in the 21st century by US neoconservative governments. The treaty removed the threat of Russian missiles against Europe and the threat of European-based US missiles to Russia. The importance of the treaty is due to its reduction of the chance of accidental nuclear war. Warning systems have a history of false alarms. The problem of US missiles on Russia’s border is that they leave no time for reflection or contact with Washington when Moscow receives a false alarm. Considering the extreme irresponsibility of US governments since the Clinton regime in elevating tensions with Russia, missiles on Russia’s border leaves Russia’s leadership with little choice but to push the button when an alarm sounds.

That Washington intends to put missiles on Russia’s border and pulled out of the INF Treaty for this sole purpose is now obvious. Only two weeks after Washington pulled out of the treaty, Washington tested a missile whose research and development, not merely deployment, were banned under the treaty. If you think Washington designed and produced a new missile in two weeks you are not intelligent enough to be reading this column. While Washington was accusing Russia, it was Washington who was violating the treaty. Perhaps this additional act of betrayal will teach the Russian leadership that it is stupid and self-destructive to trust Washington about anything. Every country must know by now that agreements with Washington are meaningless.

Surely the Russian government understands that there are only two reasons for Washington to put missiles on Russia’s border: (1) to enable Washington to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike that leaves Russia no response time, or (2) to enable Washington to threaten such a strike, thus coercing Russia to Washington’s will. Clearly, one or the other of these reasons is of sufficient importance to Washington for Washington to risk a false alarm setting off a nuclear war.

Military analysts can talk all they want about “rational players,” but if a demonized and threatened country with hostile missiles on its border receives a warning with near zero response time, counting on it to be a false alarm is no longer rational…

Why do Romania and Poland enable this threat by permitting US missiles to be stationed on their territory?

Little doubt the Romanian and Polish governments have been given bagfulls of money by the US military/security complex, which wants the multi-billion dollar contracts to produce the new missiles. Here we see the extreme irresponsibility of small countries. Without the corrupt and idiotic governments of Romania and Poland, Washington could not resurrect a threat that was buried 31 years ago by Reagan and Gorbachev.

Even the American puppet state of occupied Germany has refused to host the missiles. But two insignificant states of no importance in the world are subjecting the entire world to the risk of nuclear war so that a few Romanian and Polish politicians can pocket a few million dollars.

Missiles on Russia’s borders that provide no response time are a serious problem for Russia. I keep waiting for Moscow to announce publicly that on the first sign of a missile launching from Romania or Poland, the countries will immediately cease to exist. That might wake up the Romanian and Polish populations to the danger that their corrupt governments are bringing to them.

Why aren’t the Romanian and Polish provocations sufficient justification for Russia to pre-emptively occupy both countries? Is it more provocative for Russia to occupy the two countries than it is for the two countries to host US missiles against Russia? Why only consider the former provocative and not the latter?

No one is capable of coming to Romania and Poland’s aid even if anyone was so inclined. NATO is a joke. It wouldn’t last one day in a battle with Russia. Does anyone think the United States is going to commit suicide for Romania and Poland?

Where are the UN resolutions condemning Romania and Poland for resurrecting the specter of nuclear war by hosting the deployment of US missiles on their borders with Russia? Is the entire world so insouciant that the likely consequences of this act of insanity are not comprehended?

It does seem that human intelligence is not up to the requirements of human survival.

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The Real Reasons Why The Media Is Suddenly Admitting To The Recession Threat

Posted by M. C. on August 24, 2019

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/the-real-reasons-why-the-media-is-suddenly-admitting-to-the-recession-threat_08232019

This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market. 

…The first inclination of a portion of the liberty movement will be to assume that mainstream reports of the imminent economic crisis are merely an attempt to tarnish the image of the Trump Administration and that the talk of recession is “overblown”.  This is partially true; Trump is meant to act as a scapegoat, but this is not the big picture.  The fact is, the pattern the media is following today matches almost exactly with the pattern they followed leading up to the credit crash of 2008.  Make no mistake, a financial crash is indeed happening RIGHT NOW, just as it did after media warnings in 2007/2008, and the reasons why the MSM is admitting to it today are calculated.

Before we get to that, we should examine how the media reacted during the lead up to the crash of 2008.

Multiple mainstream outlets ignored all the crash signals in 2005 and 2006 despite ample warnings from alternative economists. In fact, they mostly laughed at the prospect of the biggest bull market in the history of stocks and housing (at that time) actually collapsing. Then abruptly the media and the globalist institutions that dictate how the news is disseminated shifted position and started talking about “recession” and “crash potential”. From the New York Times to The Telegraph to Reuters and others, as well as the IMF, BIS and Federal Reserve officials – Everyone suddenly started agreeing with alternative economists without actually deferring to them or giving them any credit for making the correct financial calls.

In 2007/2008, the discussion revolved around derivatives, a subject just complicated enough to confuse the majority of people and cause them to be disinterested in the root trigger for the economic crisis, which was central bankers creating and deflating bubbles through policy engineering. Instead, the public just wanted to know how the crash was going to be fixed. Yes, some blame went to the banking system, but almost no one at the top was punished (only one banker in the US actually faced fraud charges). Ultimately, the crisis was pinned on a “perfect storm” of coincidences, and the central banks were applauded for their “swift action” in using stimulus and QE to save us all from a depression level event. The bankers were being referred to as “heroes”.

Of course, central bank culpability was later explored, and Alan Greenspan even admitted partial responsibility, saying the Fed knew there was a bubble but was “not aware” of how dangerous it really was. This was a lie. According to Fed minutes from 2004, Greenspan sought to silence any dissent on the housing bubble issue, saying that it would stir up debate on a process that “only the Fed understood”. Meaning, there was indeed discussion on housing and credit warning signs, but Greenspan snuffed it out to prevent the public from hearing about it.

Today we have a very similar dynamic. Use of the “R-word” in the mainstream media and among central banks has been strictly contained for the past several years.  In the October 2012 Fed minutes, Jerome Powell specifically warned of what would happen if the Federal Reserve tightened liquidity and raised interest rates into economic weakness.  He warned that this would have negative effects on the stimulus addicted investment environment that the central bank had fostered.  This discussion was held back from the public until only a year-and-a-half ago.  As soon as Powell became chairman, he implemented those exact actions.

Only in the past year as talk of recession begun to break out, and only in the past couple of weeks have outlets become aggressive in pushing the notion that a financial crash is just around the corner. The reality is that if one removes the illusory support of central bank stimulus, our economy never left the “Great Recession” of 2008.  Signals of renewed sharp declines in economic fundamentals have been visible since before the 2016 elections.  Alarms have been blaring on housing, auto markets, manufacturing, freight and shipping, historic debt levels, the yield curve, etc. since at least winter of last year, just as the Fed raised rates to their neutral rate of inflation and increased asset cuts from the balance sheet to between $30 billion to $50 billion or more per month.

The media should have been reporting on economic crisis dangers for the past 2-3 years.  But, they didn’t give these problems much credence until recently.  So, what changed?

I can only theorize on why the media and the banking elites choose the timing they do to admit to the public what is about to happen. First, it is clear from their efforts to stifle free discussion that they do not want to let the populace know too far ahead of time that a crash is coming. According to the evidence, which I have outlined in-depth in previous articles, central banks and international banks sometimes engineer crash events in order to consolidate wealth and centralize their political power even further. Is it a conspiracy? Yes, it is, and it’s a provable one.

When they do finally release the facts, or allow their puppet media outlets to report on the facts, it seems that they allow for around 6-8 months of warning time before economic shock events occur. In the case of the current crash in fundamentals (and eventually stocks), the time may be shorter. Why? Because this time the banks and the media have a scapegoat in the form of Donald Trump, and by extension, they have a scapegoat in the form of conservatives, populists, and sovereignty activists.

The vast majority of articles flowing through mainstream news feeds on economic recession refer directly to Trump, his supporters and the trade war as the primary villains behind the downturn. The warnings from the Fed, the BIS and the IMF insinuate the same accusation….

Another factor on our timeline beyond Trump’s helpful geopolitical distractions is the possibility of a ‘No-Deal’ Brexit in October. I continue to believe this outcome (or something very similar) has been pushed into inevitability by former Prime Minister Theresa May and EU globalists, and that it will be used as yet another scapegoat for the now accelerating crash in the EU. With Germany on the verge of admitting recession, Deutsche Bank on the edge of insolvency, Italy nearing a political and financial crisis, etc., it is only a matter of months before Europe sees its own “Lehman moment”. The Brexit is, in my view, a marker for a timeline on when the crash will hit its stride…

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The Low Inflation Rate Lie | Greg Hunter's USAWatchdog

 

 

 

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Koch & Soros Unite To CENSOR The Internet

Posted by M. C. on August 24, 2019

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/koch-soros-unite-to-censor-the-internet_08212019

Mac Slavo

Establishment left-wing and establishment conservative billionaires are teaming up to censor the Internet.  It looks like elitists on both sides of the political aisle are trying to make sure you only get the information they want you to have.

Organizations established by left-winger George Soros and neo-conservative Charles Koch have been working together on a key priority of globalist neoliberals and neoconservatives: censorship of the Internet, according to Breitbart News. Censorship is necessary for tyranny so it makes sense that those who need the government to enslave humanity would be working together to achieve the means to an end.

Last year, the Charles Koch Institute pledged its support for the “After Charlottesville Project,” an initiative organized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) aimed at combating “online extremism.”

Sponsors of the initiative include Comcast, NBC Universal, the Kresge Foundation, and the George Soros Charitable Foundation.

Other groups involved in the project include a host of Soros-funded organizations, including “Hope not Hate,” the British equivalent of the far-left SPLC, and the pro-immigration National Immigration Forum.

The former group, Hope not Hate, has a reputation for far-left extremism. Liberal anti-extremism campaigner Maajid Nawaz accused them of “book burning” after it announced a campaign to get allegedly “racist” books banned by major retailers. It was also forced to retract a smear against a Jewish pro-Israel activist last year.-Breitbart News

The Charles Koch Institute, once seen as a conservative nemesis of the left, has now aligned itself with this group of left-wing, pro-censorship, anti-Trump agitators. When it comes to censoring the Internet, both the progressive and “conservative” establishment appear to be converging on a common position.

The Charles Koch Institute now also appears committed to advancing Internet censorship and aligning with totalitarianism and slavery over freedom and libertarian principles. Koch is now for  “content moderation,” as they call it. Sarah Ruger, the Institute’s director of “free expression initiatives” has praised Airbnb for canceling the reservations of far-right activists, and has called for “online hate” to be treated like a “virus.”

As always, there’s an elephant in the room — what counts as “online hate?” Is it questioning the official narrative? Is it condemning authoritarians who harm others? Is it siding with morality even though it contradicts the existence of government?  What exactly is “online hate” and who gets to decide if you’re hateful?

 

Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 728 people
Date: August 21st, 2019
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to http://www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

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