Tag: oppression

A UCLA professor who exposed corruption while also challenging the legitimacy of certain California fuel regulations, has sued the university for firing him.

12:09 am

The McCarthyism of the environmental movement: A UCLA professor who exposed corruption while also challenging the legitimacy of certain California fuel regulations, has sued the university for firing him.

Enstrom charged in 2008 that his colleagues exaggerated the adverse effects of particulate matter in order to justify expensive diesel fuel regulations to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Enstrom testified in the same year to the state Senate that the lead contributor to the CARB report, Hien T. Tran, paid $1,000 for his Ph.D. from a fake university, and members of a CARB panel had exceeded their mandated three-year term limits by decades.

Shortly after Enstrom revealed the misconduct, UCLA began sending him notices of termination and has refused to compensate him for more than a year’s worth of work….

Tran was eventually suspended for 60 days, and one professor who had served on the CARB panel for 26 consecutive years was removed and later put back on the panel. John Froines, who has publicly supported diesel fuel regulations, was on a committee that voted to dismiss Enstrom.

Read the whole thing. It illustrates why attending UCLA for a science education is clearly a waste of time. They don’t want to teach their students science. They want to teach them propaganda.

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“So come and get me if you must, Mr. President. I will not bow to your wicked regulation.”

2:21 pm

We’ve only just begun: “So come and get me if you must, Mr. President. I will not bow to your wicked regulation.”

James Dobson is not to be taken lightly. Under the Obamacare HHS contraceptive mandate, his organization, Focus on the Family, would not qualify for any exemption and would be required to pay for contraceptives and abortion drugs. And if Dobson’s organization defies the federal government here, expect very loud fireworks, as Focus is very large with a very large following.

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The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has asked the Utah state legislature for permission to scan the license plates of all cars driving on Interstate 15.

7:18 pm

What could go wrong? The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has asked the Utah state legislature for permission to scan the license plates of all cars driving on Interstate 15.

Worse, they are already scanning plates in Texas and California, and plan to add Arizona to the list.

I especially like this quote from a Utah legislator in response to the request. “I’ll be quite frank with you. A lot of us in Utah don’t trust the federal government.” Do tell.

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More colleges have announced plans to drop their student healthplans due costs imposed by Obamacare.

10:51 am

Repeal it! More colleges have announced plans to drop their student healthplans due costs imposed by Obamacare.

Lenoir-Rhyne University of Hickory, N.C., the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., and Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa—all private liberal-arts colleges—have told students they are dropping school-sponsored limited-benefit insurance plans starting in the fall. The three colleges said students’ premiums would have gone up roughly tenfold, and they said they could no longer justify making students sign up if they didn’t have their own insurance. [emphasis mine]

And if they don’t drop their healthplan?

The State University of New York at Plattsburgh said its 2011-2012 premium was $440 for a plan that covered up to $10,000 for each injury or sickness. Officials said the premium for the coming year would be $1,300 to $1,600 for a plan that meets the new requirements. The school will continue to require students to carry insurance, either through the school or not.

How’s that hope and change working out for you, students?

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A bank run by an Obama bundler has gotten an Republican-led House committee to exempt that bank from provisions of the Frank-Dodd act, saving the bank $300 million.

5:07 pm

Bipartisan corruption: A bank run by an Obama fund-raiser has gotten an Republican-led House committee to exempt that bank from provisions of the Dodd-Frank act, saving the bank $300 million.

Any law that allows legislators to grant individual waivers isn’t a law at all but a form of extortion: Pay up or you won’t get your exemption. Dodd-Frank, as well as much of all the legislation passed by Congress in the past decade, should be repealed so that everyone gets the exemption.

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An economy built to stall

8:48 pm

“An economy built to stall.”

In his first two years in office, Democrats gave Mr. Obama everything he wanted, save for cap and trade and union card-check, which would have done even more harm to job creation. They passed stimulus, ObamaCare, multiple housing bailouts, Dodd-Frank and more.

Even after Republicans took the House, they gave Mr. Obama the payroll tax holiday he demanded first for 2011 and again for 2012. Far from some new fiscal “austerity,” overall federal spending hasn’t declined. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has delivered monetary stimulus after stimulus—QE I, QE II, Operation Twist, and 42 months of near-zero interest rates with the promise of 30 months more.

Mr. Obama has had the freest run of policy of any President since LBJ. So maybe the problem is the policies.

Maybe Milton Friedman was right that “temporary, targeted” tax cuts don’t change the incentives to invest or hire because people aren’t stupid. Maybe each $1 of new federal spending doesn’t produce a “multiplier” of 1.5 times that in added output. Maybe the historic burst of regulation of the last three years has harmed business confidence and job creation. And maybe the uncertainty that comes from helter-skelter fiscal and monetary policy has dampened the animal spirits needed for a durable expansion.

As I said yesterday, though no president or Congress is entirely to blame for the state of the economy, they both can do great harm if they make decisions that interfere with the freedom of the market. And sadly, having the government interfere with the freedom of the market has been Obama’s mantra since the day he took office.

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Florida has decided to continue to purge its election rolls of illegal and ineligible voters, in defiance of the Obama administration’s demand that it stop.

3:18 pm

Florida has decided to continue to purge its election rolls of illegal and ineligible voters, in defiance of the Obama administration’s demand that it stop.

The state is enforcing the law, as written on the books. Yet Eric Holder’s Justice Department somehow thinks that this is illegal. Maybe someone should teach Holder and his attorneys how to read.

In related news, Holder’s Justice Department is suing a Las Vegas casino because the casino followed the law in verifying that all its employees were legal residents of the United States.

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A government study has found that the more educated in science and math an American is the more likely they will be skeptical of the dangers of global warming.

8:28 am

A government study has found that the more educated in science and math an American is, the more likely they will be skeptical of the dangers of global warming.

The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing: Rather, the researchers and trick-cyclists who carried it out were doing so from the position that the “scientific consensus” (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting US voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO2 emissions.

Having discovered that educating the public will defeat these activists in their goals, the researchers than suggest, like Paul Krugman, that maybe the U.S. government should stop trying to educate people and focus on fake propaganda instead.

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According to one professor, the government should require people to exercise in order to control their weight.

1:37 pm

Modern intellectualism: At a Harvard conference, a scientist has proposed that the government should require people to exercise in order to control their weight.

At a “Harvard Thinks Big” confab earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman offered his own bright idea for tackling the nation’s obesity epidemic. Merely medicating it won’t do, he said, and education is well-meaning but ineffective. His answer? “Coercion. … We should start telling corporations what to do.” But not just corporations. He also advocated – “to hearty applause,” the Harvard Gazette noted – “requiring people to exercise.” [emphasis mine]

I emphasis the applause to illustrate that this tyrannical attitude is not unusual in academic circles. The modern elite community is very arrogant, and believes it has the right to tell everyone else what to do.

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Banned from using heavy equipment by the Forest Service to repair their water supply, Tombstone residents are planning a “Shovel Brigade” in June.

11:30 am

Banned by the Forest Service from using heavy equipment to repair their water supply, Tombstone residents are planning an event in June where thousands will gather to do the work manually with shovels.

According to the Tombstone Shovel Brigade’s website, the group was established for several reasons, including to bring public awareness to the issues facing the city regarding repairs to its historic water system and the “limited cooperation” the city has received from the Forest Service.

“Another goal of the Tombstone Shovel Brigade is to get a lot of work done using hand tools and horses. A few workers can only make so much progress but a couple of thousand people with picks, shovels, ropes and chains can accomplish a lot and will send a loud message to the National Forest Service and the federal government,” states the website.

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The rise of leftist eco-terrorism.

9:58 am

The rise of leftist eco-terrorism.

A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links.

In other words, they can’t persuade with cogent rational arguments, so the answer is violence and terrorism. Nor is this surprising, considering that these violent groups are definitely leftist and therefore believe in a top-down command economy. The idea of letting people decide for themselves what’s best is beyond their ken.

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Another right wing blogger has had the police called to his house because of a fake report of a shooting at his house.

9:52 pm

Leftwing civility? Another right wing blogger has had the police arrive at his house because of a false report of a shooting.

The intention of the false report is to cause a SWAT team to descend on the house, guns blazing. In this case this fortunately did not happen.

We don’t know yet who made the false report, but the MO is identical to the previous events that appeared to have been instigated because the conservative blogger had written about leftwing activist Brett Kimberlin’s criminal past.

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A graveyard of ships in the desert

9:35 am

A graveyard of ships — in the desert.

This environmental disaster in the Soviet Union was caused more by that failed country’s centralized state-run command society than the technological society they were trying to create. Though technology in any kind of society can certainly do harm to the environment, when all decisions are controlled by a single entity — in this case the communist Soviet government — it is practically impossible to adapt and adjust when things start going wrong.

In a free democracy, however, you have many safety valves. No project is ever so big that it effects everything, and if things start to go wrong the chaos of freedom will allow people to choose differently, correcting the problem more quickly.

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So how’s that old Arab Spring going?

5:02 pm

“So how’s that old Arab Spring going?”

Not so good, based on the candidates running for president in Egypt.

Then there is this key paragraph which sums up the West’s entire response to the totalitarian Islamic threat since 9/11:

One of the basic defects of the Bush administration’s designation of a “war on terror” was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions [the internet] are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They’re not.

We aren’t fighting an emotion (“terror”), we are fighting violent Islamic radicals who believe that God has given them the right to kill anyone who disagrees with them.

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