Regulating the Future

(Hat tip: KimR) - Government pretends it's the cause of progress. Then it strangles innovation. We know government understands that new technologies are important. The military invests in robots and traffic cops use radar guns. But when the rest of us use robots or fly drones, government gets eager to put rules in place before things get "out of control." Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

Letter to Editor PREDICTED COLORADO EPA SPILL One Week Before Catastrophe=> So EPA Could Secure Control of Area

Last Wednesday, a small EPA-supervised work crew inspecting the Gold King mine accidentally knocked a hole in a waste pit, releasing at least three million gallons of acidic liquid laden with toxic heavy metals. (ABC) --This letter to editor was published in The Silverton Standard and The Miner, a local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist, one week before the EPA mine spill. The letter detailed verbatim, how EPA officials would foul up the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money.

Read more at Gateway Pundit
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

They Live, We Sleep: A Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

...A 2014 study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled. Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

Read more at the Rutherford Institute
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Wealthy donors on left launch new plan to wrest back control in the states

A cadre of wealthy liberal donors aims to pour tens of millions of dollars into rebuilding the left’s political might in the states, racing to catch up with a decades-old conservative effort that has reshaped statehouses across the country. The plan embraced by the Democracy Alliance, an organization that advises some of the Democrats’ top contributors, puts an urgent new focus on financing groups that can help the party regain influence in time for the next congressional redistricting process, after the 2020 elections. The blueprint approved by the alliance board calls on donors to help expand state-level organizing and lobbying for measures addressing climate change, voting rights and economic inequality.


Read more at the Washington Post
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Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ): Culture of Control is Unfair & Un-American

MAR. 4, 2014 - Despite not knowing your situation or your specific needs, perfect strangers now decide what is best for you. ✧ Whether it's the food you want to eat, the home loan you want to get, the toys your kids want to play with, the cars you want to drive or how much water your toilets can flush, America's everyday choices have always been plentiful. A primary reason for this abundance is the tradition of negligible government intrusion in your lives. ✧ Unfortunately, this tradition has been eroded over the years, and your choices and your freedom to make even the smallest decision are suffering because of it. ✧ Faceless bureaucrats — strangers who have decided they know better than you — set out a handful of options that they like and force you to "choose" from them. In today's America, this is what government bureaucrats pass off as your choice. The façade of choice is present, but — as you and I both know — we accept their dictates or else.

Read more of Rep. Garrett's opinion piece at Garrett.house.gov/opinion Read More......

Human population a plague on the Earth?

Rob Sloan of The American Vision takes on 16th Century Giovanni Botero, 18th Century Dr. Robert Wallace, 19th Century Thomas Robert Malthus, and now Sir David Attenborough, Bill and Melinda Gates, and hoards of environmentalists and NGO utopians claiming that earth cannot support high populations or that people are the scourge of the earth and strict population control is a necessity. Sloan disputes the dire warnings that worldwide famine and poverty is a certainty if human population is not drastically reduced. He writes,

It is quite simply a fallacy to equate large populations with famine and poverty and an even bigger error to propose population control as the means of dealing with the situation. As the economist Murray Rothbard pointed out, “A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development.

Snip

The fact is, Sir David Attenborough, along with Bill & Melinda, have no more idea what the maximum population of the Earth is than I do or Malthus did 200 years ago. Only God knows that. Nor do they know how much more abundance the Earth can bring forth than it presently does. Again only God knows that. What we do know is that where the gospel has prospered and where people have by and large been allowed to innovate and produce, blessing has followed, populations have grown and the people have been fed. And where the state has attempted to fill the role of God, centrally planning, disincentivising work and innovation, poverty and famine inevitably follow.

Read full article at American Vision... Read More......

Re-education at George Mason

By Walter E. Williams - This week begins my 34th year serving on George Mason University's distinguished economics faculty. You might imagine my surprise when I received a letter from its Office of Equity and Diversity Services notifying me that I was required to "complete the in-person Equal Opportunity and Prevention of Sexual Harassment Policies and Procedures training." This is a leftist agenda for indoctrination, thought control and free speech suppression to which I shall refuse to submit. Let's look at it.

Ideas such as equity and equal opportunity, while having high emotional value, are vacuous analytical concepts. For example, I've asked students whether they plan to give every employer an equal opportunity to hire them when they graduate. To a person, they always answer no. If they aren't going to give every employer an equal opportunity to hire them, what's fair about forcing employers to give them an equal opportunity to be hired?

I'm guilty of gross violation of equality of opportunity, racism and possibly sexism. Back in 1960, when interviewing people to establish a marital contract, every woman wasn't given an equal opportunity. I discriminated against not only white, Indian, Asian, Mexican and handicapped women but men of any race. My choices were confined to good-looking black women. You say, "Williams, that kind of discrimination doesn't harm anyone!" Nonsense! When I married Mrs. Williams, other women were harmed by having a reduced opportunity set.

George Mason's Office of Equity and Diversity Services has far more challenging equity and diversity work than worrying about the re-education of Professor Williams. They must know that courts have long held that gross racial disparities are probative of a pattern and practice of discrimination. The most notable gross racial disparity on campus, and hence probative of discrimination, can be found on GMU's fabulous men's basketball team. Blacks are less than 9 percent of student enrollment but are 85 percent of our varsity basketball team and dominate its starting five.

It's not just GMU. Watch any Saturday afternoon college basketball game and ask yourself the question fixated in the minds of equity, diversity and inclusion hunters: Does this look like America? Among the 10 players on the court, at best there might be two white players. In 2010, 61 percent of Division I basketball players were black, and only 31 percent were white.

Allied with the purveyors of equity, diversity and inclusion are the multiculturalists, who call for the celebration of cultures. For them, all cultures are morally equivalent and to deem otherwise is Eurocentrism. That's unbridled nonsense. Ask your multiculturalist: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan Africa and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is practiced in Sudan and Niger; is that a cultural equivalent? In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limits on women - such as prohibitions on driving, employment, voting and education. Under Islamic law, in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves face the punishment of having their hand severed. Are these cultural values morally equivalent, superior or inferior to those of the West?

Western values are superior to all others. Why? The greatest achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights. The Western transition from barbarism to civility didn't happen overnight. It emerged feebly - mainly in England, starting with the Magna Carta of 1215 - and took centuries to get where it is today.

One need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. It's no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person.

Western values are under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. They want to replace personal liberty with government control and replace equality before the law with entitlement. The multiculturalism and diversity agenda is a cancer on our society, and our tax dollars and charitable donations are supporting it.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Read More......

Common Core: Bad for Kids

[Adapted from an article in the Oregon Federation of Republican Women's April-May 2013 edition of Republication]: Holly Swanson, outstanding author, activist and member of the Josephine County Republican Women warns, "The Education for Sustainability movement is drastically altering the curriculum in our schools, changing the role of public education and imposing a political agenda on our innocent children. The aim of this indoctrination program is to train America’s children to be against our form of government, free enterprise system, religious beliefs and much more." Holly urges Republicans to become active in attending school board meetings, writing their government representatives, researching, becoming informed and learning from their children and grandchildren what they are studying.

WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is leading an effort to ask leading Senate appropriators to restore state-level decision making about academic content in public schools in response to the way federal incentives have interfered and put a heavy hand on states to adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Grassley said the Common Core program was initially billed as a voluntary effort, and that current federal law makes clear that the U.S. Department of Education may not be involved in setting specific content standards or determining the content of state assessments. “The reality is that the U.S. Department of Education has made adoption of standards matching those in Common Core a requirement for getting waivers and funds,” Grassley said. “This violates the structure of our education system, where academic content decisions are made at the state level giving parents a direct line of accountability to those making the decisions. The federal government should not be allowed to coerce state education decision makers.”

In a letter to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that funds education, Senators Chuck Grassley, Mike Lee, Tom Coburn, James Inhofe, Deb Fischer, Rand Paul, Pat Roberts, Jeff Sessions, and Ted Cruz urged appropriators to set clear restrictions on the U.S. Department of Education from setting academic content standards either directly or indirectly when they put together legislation to fund the U.S. Department of Education for the next fiscal year.

Get involved. If there was ever an issues for Republicans to get behind, it is re-empowering control of the education system to the states, local school boards and parents.

  Holly Swanson is the author of Training for Treason: The Harmful Agenda Behind Education for Sustainability and Set up & Sold Out: Find Out What Green Really Means. She is at the forefront of the fight to protect America's children from the indoctrination of a dangerous ideology that will steal their freedom and change America forever. Read More......

EPA says WATER is a pollutant; Virginia AG sues

A heated legal battle between Virginia officials and the Environmental Protection Agency over what EPA critics describe as a land takeover gets its day in federal court Friday. ✧ The EPA, citing an abundance of stormwater runoff, has proposed a plan that Virginia officials say would cost them nearly half a billion dollars -- and could cost homeowners and businesses their private property.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican, says what the EPA has proposed is "illegal," and he's not alone in the fight. He's been joined in a lawsuit against the federal agency by the Democratic-controlled Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. ✧ Cuccinelli argues that what the EPA has planned would require state and county officials to "take people's houses, evict them, knock the houses down and plant grass." Read more at Fox News...

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Sowell: Socialist or Fascist

TOWNHALL.COM, 6/12/2012 by Thomas Sowell - "It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism. ✧ What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector." Read more at TownHall.com... Read More......

Surrendering Internet to Foreign Powers

NEWSMAX, 1/31/2010 by Bradley A. Blakeman - Without the ingenuity of America’s brightest minds and the investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars, there would be no Internet, as we now know it today. ∴ Now, the Obama administration has moved quietly to cede control of the Web from the United States to foreign powers. Read more at Newsmax... Read More......

Waiting for the water to boil

If you're going to fight to preserve America's free enterprise system, Fight Fiercely! -- Tea Party Warrior

TEAPARTYWARRIOR.COM (via email), 7/5/2009 by John Eidson - For the last four decades, most Americans have been like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of water that is slowly rising in temperature -- by the time the water finally boils, it’s too late to get out alive. While most of the nation has been politically asleep, Trojan horse socialists have been busy at work chipping away at one cherished freedom after another as part of their unstated agenda to dismantle the American free enterprise system in favor of an economy controlled by government. In the last election, these social utopians hit the Mother lode, and have boldly emerged from hiding.

The “change” we’re witnessing has been tried many times before
The federal government is seizing control of private sector industries. Compensation ceilings are being mandated, the first step toward a tightly regulated labor force where government decides how much workers are allowed to make. And, in the name of “fairness,” massive wealth redistribution is well underway. These changes have all been tried many times before. Where? In places like the Soviet Union, East Germany, Communist China, and Cuba. In every case, the utopian promises of a charismatic leader who rose to power during a time of national crisis failed to materialize, and individual freedoms were taken away at the point of a gun as frog-in-the=water societies belatedly awakened to the harsh realities of being ruled by an authoritarian government.

TIME IS SHORT
As you sin in your comfortable home in a pot of warming water, time is running out to stop the radical changes that threaten your way of life. If you oppose the intentional destruction of the American free enterprise system, you are not alone. Find out how you can become a political activist in the Tea Party Movement by clicking HERE

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Signs of Intelligence?

National Review Online, April 20. 2007 - Fred Thompson wrote,

One of the things that's got to be going through a lot of peoples' minds now is how one man with two handguns, that he had to reload time and time again, could go from classroom to classroom on the Virginia Tech campus without being stopped. Much of the answer can be found in policies put in place by the university itself.

Virginia, like 39 other states, allows citizens with training and legal permits to carry concealed weapons. That means that Virginians regularly sit in movie theaters and eat in restaurants among armed citizens. They walk, joke, and rub shoulders everyday with people who responsibly carry firearms — and are far safer than they would be in San Francisco, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C., where such permits are difficult or impossible to obtain.

The statistics are clear. Communities that recognize and grant Second Amendment rights to responsible adults have a significantly lower incidence of violent crime than those that do not. More to the point, incarcerated criminals tell criminologists that they consider local gun laws when they decide what sort of crime they will commit, and where they will do so.

Still, there are a lot of people who are just offended by the notion that people can carry guns around. They view everybody, or at least many of us, as potential murderers prevented only by the lack of a convenient weapon. Virginia Tech administrators overrode Virginia state law and threatened to expel or fire anybody who brings a weapon onto campus.

In recent years, however, armed Americans — not on-duty police officers — have successfully prevented a number of attempted mass murders. Evidence from Israel, where many teachers have weapons and have stopped serious terror attacks, has been documented. Supporting, though contrary, evidence from Great Britain, where strict gun controls have led to violent crime rates far higher than ours, is also common knowledge.

So Virginians asked their legislators to change the university's "concealed carry" policy to exempt people 21 years of age or older who have passed background checks and taken training classes. The university, however, lobbied against that bill, and a top administrator subsequently praised the legislature for blocking the measure.

The logic behind this attitude baffles me, but I suspect it has to do with a basic difference in worldviews. Some people think that power should exist only at the top, and everybody else should rely on "the authorities" for protection.

Despite such attitudes, average Americans have always made up the front line against crime. Through programs like Neighborhood Watch and Amber Alert, we are stopping and catching criminals daily. Normal people tackled "shoe bomber" Richard Reid as he was trying to blow up an airliner. It was a truck driver who found the D.C. snipers. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that civilians use firearms to prevent at least a half million crimes annually.

When people capable of performing acts of heroism are discouraged or denied the opportunity, our society is all the poorer. And from the selfless examples of the passengers on Flight 93 on 9/11 to Virginia Tech professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who sacrificed himself to save his students earlier this week, we know what extraordinary acts of heroism ordinary citizens are capable of.

Many other universities have been swayed by an anti-gun, anti-self defense ideology. I respect their right to hold those views, but I challenge their decision to deny Americans the right to protect themselves on their campuses — and then proudly advertise that fact to any and all.

Whenever I've seen one of those "Gun-free Zone" signs, especially outside of a school filled with our youngest and most vulnerable citizens, I've always wondered exactly who these signs are directed at. Obviously, they don't mean much to the sort of man who murdered 32 people just a few days ago.

Fred Thompson is an actor and former United States senator from Tennessee. © ABC
See also: Hollywood vs. Iran by Fred Thompson

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