NOAA Caught Rewriting US Temperature History (Again) from Powerlineblog.com

Posted on May 5, 2015 by John Hinderaker in Climate

 

We have written a number of times about how government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here in the U.S., have systematically adjusted temperature history to make the past look colder. They apparently do this, usually surreptitiously and without explanation, in order to stoke global warming hysteria. See, for example, He Who Controls the Present Controls the Past and Inside the Global Warming Scandal.

Now Mike Brakey, an engineering physicist and heat transfer specialist, has caught NOAA revising historic temperature data for Maine–as always, to make the past look cooler and the present warmer by comparison:

Over the last months I have discovered that between 2013 and 2015 some government bureaucrats have rewritten Maine climate history… (and New England’s and of the U.S.). This statement is not based on my opinion, but on facts drawn from NOAA 2013 climate data vs. NOAA 2015 climate data after they re-wrote it.

We need only compare the data. They cooked their own books (see numbers below).

Click to enlarge:

This graph presents the data visually. The black line shows average annual temperatures for Maine from 1895 to the present as they were recorded at the time, and as NOAA published them in 2013. Thermometers have recorded no net warming since 1895. The blue line represents NOAA rewritten history as it appears in 2015. Note how NOAA reduces earlier temperatures more than recent ones to give the graph a plausibly warming trend. The green line shows average annual temperatures for a single location, Lewiston-Auburn, showing a steep decline since 2000. Click to enlarge:

NOAA has made similar adjustments to past temperatures around the United States. Brakey writes:

It appears NOAA panicked and did a massive rewrite of Maine temperature history (they used the same algorithm for U.S. in general). The new official temperatures from Maine between 1895 and present were LOWERED by an accumulated 151.2°F between 1895 and 2012.

In my opinion, this is out-and-out fraud. Why did they corrupt national climate data? Global warming is a $27 billion business on an annual basis in the U.S alone.

Now NOAA data revised in 2015 indicate that 1904, 1919 and 1925 in Maine were much colder than anything we experience today. (See the scorecard above comparing the NOAA data that are 18 months apart). Note how for 1913 the NOAA lowered the annual temperature a whole 4°F!

For the balance of the years, as they get closer to the present, the NOAA tweaks less and less. They have corrupted Maine climate data between 1895 and present by a whopping accumulated 151.2°F.

David Archibald writes:

Their cooling of the past to keep the global warming meme alive reminds me of the old Soviet joke – the future is known, it is the past that keeps changing.

Would someone please try to explain why this isn’t the biggest scandal in the history of science?

Race, Politics and Lies (Creators.com)

Thomas Sowell

 

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.
Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?
When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of "us against them" that was more popular.
That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a "legacy of slavery" in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.
The "legacy of slavery" argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.
Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.
You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.
We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.
Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, DOWN — during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.
Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read "Life at the Bottom," by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.
One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM

Republicans and Race: A Reality Check (The American Spectator)

The Right Prescription

The GOP is, and always has been, the party of African-American progress.

By David Catron – 5.4.15

• SmallerLarger
• Print Article

image: http://cdn.spectator.org/styles/article_page/s3/1024px-The_Hermitage_by_Jim_Bowen.jpg?itok=r-rl4GnT

Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, near Nashville (Jim Bowen/Creative Commons)

4Share 12Tweet 0Share 3Email

Last week, even as Baltimore was burning, our “post-partisan” President used the tragedy as an excuse for a political cheap shot. Suggesting that the riots were caused by a paucity of inner city investment, he averred that his agenda “would make a difference right now,” but that he was being thwarted by parsimonious Republicans in Congress. Obama’s claim, which combined a characteristic lie about his own agenda with the insinuation that the GOP is the party of racism, was despicable. But it does offer an opportunity to compare the record of Obama's party on race to that of the Republicans.

Let’s begin at the beginning: The first Democrat president was Andrew Jackson, who was not merely pro-slavery. He personally owned 150 African-American slaves who worked his thousand-acre cotton plantation. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln. In addition to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he persuaded Congress to pass the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the U.S. Sadly, Lincoln didn’t live to see the amendment become part of the Constitution because he was murdered by a Democrat before it was ratified by the requisite number of states.

After the failure of their attempt to preserve slavery by seceding from the Union, the Democrats who had led the Confederacy embarked on a campaign of domestic terror to oppose African-American aspirations to equality. This is confirmed by leftist historian Eric Foner, who debunks a considerable amount of Democrat revisionism in A Short History of Reconstruction. For example, despite attempts by modern Democrats to associate the Republican Party with the KKK, Foner’s book contains this inconvenient fact: “The Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”

While the KKK shot Republicans and lynched former slaves in the defeated Confederate states, Democrats in Washington, including many from the North, worked diligently to derail any GOP legislation confirming African-Americans as free citizens. Not least among them was Democrat President Andrew Johnson. As Foner recently wrote in the New York Times, Johnson clashed repeatedly with the GOP-controlled Congress: “Over Johnson’s veto, Congress enacted… the Civil Rights Act of 1866, still on the books today. It affirmed the citizenship of everyone born in the United States, regardless of race.”

The GOP won similar battles over the Democrats with the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, which guaranteed African-Americans equal protection under the law and the right to vote. Although it has long since been forgotten, these and other achievements earned Republicans the electoral support of most African-American voters for the next 75 years. Nonetheless, the Democrats maintained control of politics in what they called “the solid south,” where they created a malignant morass of legal obstacles that prevented African-Americans from enjoying the rights of full citizenship for another century.

These legal obstacles were, of course, collectively known as “Jim Crow.” And many prominent Democrats whose reputations have since been whitewashed supported them. Included among these was that icon of progressivism, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was an unabashed racist who reintroduced segregation to the federal civil service when he took office. And, when a group of African-American professionals came to the White House to protest this outrage, Wilson threw them out after pompously declaring: “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

Wilson believed this bilge not merely because of his general predilection toward racism, but also because it bore the imprimatur of the Supreme Court, which had legitimized the “separate but equal” doctrine in its notorious Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. This disgraceful ruling was eventually overturned by a later Supreme Court led by a conservative Republican named Earl Warren. Chief Justice Warren, a former Governor of California who had been appointed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in October of 1953, presided over the Court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

This ruling earned Warren the lasting enmity of most Democrats, and set off a two-decade legal war between diehard segregationists and the U.S. Department of Justice. Among these diehard Democrats was future president Jimmy Carter, whose opposition to school integration is well-documented. Another unrepentant opponent of racial integration was the Arkansas Democrat, J. William Fulbright, a signatory to the infamous Southern Manifesto. Yet, when Fulbright died, he was eulogized as “a man who changed our country and our world for the better” by his best-known protégé, President Bill Clinton.

And no discussion of Democrat opposition to African-American aspirations can omit mention of the marathon Senate filibuster, led by Fulbright and former KKK official Robert Byrd, to prevent passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It lasted for 60 Senate working days and seemed likely to succeed until Republican Everett Dirksen convinced 27 GOP senators to join a bipartisan vote for cloture. The Act banned employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin—and it was pulled across the finish line by Republicans over the objections of the nation’s most powerful Democrats.

At this point in any comparison of the two parties, Democrats usually try to prevent further embarrassing revelations by claiming that such contrasts are unfair because the two parties have somehow reversed their positions, leaving Democrats in possession of the moral high ground on race. According to this tale, all the racist Democrats defected to the GOP during the late 1960s. This is revisionist nonsense. In reality, virtually all of them remained Democrats, including those named above and other racist luminaries such as Russell Long, John Stennis, Herman Talmadge, Richard Russell, and Al Gore, Sr.

After these people failed to halt progress, the Democrats hit on the idea of herding African-Americans onto a new type of plantation called the “Great Society.” On this kinder, gentler plantation, African-Americans are encouraged to become dependent on federal largesse. As “unhyphenated American” Lloyd Marcus writes, “Addicting people to cradle to grave welfare is evil, robbing folks of pursuing their God given gifts and potential.” The liberals who run this plantation, Marcus continues, “hope to get as many folks as possible… hooked on welfare to keep the masses voting Democrat.”

The two-word answer that all Democrats and liberals use to defend their long and tawdry legacy of racism is, predictably, “Barack Obama.” Marcus responds to that as follows: “Democrats have played blacks for over 50 years. Obama is simply their latest front man, brilliantly covered in a black skin disguise.” And Baltimore? “The recent Baltimore riots perfectly illustrate my point. Rioters expressed anger over high black unemployment, poor schools, and poverty.” All of these social ills have become measurably worse since Obama took office, of course, and African-Americans have suffered the most.

Yet the President would have us believe that the evil Republicans are the problem. He claims to have a program to cure the disease that afflicts Baltimore and other major cities but says, “I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities.” But dumping more taxpayer money into demonstrably ineffective welfare programs isn’t going to work. A brief review of GOP and Democrat history on race suggests that the best hope for African-Americans in those cities is to dump the Dems and put Republicans in charge of their local governments.

Read more at http://spectator.org/articles/62592/republicans-and-race-reality-check

16 Signs That The Economy Has Stalled Out And The Next Economic Downturn Is Here (Zerohedge.com)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/01/2015 08:00 -0400

• Bank of New York
• Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Federal Reserve
• Federal Reserve Bank
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• fixed
• Foreclosures
• Gross Domestic Product
• Housing Market
• John Williams
• Reality
• Recession
• recovery
• Student Loans
• Trade Deficit

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If U.S. economic growth falls any lower, we are officially going to be in recession territory. On Wednesday, we learned that U.S. GDP grew at a 0.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2015.  That was much lower than all of the “experts” were projecting.  And of course there are all sorts of questions whether the GDP numbers the government feeds us are legitimate anyway.  According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were used they would show that U.S. GDP growth has been continuously negative since 2005.  But even if we consider the number that the government has given us to be the “real” number, it still shows that the U.S. economy has stalled out.  It is almost as if we have hit a “turning point”, and there are many out there (including myself) that believe that the next major economic downturn is dead ahead.  As you will see in this article, a whole bunch of things are happening right now that we would expect to see if a recession was beginning. The following are 16 signs that the economy has stalled out and the next economic downturn is here…

#1 We just learned that U.S. GDP grew at an anemic 0.2 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2015…

The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.

#2 If you strip a very unusual inventory buildup out of the GDP number, U.S. GDP would have actually fallen at a -2.5 percent annual rate during the first quarter…

The only good news: the massive inventory build, the largest since 2010, boosted GDP by nearly 3.0%. Without this epic stockpiling of non-farm inventory which will have to be liquidated at some point (and at a very low price) Q1 GDP would have been -2.5%.

#3 Our trade deficit with the rest of the planet is absolutely killing our economic growth.  According to the Reality Chek Blog, U.S. economic growth would have been a total of 8 percent higher since the end of the last recession if we actually had balanced trade with other nations…

As of the new first quarter figures, the worsening of the trade deficit has reduced the cumulative real growth of the U.S. economy by 7.99 percent since the current recovery began in the second quarter of 2009.

#4 According to numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in one out of every five American families nobody has a job.  So how in the world can the “unemployment rate” be sitting at “5.5 percent” when everyone is unemployed in 20 percent of all families in the United States?  It doesn’t make any sense.

#5 The rate of homeownership in the United States has just hit a brand new 25 year low.  How can anyone claim that the middle class is “healthy” when the percentage of Americans that own a home is the lowest that it has been in more than two decades?

#6 Back in 2013, 31 percent of all Americans said that they did not anticipate buying a home “for the foreseeable future”.  Just two years later, that number has risen to 41 percent.

#7 The student loan bubble is clearly bursting.  According to Bloomberg, only 37 percent of all student loan borrowers are actually up to date on their payments and reducing their balances…

With borrowers increasingly struggling to repay their student loans, Moody’s Investors Service is warning it may take investors longer than promised to get their money back. The credit grader said this month it may lower rankings on $3 billion of top-rated debt as investors face the threat of slowing principal payments or even receiving no interest.

The concern underscores the fallout from a record $1.2 trillion in U.S. student loans that’s spreading to everything from the housing market and consumer spending to taxpayers. As a sluggish economic recovery forces borrowers to miss payments or tap relief programs, only 37 percent are current and reducing their balances, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York presentation this month.

#8 Procter & Gamble has announced that it will be cutting up to 6,000 more jobs from their payroll.  Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”?

#9 McDonald’s plans to permanently shut down 700 “poorly performing” restaurants over the course of 2015.  Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”?

#10 It is being projected that half of all fracking companies in the United States will be either “dead or sold” by the end of 2015.

#11 Retail sales in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.

#12 Wholesale sales in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.

#13 Factory orders in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.

#14 Credit requests are being declined at a rate that we haven’t seen since the last recession.

#15 U.S. export growth has gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

#16 As the U.S. economy begins to head into another downturn, most Americans are completely unprepared for it.  In fact, one recent survey discovered that 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.

Don’t let this next recession take you by surprise.

Back in 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs or businesses because of the sharp economic downturn.  Because most of them were living paycheck to paycheck, all of a sudden a whole lot of Americans could not make their mortgage payments and foreclosures surged to unprecedented heights.  Millions of families that thought they were operating on a solid foundation saw their middle class lifestyles evaporate in just a matter of a few months.

That is why it is so vital to prepare yourself financially, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually for the great storm that is coming ahead of time.  Over the past couple of years, I have been working on a new book entitled “Get Prepared Now” which talks about how to make these preparations.  On Wednesday, it was finally released to the public.  I hope that you will check it out.

The past few years have been a period of relative stability for the U.S. economy.  A lot of people have been lulled into a false sense of security during that time.  These people have become convinced that our problems have been fixed.  But they haven’t been fixed at all.  In fact, our problems are far, far worse than they were just prior to the last financial crisis.

When the next great financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a spike in the suicide rate just like we did during the last one.  Millions will be blindsided by what is coming and will give in to depression and despair.  But that doesn’t have to happen to you.  It is empowering to know what is coming and to understand why it is coming.  It is empowering to get prepared in advance for turbulent times.  It is empowering to have a plan for the years ahead.

Even though I write about all of the horrible things that are coming to this country every day, I live my life with no fear, and that is what I want for all of you as well.

Do you want to know who will be giving in to fear and panic when things start to go really crazy?

It will be the people that had no idea what was coming and made no preparations whatsoever.

Yes, the times ahead are going to be extremely challenging, but they can also be the best times of your life.

It is all going to come down to how you respond to a world that is going completely insane.

The choice is up to you.

The Last Time Initial Jobless Claims Were This Low Was The Peak Of The Dot-Com Bubble (Zerohedge.com)

 

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/30/2015 08:43 -0400

• Initial Jobless Claims

inShare0

Initial jobless claims have been worse than expected for the last 2 weeks but remained below the magical 300k level, so it was only appropriate that this week all the great economic news of late - record plunge in US macro disappointments and a dismal 0.2% GDP print - would be met with the lowest claims print in 15 years. At 262k (against a 290k expectation), initial claims has only been lower once - the week of April 14th 2000 - which just happened to mark the top of the Dot-Com bubble. While this is great news, we do note that a rolling average of Texas Jobless claims shows the improving trend has stalled.

Outlier or new trend?

But a rolling average of Texas Jobless claims shows the improving trend has stalled...

Perhaps most worrying is this... the last time we were this low - only once in history, marked the week of the top of the DotCom bubble in 2000....

Charts: Bloomberg

Is This A Blow-Off Top? Four Ways To Tell (Zerohedge)

 

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/27/2015 23:35 -0400

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Those who lived through the last two speculative blow-off tops know the impossibility of predicting the final top.

How can we tell if stocks are in the final blow-off stage of a bubble? There are four basic give-aways:

1. Parabolic rises in stocks and speculative debt.

2. The mainstream financial media claims the clearly visible bubbles are justified by fundamentals.

3. Conventional financial authorities insist this is not a blow-off top.

4. The expressions of regret of those who sat out the latest rally become ubiquitous.

In the past few days, I have read two laughably baseless justifications of the bubble in Chinese stocks by conventional financial analysts:

A) China is a "black box," i.e. unfathomable, so go with what we know, which is that China is a nation of entrepreneurs: this is the green light to buy the bubble here if you want to reap easy profits.

B) The stock market bubble in China is positive evidence of a healthy re-adjustment of China's financial system.

That neither thesis has the slightest foundation in reality doesn't matter, as the real agenda of the analysts is to justify their own attempts to join the crowd reaping vast profits in the bubble.

This denial that a speculative blow-off is clearly occurring is a key indicator that a blow-off top is in its final stages.

Consider the Shanghai stock index (SSEC). Is it truly normal for the stock markets of nations with economies approaching stall-speed to double in less than a year?

Amazon is a large, well-run corporation, but its core businesses are low-margin (as for the cloud business--everybody and their brother is ramping up their cloud biz). Is it truly normal for a low-margin company's stock to rise 50+% in four months?

Margin debt reflects the "animal spirits" of speculation and confidence. When borrowed money is used to buy more stocks, it makes the resulting rise vulnerable to a decline that forces recent buyers to liquidate their positions to cover their margin calls.

Margin debt has reached new highs; what happened when margin debt hit these levels in prior cycles?

The soaring confidence in future advances that define blow-off tops is visible in declining measures of volatility such as the VIX and VXX. (Recall that volatility and stocks are on a see-saw; should the VXX reverse and move higher, stocks would plummet.)

One last method to identify blow-off tops is to look for repeating patterns that marked previous blow-off tops.

Those who lived through the last two speculative blow-off tops know the impossibility of predicting the final top. Those who bet the top is in (i.e. make short bets that will gain if the market reverses and drops) are often forced to cover when the market advances further, and this panic buying pushes the market even higher.

Only when the ranks of bears willing to bet against the market thin will the short-covering boost dissipate. At that point of bearish exhaustion, the market will roll over when the greater fools (last buyers of the blow-off top) run out of margin buying power.

Average:

4.545455

Your rating: None Average: 4.5 (33 votes)

The Four Chartsmen Of The Recession (Zerohedge)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/15/2015 22:40 -0400

• Lehman
• Recession

While broadly-speaking, both 'hard' and 'soft' macro data has disappointed, the scale of those 'missed expectations' is stunning - worst since Lehman. While this is blamed on weather, the fact is that America had 30% less snow this year than last and still, as the following four chartsmen of the recession-pocalypse show, the YoY drops are on a scale not seen outside of a recession...

US Macro Data has surprised to the downside on a scale not seen since Lehman...

So here are the four charts that can only be ignored by the likes of Liesman, Kudlow, and Cramer...

Sales are weak - extremely weak. Retail Sales have not dropped this much YoY outside of a recession...

And if Retail Sales are weak, then Wholesalers are seeing sales plunge at a pace not seen outside of recession...

Which means Factory Orders are collapsing at a pace only seen in recession...

And finally - coming full circle - it appears everyone is scrambling for credit to afford to maintain even a semblance of living standards (and lift retail sales) but "rejections" of credit requests have never - ever - been higher...

So the credit available to goose retail sales, which will goose wholesale sales which will drive factory orders... is no longer available to every muppet with a 500 FICO (old or new version) Score!!

*  *  *

But apart from that, given that US equities are at record highs, everything must be great in the US economy.

Bonus Chart: Just in case you figured that if domestic credit won't goose the economy, what about the rest of the world... nope!! Export growth is now negative... as seen in the last 2 recessions.

Average:

4.875

Your rating: None Average: 4.9 (8 votes)

Liberals May Regret Their New Rules

Townhall.com ^ | April 5, 2015 | Kurt Schlichter

Posted on ‎4‎/‎5‎/‎2015‎ ‎8‎:‎33‎:‎41‎ ‎AM by Kaslin

That photo is me about ten years ago, standing in the ruins of a land where people rejected the rule of law in favor of the rule of force. I think a lot about my year-long deployment to Kosovo these days. I think a lot about people today who, for short term political points, cavalierly disregard the rules, laws and norms that made America what it is. I think a lot about how liberals, especially those who boo God, should pray to Him that those rules, laws and norms are restored.

I am most certainly not smiling – I am squinting in the winter sun, having doffed my ever-present Ray-Bans. Behind me is – well, was – a village along the Ibar River in northern Kosovo. In the 1990s, it was full of Serbs and gypsies (The new, politically correct term is “Roma”). Back then, after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Kosovo was a province of Serbia. Without rehashing the centuries of ancient animosities and grievances, the Orthodox Serbs found themselves unrestrained by the political consensus that Josip Tito had enforced and began an escalating series of petty and not-so-petty oppressions against the Kosovar Albanians. The “K-Albs” are about 10% Christian but mostly moderate Muslims (we called them “party Muslims,” and our troops used to love to go on patrol through K-Alb towns during the spring when the gorgeous Albanian women were in full effect). They were a minority in Serbia as a whole, but a majority in the province of Kosovo.

Now, there’s no understanding Balkan hatreds – don’t even try. But basically, the tensions really kicked in after Slobodan Milosevic came to the battlefield at Kosovo Polje in 1989 on the 500^th anniversary of the Muslim Ottoman Turks annihilating the cream of Serbian nobility. Thereafter, the campaign of exclusion and harassment against the K-Albs by Serbs ratcheted up. Where they had lived together in peace before, now the Serbs – unrestrained by laws, rules or norms – became increasingly despotic.

Eventually, the Serbs tried to drive out the despised minority K-Albs. NATO intervened and saved the Albanians, who promptly came back and drove the Serbs out. The Roma, perceived as allies of the Serbs, fled too. That village behind me wasn’t blown up by explosives. That damage was done by people, with picks and shovels and bare hands.

Which brings us to America in 2015. It’s becoming a nation where an elite that is certain of its power and its moral rightness is waging a cultural war on a despised minority. Except it’s not actually a minority – it only seems that way because it is marginalized by the coastal elitist liberals who run the mainstream media.

Today in America, we have a liberal president refuses to recognize the majority sent to Congress as a reaction to his progressive failures, and who uses extra-Constitutional means like executive orders to stifle the voice of his opponents. We have a liberal establishment on a secular jihad against people who dare place their conscience ahead of progressive dogma. And we have two different sets of laws, one for the little people and one for liberals like Lois Lerner, Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton, who can blatantly commit federal crimes and walk away scot free and smirking.

Today in America, a despised minority that is really no minority is the target of an establishment that considers this minority unworthy of respect, unworthy of rights, and unworthy of having a say in the direction of this country. It’s an establishment that has one law for itself, and another for its enemies. It’s an establishment that inflicts an ever-increasing series of petty humiliations on its opponents and considers this all hilarious.

That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot expect to change the status quo for yourself and then expect those you victimize not to play by the new rules you have created. You cannot expect to be able to discard the rule of law in favor of the rule of force and have those you target not respond in kind.

Liberals ask how a baker can believe that making a cake for a same sex wedding violates his conscience, but they don’t think about how the standard they are setting is that the government now gets to determine the validity of individual beliefs. Do they want us passing judgment on them?

Liberals imagine that their president can simply take whatever actions he pleases – including ones he previously admitted were unconstitutional – and that the next Republican president won’t do the same. Except then it will be to negate their cherished policies.

Liberals praise Harry Reid for lying about Mitt Romney and for ensuring the GOP’s voice can’t be heard on Capitol Hill, but they don’t think about what happens to them when they are out of power in an environment where slander is the norm and where minorities have no say. Conservatives have principles, but human nature is a powerful thing, and human nature favors payback.

The revolt has begun, peacefully. In 2010, and again in 2014, the Silent Majority returned and sent an unmistakable message to the liberal elite. When Bill Clinton got that message in 1994, he recognized that opposition and worked with it. But under Obama, the liberal elite acts to ignore and delegitimize the opposition. 2014 was not a tantrum; it was a warning, and the liberals are betting that they can bluff and bluster their way through it.

When you block all normal means of dissent, whether by ignoring the political will of you opponents or using the media to mock and abuse them, you build up the pressure. In 30+ years as an active conservative, I’ve never heard people so angry, so frustrated, so fed up. These emotions are supposed to be dissipated by normal political processes. But liberals are bottling them up. And they will blow. It’s only a matter of how.

Liberals need to understand the reality that rarely penetrates their bubble. Non-liberal Americans (it’s more than just conservatives who are under the liberal establishment’s heel) are the majority of this country. They hold power in many states and regions in unprecedented majorities. And these attacks focus on what they hold dearest – their religion, their families and their freedom.

What is the end game, liberals? Do you expect these people you despise to just take it? Do you think they’ll just shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, I guess we better comply?” Do you even know any real Americans? Do you think you’ll somehow be able to force them into obedience – for what is government power but force – after someone finally says “Enough?”

In my book Conservative Insurgency, I offer a scenario set in the late 2010s where the Texas governor refuses to allow Hillary Clinton to enforce an unconstitutional handgun ban within his state. It devolves into a brief, bloody spasm of violence, after which a sobered country walks back from the precipice and returns to resolving conflicts through the Constitution (albeit, with some lingering damage to our political and social norms). But there is no guarantee that things might not spin out of control the other way. And then liberals would be well advised to ask themselves who will be willing to fight and die to preserve their power and policies. In contrast, there are an awful lot of people willing to fight and die for their religion and our Constitution.

And let’s be blunt – these are the people with most of the guns and the training to use them. That’s the reality of the rule of force. I’ve seen it – it’s there behind me in that photo.

Now, this will no doubt draw the lie that I am somehow advocating violence. The current liberal habit of shamelessly lying about their opponents makes civil debate impossible. Similarly, the mockery of non-liberals before stacked audiences of trained seals a la Jon Stewart is part and parcel of the same strategy of delegitimizing any opposition. Closing down the option of discussion leaves their opponents with only the option of action. So far, the action has only been in funding campaigns for oppressed pizzerias and in the voting booth – though they’ve trying to nullify that too.

I’m not advocating violence – I am warning liberals that they are setting the conditions for violence.

And that better worry them, for the coastal elites are uniquely unsuited to a world where force rules instead of law. The Serbs were, at least, a warrior people. The soft boys and girls who brought us helicopter parenting, “trigger warnings” and coffee cups with diversity slogans are not.

I know the endgame of discarding the rule of law for short-term advantage because I stood in its ruins. Liberals think this free society just sort of happened, that they can poke and tear at its fabric and things will just go on as before. But they won’t. So at the end of the day, if you want a society governed by the rule of force, you better pray that you’re on the side with the guns and those who know how to use them.

Singapore Has Found A Workable Alternative to the Welfare State

Townhall.com ^ | April 4, 2015 | John C. Goodman

Posted on ‎4‎/‎4‎/‎2015‎ ‎9‎:‎29‎:‎22‎ ‎AM by Kaslin

Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, died last week at age 91. Almost every obituary has remarked on the radical transition his leadership heralded. As John Fund wrote at National Review:

“By embracing free trade, capital formation, vigorous meritocratic education, low taxes, and a reliable judicial system, Lee raised the per capita income of his country from $500 a year to some $52,000 a year today. That’s 50 percent higher than that of Britain, the colonial power that ruled Singapore for 150 years. Its average annual growth rate has averaged 7 percent since the 1970s.”

Part of the reason for Singapore’s remarkable climb up the international income ladder is bread and butter capitalism. The Frasier institute’s Freedom of the World report lists Singapore as the second freest economy in the world -- right behind Hong Kong. As Frasier scholars have demonstrated year after year, economic growth and free markets go hand and hand.

But Singapore has done something even more remarkable than its economic accomplishments. It has built an alternative to the European style welfare state. Think of all the reasons why people turn to government in other developed countries: retirement income, housing, education, medical care etc. In Singapore people are required to save to take care of these needs themselves.

At times the forced saving rate has been as high as 50 percent of income. Today, employees under 50 years of age must set aside 20 percent of their wages and employers must contribute another 16 percent. These funds go into accounts where they grow through time until specific needs arise. For example, one of the uses for these savings is housing. About 90 percent of Singapore households are home owners – the highest rate of home ownership in the world.

In health care, Singapore started an extensive system of “Medisave Accounts” in 1984 – the very year that Richard Rahn and I proposed “Medical IRAs” for America in the Wall Street Journal. Today, 7 percentage points of Singapore’s 36 percent required savings rate is for health care and is deposited in a separate Medisave account for each employee. Individuals are also automatically enrolled in catastrophic health insurance, although they can opt out. When a Medisave account balance reaches about $34,100 (an amount equal to a little less than half of the median family income) any excess funds are rolled over into another account and may be used for non-health care purposes.

For many years, the only two scholars in the Western world who paid much attention to Singapore were Washington University economist Michael Sherraden and me. Michael approached the Singapore experience from a left-of-center perspective and I came from the opposite direction. We both ended in the same place: this is an alternative to the welfare state that works.

Lately, quite a number of other scholars have discovered Singapore, especially its health care system – again, with both right and left finding a lot to admire. It’s taken almost three decades, but Singapore is now the subject of a book by Brookings Institution, a whole slew of posts by Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll, and a good overview by Tyler Cowen, with links to other studies and comments.

Sherraden recently summarized some of Singapore’s major social policy innovations as follows:

“Step by step, the Singapore state created a new social policy system that had asset building as its central structure…. In the world of social policy, it would be hard to overstate the exceptionality and the extent of this innovation…. During the past 25 years, Singapore policy has taken important steps toward lifelong asset building, beginning very early in life. These innovations include EduSave, the Baby Bonus, Child Development Accounts, and related asset-building incentives.”

For John Fund, Singapore’s most significant accomplishment is the avoidance of the mistakes of other countries:

“I believe that the least appreciated part of Lee Kwan Yew’s legacy is his method of ensuring that one generation won’t bankrupt future generations by selfishly living beyond its means. It’s a welfare state that works, and one he always said was available to any political leader with the courage to tell his people the truth about the limits of government’s power to pass out goodies.”

For my part, I would summarize the philosophy of Singapore as follows:

• Each generation should pay its own way.
• Each family should pay its own way.
• Each individual should pay his own way.
• Only after passing through these three filters should anyone turn to the government for help.

If the United States had adopted a similar approach to public policy, there would be no deficit problem in this country.

Let's hear it for a Quebec mayor...

 

Or as the commercial promoting pork says
“put some pork on your fork”

WAY TO GO QUEBEC .......

MAYOR REFUSES TO REMOVE PORK FROM SCHOOL CANTEEN MENU... EXPLAINS WHY

Muslim parents demanded the abolition of pork in all the school canteens of a Montreal suburb.

The mayor of the Montreal suburb of Dorval ,has refused, and the town clerk sent a note to all parents to explain why...

“Muslims must understand that they have to adapt to Canada and Quebec , its customs, its traditions, its way of life, because that's where they chose to immigrate.

“They must understand that they have to integrate and learn to live in Quebec .

“They must understand that it is for them to change their lifestyle, not the Canadians who so generously welcomed them.

“They must understand that Canadians are neither racist nor xenophobic, they accepted many immigrants before Muslims (whereas the reverse is not true, in that Muslim states do not accept non-Muslim immigrants).

“That no more than other nations, Canadians are not willing to give up their identity, their culture.

“And if Canada is a land of welcome, it's not the Mayor of Dorval who welcomes foreigners, but the Canadian-Quebecois people as a whole.

“Finally, they must understand that in Canada ( Quebec ) with its Judeo-Christian roots, Christmas trees, churches and religious festivals, religion must remain in the private domain.

The municipality of Dorval was right to refuse any concessions to Islam and Sharia.

“For Muslims who disagree with secularism and do not feel comfortable in Canada , there are 57 beautiful Muslim countries in the world, most of them under-populated and ready to receive them with open halal arms in accordance with Shariah.

“If you left your country for Canada , and not for other Muslim countries, it is because you have considered that life is better in Canada than elsewhere.

“Ask yourself the question, just once, “Why is it better here in Canada than where you come from?”

“A canteen with pork is part of the answer.”

If you feel the same forward it on, if not, hit the delete key!