Category Archives: Other Views

Cops Around the Country Quietly Begin Rebelling Against the Drug War, by Carey Wedler

It is a close race for which US government “war” has been the biggest failure: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, or the war on terrorism. The one constant is that continuous failure never seems to prompt any kind of new approach. However, Police Chief Leonard Campanello of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is trying something different, and its working! From Carey Wedler at theantimedia.org:

It is a rare occurrence when police officers in America organize to undermine the very Drug War they vociferously fight for politicians. Police Chief Leonard Campanello of the Gloucester, Massachusetts Police Department, however, did just that earlier this year when he decided to treat — not arrest — heroin addicts who came to his department seeking help. His revolutionary “ANGEL” program has proven successful for addicts and their families in Gloucester, but it has also inspired other departments across the country to adopt similar programs amid growing officer fatigue over the ineffectual arrest and incarceration of addicts.

In May, Campanello announced via Facebook that his department would adopt the new policy of treatment over arrest (note: it does not apply to individuals caught in possession of drugs who do not turn themselves in). The move was met with widespread praise and the new policy was officially enacted in June. Treatment centers and pharmacies have partnered with the police department to ensure addicts receive the care they need.

As the police department’s website explains:

“If an addict comes into the Gloucester Police Department and asks for help, an officer will take them to the Addison Gilbert Hospital, where they will be paired with a volunteer ‘ANGEL’ who will help guide them through the process. We have partnered with more than a dozen additional treatment centers to ensure that our patients receive the care and treatment they deserve — not in days or weeks, but immediately.
“If you have drugs or drug paraphernalia on you, we will dispose of it for you. You will not be arrested. You will not be charged with a crime. You will not be jailed.
“All you have to do is come to the police station and ask for help. We are here to do just that.”

Five months since the program launched, Campanello reports positive results: over 260 addicts have been placed in treatment. This summer, shoplifting, breaking and entering, and larceny dropped 23% from the same period last year. “We are seeing real people get the lives back,” he said. “And if we see a reduction in crime and cost savings that is a great bonus.”

To continue reading: Cops Rebelling Against the Drug War

Biggest U.S. Iron Ore Producer Says Rio, BHP in ‘Imaginary World’ by Jasmine Ng

The situation in iron ore looks just like the situation in oil and a lot of other commodities: continued production in the face of massive gluts and declining prices. From Jasmine Ng at bloomberg.com:

Biggest Australia miners won’t change behavior, Goncalves says

`Prices below $50 are not comfortable to anyone,’ CEO says

The biggest iron ore producer in the U.S. says its larger rivals in Australia are hurting themselves as well as their competitors as they ramp-up production in an oversupplied market.

With iron ore slumping to less than $50 a metric ton, revenues at the biggest miners are shrinking faster than costs, according to the head of Cliffs Natural Resources Inc., who said the majors’ expectations that rivals will quit the market aren’t being fully realized.

“Prices below $50 are not comfortable to anyone, including the majors,” Chief Executive Officer Lourenco Goncalves said in a phone interview from the company’s headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday. “The cost-cutting is not even close to offset their loss in revenues. My entire point: the loss in revenue, totally avoidable. Self-imposed. Self-inflicted.”

BHP Billiton Ltd. spokeswoman Emily Perry said on Wednesday the company wouldn’t respond to Goncalves’s remarks, while Rio Tinto Group sent comments from Brendan Pearson, head of the Minerals Council of Australia, which represents miners. There is open competition in the iron ore market and the Cliffs’ CEO shouldn’t be taken seriously, Pearson said.

Raising Output

Iron ore sank below $50 last week on expanded low-cost production from Rio, BHP Billiton and Brazil’s Vale SA, coupled with signs demand in China is contracting. The biggest producers are raising output as prices sag, betting that they can pare costs per ton and boost market share while less efficient miners face closure. Iron ore will decline gradually for years to come, Alan Chirgwin, BHP’s vice president of marketing for iron ore, has forecast.

Goncalves took the helm at Cliffs in 2014 after an activist-investor revolt, promising to end the company’s vulnerability to the oversupplied seaborne market. Shares in Cliffs have fallen 73 percent in the past 12 months as iron and steel prices have tumbled. Last year, Cliffs produced about 34 million metric tons of iron ore from mines in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific. Rio produced 295.4 million tons in 2014, filings show.

“In their imaginary world, 60 million tons of capacity will go offline this year, then another 125 million tons of capacity will go out of commission next year,” Goncalves said. “That’s not the case. Everyone is driving down costs, everyone is trying to continue to cope. You’re not seeing any meaningful number of tons going offline.”

To continue reading: Biggest U.S. Iron Ore Producer Says Rio, BHP in ‘Imaginary World’

Transgenderism and Stocks: more related than you think, by DC Sunsets

Here’s an interesting take on the stock market. From DC Sunsets at theburningplatform.com:

People often refer to Charles Mackay’s 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” in the context of financial manias, but the book actually addresses several social manias as well.

This should remind us to look for manias in our social experience, and I argue that the collectivist assault on social norms best typified by “transgenderism” is cut from the exact same cloth as is the notion of assigning a profitless corporation a value of hundreds of millions, if not many billions of dollars.

Some years ago my favorite financial guru, Robert Prechter, penned a newsletter highlighting the market’s embrace of a Jungian archetype: flight.

His discussion noted that the subconscious embrace of this archetype involved a feeling that all Earthly limits were cast aside, and the person experiencing this felt as though they could simply spread their arms and rise into the sky, free of the encumbrance of gravity. His position was that the financial mania was an expression of this feeling of freedom.

I hold that the roots of this shared illusion were planted over 50 years ago, when American citizens experienced the removal of the last physical anchor of the dollar to anything real when silver was removed from coinage in 1964. Seven years later the Nixon administration ceased exchanging gold for dollars with foreign nations and the dollar became a fully free-floating abstraction. Under this new system there was no longer a fixed physical relationship between the dollar and any single thing, freeing the human herd to skip from one dollar-relationship to another, disguising the debasement of dollar-based wealth particularly in terms of dollar-based IOUs (also known as debt securities.)

Freed of all physical laws or relationships, people could see no limit to how much dollar-based wealth could be imagined into existence simply by creating a new “I’ll pay you X number of dollars in Y number of years” bond. Since that time, a virtual (in both senses) ocean of IOU-dollars has been created. Few people ever stop to even try to grasp just how many promises to deliver future dollars have been issued, and even those who do so face difficulties in determining what constitutes such a promise. The current figures vary from something like $60,000,000,000,000 to as high as $1,250,000,000,000,000. Yes, those numbers are simply incomprehensible to every single man and woman. We are cast adrift.

The current fad of transgenderism is absolutely related to this. The rationalists among us see sex as a biologically determined fact. If a human is born with an XY chromosome pair, that person is male, and if born with an XX chromosome pair, that person is female.

This biological law is no longer considered relevant in our modern time. A man who believes he should be a woman can simply state he’s a woman (a magical incantation) and others are now obligated to respect his belief increasingly on pain of legal sanction. Belief about oneself trumps biological fact. Think about that. [Arguments in favor of this sometimes raise the existence of “intersex” persons, i.e., those extremely rare people born with a non-standard sex chromosome combination like XXY or XYY, but in fact these persons are NOT transgendered; they are often reproductively sterile and again, quite rare.]

The basis of favoring respect for transgenderism is a combination of rejecting physical & natural (biological) laws and demanding a level of compassion from society’s members to the point of celebrating the Emperor’s New Clothes (on pain of being stoned by the PC mob.)

To continue reading: Transgenderism and Stocks: more related than you think

Unaffordable Care Act Third Open Enrollment Nothing to Celebrate, by Devon Herrick

This year’s price increases for Obamacare insurance policies make a bitter joke of Obama’s assurances that costs would go down under his fiasco-prone scheme. From Devon Harrick at healthblog.ncpa.org:

The third Obamacare Open Enrollment period began November 1st. As a result, many families are faced with a tough choice: purchase coverage they cannot afford with few tangible benefits, or pay an equally unaffordable penalty and hope they do not become sick. The Internal Revenue Service determined that 7.5 million individuals opted to pay the penalty rather than purchase health coverage in 2014, far more than originally projected. The penalty for going without coverage in 2014 was only $95 or one percent of income, whichever was greater. Yet the tax year data found the average penalty paid was double the minimum. This suggests it wasn’t the poor who were going without coverage; the poorest individuals either qualified for generous subsidies, Medicaid or got an exemption from the penalty. Many of those who paid the penalty were likely individuals who did not qualify for subsidies and could not afford Obamacare coverage due to the costly mandates. To make matters worse, the costs are rising fast.

According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for coverage in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee, for example, will rise by about one-third in 2016. Rates in Arizona, Delaware, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota and West Virginia will increase by 20 percent to 25 percent. Residents in Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina and Utah will see increases of above 10 percent or more.

No one will escape these rising costs. Americans with employee health plans also experience rising premiums when insurers are forced to sell bloated policies in unprofitable markets. Individuals who forego insurance and chose to pay the penalty will face a greater fine. In 2015, the penalty more than doubled from 2014; in 2016, it will increase yet again. Those failing to obtain health coverage in 2016 will face a penalty of $695 or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher.

Americans were led to believe the Affordable Care Act would save the average family about $2,500 per year. That dubious claim was actually just a sound bite with no basis in fact. Unfortunately, in a health reform debate about complicated insurance regulations, a simple assertion that families would save a couple hundred bucks a month resonated more than wonky counterarguments about adverse selection, moral hazard and rising deficits. The Obama Administration would ultimately be proved wrong about cost savings; it recently acknowledged that the “Affordable Care Act” is not affordable for many individuals. An “I told you so” may be in order, but it hardly makes people saddled with high insurance premiums feel any better.

To continue reading: Unaffordable Care Act Nothing to Celebrate

Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General, by Justin Gillis and Clifford Krauss

This is frightening. Exxon Mobil is being investigated for lying to the public about the risks of climate change, when in fact nobody knows exactly what those risks are. This smells like a money grab orders of magnitude greater than tobacco and asbestos for plaintiffs’ attornies, because the oil companies have much deeper pockets. One potential line of attack: hydrocarbon=based companies did not adequately disclose the risk that government bodies might decide their products would cause global warming and curb or prohibit the use of those products. In other words, these companies are supposed to be able to guess beforehand how the political football known as global warming is going to bounce. From Justin Gillis and Clifford Krauss at nytimes.com:

The New York attorney general has begun an investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business.

According to people with knowledge of the investigation, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a subpoena Wednesday evening to Exxon Mobil, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents.

The investigation focuses on whether statements the company made to investors about climate risks as recently as this year were consistent with the company’s own long-running scientific research.

The people said the inquiry would include a period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science, even as its in-house scientists were outlining the potential consequences — and uncertainties — to company executives.

Kenneth P. Cohen, vice president for public affairs at Exxon Mobil, said on Thursday that the company had received the subpoena and was still deciding how to respond.

“We unequivocally reject the allegations that Exxon Mobil has suppressed climate change research,” Mr. Cohen said, adding that the company had funded mainstream climate science since the 1970s, had published dozens of scientific papers on the topic and had disclosed climate risks to investors.

Mr. Schneiderman’s decision to scrutinize the fossil fuel companies may well open a new legal front in the climate change battle.

The people with knowledge of the New York case also said on Thursday that, in a separate inquiry, Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, had been under investigation by the attorney general for two years over whether it properly disclosed financial risks related to climate change. That investigation was not previously reported, and has not resulted in any charges or other legal action against Peabody.

Vic Svec, a Peabody senior vice president, said in a statement, “Peabody continues to work with the New York attorney general’s office regarding our disclosures, which have evolved over the years.”

The Exxon inquiry might expand further to encompass other oil companies, according to the people with knowledge of the case, though no additional subpoenas have been issued to date.

To continue reading: Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies

Dalton Trumbo Had It Coming, by Patrick J. Buchanan

The Orwellian whitewash by Hollywood and liberals of Communist infiltration in the government, the movie industry, and the atomic energy complex during the 1940s and 1950s never ends. Unfortunately for the whitewashers, files uncovered from the Soviet Union during that time conclusively prove the infiltration (see “The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors,” Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel). Many of the accused also were done in by damning documentary and photographic evidence and testimony from confessed fellow travelers. Patrick Buchanan takes on the latest Hollywood whitewash, from a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

“Dalton Trumbo was a socialist, but he loved being rich.”

So says Bryan Cranston, who stars in “Trumbo,” out this week, and plays the screenwriter who went to prison with the Hollywood Ten in the time of Harry Truman.

Actually, Trumbo was not a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Trumbo was a Stalinist, a hard-core Communist when the Communist Party USA was run from Moscow by the Comintern, agents of the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.

Trumbo was not what Lenin called a “useful idiot,” a liberal simpleton. He was the real deal, a Bolshevik who followed every twist and turn in the Moscow party line.

When Hitler signed his infamous pact with Stalin, and Germany and Russia crucified Poland and Hitler overran France, Trumbo justified the Nazi brutality, “To the vanquished all conquerors are inhuman.”

As Churchill led his country in defying Hitler, Trumbo, in his 1941 novel, “The Remarkable Andrew,” trashed Britain as no democracy, as it had a king, and charged FDR with “black treason” for seeking to aid the Brits in their desperate fight to stave off defeat by the Nazis.

A talented screenwriter who wrote “Roman Holiday,” “Spartacus” and “Exodus,” Trumbo was attracted to revolutionary violence.

Invited to do a screenplay of William Styron’s “Confessions of Nat Turner,” about the Virginia slave who led a rampage of rape and murder in 1831, Trumbo wrote back:

“[I]n carrying through his rebellion Turner did nothing more than accept a principle of white Christian violence which had enslaved all of Africa, and used it for the first time in American history as a weapon against white Christians.”

Biographer Larry Ceplair quotes Trumbo as describing America as “fundamentally” racist, with racism “the keystone of national policy both domestic and foreign…

“How many gooks have we killed in Korea? How many slopes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia? Millions, and we’re still killing more of them. Our thirst for the blood of dark-skinned sub-humans is insatiable.”

Why is Hollywood making a movie about Trumbo?

To whitewash the traitor and his comrades who were blacklisted for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee about their Communist Party membership and affiliations.

In promoting “Trumbo,” Hollywood’s flacks write of the late 1940s as the “darkest days” in American history.

They were dark all right. But probably less dark for Tinseltown Bolsheviks than the hundreds of millions who fell under the rule of the revolutions and regimes they supported in those years.

Between 1946 and 1950, Stalin murdered the Russian POWs we sent back in Operation Keelhaul, imposed his barbarous rule on 10 Christian nations of Eastern Europe, blockaded Berlin, built an atom bomb with the aid of American traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, helped Mao Zedong conquer China and begin a slaughter of Chinese that would exceed the millions attributed to Stalin himself.

To continue reading: Dalton Trumbo Had It Coming

The Never-Ending War, by Ann Jones and Nick Turse

From Ann Jones and Nick Turse at tomdispatch.com:

In an effort to attack Taliban fighters, an air strike by a U.S. plane killed dozens of civilians in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In the wake of the attack, an American general responded in unequivocal fashion. “I take this possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously,” he said. “I have ordered a complete investigation into the reasons and results of this attack, which I will share with the Afghan people.”

In an effort to attack Taliban fighters, an air strike by a U.S. plane killed dozens of civilians in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In the wake of the attack, an American general responded in unequivocal fashion. “I want to offer my deepest condolences to those innocent civilians who were harmed and killed on Saturday,” he said. “I’ve ordered a thorough investigation into this tragic incident… we will share the results of the investigation once it is complete.”

The first of those air strikes took place in 2009 and targeted fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban. The second took place last month and targeted a hospital that Afghan officials say was used as a safe haven by the Taliban. The striking similarities between the two attacks are rooted not in uncanny coincidence but in the law of averages. Bomb a country long enough and such echoes are bound to occur.

Of course, U.S. planes have been carrying out attacks and terrorizing innocent Afghans in and around Kunduz (and elsewhere in the country) since 2001. This is, after all, America’s war in Afghanistan, which has produced eerily repetitive tragedies; a war that’s also seen almost endless announcements of achievements, improvements, and progress; a war that seems to regularly circle back on itself.

“The Taliban is gone,” Army General Tommy Franks, the chief of U.S. Central Command, announced in 2002. “Afghanistan is rising from the oppression of the Taliban into an independent, democratic nation.” Six years later, the Taliban was, oddly enough, still around. But things were still going well. “We’re clearly not done… But I do know that we’re making good progress, and each and every day we’re making a difference in the Afghan people’s lives,” said Army Major General Jeffrey Schloesser. In 2010, Army General David Petraeus offered his unique assessment of the war. “We’re making progress, and progress is winning, if you will,” he insisted. This summer, another five years having passed, Army General John Campbell weighed in: “We have done a great job, both from both a conventional perspective and our special operating forces, and from the Afghan security forces… I see [the Afghans] continue to progress and continue to be very resilient.”

There have been so many claims of “progress” these last 14 years (and so many air strike apologies as well) and yet each announcement of further success seems to signal the very opposite. Days after Campbell spoke, for instance, Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the U.S. deputy chief of staff for communications in Afghanistan, told reporters, “Kunduz is — is not now, and has not been in danger of being overrun by the Taliban… that’s sort of how we see it.” Just over a month later, Kunduz fell to the Taliban.

To continue reading: The Never-Ending War

For WHO, Red Meat Is a Red Herring, by Yuri N. Maltsev

Collectivism sneaking in under the guise of health and environmentalism. Who would have guessed? From Yuri N. Malsev at mises.org:

Our booming green-industrial complex built up by administrations of both parties in the US is effectively using the United Nations, its thirty two “sister” institutions — such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and numerous “tribunals” — and hundreds of training and research centers. This huge international bureaucratic buildup is already employing over a million “international civil servants” to administer what our socialist visionaries hope will become the world government of the future.

An increasingly important “sister institution” of the UN system is the highly politicized “World Health Department” also known as the World Health Organization (WHO) which, as part of a new scare campaign, has issued new declarations that sausages, hot dogs, bratwurst, and ham are carcinogenic, and that all red meat is “probably carcinogenic.”

This new anti-meat campaign, however, is not about your health, but about the “health of the planet.” WHO’s attack on meat is happening just before the Paris gathering on global warming and is a part of the slow motion socialist revolution poorly disguised as “climate change awareness.” As usual, socialist policies today are justified as “necessity for future generations.” Famous Nobel Laureate in physics, Dr. Ivar Giaever, once an Obama supporter, now stands against the president on global warming. “I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem.” Giaever ridiculed Obama for stating that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” The physicist called it a “ridiculous statement” and that Obama “gets bad advice” when it comes to global warming. I am sure that Obama and other politicians are peddling the climate change agenda not because of “bad advice,” but because advocates provide them with the argument for central planning and curtailing of individual liberty.

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Paris from November 30 to December 11, is designed by the Obama administration as the major leap forward toward world government and central planning. It will be the twenty-first yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the eleventh session of the Meeting of the Parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The conference objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the countries, including the US.

To continue reading: For WHO, Red Meat Is a Red Herring

Vaccine Whistleblower Gave Congress Thousands of Documents, Claims CDC Destroyed Proof of MMR-Autism Link, by Michael Krieger

From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

I want to start off this post by making it clear that I’m not remotely anti-vaccine. Personally, I chose to receive a Hepatitis A shot prior to my Asia travels last winter, and I also recently received a TDAP booster in order to reduce the risk of transferring pertussis to my newborn son, which can be quite dangerous if contracted by babies.

While I’m not anti-vaccine, I am anti-ignorance, and there’s a lot of ignorance and bluster out there when it comes to this subject. I know this, because I spent a lot of time researching the topic over the past nine months, after finding out that my wife was pregnant. It’s a complicated topic, which is why this is the first time I’ve ever written about it.

I came to realize that what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote in an Alternet article earlier this year is undoubtably true. He noted:

Vaccines are big business. Pharma is a trillion dollar industry (1) with vaccines accounting for $25 billion in annual sales. (2) CDC’s decision to add a vaccine to the schedule can guarantee its manufacturer millions of customers and billions in revenue (3) with minimal advertising or marketing costs and complete immunity from lawsuits. High stakes and the seamless marriage between Big Pharma and government agencies have spawned an opaque and crooked regulatory system. Merck, one of America’s leading vaccine outfits, is currently under criminal investigation for fraudulently deceiving FDA regulators about the effectiveness of its MMR vaccine. Two whistleblowers say Merck ginned up sham studies to maintain Merck’s MMR monopoly. (4)

Big money has fueled the exponential expansion of CDC’s vaccine schedule since 1988, when Congress’ grant of immunity from lawsuits (5) suddenly transformed vaccines into paydirt. CDC recommended five pediatric vaccines when I was a boy in 1954. Today’s children cannot attend school without at least 56 doses of 14 vaccines by the time they’re 18. (6)
An insatiable pharmaceutical industry has 271 new vaccines under development in CDC’s bureaucratic pipeline (7) in hopes of boosting vaccine revenues to $100 billion by 2025. (8)The industry’s principle spokesperson, Dr. Paul Offit, says that he believes children can take as many as 10,000 vaccines. (9)

To continue reading: Vaccine Whistleblower Claims CDC Destroyed Proof of MMR-Autism Link

The C02 Trump Card, by Eric Peters

From Eric Peters, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

It had to happen – and now it has.

VW – and soon, everyone else, inevitably – is under the gun over “emissions” that aren’t even pollutants.

Carbon dioxide.

This inert gas (look it up if you missed it in high school chemistry) doesn’t contribute to smog, cause acid rain, deplete the the ozone layer, irritate the lungs, or harm babies. Plants breathe it and by breathing it, produce the oxygen we need to breathe. If C02 is a “pollutant” then according to the same logic, so is water vapor (oy, don’t give them ideas).

But carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse gas” that contributes to “climate change,” the new (and pope-approved!) catch-all phrase that encompasses warmer and colder weather, neatly pathologizing both of them.

Cows produce it; we produce it and cars produce it.

VW is in the crosshairs because of this.climate change image

A couple of days ago, the company issued another apologia (here) for “understating” the “emissions” of this inert gas by its gasoline-powered (note italics) powered cars. The “affected” vehicles (about 1 million of them, so far) this time aren’t U.S. models but they aren’t diesel models.

In Europe, you see, they already treat carbon dioxide – an inert gas – as a motor vehicle exhaust subject to government regulation. This is not yet the case in the U.S., but it is only a matter of time.

As they used to say in Germany before the war – der tag kommt.

The Europeans have fully embraced the climate change tar baby – which means they’ve accepted the idea that the inert gas, carbon dioxide, is something that must be “controlled.”

And you can’t control C02 without controlling people.

That’s the beauty of it – from the perspective of those who want to “save the planet” from personal mobility via the privately owned car: Carbon dioxide emissions can’t be eliminated or even appreciably “controlled” without eliminating or severely controlling internal combustion. Because C02 is the product of normal combustion whereas the exhaust emissions heretofore considered harmful (and regulated) are the byproducts of imperfect (incomplete) combustion.

To continue reading: The CO2 Trump Card