A friend of mine sent me a video of an internet opportunity that his son received. One that promised easy money – thousands of dollars per day – even when he sleeps And, one that was sent only to him, one of forty-nine specially selected recipients. Of course, the son was hooked – begging his father for the $400 good faith investment in the money-making “technology.” Telling his father that there was absolutely no risk and a 30-day money back guarantee. If the kid had been a tad smarter and internet savvy, he would have noticed that the enterprise was “offshore” and beyond the reach of the U.S. law enforcement and legal authorities. With a zero chance of getting his money returned after it had been processed by an overseas payment facilitator.
To start with, the video featured a mansion – one that I have seen before. It helps to have grown up in West Los Angeles where movie locations with rentable mansions are just minutes away. Of course, there were the obligatory cars, the Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini – all without license plates and probably trucked in from a local car dealer for the commercial shoot.
And, the proof of consistent daily earnings consisted of screen shots that looked legitimate, but who really knows as I can duplicate the same shot in a matter of minutes. You know the shots have been manipulated as multiple dates and times flashed by as the narrator told you of the thousands of dollars per day he was making.
But, the kicker was – and it is the reason for this particular blog post – that if you entered the so-called information guru’s name plus the word scam into a Google search box, you got a large number of reviews. Many asking if the opportunity was really a scam – and, of course, concluding it was a legitimate deal that should not be passed up. Of course, the review site’s creators screwed the pooch. All of these sites had the same pop-up offer when you tried to leave the page. All leading directly to the so-called guru’s website.
So, in the interests of education, you need to remember only a few basic things.
Bottom line …
Don’t be sucked in. If it were that easy, the yacht harbor would be overflowing and there would be more Ferraris than Volkswagens.
Steve
Funny thing about the racists who depend on their ability to stir up racial discord to push their socialist agenda forward. Anything which does not play into their racist narrative must be demonized, denigrated, and disparaged. Rather than allowing justice to prevail, the progressive racists are busy stirring up additional controversy … possibly to hide the truth: Trayvon Martin was a thuggish, drug-using, assailant on the night of his death.
Here is a prime example of progressive race-baiting …
George Zimmerman's Defense Team Releases Texts and Photos to Fit Their Racist Narrative -- "Is the defense trying to prove Trayvon deserved to be killed by George Zimmerman because of the way he looked?"
The defense team for George Zimmerman, the man accused of killing unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, released dozens of photos and text messages of the 17-year-old murder victim in a seeming effort to portray him as a “gangsta” troublemaker.
Let’s review, the progressives subjected George Zimmerman, his family, his friends, and associates to intense scrutiny in order to “prove” that George Zimmerman was a racist, bent on profiling an innocent black teenager walking home from a convenience story. At first, they spun the story as “racist white man kills black man in an unprovoked attack.” Even the corrupt progressive mainstream saw official police tapes altered to portray the subject in a false and misleading light. They even used Trayvon's childhood photos to avoid showing Trayvon Martin for what he appeared to be on the night in question, a muscled thug. Then it was discovered that George Zimmerman was Hispanic, with many black friends who vouched for the fact that he was not a racist. The narrative was changed in a way that embarrassed the progressives and made them look like the race-baiters that they were.
It is unclear whether the texts and photos will be permissible in court, though attorneys for Martin’s family claim they represent “irrelevant red herrings.” Zimmerman’s attorneys are expected to use the “evidence” to make insinuations about Martin’s character, as the Zimmerman can be heard in a 911 call accusing the teen of being “up to no good” and “on drugs or something.”
Is Trayvon’s character, demeanor, and motivations not important to Zimmerman’s defense; as it goes to why Trayvon Martin didn’t simply confront Zimmerman and ask if there is a problem? At this point, Trayvon could have explained where he was doing and where he was going. But, according to media reports, Trayvon became belligerent and hostile – possibly attacking Zimmerman and leading to his responsibility for his own death minutes later.
From the actual 911 transcript …
Dispatcher: Sanford Police Department. …
Zimmerman: Hey we've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real suspicious guy, uh, [near] Retreat View Circle, um, the best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he's up to no good, or he's on drugs or something. It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy is he white, black, or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.
<Source>
Continuing with the progressive’s pitch …
The “evidence,” posted on a website run by Zimmerman’s attorneys, includes text messages from Martin discussing cannabis, a school suspension and a troubled home life, as well as several texts expressing interest in guns. The defense also posted 25 photos of Martin, some previously released on the internet, which include photo of the teen wearing gold teeth and flicking the camera off, as well as a photograph in which he appears to be smoking cannabis.
Notice how the progressives put quotes around the word “evidence,” as if these items are somehow suspect and should not be considered as “evidence.”
Benjamin Crump, an attorney representing Martin’s family, noted the irony of Zimmerman’s defense pushing a stereotypical image of Martin in a case already fraught with racial implications.
It was the progressives who first jumped into the use of stereotypical images as they suggested that a white man wantonly killed an innocent black teenager. As for the case being fraught with racial implications, it is the professional race-baiters that are stirring the pot to advance their personal and professional agendas.
"Is the defense trying to prove Trayvon deserved to be killed by George Zimmerman because of the way he looked?" Crump said in a statement obtained by NBC. "If so, this stereotypical and closed-minded thinking is the same mindset that caused George Zimmerman to get out of his car and pursue Trayvon, an unarmed kid who he didn't know. The pretrial release of these irrelevant red herrings is a desperate and pathetic attempt by the defense to pollute and sway the jury pool."
Let us look at this from a realistic perspective of a community watch person seeing an unknown person acting suspiciously … and who calls the police. There is nothing inherent racist in this prudent action and Zimmerman should be commended for trying to protect his community. Look at how the progressives claim that Trayvon’s character and past actions are irrelevant red herrings while they continue their attempts to smear Zimmerman’s character and past actions. Furthermore, characterizing these evidentiary items as a desperate and pathetic attempt to pollute and sway the jury rings hollow as progressives use articles such as this one to do the very same thing.
One of many striking example of an apparent “red herring” released by Zimmerman’s defense is text messages referring to Martin’s homelife. In one text, from Nov. 22, 2011, he writes, "My mom just told me i gotta mov wit my dad … She just kickd me out." Some legal experts say Zimmerman’s defense will have a hard time using the texts and photographs in court, as it resides in the legally murky area of character evidence.
“What does his mom saying he needs to live with his dad for a while say about why he was shot? Nothing,” Jeff Deen, a former state attorney in Florida, told NBC. “Generally, reputation evidence is not admissible in court.” Source: George Zimmerman's Defense Team Releases Texts and Photos to Fit Their Racist Narrative | Alternet
Excuse me? It’s not the short-hand style of messaging that is troubling, but the fact that Trayvon apparently became unmanageable or disrespectful for reasons now unknown, prompting his mother to kick Trayvon out of the family home. Could it be that Trayvon was acting out the gangsta lifestyle – and that it is possible that he believed he had a physical advantage over Zimmerman which lead to Trayvon attacking Zimmerman, and not Zimmerman attacking Trayvon. It has also been suggested that Zimmerman shot Trayvon as his head was being smashed into a concrete sidewalk – certainly self-defense.
Bottom line …
The progressives and race-baiters need to make this about Zimmerman to disguise the fact that another young black precipitated his own death during a violent attack that need not have occurred. We need to wait for the wheels of justice to turn … and meanwhile note that the progressives have a vested interest in the case.
-- steve
Now that democrats are in perpetual campaign mode, don’t put anything past them when it comes to disadvantaging republicans in the 2014 congressional election cycle or the 2016 presidential election cycles. By sowing the seeds of discontent and discord among republicans – they divide the party into easily-defeated pieces.
Obama's Tuesday: The Jersey Shore with Chris Christie
President Barack Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are getting back together for another tour of the Jersey Shore. Obama will travel to New Jersey on Tuesday to inspect the Shore’s recovery from Hurricane Sandy, a White House official said Thursday. While in New Jersey, Obama will deliver remarks about “expanding economic opportunity for middle class families who were hard hit by the storm” and meet with residents who have benefited from the federal recovery efforts. Source: Obama's Tuesday: The Jersey Shore with Chris Christie - POLITICO.com
When is the republican party going to get serious about policing their own and keeping republicans from putting their foot in their mouths – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?
Or, in Chris Christie's place -- promoting more aisle-hopping RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) like John McCain and Lindsey Graham? For those that wonder: yes, I think Chris Christie and Marco Rubio are RINOs.
Why republicans should not bash Obama for all of the scandals, all of the time, is beyond me. And yet we find Chris Christie providing him with a favorable photo op.
-- steve
The problem with global warming activists is that they are becoming like all radical progressives, having determined the ends justify the means, they are willing to say or do anything to pursue their twisted agenda. To the extent that ordinary citizens accept the prognostications of well-credentialed progressives without critical analysis, marks them for a life of unneeded sacrifice and suffering for a specious cause based, not on science itself, but on the hypothesis that global warming is man made and the hubris that man has the ability to modify nature on an unimaginable scale that defies all reason.
We cannot control the energy output of the Sun, the position of our Earth relative to the Sun, the Earth’s rotational dynamics, the Earth’s tectonic plate shifts and vulcanology, the deep ocean currents, and the most prevalent of greenhouse gases, water vapor, and yet we allow the global warming activists and radical progressive politicians to formulate corrupt and self-serving public policies based on little more than fairy tales.
To examine the extent of the perfidy being perpetrated on the American public, it might be instructive to return to Connor Clarke’s two-part interview of Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling that appeared in the July, 2009 issue of the Atlantic Magazine.
Who is Thomas Schelling and why should we believe him on the science of global warming?
Author: Over the weekend I spoke with Thomas Schelling, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on game theory and collective bargaining. Schelling's early work was about war and arms control, but I wanted to speak with him about a different collective bargaining problem that's been in the news: Global climate change. <Interview Part One>
Like most acolytes of global warming, Schelling is not a climate scientist, but an economist whose views lie more with the public policies and political structures of global warming than the science behind global weather dynamics. In this regard his viewpoint is no more scientific or relevant than the opinion of the average man on the street. In fact, substantially less so, because he has apparently raised the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming to a certitude required to adopt onerous public policies that lead to larger, more centrally-planned government, higher taxes, wealth redistribution, a reduced standard of living, population controls and less individual freedoms in favor of the socialist “collective” society.
Religion, the acceptance of the tenets of faith which may not be rational or provable …
Author: I wanted to go back to the international climate-change negotiation process. So assuming we had a perfect U.S. bill -- written by you or by 15 experts working on this full time -- how would the international negotiation process work? It's not obvious that averting global climate change is in the rational self-interest of anyone that is alive today. The serious consequences probably won't occur until 2080 or 2100 or thereafter. That's one problem. Another problem is that those consequences are going to be distributed in a radically uneven way. The northwest of the United States might actually benefit. So how does a negotiation process work? How does a generation today negotiate on behalf of future generations? And how do we negotiate when the costs are distributed so unevenly?
Well I do think that one of the difficulties is that most of the beneficiaries aren't yet born. More than that: Most of the beneficiaries will be born in what we now call the developing world. By 2080 or 2100 five-sixths of the population, at least, will be in places like China, India, Indonesia, Africa and so forth. And what I don't know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese.
It's a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there's a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane from permafrost, and from huge offshore deposits of methane all around the world. If you begin to get methane leaking on a large scale -- even though methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere very long -- it might warm things up fast enough that it will induce further methane release, which will warm things up more, which will release more. And that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious.
Perhaps averting global climate change is not in the rational self-interests of everyone, but doesn’t this posit that the solution to this “problem” is based in the necessity for a global solution, a one-world government structure presided over by enlightened ruling elites that are needed to manage rather unexceptional population units (the people)? Which is the basis for international socialism and communism. But one part of Schelling’s answer rings true: “And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious.” Institutional lying for the benefit of the enlightened ruling elite and the special interests who support them in return for political perks and privileges.
Exaggerate – you mean lying to the public to bring about a political effect?
Author: And when you say, "exaggerate the costs" do you mean, American politicians should exaggerate the costs to the American public, to get American support for a bill that will overwhelmingly benefit the developing world?
[Laughs] It's very hard to get honest people.
Author: Well, part of me sympathizes with the case for disingenuousness! I mean, it seems to me that there is a strong moral case for helping unborn Bangladeshi citizens. But I don't know how you sell that. It's not in anyone's rational interest, at least in the US, to legislate on that basis.
That's a problem. The standard of living in the United States will almost certainly be higher in 80 years than it is now.
I don’t know what is so funny about the situation; especially as it benefits politicians and the special interests while disadvantaging the average American citizen.
What? The risk of a planetary catastrophe does not require an immediate emergency effort?
If I were to come clean to the American public I would say that, except for a very low probability of a very bad result -- which is the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which would put Washington DC under water -- we are probably going to outgrow any vulnerability we have to climate change. And in case we'll be able to afford to buy food or import it is necessary. You know, very little of the US economy is susceptible to climate. All of agriculture is less than 3% of our gross product. Forestry may be endangered. Fisheries may be endangered. But recreation might actually benefit!
So if we can double our GDP in the next 70 or 80 years, even if we lose some of our GDP from climate change -- even if we lose 10% of our GDP from climate change -- we're still ahead so much that the effect of climate change wouldn't be noticed. But it would be pretty disastrous in a lot of the less developed parts of the world. And that's why I think it's crucially important not to demand anything of China, India and so forth that will significantly impede their economic progress.
It appears that, once again, what we are really discussing is not global warming, but a methodology to implement international socialism and communism. Wealth redistribution on a grand scale. The management of scarcity to increase political control over entire populations and convey outsize profits to select special interests.
Author: And there's sort of a cruel paradox there. On the one hand, it does seem like you want to say to India and China, "Grow your economies so that you have a greater capacity to adapt to climate change." On the other hand, it seems like that growth will also exacerbate the effects of the climate change. It seems like the growth that creates adaptive capacity is racing against the growth that is aggravating what the adaptive capacity is needed to protect against.
Yeah, except that if the developed countries -- the OECD or something like that, plus Japan -- if they are really serious, they'll tell India and China and Brazil, "we're going to provide enormous assistance to help reduce your dependence on fossil fuels. And we don't expect you to pay for it yourselves. We will pay for it because we're rich and you're not." But once we get whatever we're going to get -- you know, our own Waxman-Markey kind of thing, and some of the European countries have that too -- then I think we have to decide which developing countries participate, to what extent and so forth. We're going to have to find some institutions that determine which developing countries get the assistance, and how much. And we're going to have to have some intermediate organization to administer the funds and ensure that they are used for what they are intended for. This will have to be something at least on the scale of the old Marshall Plan.
But while people talk about this -- the need for aid from the developed countries -- nobody that I know of is thinking about how in the world you organize so that the rich countries can agree what you do with the poor. You need to know who divides the money, and who monitors is. We're going to need a whole new set of institutions, beyond the Copenhagen kind of institutions, where the rich countries decide what they're going to do about their own emissions.
And there you have it. The one-world government institution, perhaps as conceived by the United Nations, an institution that desperately wants to exert its own authority and to secure its funding mechanisms so they are not constrained by the contributions of member states, e.g. the evil United States of America. Let us not forget that the greatest driver of global warming is the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). An institution consisting more of politicians and administrators of scientific projects than working climate scientists. An organization that is arguably corrupt in the face of the disclosures known as the Climate-gate e-mails.
Wealth re-distribution for political power …
Author: Occasionally you see from people who are critical of Waxman-Markey -- or any mechanism for pricing carbon today -- you see the argument that the developing world will be best served by ignoring a pricing system altogether, and having the world grow as fast as possible, and having the kind of massive redistribution scheme you described above. So is it necessary to price carbon at all, if you assume that in the future some institutions will emerge that do the kind of redistribution you describe?
That's a hard thing to talk about -- this notion that we're going to commit ourselves to massive redistribution long after you and I are dead. I think it makes more sense early on to display some kind of sacrifice.
The rich counties -- especially the United States -- do so little in the way of foreign aid right now. The newspaper reports this morning that the rich world will devote an additional $20 billion over the next few years for food in Africa. Well, these are piddling amounts.
It's very hard to get Americans to engage in what they think will be suffering not just for the polar bears but for the poor around the world who will indeed suffer if they can't outgrow their vulnerability to climate change. I think there is reason for everyone to worry if temperatures go up six or eight degrees. As could happen.
Who is this asswipe who disparages a United States who shares its wealth with the world – above and beyond any contributions from other nations? And, they are not afraid to note that this will be a massive redistribution of wealth. The mere mention of Waxman-Markey makes me ill. One, because Henry Waxman is my own representative; and two, because the program is a scam. A way to sell government-approved indulgences for local polluters to keep poisoning our air, water, and land as long as they redistribute the wealth of their ratepayers and clients to some third-world nation. This is bullshit.
The honest scientists really don’t know what is happening, when it will happen, or even if it can be measured against the background of climate’s natural variability …
Author: But that is not likely to happen for a long time, is it?
Well, I think it could happen as we enter the 22nd century. But the great uncertainty, again, has to do with these huge quantities of methane: these deposits warm up, and the methane begins to be released, and then you have a runaway release.
All of the dire results are the predictions of unproven climate models with their false assumptions, flawed programming, and highly-manipulated data. Models that cannot account for the continuing rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide while we appear to be in a decade-long cooling trend. These models are incomplete and imperfect and yet the climate activists want the general public to treat them like the Oracle of Delphi. Unfortunately, a more apt analogy comes from the computer world: garbage in – garbage out.
I wanted to ask one more question, to go back to the moral issue here. It does seem to me that the strongest case for mitigating the effects of global climate change is a moral one. It is based not on our own interest but on the interests of people in the developing world who don't yet exist. But it also seems to me that -- while I don't know much about game theory -- collective bargaining theories generally assume the participants are rational and self-interested. So how does one go about making sense of an arrangement where we must set our self-interest aside? How does one make the moral case in a situation like this? Or is my description of collective bargaining just totally idiotic?
Well, I think you have to realize that most people have very strong moral feelings. I think in a lot of cases they're misdirected. I wish moral feelings about a two-month old fetus were attached to hungry children in Africa. But I think people have very strong moral feelings. In fact, I'm always amazed by the number of people who at least pretend they're worried about the polar bears.
And one thing that I think ought to help but doesn't is that -- and my impression is that maybe this is slightly changing -- the organized churches in American don't take seriously preserving the heritage that God gave us. I've heard congressmen confess to being devote Episcopalians say that what god gave us ought to be preserved. But I get no impression that Protestants and Catholics are sermonizing on the importance of preserving the bounty of the earth, the richness of the species, or preserving the planet as we would like to know it. And I think that if someone could mobilize the church to be interested...
I spent a long time concerned with smoking behavior. And when I was a boy the churches were very adamant about smoking. And my grandfather, who was sort of devout, he wouldn't hire a boy to mow the lawn if he knew the boy smoked. And we know how potent the churches can be, because nobody smokes on campus at the University of Utah. And nobody smokes among the Seventh-Day Adventists or the Jehovah's Witnesses. And the Mormons aren't supposed to drink coke and coffee, let alone smoke.
And I think the churches don't realize that they could have a potent effect in not letting so much of gods legacy -- in terms of flora and fauna -- be destroyed by climate change.
One, you cannot legislate morality. Two, science is oblivious to both morality, religion, and good intentions. And three, just what religion are you speaking about? There has always been a corrupt and dodgy relationship between church and state, mostly with the church providing control over their flocks lest they interrupt the corrupt activities of the state. The reason that the corruption of politics, the criminality of the Mafia, and the sanctity of the church can co-exist without major moral conflict in Italy and elsewhere in the world. Where you find murderous thugs wearing crosses as if to protect them from the evil they visit on others who are less armed or protected.
But, the real paradox is why both socialism and communism denounce the influence of the church in favor of the state and seem to regard the church as an impediment so as far as it prevents the strong and wealth from preying (pun intended) on weak and poor.
What miscreant wishes for death and destruction in order to sell his political agenda of socialism and communism?
But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening -- you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth -- that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don't think that's going to happen. Source: An Interview With Thomas Schelling, Part Two - Conor Clarke - The Atlantic
Bottom line …
The so-called intellectuals, with their political correctness, multi-culturalism, and moral equivalence are scared rabbits – scared because they are afraid that someone will wake up to their scheme, call bullshit, prosecute their sorry asses for fraud, and throw them in the slammer where they belong. In many cases, politicians, institutions, and scientists having become notably corrupt as the feed off the public teat. With no meaningful value to their work, and as they pursue even more power and profits from the public’s purse.
Be careful about what you read – even this post – and think for yourself.
And, if you want the short-hand version of global warming, ask yourself if it is not natural for a planet emerging from a little ice age to warm. And, that the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide can be explained by a cold beer. Just as a cold beer gives off dissolved carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when opened on a warm day, the warming oceans are outgassing dissolved carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Perfectly normal and natural. And, because the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide lags the rise in global temperature, it cannot be considered causal.
Remove all of the political corruption in the 2014 congressional election cycle, the 2016 presidential election cycle, and completing the task of cleaning out corrupt Senators in 2018. It’s now or never.
-- steve