Thursday, February 28, 2019

P&D Today

By Rich Kozlovich
I'm busy working on a project and don't have the time to do a larger editon today, but there may be an evening edition, so here are what I think are two important commentaries and one post, equally important, and maybe more important.
Leftist Arrogance


Is a Second Civil War Coming?

February 28, 2019 By Jeff Lukens

Civil wars are horrendous and bloody affairs. That's why we should avoid them. They happen when two sides cannot settle on who runs the country. When they can't reconcile the matter through elections, the country falls apart. When one side does not accept the election results, we have a countdown to a civil war.  This is the thesis put forth by journalist Daniel Greenfield.  It rings true on many levels. ........... Parts of the country detest the other parts. Coastal elites dislike flyover country. The blue states despise the red states, and vice versa.


Ask yourself, why are liberals always angry? Why are they so vulgar? Why do they slander and push fake labels like racist, sexist, and homophobic? Why do they engage in "emotional outbursts" when challenged? Why are they violent? ................This is a dangerous time.


If There's a Hair in Your Soup, Thank New York's Commission on Human Rights

Daniel Greenfield 5 Comments Tuesday, February 26, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In December 2018, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a radical group supportive of terrorists, passed a display in the window of a Prada store in New York City. The display showed toy squids, aliens and monkeys that were part of the Pradamalia line, a name that combined Prada’ and ‘Animalia'. Alongside the $500 squids and aliens were two toy monkeys. One green and one red.

The green monkey named Toto wasn't a problem. But the, now banished eighth creature, a red monkey named Otto, triggered Chinyere Ezie, the CCR lawyer, whose viral post declared, " I’m shaking with anger". According to Ezie, the red monkey was a clear case of blackface imagery.

The rest of the story: outrage, hashtags (#StopBlackface #BoycottPrada #EndRacismNow) apologies, boycotts, a Prada diversity council, and a campaign accusing other luxury brands of racism is familiar.

But something much more disturbing than a toy monkey in a Soho store happened in between.

The New York City Commission on Human Rights sent a cease and desist letter to Prada, in its own words, “demanding the company immediately stop displaying and selling the ‘Pradamalia’ goods.”

"The Commission is taking swift action to demand Prada immediately comply with the NYC Human Rights Law," Assistant Commissioner Sapna V. Raj warned.

The Commission's press release threatened that, "it has the authority to fine violators with civil penalties of up to $250,000 for willful and malicious violations of the Law."

A government agency issuing an order to stop displaying an artistic product (that is what Prada considered its Pradamalia collection) and threatening fines is a blatant First Amendment violation. Yet this abuse of power went largely unnoticed by the NYCLU, which these days seems to spend much of its time backing a Judeophobic campaign against Orthodox Jewish schools in the city. And while the stakes, a cartoon monkey that Prada swiftly disavowed, may seem silly, the case has ominous implications.

New York City's Human Rights Law is a sprawling and unwieldy mess, some of whose provisions would probably not survive a vigorous court challenge, and the Commission wields a disturbing amount of power, including the threat of prison for anyone who impedes its activities, but in this case it appeared to be defining speech as a discriminatory practice. And that is an attack on the First Amendment.

The Commission claims to fight for social justice, but its commitment to social justice appears to casually violate some of the most important civil rights protected by the United States Constitution.

The Prada case cast a brief gleam of light on how out of control a mostly obscure agency had become.

New York City had long ago rolled through the usual spectrum of legal protections for everyone from ex-cons to transgender men. And the Commission has been desperately concocting new legal protections. Its latest initiative declares that employers, including in the health care and food service industries, may not prevent employees, regardless of race, from wearing dreadlocks because that’s racial discrimination.

The Commission's new guidelines insist that employees have "the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state.” Schools, public and private, are also forbidden from banning dreadlocks.

Commissioner Carmelyn P. Malalis boasted that “human rights warriors” had gone on Al Jazeera to discuss hair rights. Al Jazeera is Qatar’s Islamist propaganda network. Under Islamic law, women’s hair must be covered with anything ranging from a hijab to a burka. There are no “hair rights” in Islam.

And “human rights warriors” sounds like a government agency deploying official social justice warriors.

Hair rights may sound silly, but what it really means is that restaurants will have to choose between keeping hair out of the steaks and salads of their customers, or dealing with the Commission on cases that will last for years and potentially cost the victims tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When you find a hair in your soup in a New York restaurant, you can thank the Commission.

But the Prada crackdown and hair rights had become typical of a New York City government spinning out of control under Mayor Bill de Blasio and his even more radical New York City Council counterparts.

Amazon’s pullout and the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had focused national attention on the deranged radicalism and incompetence that had become the hallmarks of New York City politics.

What does the Commission actually do?

In 2014, a “small restaurant” in Brooklyn posted an ad on Craigslist seeking an “experienced waitress who can make cappuccino”. The Commission went after the unidentified 25-seat restaurant and its minority owner because he had used “waitress” instead of “wait-person” or “wait-thing.”

The owner told the representative of the Commission that he hadn’t done anything wrong and hung up the phone. He did not show up at any of the hearings and showed no interest in the kangaroo court.

In 2015, an administrative law judge held him liable for gender discrimination. Since Mr. Rosario didn’t show up, the Commission insisted he should be punished, "primarily because of the important public interest in ensuring cooperation with the Commission's administrative investigation and hearing processes."

The final order was signed by Commissioner Carmelyn P. Malalis three years after the original offense. Malalis has a B.A. in Women's Studies from Yale and a seemingly boundless hatred for restaurants.

A previous order had hit Crazy Asylum, a restaurant, accused of also putting up a Craigslist ad for “waitresses” who could wear heels, with a $10,000 fine after wasting four years on this case. “Respondents were not sufficiently deterred from posting another advertisement indicating a limitation on gender even after they had received the Bureau's Complaint,” the Malalis order fumed.

The inmates, with their degrees in Women’s Studies, were officially in charge of the asylum.

Also facing the Commission’s wrath was an Indian restaurant which had put out an ad for an Indian waiter or waitress back in 2013. The Commission conducted a sting operation by sending an email job application for “George Harris” and “using an email add-on that confirms when an email has been opened by the recipient, the tester confirmed that both emails were opened. However, the tester did not receive a response to either job application.” Would that hold up in court? Welcome to New York.

George, who didn’t exist, didn’t get the job. Neither did anyone else because the job no longer exists.

The Indian restaurant shut down, but the case kept going with a penalty finally issued four years later. Once again, Commissioner Malalis declared that, “Respondents' failure to cooperate with the Bureau investigation and to participate in the OATH hearing process necessitates the imposition of civil penalties.” The worst crime the Commission can think of isn’t racism: it’s ignoring the Commission.

However, all the managerial staff for the Indian restaurant that doesn’t exist were ordered to attend a Commission-led training that will teach them it’s wrong to hire Indians to work at Indian restaurants.

The Indian restaurant and the jobs of all its employees had to be destroyed for social justice.

Meanwhile two Muslim taxi drivers, Baqir Raza and Mohammed Dahbi, who discriminated against a black woman and a lesbian couple, got off with no fines. Instead, even though their alleged actions were actually discriminatory, in the interests of “restorative justice”, a euphemism that means giving minority offenders a pass, they were instead ordered to educate other drivers about the evils of discrimination.

The Commission had spoken.

Under Republican governance, New York City began a major turnaround. What made that turnaround possible was a crackdown on crime and quality of life issues, along with creating an environment that encouraged businesses to stay in New York, and attracted new companies to do business there.

All of these three factors were reversed under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Term limits, instead of reforming government, pushed out professional politicians and replaced them with motivated radicals. Policing was once again crippled and quality of life offenses became protected behavior on its streets.

New York City is steadily bleeding people. Beyond the established financial and cultural industries, few companies want to deal with a deranged regulatory environment run by incompetent radical activists.

Amazon couldn’t make it in New York. Smaller companies don’t even want to try.

The New York City Commission on Human Rights is both ridiculous and disturbing, a Kafkaesque monstrosity exercising dubious powers for radical ends, holding its own hearings, inventing its own laws and spitefully punishing small businesses who dare to ignore the radical agendas of its identity politics.

New Yorkers needs some human rights activists to save them from their Commission on Human Rights.



Thank you for reading.

Six Key Things to Understand for Sensible Fiscal Policy

February 25, 2019 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty



Principle #2 – Entitlements programs are the main drivers of excessive spending. All the long-run forecasts show that the burden of spending is rising because of the so-called mandatory spending programs. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were not designed to keep pace with demographic changes (falling birthrates, increasing longevity), so spending for these program will consume ever-larger shares of economic output.
Principle #3 – Deficits and debt are symptoms of the underlying problem. Government borrowing is not a good idea, but it’s primarily bad because it is a way of financing a larger burden of spending. The appropriate analogy is that, just as a person with a brain tumor shouldn’t fixate on the accompanying headache, taxpayers paying for a bloated government should pay excessive attention to the portion financed by red ink.



Here are a few other observations from the interview.

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Cartoon of the Day

An Unnatural Love Affair

By Stephen Mauzy March 29, 2011 @ American Thinker

(Editor's NoteI would like for you to read the last paragraph over a couple of times as each reading allows for further insightful thought. Published with permission.  Emphasis is added by me.  RK)

Given the innumerable combinations of psychoses, fetishes, predilections, infatuations, and obsessions that can afflict earth's seven billion human inhabitants, it is within the realm of possibilities that at least one of the seven billion has anthropomorphized a rock and is interacting with it as if it were a sentient human being.

Preposterous? Hardly, when considering that a Mr. Art Price Jr. of Bellevue, Ohio was arrested for having a public dalliance with a picnic table and that a Ms Sharon Tendler of London married a dolphin.

If one anthropomorphizes a rock, one is a nut job. If one anthropomorphizes billions of rocks, one is an environmentalist. The personification of nature is evident in the language. Nature is cast in the image of man, or, more accurately, woman; thus nature is imbued with womanly feelings, desires, and attributes. Nature is lovely, delicate, and anemic - a description more accurate of Audrey Hepburn than of an amalgam of dirt, rocks, sand, and water and one at which your average resident of Fukushima Prefecture would take umbrage.

The environmentalist's unnatural love affair with nature would be no more intrusive or offensive than the nut job's love affair with a rock. The difference is that the environmentalist relentlessly coerces everyone into his indulgent fantasy -- a grim world predicated on privation and scarcity.  To the environmentalist's mind, nature is like a female mammalian: she can give only so much before the teat runs dry. 

It's a misconception on steroids.  Nature, as inanimate and sterile as it is, is about abundance and possibilities. Professional alarmist and renowned Malthusian Paul Ehrlich had this fact handed to him on a nickel-plated, chromium-infused, tin-alloyed, tungsten-hardened copper plate by environmental economist Julian Simon, in 1990. 

A decade earlier, Ehrlich and Simon famously wagered on the price direction of the aforementioned metals -- picked by Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet they would increase, Simon they would fall. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities trended lower during the wager period.

Ehrlich lost because of a contrived belief in scarcity where none exists.  A scoop of earth will comprise elements ranging from aluminum to zirconium.  Consider the number of scoops that can be taken from the earth's 198 million square mile surface.  Now consider the number of scoops if we expand the possibilities 25 miles down to the earth's lithosphere.

What is usable today is a mere rounding error compared to the overall supply of natural resources, but it is only a rounding error because of human knowledge, which progresses over time. The supply of economically usable natural resources expands as we increase our knowledge of and our mastery over nature.  Iron was irrelevant to Stone-Age man, silicon  was superfluous to Midde-age man, but their value eventually became evident when discovery and knowledge enabled future man to forge iron into steel and silicon into transistors.

But the environmentalist whinges that we will exhaust what we have mastered and be left destitute. George Reisman, Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, offers a counter perspective.

[T]he total of the supply of minerals mined by man each year amounts to substantially less than 25 cubic miles. This is a rate that could be sustained for the next 100 million years before it amounted to something approaching 1 percent of the supply represented by the earth. (These estimates follow from such facts as that the total annual global production of oil, iron, coal, and aluminum can be respectively fitted into spaces of 1.15, 0.14, 0.5, and 0.04 cubic miles, based on the number of units produced and the quantity that fits into one cubic meter.)

The environmentalist will riposte not all resources are alike. Oil is different: once consumed it is gone forever. Environmentalists and economists have been warning about peak oil since the wells in western Pennsylvania began running dry, which wasn't long after Col. Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in Titusville, in 1859.

Before Pennsylvania's oil fields became economically barren, though, drillers moved further west and struck oil in Ohio, then Texas, then Wyoming, then California, then Alaska. Prices rose, then dropped as drillers mastered the ability to extract less convenient reserves. The process has been replicated numerous times since, and will be replicated numerous times in the future.  Peak oil in one market spurs production in other markets.

And there are still many oil markets left to spur. From 1970 to 2005, U.S. daily oil consumption increased to 20 million barrels per day from 15 million, slightly less than a 1 percent annual increase.  If we extrapolate this growth rate a hundred years, to 2105, the United States will consume 1.26 trillion barrels of oil. A barrel of oil is 5.6 cubic feet, therefore, we will use 7.08 trillion cubic feet of oil over the next 100 years. The numbers are staggering until placed in context: a cubic mile equals 147 billion cubic feet. The entire surface of the earth is open to drilling up to six miles deep (the continental surface averages 25 miles thickness), that's 1.2 billion cubic miles, of which only 48 will be needed to supply U.S. oil demand for the next 95 years.

Of course, we can exploit to our heart's content, but we will bury nature in garbage while doing so. The total acreage devoted to landfill use in the United States is about 560,000 acres. That is about 0.02 percent of all the land in the nation.  Holding all of America's garbage for the next hundred years would require a space only 255 feet high or deep and 10 miles square.

Perhaps we will choke nature to death instead. There is the obvious: nature is inanimate, so it doesn't breathe.  Life is different, it has to.  On that front, air pollution has been on the decline for decades, and emission trends from vehicles and industrial sources confirm that pollution levels will continue to decline in the future. Yet environmentalist have gone to great lengths to convince the public otherwise.

Our mastery and exploitation of nature correlates positively with our living standards. The environmentalist lowers these standards by forcing the person of today to conserve today's very abundant resources for generations of unborn persons of tomorrow, who, in turn, will be coerced to conserve these same resources for yet future generations of unborn. The process not only attenuates our discovery and mastery over new resources, it is as absurd as passing along into perpetuity a present that no one gets to open.

Even more absurd, the value creators -- the people who improve life -- are the environmentalist's chief enablers.  Because the value creators have discovered processes that turn nature into roads, automobiles, hotels, restaurants, gasoline, climate-specific clothing, and other life enhancing goods, the environmentalist can continue to anthropomorphize nature, oblivious to the malevolence of the raw environment around him.

Stephen Mauzy is a financial writer, analyst, and principal of S.P. Mauzy and Associates. Send him e-mail at .


Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Fighting for energy and human rights equality in Africa

The Congress of Racial Equality Uganda has lost another leader, but the fight continues

Paul Driessen




Like Cyril, she was passionate about these issues, including using DDT and other insecticides – what she called “the African equivalent of chemotherapy drugs” – to prevent malaria and other devastating insect-borne diseases. She wrote in a 2006 Washington Times article:



Fiona got emotional when she wrote about environmentalist groups and US, EU, World Bank, WHO and other rich country bureaucrats who she believed were using Africans as test subjects in “energy, malaria and agricultural experiments that perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and death in the name of protecting the environment.”

“China and India put up with this immoral eco-colonialism for decades,” she wrote. “Finally, they had enough. They refused to be the environmentalists’ experimental pawns any longer. They took charge of their own destinies, charted their own future, financed their own projects, and refused to be stopped again by anti-development green policies, politicians and pressure groups.


“Let us be brave and bold!” Fiona exhorted. “Let us become prosperous and healthy together.”






“Calls for us to live ‘sustainably,’ use wind and solar and biofuel power, and never use fossil fuels, are a demand that we accept prolonged starvation and death in our poor countries,” Steven wrote in one article. “They mean desperate people will do horrible things to survive, even just another day.” 


When will the day come, Steven wondered – echoing what Fiona and Cyril had been saying for over a decade – when politicians and activists, who say their care about the world’s poor, “stop worrying about global warming, pesticides and GMO crops – and start helping us get the energy, food, medical facilities, technologies, jobs and economic growth we need to improve our lives?”




Five Members of Corrupt Congressional Black Caucus Take $60,000 Trip to South Africa for Beyonce Concert

February 25, 2019


Via FOX News:

They attended the “Global Citizen Mandela 100” concert from Dec. 1-3 to celebrate the centenary birth of the late Nelson Mandela and raise awareness of global poverty. In addition to Beyoncé, other musical acts included her husband Jay Z, Ed Sheeran, Pharrell Williams and Chris Martin.
One-third of the Congressional Black Caucus members have been named in an ethics probe during their career........To Read More.....

Kamala Harris's solution to Venezuela crisis bombs with Venezuelans

February 25, 2019 By Monica Showalter

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris belatedly weighed in on the Venezuelan crisis, seeking to show us her "leadership."   Here's her pair of tweets, sandwiched in between her calls for gun control, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, her supposed refusal to take PAC money (probably couldn't get any), and vague boilerplate about "better education":................. To Read More

Spies Like Us

Daniel J. Flynn 

“I will always say that I’m innocent and that I’m being framed,” testified Judith Coplon after being arrested in 1949 with a Russian agent, secret government documents, and after a chase worthy of The French Connection.  The pinched Justice Department official always said she was innocent and framed.  She certainly never believed that.

By last week, when the New York Times reported Coplon’s death at 89, nobody contested her guilt.  Coplon’s name had popped up in an incriminating manner in the Soviet archives and in the Venona intercepts, where she is described as “politically well-developed” and having “no doubts about whom she is working for.”

“Was she a spy?” daughter Emily rhetorically asks in the Times.  “I think it’s another question that I ask:  Was she part of a community that felt that they were going to bring, by their actions, an age of peace and justice and an equal share for all and the abolishing of color lines and class lines?”  She answers, “If these were things that she actually did, she was not defining them as espionage.”

The children of Stalin’s Western minions have largely dropped protestations of parental innocence.  They concede their moms and dads guilty—of saving the world, of ushering in peace, of fighting for equality, of trying to eradicate prejudice.

Physicist Theodore Hall gave atomic secrets to the Soviets.  He didn’t serve a day in prison.  Instead, he led a comfortable life as a biological researcher at Cambridge University.  “He did what he did out of a real motive to save people’s lives,” daughter Ruth explained upon his 1999 death.  “It was an obligation.  He was a principled man of enormous integrity.  He did what he did at great personal risk.  He had nothing to gain from it personally.”

The Rosenbergs conspired to pass atomic secrets to Stalin too.  The macabre outcome for them couldn’t have been more different than Hall’s life in a bucolic English college town.  “What would the post-1950 world have looked like if the U.S. had the [nuclear] monopoly?” Michael Meeropol, eldest son of the Rosenbergs, asked on a “Nova” epidsode in 2002.  “It would be a very safe prediction to suggest that we would have used it on China in Korea, that we would have used it to help the French in Indochina in 1954.  Atomic espionage, he posits, “may have prevented World War III.”

The survivors talk as though their parents aided the Dalai Lama or Bob Geldof.  They gave military secrets to one of history’s most prolific mass murderers. Their willingness to commit treason for free is cited as a mark of good character.  If they had received money or sex in exchange for their treachery we could at least chalk it up to human weakness.  Alas, they needed no such inducement to help Joseph Stalin.  Instead, as evidenced even in their offspring, arrogance motivated these would-be world-savers.

They knew better than to believe tales of manufactured famine in the Ukraine, Moscow show trials, the gulag, and Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe.  They knew better than the elected officials entrusted by the people what information should be kept secret and what information should be shared.  They knew better than the criminal justice system, the public, and in some cases, even their children, so they maintained the ignoble lie of innocence until death.

The baby boomers are often accused of perfidy toward their elders.  But that just isn’t so for red-diaper babies.  In their fidelity toward their parents, the children of Communists exhibit a traditionalism rarely associated with the political creed they were born into.  One can fault the parents for risking to transform their offspring into orphans.  One can’t question the love of the children toward their parents—or at least toward the ideals on which their parents raised them.

Lest anyone accuse the children of Communists of uniform zeal in abiding by God’s commandment to honor thy parents, there is the case of Morton Sobell.  When a 91-year-old Sobell finally came clean about his atomic espionage, and implicated Julius Rosenberg in the process, filial loyalty demanded too much.  Stepdaughter Sydney Gurewitz Clemens groused that Sobell’s 2008 admission “complicated history and the personal histories of the many millions of people, all over the world, who gave time, energy, money, and heart to the struggle to support his claims of innocence.”  Put another way:  Don’t you dare pull the plug on our collective hallucination.

“If you feel that what you’re doing answers to a higher ideal,” Coplon’s daughter instructs, “it’s not treason.”  You can’t take it with you.  The illusions that Judith Coplon bequeathed to her daughter affirm that.


Moore: 'I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar 'sixth mass extinction' article in February 1999"

By: - Climate Depot March 4, 2011

Climate Depot Exclusive

More on the ‘science’ behind the extinction claims: