Category: Uncategorized

Homeschool or Die vol. XXXLVI

I can’t help but notice the difference between the way fatalities are treated depending upon whether the children killed are being educated at home or at public school.  If seven children were killed by a demented homeschool mother, this would spark a national media outcry and demands for more restrictions on homeschooling.

And yet, in the past four months, we have seen multiple incidences of multiple fatalities due to acts of Man and Nature, but the thought that perhaps it is not wise to congregate large numbers of vulnerable children together never seems to enter the national discourse.

According to Wikipedia, there have been 278 tornado-related deaths at school since 1885.  That is nearly 2.2 deaths per year, which is a trivial percentage of the 48 million or so children attending the public schools.  And yet, they are entirely avoidable deaths; under the oft-cited “if just one life can be saved” metric, it cannot be denied that children who are not forced to congregate en masse at school cannot be killed by tornadoes there.

Two tornado-inflicted deaths per year isn’t much, but add to them the 26 schoolbus deaths per year, the 600 school-automotive deaths per year, and the 34 violence-related deaths, and it soon becomes readily apparent that school cannot reasonably be considered a safe place for children.

Forget the superior education received by homeschooled children.  Doesn’t saving the lives of more than 662 children every year make banning school a moral imperative?

Especially in light of the fact that 119 children under the age of twelve, (and 565 under the age of 18), were killed by guns.  School is literally more lethally dangerous than guns; something you might want to remind your average pro-public school, pro-gun control left-liberal.

Guns secure freedom at a lower cost in children’s lives than the public schools manage to deliver inferior educations. We don’t need gun control, we need school control.

Benghazi sinks the Lizard Queen and the Magic Negro

This display of ineptitude would tend explain why, for better or for worse, white men run the world:

The former diplomats inform PJM the new revelations concentrate in two areas — what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi and the pressure put on General Carter Ham, then in command of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and therefore responsible for Libya, not to act to protect jeopardized U.S. personnel.

Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.

Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”

This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.

The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.

He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.

Regarding General Ham, military contacts of the diplomats tell them that AFRICOM had Special Ops “assets in place that could have come to the aid of the Benghazi consulate immediately (not in six hours).”

Ham was told by the White House not to send the aid to the trapped men, but Ham decided to disobey and did so anyway, whereupon the White House “called his deputy and had the deputy threaten to relieve Ham of his command.”

I’m out of the business of political predictions, but I will say that the average Boy Scout leader would know better than to do as either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama did with regards to Benghazi.  If the news gets out, whoever is responsible for threatening to relieve Ham of his command for doing his freaking job should be political toast.  Even if he is blessed with magical negritude.

Goldman Sachs opposes UK independence

In related news, Rapey McRaperson announced that he is opposed to women carrying handguns and pepper spray, saying that it would be a “loss/loss scenario”:

Kevin Daly, part of the investment bank’s economic team, has concluded that a
British departure from the EU would result in a “loss/loss scenario” in
which both the UK and the rest of the bloc would be damaged.
But in a note to investors, Mr Daly added that Goldman does not expect an
in/out referendum because the Tories first need to win an outright majority
and, the bank reckons, “at this stage, this doesn’t appear likely”.
Mr Daly said a UK exit would “come with a significant economic cost to the UK”
because it is “highly integrated” with the EU. The economist noted that
trade with the other 26 members of the EU accounts for 16pc of UK GDP.

He dismissed those who argue that Britain could negotiate a trade deal with
the EU once it had left. “Given the size and importance of the UK economy,
it is unlikely that the UK could negotiate the same access to the EU single
market that Switzerland and Norway have achieved,” he said.

Goldman isn’t even trying to make sense of its pro-EU position here.  Britain not only sends billions of pounds into the Brussels sinkhole every year, but has nonsensical and tremendously wasteful regulatory regimes imposed upon it, to say nothing of millions of unwanted economic migrants.  And when has being bigger and more important ever made it HARDER for a nation to pursue what it wants in negotiation?

Another step closer

There is evidence connecting the White House to the IRS investigations after all.  But no proof that Obama knew about it or ordered it… yet:

The White House on Monday once again added to the list of people who
knew about the IRS investigation into its targeting of conservative
groups — saying White House chief of staff Denis McDonough had been
informed about a month ago.

Press secretary Jay Carney said again
that no one had told President Barack Obama ahead of the first news
reports: not his top aide McDonough, nor his chief counsel Kathy
Ruemmler, nor anyone from the Treasury Department.

Monday’s revelation amounts to the fifth iteration of
the Obama administration’s account of events, after initially saying
that the White House had first learned of the controversy from the
press.

And the scandal grows….

Don’t blame Jenny McCarthy

It’s not the unvaccinated causing the increase in the incidence of whooping cough, it’s the vaccines:

Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in
recent years. A new study confirms what scientists have suspected for
some time: The
return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer
vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the
new shots don’t
offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do….

Researchers have long suspected that new vaccines might have something
to do with it. Until the 1990s, children routinely received a so-called
whole-cell
vaccine, made from pertussis bacteria, Bordetella pertussis,
that were killed by exposure to formalin or other chemicals. These
vaccines were known to contain a toxin that can provoke powerful
side effects. Most vaccinated infants had fever and severe pain at the
injection site,
sometimes accompanied by febrile seizures or fainting fits in which
the infant turned pale, unresponsive, and “floppy.” 

Strange that while researchers “have long suspected” the new vaccines, the vaccine advocates writing in the media have constantly pointed at Hollywood actresses and vaccine skeptics.

First they came for the conservatives

“IRS commissioner Steven Miller said the IRS’s targeting of conservatives “is absolutely not illegal”

Fascinating.  I’m sure the Jews, among others, will be delighted to hear that it is now “absolutely not illegal” to have government agents targeting a particular minority among the population.

You know how it goes: “first they came for the conservatives, but I was not a conservative….”

US military unilaterally overturns Posse Comitatus.

“In essence, this policy change seeks to supersede Posse Comitatus,
the 1878 law which forbids the military from being involved in domestic
law enforcement “except in cases and under circumstances expressly
authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” Under the Insurrection Act of 1807,
the President may deploy armed forces domestically under extreme
circumstances but Congress has to review the action every 14 days.


Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973,
the President cannot commit troops to an armed conflict for a period
longer than 60 days without an authorization from Congress of the use of
military force or a declaration of war.


Under no circumstances in current US law is it legal for
the military to deploy itself domestically without authorization from
either the President, Congress or both.”
 It looks as if the U.S. military are actively expecting some sort of trouble in which authorization for the military’s use by the command-in-chief isn’t possible.  I wonder why they are anticipating that?  Especially when the organization most capable of arranging a situation where that authorization isn’t possible is the U.S. military.
The Ciceronian historical cycle anticipates the development of an aristocracy at this point.  It’s interesting to consider from what that aristocracy might develop, as the areas of corporate and military power appear to be the two aspects of society that are increasingly immune to government regulation.  If the Ciceronian model is still relevant, the aristocracy would likely develop out of that corporate-military intersection.

A whistle, blown

A certain corporation has been actively avoiding British taxes:

A FORMER Google executive has blown the whistle on a massive and “immoral” tax avoidance scheme that has “cheated” British taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of pounds over the past decade.

Barney Jones, 34, who worked for the internet search giant between 2002 and 2006, has lifted the lid on an elaborate structure which diverts British profits through Ireland to the Bermuda tax haven.

Although Google’s London sales staff would negotiate and sign contracts with British customers, and cash was paid into a UK bank account, deals were technically booked through its Dublin office to minimise its liabilities here. Jones, a devout Christian and father of four, is ready to hand over a cache of more than 100,000 emails and documents to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), detailing the “concocted scheme”. 

My father was sentenced for twelve years of prison for a similar
avoidance scheme that amounted to $2 million.  Granted, that was in the USA and not the UK, but I tend to doubt that Google only used this sort of scheme to divert British profits. I wonder how much prison
time the influential and politically connected Google executives will
see?  About as much as John Corzine saw for failing to return hundreds of millions of dollars on deposit with MF Global to its depositors, I expect. 

Some versions of this sort of structure are perfectly legal, of course.  If the sales staff had been in Dublin and the cash paid into Ireland, there wouldn’t be an issue; the business would be legitimately Irish.  But the more influential corporations become, the more they expect to be permitted to not have to bother with petty matters such as sovereign nations and national law when it doesn’t suit them to do so.

This should suffice to demonstrate that corporatism is manifestly not capitalism, and moreover, that it is intrinsically hostile to national interests.  Never forget that corporations are artificial creations of the State.

My favorite conspiracy ever

I can’t even begin to describe how much I love this conspiracy theory:

You know what they say about the early Middle Ages, don’t you? If you can remember them, you weren’t really there. However, if you could recall those times, was this simply because you had been making up the entire era as a state-enrolled forger? If so, this would be explicable by the Phantom Time Hypothesis (PTH), a chronological theory almost unheard of in its radicalism, and which has been propagating steadily through German academic circles since 1998.

Picture a mediæval-style ‘Man­hattan Project’ with scriptoria instead of hangars, and Gothic minuscule instead of maths. Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (980–1002) has engaged his theo­logians under the leadership of Gerbert d’Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) in a project that is among the most zealous and secretive of its kind since the facsimile houses of Alexandria were at their busiest. The gilding of narratives has many precedents in the writing of hist­ories, especially self-aggrandising ones. But the one described by the PTH takes this art of embellishment up a few more notches: more than two centuries worked up from scratch, then infiltrated into as many chronologies as possible. Only a Middle Gothic or a Byzantine fanatic could have taken it to such lengths. But it worked. And as the traces were destroyed, the histories reconfigured and rebound, no one was any the wiser. At least until Heribert Illig and his adherents apparently figured it out.

Illig’s theory is rooted in the introduct­ion of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. It had long been known that the old Julian calendar had a defect – the Julian year being roughly 11 minutes too long – and the new calendar was designed to correct this discrepancy, to the tune of making up for 10 days that gradually slipped during the years between AD 1 and AD 1582. But Illig alleged that the Julian calendar should have produced a discrepancy of not 10 but 13 days over the period in question, and concluded that roughly three centuries had been added to the calendar that had never existed. His response was to run with the notion of calendar “slack” and look for corroborat­ive evidence.

It’s even got a cool name: Phantom Time.

The scam collapses

It is becoming gradually clear, even to the True Believers in the Scientific Consensus, that the Global Warming Fairy isn’t arriving after all:

The Economist, which (despite a recent decline) remains probably the
best news magazine in the English language, now admits that (a) global
average temperature has been flat for 15 years even as CO2 levels have
been rising rapidly, (b) surface temperatures are at the lowest edge of
the range predicted by IPCC climate models, (c) on current trends, they
will soon fall clean outside and below the model predictions, (c)
estimates of climate sensitivity need revising downwards, and (d)
something, probably multiple things, is badly wrong with AGW climate
models.

Something is badly wrong with AGW climate models?  You don’t say.  It won’t be long before they’ll be similarly admitting that there is something badly wrong with the TENS models… or at least, they would if such models even existed.

Talk of “global warming” and even “climate change” has become so sparse these days that I actually had to dust off the post label.