Once again, Americans set a new record for contributions to charity.
American donors gave $295.2 Billion to charity in 2006. This beat all previous records, including the 2005 record that resulted from hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma and the tsunami which struck Asia.
This data is generated by the Giving USA Foundation from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
According to the Charities Aid Foundation, Americans give 1.7% of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to charity, while the British give .73% and the French give .14%.
MSNBC recently published an excellent article on professional journalists who give money to politicians. The article, The list: Journalists who wrote political checks, is a classic piece of investigative journalism by Bill Dedman.
Dedman identified 143 journalists who had given money to political causes. He found 125 journalists who had given to Democrats and liberal causes, 16 journalists who had given to Republican or conservative causes, and two journalists who had contributed money to both sides.
Why is this a big deal? Most news organizations have ethics rules which bar their reporters from participating in partisan politics. Many of these people could be fired for their actions.
Many “professional” journalists consider themselves “above” politics. They somehow believe that they are immune from bias and that everything they report is “objective.”
What a pile of horse manure! None of us are objective. The only path to objectivity starts with accepting and understanding our personal biases. These people are deluding themselves, and then they are attempting to delude their audiences.
From a purely political perspective, we can plainly see that almost eight times as many journalists contributed to left-wing causes than right-wing causes. Media bias is real and it is strongly bent to the left.
I would be OK with this bias if these holier-than-thou liberals would just come out into the open and admit their biases. Instead, they lie to us and claim an objectivity which does not — and can not — exist.
The Internet is slowly releasing the stranglehold mass-media has held on news reporting for the last several hundred years. This change is being accelerated by the realization that the “professional” journalists employed in mass media have been lying to us for decades. If mass media wants to continue to exist in the future, it is going to have to come clean with it’s audience. The “professional” journalists are going to have to admit their personal biases and engage their audiences in an honest dialog about the issues. If they can’t honestly and intelligently support their personal beliefs, they should be replaced by a new generation of journalists who can.
I just took my truck and my wife’s car to get the government mandated emissions tests. There was no technical need for the tests, the vehicles are both too new to possibly fail to meet emissions requirements. However, the government requires that we waste our time with this idiocy to pacify the fascist environmentalists.
The emissions testing facility doesn’t accept credit cards or debit cards, only cash. Except, they don’t take just any cash. They don’t give change. They demand exact change. Great customer service, No?
Why should they bother with customer service? They are a privately-owned government-sponsored monopoly. They charge $25 for two minutes work and they always have a line of people waiting to be fleeced. And yet, with all of those customers, somehow they can’t make change. Hmmm…
This isn’t an oddity. This is the natural result of government coercion. Their “customers” have no freedom of choice, so why should they bother to pay any attention to their customers desires?
Each American who is forced to participate in this fleecing loses not only $25, but also the time off work which is required to comply with this idiotic and useless bureaucratic bullying.
It’s a damned shame that we as a people have let our nation come to this, where we exist as slaves to our own government.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Twiss, a Class A moron, has charged nine people with plotting to overthrow the brutal Communist government of Laos.
Chief among those being charged is General Vang Pao, a hero to both the Hmong people and freedom lovers everywhere. General Pao acted as a major U.S. ally while serving in the Royal Army of Laos and combating both the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese Army.
Also charged were:
Lt. Colonel Harrison Ulrich Jack, founder of the Hmong Emergency Relief Organization and president of the Youth Development Academies of America
Lo Thao of, president of United Hmong International
Youa True Vang, founder of Fresno California’s Hmong International New Year
Hue Vang, a former Clovis police officer
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Twiss says that “thousands of co-conspirators remain at large.” I’d like to include myself in that group.
I would be proud to include myself in any group which opposes tyranny anywhere on the planet. I would be proud to include myself in any group which opposes the murderous Communist dictators who currently possess a stranglehold on the people of Laos.
I am ashamed that our own government is so lost and confused that it is actively opposing freedom for the people of Laos. Freedom isn’t a uniquely American right. Freedom is the most fundamental of all human rights. It is to our shame that we deny this freedom to the people of Laos.
FoxNews published an article titled Newly Released CIA Documents Show Agency’s Dark Past which talks about a number of abuses of power on the part of the CIA thirty years ago which are now being declassified.
While some of the abuses are egregious and should never be repeated, quite a few of the listed “abuses” are not abuses at all — but are reasonable tasks which should and must be accomplished to protect our national security and the freedom which we enjoy because of it.
The “two-year physical confinement” in the mid-1960s of a Soviet defector.
Sorry Yuri. We screwed up. Yuri Nosenko was a legitimate defector who would have been able to provide invaluable assistance to the United States — had we believed him. Instead, we thought he was a fake — a KGB plant. David Murphy (Chief of the Soviet Division of the CIA), Richard Helms (Director of the covert side of the CIA) Lawrence Houston (the CIA’s legal counsel), Nicholas Katzenbach (Deputy U.S. Attorney-General) and Robert F. Kennedy (Attorney General) imprisoned Nosenko.
Sorry Yuro, but you were not a citizen. You were a defector. You had very few legal rights. What we did wasn’t “nice” and it was a huge error, but it should not be a crime. I’m glad it was eventually straightened out.
Assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro.
Assassinating foreign leaders who are opposed to U.S. interests should be the job of the CIA. I know that it isn’t currently legal — but it should be.
Right now, it’s easier for us to go to war and kill hundreds of thousands of underlings than it is for us to whack the one bad seed at the center of a rotting country.
We should kill Castro, and Chavez, and Mugabe, and Kim Jong Il, and probably a dozen other murdering dictators. The world will be a better place without them.
CIA wiretapping in 1963 of two columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, following a newspaper column in which national security information was disclosed.
Technically, domestic wiretapping isn’t the CIA’s job. They should have called the FBI, but we all know how poorly the agencies worked together before the Bush Administrations recent reorganization.
Domestic wiretapping for national security purposes. My heart bleeds for the two columnists who endangered U.S. national security to sell more newspapers. Wait, no it doesn’t. I really don’t care that their privacy was invaded and they didn’t even know about it.
The “personal surveillances” in 1972 of muckraking columnist Jack Anderson and staff members, including Les Whitten and Brit Hume
The CIA followed these guys around. Big deal. I could do the same today, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. I can follow anyone I want. There are people who do this for a living. I’m not even talking about private investigators, I’m talking about paparazzi!
The personal surveillance of Washington Post reporter Mike Getler
Ditto. Reporters usually follow people around. Now they get a taste of their own medicine.
CIA screening programs, beginning in the early 1950s and lasting until 1973, in which mail coming into the United States was reviewed and “in some cases opened” from the Soviet Union and China.
Sorry folks, but international mail from hostile nation-states deserves to be opened. We were involved in a cold war where hundreds of millions of lives were are stake. In that context, no one cares about your personal mail. I’m sure that the CIA didn’t tell your wife that you were cheating on her.
Summary
The majority of these actions by the CIA had the net effect of increasing freedom, not decreasing it. Except for Yuri Nosenko, no one’s freedom was limited by these actions. Again, sorry Yuri.
Freedom is the most precious thing that we have in this life, and these actions by the CIA — overall — helped to preserve the freedom which we now enjoy.
Yes, the CIA could have been less aggressive in its defense of our freedoms, but is that really what we want? Do we want milquetoast defenders of our most important rights. I do not believe so.
As Barry Goldwater stated in 1963, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
The Canadian National Post has just published an excellent article titled Read the Sunspots, by R. Timothy Patterson. Dr. Patterson is a professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre at Carleton University.
Patterson is one of a growing number of scientists who want to put the “science” back into “Earth Science.” As such, he is at odds with politicians like Al Gore who treat Earth Science more as a religion than a scientific endeavor.
The article documents the correlation between climate change and solar activity. As we all know, the Sun is the most significant factor which effects the Earths climate. Moreover, Dr. Patterson warns that we could soon be in for a major risk of global cooling:
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada.
The article contains a very useful list of links to similar scholarly articles on the environment which have been published by the National Post. The entire series is highly recommended.
For those not familiar with Vaclav Claus, he is not only a respected economist and professor, he is also the current President of the Czech Republic. Claus has never been afraid to speak the truth, and now he had identified his greatest opponent since the fall of global communism — radical environmentalists.
Claus has written an op-ed piece for the Financial Times titled Freedom, Not Climate, Is At Risk. In the article, Claus takes a hard line against these pseudo-scientific enemies of human progress.
As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.
The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.
The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.
The entire article is well worth reading, and forwarding to your friends.
JunkScience.com is one of the best web sites on the Internet. Webmaster and author Steven Milloy is a careful researcher in the fields of science which are overpopulated with undereducated politicos.
Steven carefully dissects groundless pseudo-scientific claims regarding the environment, pollution, global warming, RF emissions, biotechnology, genetically engineered foods, and any other scientific topic where politicos normally feel safe to spew junk science at us.
Read JunkScience.com and inoculate yourself against the disease of ignorance.
