John Stossel: More Anarchist Than Most

Posted by Gavin McInnes on February 17, 2010

The Anarchists in Vancouver are not happy about the Winter Olympics being held there and recently marched through town smashing windows, covering their faces, and yelling about everything from capitalism to the seal hunt to indigenous land. Some of their beefs are valid. The Olympics is a big waste of taxpayers’ money and in a city where one junkie dies every day, the local government could afford to be focusing on more serious problems. However, when reading the “manifestos” of today’s anarchists, one thing becomes abundantly clear, they hate capitalism more than they hate government.
I grew up going to anarchist conventions and don’t regret the various A’s I have tattooed up and down my arms in the slightest (in fact, I just got two more). We looked exactly like the 2010 Olympic protestors when we did things like protest outside the Chinese Embassy for China’s human rights violations in 1988. But back then, only a handful of anarchists would cover their faces. It drove us nuts because we were out there screaming about government ineptness and guys are acting like our adversary knows what he’s doing. “You realize your assumption that they are recording your face and putting you in some kind of massive database implies they know what they’re doing, right?” we’d ask them. This seemingly small detail is actually indicative of a much bigger split in the anarchist community: government aptitude.

“Politics is Hollywood for ugly people and the White House is just a big DMV with Greek columns out front.”
Anarchists with covered faces smashing the windows of retail stores are in fact, communists. Sure, the wage discrepancy between CEOs and factory workers is disgusting. I also hate the way big business ships in illegals and lowers the minimum wage to zero but if anyone has dealt with government at any level in their adult life they’d realize big business is the lesser of two evils by a long shot.
Today’s anarchists want money out of entrepreneur’s hands and into government hands where it can rot. They advocate unions like it was the 1930s and guys with tweed caps needed to get compensation for black lung. Nice sentiment but today’s teacher’s union is the most powerful political lobby in the world and has more cronies on both the Democratic and the Republican side than any other group in Washington. These unions are essentially mobsters who shake down anyone who dares pay electricians less than $50 an hour plus time-and-a-half for overtime plus double time-and-a-half for holidays. That’s more than architects and doctors make when they start out. Is $700 a day the fair wage the anti-capitalists want for the workingman? It’s more money than I ever made and I’m rich.
I often visit the anarchist squat Dial House where the founders of anarcho punk, Crass set up shop in the early 70s and are still there today. I had a seven-hour argument with the patriarch of the commune, Penny Rimbaud because I had the gall to point out it was ridiculous Mugabe was still alive and said if I was a Zimbabwean, he would have been blown up long ago. The Taliban did a seamless job of assassinating Massoud and all it took was a trick camera so why can’t the MDC do something similar? Like all anarchists, Rimbaud was stunned I didn’t know this wasn’t all part of the big government plan. “Zimbabwe is needed to cart diamonds out of South Africa,” he explained. “America needs him there the same way they need Iraq to get oil out.”
I don’t get it. If government is such a powerful monster, why do anarchists want to give it The Gap’s profits? They can’t seem to decide if the government is this elaborate network James Bond reports to or a quaint group of intellectuals who want to empower the poor. The truth is. It’s neither. They are not all-knowing they are know nothings. They are not a “secret society” (as Crass once said) they can’t even keep an infidelity secret. Since the president got caught using a cigar as a dildo, we’ve learned: John Edwards was screwing his biographer, governor Mark Sanford was boning his Argentinean mistress, senator Larry Craig was fishing for blowjobs in the bathroom, and Spitzer was fucking prostitutes with his socks on. Politics is Hollywood for ugly people and the White House is just a big DMV with Greek columns out front.
Danny Schechter’s new book Plunder! Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, makes it crystal clear: the government is everything bad you can say about big business but without the “employing people and manufacturing stuff” part. This sentiment is what attracted me to the anarchist movement in the first place—not Marx’s intellectual claptrap about his “dialectic.”
This is why, as an adult, I’m drawn to libertarians like John Stossel. Sure there’s flaws like a love of open borders which I see as a chance for big business to go on an exploitation bender (anarchists also want open borders which I never quite got), but Stossel’s show spends 90 percent of its time pointing out government incompetence and exposing the way they oppress the everyman. During each episode he holds up a tiny book that’s about half the size of the communist manifesto and explains this is the bill of rights and the constitution combined. Then he shows us the endless piles of documentation the government uses for even the most insignificant rule. “This is all we need,” he says holding up the small book. That’s the closest I’ve seen to a plausible anarchist goal in America—ever.
Then Stossel gets specific. We learn about swimming pools that have diving boards revoked because of impending danger and then cause more accidents because kids no longer know where the deep end is. We hear local governments in Texas are strangling restaurants with insanity like “No Outside Dancing” laws (a bizarre rule New York’s previous mayor used to close down clubs he didn’t like). Stossel is very vocal about big money firms like Goldman Sachs and how much they’ve benefited from Obama’s new big government plans. From daycare workers being muscled into joining unions to California being bankrupted by bureaucrats, John Stossel has done more to mobilize hatred for government than any punk kid in black sweatshirt could ever hope to.
If the fashionable punks in Vancouver really cared about personal freedom and really wanted to abolish as much of the government as possible, they would swallow their prejudice, tune into Fox, get over his moustache, and take notes from the most articulate and driven anarchist in America today. In short, it’s time for crusty punks to Get Stosselized!
(I’m trademarking that so don’t even think about stealing it.)
Article URL: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/john_stossel_more_anarchist_than_most/

Food expiration dates bullshit!

http://www.slate.com/id/2244249/

Consensus or Con?

 

The global warmists are the real deniers. 

By JAMES TARANTO

This column was scoffing at global warming back when global warming was still cool. But even we have been surprised at the extent of the past three months' "meltdown" of global warmism, to use the metaphor that everyone seems to have settled on.
As we've written on various occasions, we didn't know enough about the substance of the underlying science to make a judgment about it. But we know enough about science itself to recognize that the popular rendition of global warmism--dogmatic, doctrinaire and scornful of skepticism--is not the least bit scientific. The revelations in the Climategate emails show that these attitudes were common among actual scientists, not just the popularizers of their work.
Still, we would not have gone so far as to say that global warming was just a hoax. Surely there was some actual science to back it, even if there was a lot less certainty than was claimed.
Now, though, we're wondering if this was too charitable a view. London's Sunday Times reports that scientists are "casting doubt" on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution," a claim the IPCC describes as "unequivocal":

"The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change," said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

"The story is the same for each one," he said. "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development."

Meanwhile, the BBC carries an extraordinary interview with Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the central Climategate figure. In the interview, Jones admits that the periods 1860-80 and 1910-40 saw global warming on a similar scale to the 1975-98 period, that there has been no significant warming since 1995, and that the so-called Medieval Warm Period calls into question whether the currently observed warming is unprecedented.
And then there's this exchange:

When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over," what exactly do they mean--and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

So "the vast majority of climate scientists" don't think the debate is over? Someone had better tell the IPCC, Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and most of our colleagues in the media, who have long been insisting otherwise--and indeed, who continue to do so. An example is this piece from yesterday's Washington Post:

With its 2007 report declaring that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Prize--and a new degree of public trust in the controversial science of global warming.

But recent revelations about flaws in that seminal report, ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are undermining confidence not only in the panel's work but also in projections about climate change. Scientists who have pointed out problems in the report say the panel's methods and mistakes--including admitting Saturday that it had overstated how much of the Netherlands was below sea level--give doubters an opening.

It wasn't the first one. There is still a scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. But . . .

That sentence beginning "There is still . . ." seems a rote recitation of an editorial position, sort of like when a news story refers to "a procedure that opponents call 'partial-birth abortion,' " or when Reuters puts scare quotes around "terrorism." (Or, for that matter, like when we refer to John Kerry as "the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam," except that we are satirizing the practice.) The gist of the Post's story is that the so-called consensus no longer exists, if it ever did. So why is the paper compelled to assert that it still does?
For an amusing example, listen to this New Yorker podcast on Climategate, featuring writers Elizabeth Kolbert and Peter J. Boyer. Boyer acknowledges that the emails raise serious questions about Climate science, but Kolbert denies it. Listen, though, to Kolbert's tone of voice: She sounds extremely defensive, as if she feels personally threatened by questions about global-warmist doctrine.
And maybe she does. There are, no doubt, lots of true believers in global warming--not scientists, but people, including many journalists, who have embraced global warmism as a political and quasireligious doctrine based, they have been led to believe, on the authority of science.
Even Phil Jones acknowledges climate science is rife with uncertainty, but global warmism's popularizers refuse to brook any doubt or acknowledge that the "consensus" they have touted is a sham.
And they used to call us deniers.

We Blame George W. Bush 
Remember when liberating Iraq was the worst foreign-policy mistake in American history? Now it turns out to have been anything but. The Los Angeles Times's Andrew Malcolm notes that Iraq is now so successful that the Obama administration, speaking via Vice President Biden, is taking credit for it. Here is what Biden said last night on CNN's "Larry King Live":

I am very optimistic about--about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

I spent--I've been there 17 times now. I go about every two months--three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society. It's impressed me. I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.

Malcolm notes that Biden and President Obama both opposed the 2007 surge, and that Biden once had some crazy plan for partitioning Iraq. But all's well that ends well. And as for former president George W. Bush, just remember Reagan's dictum: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."

Keo Capestany, 73, got stung twice, first by a bee and then by a hospital. Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times, reports that Capestany ate a piece of steak at a picnic, not noticing that "a yellow jacket was clinging to the bottom side. It stung or bit him right on the tongue."
Capestany's tongue got swollen, and he worried that it might obstruct his breathing. So he went to the Harborview Medical Center. After almost a day on a Benadryl drip, doctors gave him a clean bill of health and sent him home from the hospital:

Two weeks later, though, he got stung again: The bill was $8,200. The IV costs alone were $2,469. The emergency room fee: $2,822. The pharmacy tab ran to $964. . . .

Capestany found out that though he spent about 22 hours there in a room, his treatment is considered "outpatient."

His insurance (Medicare Part A and his wife's policy) only give broad coverage for inpatient hospitalizations, not outpatient visits. . . .

Harborview couldn't discuss Capestany's bill with me, but said it's Medicare that sets the rules on whether someone is an inpatient or out.

In fact, Medicare puts out a six-page guide--with charts--on how to tell which is which. It's so complicated, they advise that if you're ever in a hospital for more than a few hours, you better ask about your status. I wonder: Would staff even know the answer?

It seems Capestany is stuck with the bill. And here is the lesson columnist Westneat draws from the story:

I sure don't know what would work. A single-payer system, competing insurance exchanges, health savings accounts--all seem better than what we have now.

Yet some say no, slow down. Leave health care until we repair the economy.

At $8,200 for a bee sting, health care could become all that's left of the economy.

If only the federal government ran health care, we wouldn't have to worry about Medicare rules. Brilliant!

Times to City: Drop Dead 
The Obama administration appears to be backing away from one of its most grievous mistakes, the New York Post reports:

The trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed won't be held in lower Manhattan and could take place in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, sources said last night.

Administration officials said that no final decision had been made but that officials of the Department of Justice and the White House were working feverishly to find a venue that would be less expensive and less of a security risk than New York City.

The back-to-the-future Gitmo option was reported yesterday by Fox News and was not disputed by White House officials.

The Guantanamo detention facility, of course, was supposed to have closed a week and a half ago. So much for that. MSNBC.com quotes Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, repeating a threat Obama himself once made:

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to meet justice and he's going to meet his maker," said President Barack Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs. "He will be brought to justice and he's likely to be executed for the heinous crimes that he committed in killing and masterminding the killing of 3,000 Americans. That you can be sure of."

A few years ago, we asked then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales why the Bush administration had placed such emphasis on trying terrorists for war crimes, as opposed to detaining them to keep them off the battlefield. He gave us an unsatisfying answer--something about how the families of terrorism's victims wanted to see the perpetrators "brought to justice." It occurred to us later that he might have been obliquely referring to the prospect of an execution--something he couldn't mention explicitly because it would create the appearance that the U.S. was running show trials.
It seems the Obama administration wants people to think it is running show trials.
The New York Times predictably denounces the administration for failing to stick to its insane position. The editorial titled "It Happened in Our Backyard"--in fact, the Times offices are miles away from Ground Zero and the federal courthouse where the trials would have taken place--begins with the assurance that "we sympathized with the concerns about security and inconvenience raised by the Justice Department's plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed" in Manhattan.
No such sympathy was evident, though, in the original editorial praising the decision in November. Here is what the paper said back then about critics of the administration's plan: "Republican lawmakers and the self-promoting independent senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, pounced on the chance to appear on television." The Times is as ideologically zealous as ever, but at least its editors now feel obliged to give lip service to New Yorkers who live in the real world.