Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlain Day

The state of American justice has never troubled me as much as it has in recent days as I have digested the plight of American blogger Aaron Walker (aka “Aaron Worthing”), who has been subjected to numerous frivolous lawsuits by convicted Speedway bomber Brett Kimberlin for writing about Kimberlain's criminal past and offering "light, free legal help" to one Seth Allen, who himself was being sued by Mr. Kimberlain.

Mr. Walker seems to have incontrovertible proof that Mr. Kimberlain perjured himself, misled Maryland Courts, and attempted to frame him for a crime, and yet the Maryland Prosecutor seems to think there is little to be gained by prosecuting Mr. Kimberlain for these alleged criminal acts.

Michelle Malkin:

This is a convoluted, ongoing nightmare that combines abuse of the court system, workplace intimidation, serial invasions of privacy, perjury, and harassment of family members. [Stacy] McCain was forced to move with his family out of his house this week, and has just gotten a small taste of what Aaron and Patterico have been enduring over the past year. Aaron and his wife were fired from their jobs after their employer feared the office would be targeted next. Convicted bomber Kimberlin has filed bogus “peace orders” against Aaron, when it is the Walkers who are the victims, not the perpetrators.

You'll have to read it yourself to believe it.  

Warning: It is a l-o-n-g read; approximately 28,000 words.

Update: An interview with Stacy McCain.

Distrusting the State

The plight of Jessie Sansone -- the Kitchener, ON, father who was stripped searched and detained and charged with possession of a firearm by local police, and whose house was searched without a warrant on there mere suspicion that a firearm might be present in the home, because his 4-year-old daughter drew a picture of a man fighting "monsters" and "bad guys" with a gun -- sends chills up and down my spine.

Like Charles Adler and hosts of other conservatives, I am generally pro-police. I have friends who are RCMP officers. I believe every province should have a police force that enforces and upholds the law. They are a critical component of the justice system. Like most other law-abiding parents, I presume, I teach my kids that the police are good guys; in the battle between good and evil they are for us; they are here to serve the public and, as much as possible, protect the citizenry from the bad guys.

But....

When I hear stories like that of Jessie Sansone, my trust in the police is eroded. When I hear of the nonsensical, reflexive, blinkered reaction of police to the mere mention of a firearm in the hands of a law-abiding citizen, I question whether or not the police and the state are really on my side, that of a law-abiding citizen who may or may not own a firearm. When I hear about the plight of the late Shafia girls, for whom police did little to nothing out of cultural sensitivity, and juxtapose that against the plight of Mr. Sansone, a white male who -GASP!- might own a firearm, I find myself doubting the objectivity and judgment of police and the wider state apparatuses. When I reflect on other gross injustices, such as the two-tier injustice we know as Caledonia, I wonder if I am teaching my kids the honest truth about the relationship between police, the wider state, and the law-abiding non-minority Canadian citizens.

Each time a law-abiding citizen is presumed by the state to be guilty and compelled to prove their innocence I lose a little more trust in the relationship between the law-abiding the the state. In the case of Mr. Sansone, the education system, the family and community services system and the police -- all arms of the state -- let him down. With a few simple questions via phone or in person at any juncture along the way this entire episode could have been avoided. But, no. Instead the state when into reflex mode, shut off all brain activity, stopped thinking, stopped asking questions, stopped presuming innocence, and just ran roughshod over the rights of a law-abiding citizen.  

Because it could.

It's the last part that I see as the big problem exposed by Mr. Sansone's story. The state did not have to get a warrant, did not have to demonstrate just cause, did not have to presume anyone's innocence, did not have to question, did not have to call, did not have to discuss. They had full authority to enter the man's home, search his belongings, remove his children, put them in custody of the state, compel his wife to answer questions, detain and strip search him. All based on presumptions stemming from an asinine, politically-correct, myopic interpretation of a childhood drawing.

That, my friends, is wrong. From start to finish, it is wrong.

Yet nobody from the state is apologizing. Because they don't think any wrong has been done.

Therein lies the disconnect between Canadian common sense and the politically-correct over-empowered State apparatchiks, whose distrust of the law-abiding is palpable and complete.

And to think that I am moving to Ontario and will probably put my kids in public school. Ye gods.

Abstinence & Monogamy

As I have stated many times in the past, the ONLY way to prevent HIV/AIDS....    (H/T)

What has shown the potential to stop the epidemic is well known: behaviour change strategies used in Uganda and (less famously) in Zimbabwe. Uganda turned its epidemic around in the early 1990s with its ABC programme focusing on abstinence for the unmarried and “zero grazing” for the rest. This has since been undermined by aid organizations pushing condoms. Zimbabwe in the ten years to 2007 brought its HIV prevalence down from 27 per cent to 16 per cent -- mainly, according to researchers, through reductions in extramarital, commercial, and casual sexual relations”.

Edward Green, the Harvard researcher, who stumbled upon Uganda’s secret in 1993 has been trying ever since to get recognition for behavior change as the most effective means of dealing with the AIDS epidemic. In his recent book, Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment has Betrayed the Developing World (2011), he recounts how, at an AIDS conference in Washington in 2004 his presentation received muted applause.

All that stands in the way is hedonism.

But, when a female college student came to the microphone and exclaimed, “I think people should be able to have as much sex as they want, with as many people as they want,” she received a thunderous, standing ovation.

Yes, logic and self-preservation and delayed gratification be damned.

The Apostle Paul: "People will be lovers of themselves... lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God."

Leadership Fail

Ontario's Dalton McGuinty.

Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.

Incredible.

We remember them

They gave all of their tomorrows so we could have our today. Do take time to pause, remember and give thanks to Almighty God for the sacrifices made for our freedom. And if you know a Veteran, shake his or her hand today, show your appreciation and offer sincere thanks.

Timely message for Nova Scotia

It's not too late... yet.

How Unions Hijacked the Ohio Economy.

"The Occupiers are right when they say our system of wealth redistribution is broken"

"But they’re wrong about what broke it."

Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail) hits the ball out of the park and over the parking lot into freeway traffic.

The richest 1 per cent are not exactly starving out the working poor.... The problem is, our system redistributes the wealth from young to old, and from middle-class workers in the private sector to inefficient and expensive unions in the public sector.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of this redistribution is the higher-education industry. In Canada, we subsidize it directly. In the U.S., it’s subsidized by a vast system of student loans, which have allowed colleges to jack up tuition to sky-high levels. U.S. student debt has hit the trillion-dollar mark. Both systems crank out too many sociologists and too few mechanical engineers. These days, even law-school graduates are having trouble finding work. That’s because the supply has increased far faster than the demand.

The voices of Occupy Wall Street, argues Mr. Anderson and others, are the voices of the downwardly mobile who are acutely aware of their threatened social status and need someone to blame. These are people who weren’t interested in just any white-collar work. They wanted to do transformational, world-saving work – which would presumably be underwritten by taxing the rich. They now face the worst job market in a generation. But their predicament is at least in part of their own making. And none of the solutions they propose will address their problem.

Do send Wente's article to all the high school and university students you know, for economic lessons are much too painful to be learned through hindsight alone.

The coming generation(s) of potential workers must be taught the fundamental economic concept of labour value. Not all labour is of equal value, and the value of labour is variable, affected mainly by supply and demand.

The number one priority after high school is not to party and have a good time or to pip off to college or uni to get out from your parents' home. No, the number one priority is to obtain training in skills that are valuable to individuals and businesses -- aka The Market -- thus increasing the odds of finding gainful employment with an income level sufficient for sustaining oneself and (potentially) a family.

Get that single priority mixed up and you will likely wind up highly indebted and working low pay jobs, or worse, not working at all and living in a tent in downtown Toronto or Vancouver illogically complaining about how "the man" has robbed you of your future.

What does this mean in reality? It means you need to consider studying fields like mathematics, business, engineering, medicine and computer science, or pursuing specialization is particular trades, such as plumbing, construction, electrical, welding, etc. so that you have a footing of knowledge and skill that lines up with demand today and is more likely to line up with demand for the foreseeable future. It means putting educational dollars to work today to increase the odds generating income so that, should you choose to do so, you can finance a feel-good period of study that does not generate income later in life... AFTER you are earning income.

The lie at the heart of higher education is that you will be paid for effort alone, that you will earn big money because you did the work of completing a degree. The world just doesn't work that way. The world pays those whose knowledge and expertise bring value to the consumer and enable them to make money more efficiently.

H/T 

Update 15:30: "And if you have any intention of building up a political case for bailing out your bad decisions, you might start with taking even one percent responsibility for them." Burn.

How's that Arab Spring working for you?

Egypt is experiencing the new found "freedom" of sharia.

Arab Spring, Egyptian edition: a 17 year old Christian in a high school in Mallawi was ordered by his teacher to cover up a tattoo of a cross on his wrist. True to his faith, he refused to do so and instead exposed a crucifix that he wore around his neck. He was then beaten to death by his teacher and two Muslim students....

"Scientific heresy"

To whet your appetite:

The [IPCC's] glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw*, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

Do send it to your friends and family.

The employee fights back

As I commented previously, the spectacle of irate customers jumping over counters at fast-food chains to assault employees, and/or ransacking the restaurant, will end only when the assailants are met with equal or greater opposing force, which police cannot logically provide because they cannot be everywhere at the same time.

The latest scene: Greenwich Village, NYC. Two punk females thought they could assault an employee, a man we should add, without consequences. Except this time Rayon McIntosh fought back. Remember that name, folks. We need more like him. Videos: 1, 2.

It appeared to have started when two female customers argued and yelled obscenities at the cashier when he questioned a $50 bill they gave him.

One of the female customers then slapped the cashier. A woman is then seen jumping over the counter while the other woman goes behind the register.

That’s when the cashier can be seen on the video disappearing into the back of the fast-food restaurant. He comes back with a metal rod and begins hitting the women.

And they deserved every last blow. They started it, he finished it, well I might add. They are NOT victims.

But, hang on, this is America, and a black man having already been assaulted and now under threat laying a beating on two black women is a problem. Outrageously, Rayon "was arrested and charged with two counts of felony assault and criminal possession of a weapon." Apparently, he should have stopped hitting the two females once they were down, even though the videos show they kept trying to get up.

Worse still:

The owner of that McDonald’s said in a statement that she was "disturbed" by what happened and said the cashier is no longer employed there.

The absolutely wrong message being sent to the public and the remaining employees: Defend the business, defend yourself, and you'll at least get fired, if not arrested.

For utter shame.

McIntosh questioned a counterfeit bill. He was doing his job and protecting his employer. His actions prevented possible assaults on other employees. The incapacitated females certainly weren't going to trash her store. This owner should be selling Rayon McIntosh t-shirts at the front of her shop and hoisting a banner across the front of her store saying "Rayon works here." Yet what does she turn around and do? Fire the man who defended himself from further assault and did his job as an employee.

Alas, for every Rayon there's at least one shortsighted owner who don't seem to understand that each time they buckle in the face of the unruly mob they invite further attacks and financial loss. People like this will get what they deserve, just like the two presumptuous black females who thought they could follow unscathed in the footsteps of those who went on similar rampages before them.

The greedy anti-greedy

"Occupy Wall Street" is going global.

The irony of "anti-greed protestors" demanding that the state use policy to close the gap between the rich and the poor would be amusing, if not downright hilarious, were it not so ill-conceived, short-sighted and dangerous.

Cleansed of Jews

Remember: this is coming from a PLO official, the supposed "good guys,"  as opposed to the terrorists, Hamas.

On the desired WestBank-Gaza Arab state:

The future independent Palestinian state will not include a Jewish minority, a top Palestinian official told USA Today on Wednesday, adding that it was in the best interest of both peoples to "be separated."

One assumes the WestBank-Gaza Arabs no longer have a problem with the "apartheid wall" either, which has definitely proven to be in the best interest of the Jews.

As I've been saying for years....

Climate cycles are driven by that big ball of fire in the sky, not farting cows and long-haul trucking.

The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

Well, DUH! (H/T)

First Egypt...

Then Libya.

"Islam is the Religion of the State, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia)"

Funny, how those "moderate" Muslim peoples, if left to their own devices, turn to radical sharia each and every time the ruthless strong man of the region is removed.

So long, Jack

I oppose practically every policy statement of the NDP. But Jack Layton took the party to new heights and served his party and constituents well. For that, he is to be commended. He will be missed.

May he rest in peace.