Friday, May 24, 2019

The Global Warming Religion Scam

When this global warming scam first started to get publicity, about thirty or so years ago now, I can still remember my exact thoughts, "Well, if this is true, it will be the end of the debate about communism vs. freedom."

I don't think it's a coincidence that it all started at around the time the Soviet Union cracked up. That represented a kind of turning point.

Prior to the Soviet crack-up, the debate was that communism was incapable of delivering the high standards of living "the masses" in capitalist countries had come to take for granted. After the crack-up, that debate seemed to have been finally settled for most people. But the die-hard communists, not willing to let go of their sick ideology, "recycled" themselves into global warming alarmists. The whole premise of the debate was switched into - not that capitalism delivered a high standard of living - but that a high standard of living would destroy the planet - so we couldn't have it anyway. And since we couldn't have a high standard of living, we would have to settle for communism. It was really quite a brilliant bait and switch.

Even though the Soviet Union had collapsed, the communist ideology had already totally infiltrated most of the educational institutions in the West. The use of propaganda and public school brainwashing techniques thus took on the aura of a new religion due to religion's brilliant track record of trapping human minds into believing the babbling fools of the Marxist priesthood.

As Ayn Rand famously stated, more or less, "Faith - that alleged shortcut to knowledge - is nothing more than a short-circuit destroying the mind."

The rest is history.


Greenpeace Founder: Global Warming Hoax Pushed by Corrupt Scientists ‘Hooked on Government Grants’

Monday, May 20, 2019

More Uber BS

Again with the mega BULLSHIT in reporting on the crisis in the taxi industry. Consider this disgusting paragraph from the NYT report:

"The medallion bubble burst in late 2014. Uber and Lyft may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for this article, including many lenders, said inflated prices and risky lending practices would have caused a collapse even if ride-hailing had never been invented."

If the article were truthful, it would have instead said,

"The medallion bubble burst in late 2014. Uber and Lyft CAUSED the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for this article, including many lenders, said inflated prices and risky lending practices MAY HAVE caused a collapse even if ride-hailing had never been invented."

Why do they publish such misleading BS? Are the writers ignorant? Or are they dishonest?

For those who still don't understand, here is the skinny. The crisis was precipitated when governments allowed corporate power to buy and muscle their way around existing taxi regulations.

It's that simple.

NYC Taxis Medallions and Suicides

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Taxi Safety

To Styx's point about the internet, "People are too fucking saturated with material all the time to actually go out and snap and be violent."

Right on man!

It totally jibes with my observations over the last few years as a cab driver.

Pre-internet, a lot of passengers with a chip on their shoulder, or bored with existence, or terrified about the cost, or just looking for trouble would focus their attention on the driver. He should have run that yellow light, or cut through that alley or parking lot, or the meter is somehow rigged, or he is "going the long way around," or driving too slow, or driving too fast, or going exactly the speed limit, or "what nationality are you, I mean, originally."

They don't even ask whether anyone has ever puked in your cab anymore.

They are on another planet.

Since so many of them are now glued to their zombiephones, most of those "issues" have evaporated into the ether.

While I am absolutely no fan of the digital zombiefication of the population, this phenomenon did not escape my attention.

Forget about cameras and shields. Just install tablets and free wi-fi in all taxis.

Saturday, May 11, 2019

You Can't Eat Your Cellphone but...

Holy molie!

I was listening to Peter's podcast when he started talking about Bitcoin. He speculated that the average cellphone contains $30 or $40 worth of gold. So I decided to Google the question and quickly learned that the average cellphone actually contains $1.82 worth of gold!

I just threw out one of my old cellphones a while ago. I wish I had used Google first. "There's more gold in a pound of electronics than a pound of gold ore, so it's certainly worth it."

I start to wonder if I should have thrown out my old TVs and computers as well. Should I buy a smelter from Amazon for about CDN$ 659.59 plus FREE Shipping?

Should I have held on to that cellphone? Currently, $1.82 US is worth about $2.43 Canadian. Yeah, it's a pretty big package for storage of a measly $2.43 so when it comes down to it, I ask which would I rather own? A one-ounce Canadian Maple currently worth about $1285 US, or 706 used cellphones weighing about 2,824 ounces? 2,824 Ounces = about 176 pounds. Does anybody buy used cellphones?

Also, there are over 7 billion cellphones in the world today, representing some US $12.74 billion worth of gold. There are more cellphones than there are peoplekinds.

I'm just kicking the can around here but I think I can draw at least one conclusion. Maybe you can't eat your gold, but without it, there can't be any Bitcoin either.

And then there are computers and TVs, and so on.

Oh, and one more thing. When Peter asked the audience how many of them own gold he's right. They should have all raised their hands.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Speech is the New Oil

And fuck it's getting serious.

Ten years for downloading a video?

Fourteen years for sharing?

Within a half an hour of learning of the attack, I quickly found a copy of the video, though it took several attempts, and I downloaded it and copied it to a microSD card. I am teaching myself to do that reflexively given the ever-shortening lifespan of information on the web that hasn't yet been cleansed or aborted by "the authorities" to protect me from harmful knowledge.

Thank goodness Canada isn't New Zealand yet. At least I hope.

But in case no one noticed... I didn't share that video. Then again, I would not have shared it anyway. It's just brutally pointless insanity. And to be frank, the reason I watched it was to be armed with the truth in case the lying media tried to spin it to their socialistic advantage. I'm stubborn that way. If the consensus tells me I shouldn't do something, I reflexively do the opposite. That's part of why I still smoke.

I watch these things because I want to know the truth. The whole ugly truth.

And the truth in some parts of the world these days is very ugly. No wonder so many people are willing to just bury their heads in the sand.

I get it.

But is it really a good idea to deny the public access to relevant information? What the fuck is up with that?

Do you know what my mother told me? She was eleven years old when the second world war started and she lived in London. She told me she really had no idea at the time of what war meant. When she saw soldiers marching off to the meat-grinder, she literally believed that they had fist-fights. Later though, her family had to scurry off to the air-raid shelter when the Nazi bombers paid a visit, she developed a new perspective on war. Her older sister caught a piece of shrapnel from a buzz bomb that went off at the top of their street. Her brother came home after being shot down over Germany. They all thought he was dead but he showed up at the door one day. His hair had turned white.

Her father lost a leg in the First World War. I later learned that he had also lost a brother. No wonder he wasn't happy when his daughter brought home a new boyfriend who happened to be a Kraut.

These were things my mother told me. She was learning.

And now the infowar is more intense than ever.

Man, I wish I were a sports fan.

As a youngster, I was totally enthralled by war. My favourite toys were guns and soldiers. During my teen years, I grew up watching the news reports of the Vietnam war. Seeing the medevacs and the lacerated men being loaded on to the helicopters, and I didn't realize it was happening, but by the time I was seventeen I was TOTALLY CURED of any desire to join the army.

Vietnam was the "Television War." The ubiquitous coverage of front line realities influenced public opinion and the U.S. pulled out.

I'm not going to go around googling at this point to find out if the kind of news coverage we saw during the Vietnam war has been severely restricted since then, though I did see such a claim being made on some documentary, and I strongly suspect it has.

The people in power, those who start and then profit from war, DON'T WANT the people to know how terrible it really is. Else they would have a so much harder a time selling it.

Look at all of those young men, teenagers, in 1914, on all sides, waving their hats wildly, beaming from ear to ear, worried that they might have been too late and they will miss "the action!" And then when they got to the front and saw all of the shredded human bodies and smelled the stink of decomposition they had some serious second thoughts. Unfortunately, they were now in it. There was no turning back. And even if they tried, they'd end up in front of a firing squad.

This ought to make it very clear why the free flow of information is a dire threat to those who wield the real power. For one thing, and I challenge anyone to disagree with me on this point, if the entire population were to be truly educated about the horrors of war, they would avoid it at all costs.

Babies on bayonets in WWI to Babies being thrown out of incubators in Kuwait.

Information is a powerful weapon and, like guns, should be kept out of the hands of the population. Or so our masters tell us.

The sad truth is, we here in the west only had free speech so long as we didn't also have a microphone or a digital microphone. You could blab all you wanted, and send letters to the editor which rarely got printed.

Someone else was always in control of the dominant narrative. Then the internet was born. As soon as the information monopolists realized that control was slipping from their grasp, freedom of speech was no longer important to them. Jeff Zucker wins the First Amendment Award. What a fucking joke.

Yeah. That was your fucking "freedom of speech." I used to hassle my old man, who fought for the losing side, about how Nazi Germany didn't have freedom of speech. He told me that was bullshit. Then he explained that if he wanted to say that Hitler was an asshole, he could do so without fear of repercussion. I had to get a few years older before it occurred to me to ask him, "But what if you were speaking in a beer hall with a microphone, or publishing a newspaper. Would you still be allowed to call Hitler an asshole?" (It was still better than Stalin's Soviet Union at the time. In that country, you couldn't even *think* that Stalin was an asshole. You could even get five years in the Gulag for nothing at all, and one guy even bragged that he was given ten. And how did he know how to read your mind? He didn't have to. If you were dead you were not a threat. Pretty fucking simple math for a tyrant. Same goes when your Youtube channel is deleted. "No man? No problem.")

From the little I know of Nazi history their version of the internet was print and radio. Did they really have freedom of speech? Not bloody likely.

In the 15th century, the internet was the Guttenberg press. There was a lot of censorship and blood spilled over that too.

And from what I see going on around me these days the same patterns emerge.

Fucking digital book burnings.

And it ought not surprise anyone that the war on free speech is now in full swing.

Speech is the new oil.

===

https://www.bitchute.com/video/pOQQwuufNIA/

===

Saturday, March 16, 2019

Cab Driver Philosophy

Eddie the cab driver was complaining to me just last night about one of his cheapskate customers.

The super-generous liberals (aka - socialists) in charge of Hamilton's taxi regulations really "pinched out a loaf" of phony SJW legislation back in the 1990's. For those who don't know, taxi meter rates are mandated in most Western cities. To show how compassionate they were, they came up with the mandatory 10% "seniors discount." Unlike any other business that offers discounts to the customers though, the business owners did not absorb the discount. The drivers did.

I hated it from the start. It wasn't because I am greedy and cheap, which I am. It was the principle of the thing. Why should seniors, whose only real collective achievement is to reach a certain age, be entitled to any special treatment? I've always believed in equality under the law. This "discount" set an ugly precedent. If seniors should be entitled to special treatment, why not the disabled? Pregnant mothers? Welfare recipients? Students? Mental retards? You know how this story ends. Special discounts for blacks for "reparations" and eventually special discounts for Muslims just because Canada is such a "welcoming" society. A caste society. A total departure from a thousand year evolution of Western law and tradition which stressed equal rights over status.

It's a "slippery slope" as that fucking asshole McGuinty said before making it illegal for adults to smoke in cars if children were present. Fucking right it is.

In practice, it often meant that the sub-minimum wage cab driver would pick up a senior's couple with their suitcases, returning from trips to Europe or wherever, on their way to their lovely homes on Auchmar or Scenic, with several shiny new cars in the driveway, or wherever and he would, by force of law, have to provide the 10% discount directly out of his own pocket. Such compassion! The driver's kids would now have to wait another hour for the loaf of bread daddy was supposed to bring home after that trip.

Thankfully, many decent seniors refused to lower themselves to this crude form of legal robbery. But many milked it for all it was worth.

At one time, I bought one of those receipt books from an office supply store and started filling in the discount amount. Then I would get the passenger to sign it acknowledging the transfer of wealth from the poor cab driver to the often well-off senior. My plan was to collect these receipts and then submit them to City Hall for reimbursement. Of course, I never followed through because I knew my odds of success.

Also, in practice, the law created a conflict between driver and customer, and inevitably to anyone who understands the rudiments of economics, it resulted in inferior service to senior citizens. They became the new "persecuted minority," a status they now shared with another group who always complained of never being able to hail a cab. (Of course, the politicians brilliantly respond by writing laws to prohibit discrimination. If it don't fit, use a hammer.)

Aside: A funny thing I noticed when I was in Cuba. In this commie dictatorship I observed people driving around not wearing seat-belts or motorcycle helmets. At least the Cuban commies were smart enough to know they couldn't mandate the use of things that were not available in their country. Only capitalist countries can afford real socialism.

For my last ten years in the business I gave up on the aggressive hustle and just nested at the bus terminal fishing for walk-in customers. I saw the look on cabbie's faces a million times when some old lady with a walker emerged from the main doors and started hobbling over to the cab line. It was hilarious how often the first cabbie in the lineup would be glued to their terminal hoping to get a dispatch order so they could fuck off before the passenger got to their car. Or the way their eyes would dart around desperately hoping to see a more ambulatory and youthful customer who would rescue them and wouldn't demand their "senior's discount" and would often even tip.

Cabbies could be quite resourceful too. I had befriended a Sudanese driver who worked the bus. He was quite the character. He told me about this other immigrant driver whose trick was to suddenly go to the washroom when a senior with a walker, or a fold-up wheelchair, came out of those doors. The plan was calculated to induce the customer to walk to the next cab in the lineup. He was basically dumping his shit downstream. Like that character in Medieval London who directed the effluent from his indoor privy into the next-door neighbor's basement.

Well, knowing the game, my Sudanese friend was second in line when the asshole, and I mean "asshole" suddenly darted to the washroom. But my friend was ready. As soon as he saw that, he left his car and went to the phone booth at John and Hunter to pretend he was making a call. So the old lady ended up patiently waiting for the first driver to return from his phony washroom trip.

Fuck we had a good laugh about that.

I had my own run-ins with that same slimy cabbie. It got tense at times. He finally stopped trying to fuck me around.

One of the first things I learned at the school of libertarian thought was that government programs, ostensibly aimed at ameliorating the conditions of the down-trodden, almost always end up making their conditions worse.

A short list:

Rent controls - housing shortages
Minimum wages - unemployment
Drug prohibition - organized crime, money laundering, civil forfeiture, and epidemic drug use
Old age pensions - old age poverty
Welfare checks - single mothers

and so on.
and so on.

Multiply this egalitarian obsession across a million different human interactions and you end up with a less happy society. And not one in a million can understand why.

Forget about finding answers from Karl Marx. That guy was fucking clueless.

Eventually you end up with civilizations like India or China (pre-western influence) where the strictures imposed by law or by custom become so intricate, so embedded, so reflexive, so unconscious, and so wasteful that material progress becomes impossible for millennia. And even if a few people understand the cause, they are too few, and their books get burned, or banned by Amazon.com, and that civilization can stumble on for thousands of years before some natural or man-made cataclysm FORCES revolutionary change. The black plague had such an impact on Europe. After that they started to understand the importance of proper garbage and sewage disposal, and other advances which I am not knowledgeable enough to provide examples of.

So. Back to Eddie the Cabbie.

He drove a senior customer who demanded her senior's discount. The fare was $15.90 so the discount calculated as 10% of the last full dollar on the meter (How many actually know that?) was $1.50. Eddie rounded it off to $14. The passenger gave him $16 and said, "keep the change."

This little vignette demonstrates the extent of sophistication the cheapskate (usually a virtue-signalling leftist) is willing to employ in order to hide their cheapskatism. Eddie wondered why the passenger put him through all of this extra work when she could have simply said, "Here's $16. Keep the change."

But seniors, more than anyone else, well understand that the 10 cent "tip" went out back in the 1920's. No. What was going on here was the customer was attempting to camouflage their cheapness by invoking the senior's discount charade to make it look like she was actually granting a $2.00 tip. I'm telling you, people are hilarious.

I would be willing to bet that those seniors who engage in these kinds of histrionics in order to create an illusion of false generosity also tend to vote Liberal or NDP.

Maybe I can get a government grant for my "study."

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

And now I want to tell you the story about the two Scotsmen I had in my cab.

Just kidding.

Yes. I have been drinking.

===

Another good laugh. Danny "No-Hair" and I were in line at the go. We were chatting on the sidewalk when this smoking hot babe came walking by. She was impeccably dressed and gorgeous. She walked by often, so all the drivers knew her.

And whenever she walked by, all conversation would stop as the cabbies furtively feasted with their eyes.

So this one morning, Danny and I were talking when we spotted her coming and, like men with military training, we went dead silent, while pretending not to be too obvious in admiring her when we were in front of her. As soon as she passed though, our heads would turn and we study her from the back.

After she'd gone about twenty yards, Danny and I turned back to face each other and we both stated the conclusions of our studies at exactly the same time - "no ass."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It was just a measurement exercise.

Great minds do think alike though. Toxic masculinity has some intractable obsession with the size and shape of the female posterior. Don't ask me where it comes from, but I doubt it was caused by "capitalism" though I have no doubt that somewhere in the academic literature this case has been made.

It's a good thing no one ever reads my shit or the left would crucify me. Hell, I am even still on FaceBook, or I was the last time I checked.

We almost pissed ourselves laughing.

Before long, laughing will not be allowed lest someone get offended. It's already happening, actually. And wasn't there a recent report about a university in England where clapping has been banned?

Saturday, March 2, 2019

African Reparations

I've been hearing more and more lately about the demand for reparations for slavery. The idea is so disgustingly evil, I thought it would have died a well deserved death by now but it hasn't.

It prompted me to dig up my article from The Way Back Machine and republish it on my blog. It's not exactly how I would have written it today, but I decided to leave it as it was originally published back in 1999. I did go through it to remove the dead links, which turned out to be all of them except for the amazon links to Thomas Sowell's books.

© 1999 Hans Wienhold
last modified:
Tuesday, November 30, 1999 at 21:18:37
Unedited.


African Reparations

"The practice of slavery dates to prehistoric times, although its institutionalization probably first occurred in early historical times"

"Slavery," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Should the rich nations of the West pay reparations to Africa and it's Diaspora?

Grab your wallet! Yet another group is on the prowl in pursuit of unearned cash. Calling themselves "The African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission" they blame the west for Africa's social and economic problems and feel the Americas and Western Europe should fork over some $777 TRILLION plus interest in reparations. The beneficiaries of this claim are to be the people of Africa and the Diaspora.

According to the declaration of the commission (the Accra Declaration) the money would be demanded from ''all those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and institutions, who participated and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism.'' Curiously, the other nations who participated and benefited from the slave trade, those of North Africa and the Middle East are not mentioned.

"Over the centuries, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 11 million people were shipped across the Atlantic from Africa as slaves, and another 14 million African slaves were taken across the Sahara Desert or shipped through the Persion Gulf and other waterways to the nations of North Africa and the Middle East."

Race and Culture: A World View by Thomas Sowell.

Evidently, it is not the slave trade that the commission objects to since slavery as an institution existed in Africa and throughout the world long before the Portuguese got in on the game in 1444. The commisson seems to have made the observation that the West is rich enough to satisfy the claim and decided to conclude that the West is rich because of the slave trade.

The combined annual Gross Domestic Products of the 9 richest American and European economies amounts to a mere $15 Trillion [1] hence, even if those nine countries were to surender their entire Gross Domestic Product every year to Africa and the Diaspora it would take about 52 years to satisfy The African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission's claim.

Is the claim just? Well, yes and no, depending on your fundamental political philosophy. To individualists, the claim is ludicrous, to collectivists on the other hand, the claim is perfectly valid. The reason for the difference is quite simple... individualists insist that individuals are responsible for their own actions whereas collectivists subscribe to the more convenient belief that someone else is always responsible for those actions. That is why criminalists, close relatives of collectivists, are often heard to say "I am a product of society, that is why I robbed, raped and murdered. Society is responsible for my actions. It wasn't my fault."

Collectivists apply the same thinking to the economic realm... where the criminal insists someone else is responsible for what he did, the collectivist insists someone else is responsible for what he didn't do. For example, the skillful, ambitious, energetic, intelligent, hard working person must bear responsibility for the material sustenance of those who are not skillful, ambitious, energetic, intelligent and hard working.

The West's peculiar instition: the welfare state , rests on this premise. I.E. the modern version of slavery, where the government owns the people but let's them keep a portion of the value they produce so they will keep on producing. The other portion of the fruits of that labour, that part owned by the government (tax evasion is stealing it's advocates claim), is extracted via taxation and doled out to various groups in accordance with the degree of political clout those groups manage to muster. Some of the recipients of this dole do not produce but, through welfare elligability, (a legal claim to the fruits of other's labour) benefit from the coercive transfer of goods and services from those who produced them.

In the same way, those clamouring for reparations for slavery insist they are entitled to the entire life's labours of every man, woman and child in the West mainly because Africa never did produce the factories, transportation infrastructure, markets and technologies the skillful, ambitious, energetic, intelligent, hard working people of the West produced. Far from having any fundamental aversion to slavery some advocates of African Reparations explicitly endorse modern taxation slavery as a means of obtaining their booty. (see below)

According to Pan African Congress (PAC) deputy president Motsoko Pheko in an article from MISAnet/PANA " The labour of Africans was used in the Americas, Europe and West Indies to build the foundations for today's wealth of the so-called developed countries."

Does Mr. Pheko honestly believe we in the West would still be living in log cabins if not for the labour of Africans? Does Mr. Pheko really think that there would be no pharmaceutical indstry in the West if not for the labour of Africans? No electronics? No automobiles? No jets? No central heating and air conditioning? No flush toilets, washing machines and refrigerators? Are we seriously expected to believe that the vast new computer industry and the internet would not have existed in the West if not for the labour of Africans? Were the great bridges, dams and skyscrapers of the West built on African labour?

Anyone possessing the merest scintilla of economic sense would reject this whole idea out of hand. The great wealth of the West is due to capitalism, not physical labour. Unfortunately, the proportion of the populations of the Western democracies in possession of said scintilla is dangerously small, hence the possibility that the proposed victims of this reparations idea remain susceptible to myriads of specious claims.

It is difficult to believe that Mr. Pheko is serious in making this claim... indeed, the claim is so preposterous that only one conclusion can be drawn.... the true basis for the African reparations claim is precisely that African labour had nothing whatsover to do with the massive wealth of the modern West, and that therefore, in accordance with standard collectivist/criminalist thinking, Africa is morally entitled to own it - or at least fifty odd years of the entire economic output of the nine richest Western nations.

A more reasonable approach to the question of reparations might be to identify the heirs of those specific institutions and individuals who profited from the slave trade and colonialism. Having done so it would be necessary also to determine exactly which proportion of the current wealth of these institutions and individuals was due to the exploitation of the descendants of modern African and the Diaspora.

A fair minded individual could hardly object to a request that these legitimate assets be returned to the heirs of the original owners. Yet according to the essay "The legal basis of the claim for Reparations" By Lord Anthony Gifford, British Queens Counsel and Jamaican Attorney-at-Law at the Africa Reparations Movement (ARM) website,

"It would be possible to identify individual companies which could be proved to have made vast profits from slavery. There are plantation owners in Jamaica, and titled families in England, whose living heirs owe their wealth to slaving."

... but this approach would involve too much work and the defendants would reject it. Lord Gifford believes that instead, all citizens should assume collective guilt because governments have "reserves" and "taxation powers" and that it is "governments who must in the end be persuaded that reparations are to be paid" by everyone regardless of the culpability of their specific ancestors. Imposing the burden on innocent third parties[2], many of whose ancestors were hardly better off and often worse off than many slaves does not seem to deter Lord Gifford in his pursuit of what he calls "justice".

[back]

The key point here is Mr. Gifford's specific rejection of going after those who today can be identified as direct beneficiaries of the slave trade in favour of the more lucrative prospect of going after those whose ancestors were not.


[1] Annual Gross Domestic Product of Selected Nations

CountryAnnual Gross Domestic Product (1996) in Trillions
U.S.7.66
Germany1.7
France1.22
United Kingdom1.19
Italy1.12
Mexico.777
Canada.721
Spain.593
Netherlands.317
Total15.3
Source: The New World Almanac and Book of Facts 1999
 
 
[back]

[2] The population of Western Europe, North and South America is currently about 1.3 billion people. $777 TRILLION US represents a mere payout of $597,692 for every man, woman and child living in the "guilty" countries. This is about $70,636,364 for each of the roughly 11 million Africans who were shipped accross the Atlantic.

[back]

Further Reading

Conquests and Cultures: An International History
by Thomas Sowell.

An important book for anyone interested in developing a perspective on the validity of African reparations claims.

Tempo