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Today in liberal hypocrisy news, Norwegian billionaire Gunhild Stordalen, who is behind a campaign to save the planet by reducing meat consumption, is being criticized for recently buying a £20 million private jet and regularly using it to fly to exotic destinations around the world.

As many of Elon Musk’s critics have also pointed out, pollution created by air travel is a major contributor to global warming.

Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs told the Mirror:

“The hypocrisy of this is breathtaking. This is a campaign telling ordinary people they should be eating less than half a rasher of bacon per day for the sake of the environment, while the patron is flying people around the world in private jets creating one enormous carbon footprint.

This is a classic case of do as I say not as I do. Militant environmentalists can’t resist the chance to tell people how to live their lives and demonise everyday items of food.”

Stordalen is a former model who is now a doctor. She recently provided the bankroll for the EAT-Lancet study, which concluded this week that people should, on a daily basis, eat no more than two thirds of a fish finger, a quarter of a chicken breast or a penny-sized beef burger.

Stordalen has been an active campaigner for the green agenda and a outspoken vegetarian, who founded the EAT foundation in 2013. The study itself had quite a carbon footprint, too. It involved 37 experts from 16 countries who were flown around the world to dozens of different locations to try and unveil the plan this week.

She is also active on Instagram, recently posting photos of herself vacationing in Greece, Mexico, Costa Rica and Cuba. Recently, Stordalen had also been photographed in a post where she was lecturing people to cut meat from their diets.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the model-turned-doctor reportedly served sushi at her £4 million wedding in 2010. And again there was significant air travel involved: people were flown in from 3500 miles away to Morocco (because of course), where her and her husband were married at a luxury hotel.

The EAT-Lancet study calls for better use of farming land and less meat consumption to reduce methane greenhouse gas emissions. As recent as this week, Stordalen was on stage in Oslo telling people that adopting her diet was “a matter of morals”.

In Oslo, she said:

 “We all have a role to play. Whether we have power, knowledge, money, a voice, a piece of land or a piece of bread.”

…Or a private jet. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2sMVSYY Tyler Durden

Authored by Jason Morgan via The Mises Institute,

The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 21, no. 2 (Summer 2018). For the full issue, click here.

[The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017., Hope Jahren, ed., Wilmington, Mass.: Mariner Books, 2017, 352 pp.]

The Earth’s climate is extraordinarily complex. Unlike dinosaur fossils or organic chemistry or primate behavior, climate is always in flux, with countless factors influencing one another in an endless unfolding of diachronic stochastics. Given this complexity, one might presume that scientists who study planetary climate would be endowed with exceptional patience, scholarly integrity, and intellectual humility. After all, it takes a long time to learn even a little bit about such an intricate system, so part of the job description of climate scientist would seem to be acknowledging that there is only so much that is known about the 1.09 x 1044 or so molecules swirling about in the atmosphere. Even more complex than all that, though, is navigating the public’s interest in the field. Climate is contentious, and a climate scientist will have to keep his cool, sticking to the facts amidst even the most heated rhetorical environments.

And yet, this is precisely not how a startling number of climate scientists choose to behave. Former head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen, for example, once made the rather alarming claim that “it will soon be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. We have reached a critical tipping point. […] We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” And what might happen if the Earth warmed by the five degrees Hansen was warning about? Hansen tells us in detail.

The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when sea level was about eighty feet higher. Eighty feet! In that case, the United States would lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami; indeed, practically the entire state of Florida would be under water. Fifty million people in the US live below that sea level. Other places would fare worse. China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people.

Rather discomfiting for Dr. Hansen, who thought we had “at most […] ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions,” those blood-curdling visions of hundreds of millions of drowning urbanites have now gone fully a dozen years without coming to pass.

Not to be dissuaded from his task—and traipsing rather lightly past the Climategate scandal, in which University of East Anglia scientists were caught in flagrante delicto discussing the doctoring of data to match the received narrative on anthropogenic climate change—Hansen next tried to set a new tone for the climate Armageddonists. The Earth’s failure to implode on cue led Hansen and others to blame the system instead. “The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working,” he said in 2009, for example (The Guardian, 2009). Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), connected the dots between Hansen’s rantings and full-bore income redistribution, hyping the “People’s Recovery,” which attempted to shunt tax dollars into communities experimenting in “nonextractive living” and “new democratic processes”:

Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of world-views, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect.

It would be hard to beat this orchestral crescendo of embarrassments to real scientific inquiry, this twisting of science into balloon animals shaped like either Chicken Little or Karl Marx. But in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017, series editor Tim Folger gives it a try. In large measure, he succeeds, calling into question whether “climate science” has not perhaps become an oxymoron.

First, a word about the 2017 iteration of the series. The editor for that year, Hope Jahren (the author of Lab Girl(2016)), has assembled a rather puzzling collection of genuinely interesting and valuable pieces, interspersed with tendentious politically-correct huff-puffing and special pleading. To take the good entries first, Robert Draper’s essay (reprinted from National Geographic), “The Battle for Virunga,” is a tightly-written piece on the intersection of economics, politics, and wildlife in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. David Epstein’s ProPublica essay, “The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene,” tells the richly human story of Jill Viles, a muscular dystrophy patient whose extraordinary etiological insights helped track down important genetic information about lipodystrophy. And Ann Finkbeiner’s “Inside the Breakthrough Starshot Mission to Alpha Centauri,” taken from Scientific American, is a character-driven look at how new space technologies travel down the R&D pipeline. There are other fine essays in this volume, too: Tom Philpott’s on the political economy of chicken farm antibiotics, Kim Tingley’s on Polynesian navigation techniques, and Christopher Solomon’s well-researched look at Bureau of Land Management machinations in the American West.

Unfortunately, Jahren’s editorial heuristic, saturated in identity politics, leads her in the very unscientific direction of putting the scientist ahead of the science. This is especially odd, given that the writers who take the Cartesian plunge and delve into innerspace are forced to admit to having no idea who they are. Listless atheism marks Omar Mouallem’s “Dark Science,” for example. Ostensibly writing about light pollution and the efforts to combat it, Mouallem lets slip, “I once found myself in the middle of a field staring at a glistening sky. Had I still believed in him, I’d say it looked like God sneezed glitter.” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “He Fell in Love with His Grad Student—Then Fired Her for It” is the Glenn Close-esque tale of Christian Ott, a Caltech astrophysics professor who unburdens himself to his protégé about his deep-seated insecurities while publishing dozens of poems about her online. Sally Davies’ “The Physics Pioneer Who Walked Away from It All” tells us about physicist Fotini Markopoulou, who avers that “between the truth of the physical world and a physics theory, there’s humans. Of course, nothing happens there, because removing the person is the whole point of training as a scientist.” And then there is Michael Regnier’s heartbreaking true story of George Price, the man who literally did just that: removed himself, by killing himself in the name of the scientific study of altruism (“The Man Who Gave Himself Away”).

But the real editorial knifepoint of this book is its global warming agenda. Climate change crops up everywhere, from essays on Greenland (“A Song of Ice”) to Alaska (“The New Harpoon”). However, the pièce de résistance is Nathaniel Rich’s “The Invisible Catastrophe,” reprinted from The New York Times Magazine. This is passive-aggressiveness cranked up to eleven. Here, Rich manages to take a story about a methane leak in Aliso Canyon, outside Los Angeles, and turn it into a schadenfreude smorgasbord, with Rich secretly reveling in the fact that the wealthy residents of Porter Ranch—many of whom are Republicans—are finally getting a taste of their own medicine by being sickened by greenhouse gases.

But even this essay pales in comparison with Folger’s truly unhinged Foreword. Here, we find the favorite trope of the unscientific, namely, that everyone with whom one disagrees is a Nazi. Yes, a National Socialist. And not just any kind of National Socialist, but active, core members of the Party. To be more specific, bookburning Nazis. Here’s Folger:

Modern cosmology was born in Germany a century ago, and within two decades of its birth it almost died there. When Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in November 1915, it’s doubtful he could have imagined how profoundly deranged his country would become. On May 10, 1933—the same year Einstein left Germany forever—mobs of young Nazis and their supporters across Germany were feeding bonfires with his papers, along with works by Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, and others supposedly contaminated with undeutschen Geist—un-German spirit. More than 25,000 books burned on that day, including those of the 19th-century Jewish poet and playwright Heinrich Heine, who had once written, “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people. […]”

Where is Folger going with all this? Who are the modern-day Nazis in our midst? Why, climate skeptics and Trump supporters, of course:

One measure of the health of any modern society must be the degree to which it supports its scientists. A few days before I started to write this foreword, hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of cities across the country participated in the March for Science. It was an event at once inspiring and worrisome: inspiring because so many took a stand for rationalism—a public rebuke to the nation’s leaders that couldn’t be more different from the German book burnings of the 1930s; worrisome because who would have thought that in the 21st century scientists and citizens would feel the need to gather in support of something so self-evidently valuable as unfettered scientific research?

Yet the march was necessary, urgently so. Scientists at more than a dozen federal agencies have launched rogue Twitter feeds to counter the policies of a frighteningly uninformed president who once tweeted that “global warming was created by and for the Chinese.” We live at a pivotal moment in history[; …] climate change threatens not just “the environment” but civilization itself.

Now, to be fair to Folger, he is hardly the only “scientist” to have had a Hitler-themed meltdown over thermometer readings in Queen Maud Land. We are fallen creatures, and we all let our passions get the better of us from time to time. Scientists are people too, and when they get caught rigging the deck so that every card comes up the Ace of Hockey Sticks, they are apt to lash out at the whistleblowers just like anyone else. If anything, in his extremism Folger is simply following in the footsteps of his fellow “earth scientists.” Like Jacques Cousteau, for instance, who once opined that “world population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”

But there is much more to Folger’s brand of meteorological trolling than there might first appear. For example, there is the revealing research of William N. Butos and Thomas J. McQuade, whose 2015 paper on boom-and-bust cycles in the global warming industry shows the deep intertwinings of “scientific” research and the political economy. From the mid 1990s, global warming became a fashionable topic. From that point, governments increasingly began funding global warming-themed research to the exclusion of other projects. The much-touted “consensus” on global warming turns out to be little more than an illusion created by preferential funding by Washington and foregrounding by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As Butos and McQuade point out, science is supposed to be about hypotheses and experiments, but scientists turn out to be as susceptible to chicanery as politicians are once money for research starts to change hands.

Would that that were all. For what lies beneath even this fen of politicking under the rent veil of scientific disinterest is a deep uneasiness, felt most acutely by scientists themselves, over the true nature of their “scientific” enterprise. Folger is driven to accuse his critics of Nazism because he is afraid to confront their arguments head on. Why? Could it not be because of the epistemological bankruptcy of what passes as science?

Now, before the QJAE offices are deluged with hate mail, let me state that I am not a flat earther. I fully accept that pterodactyls and diplodocuses and trilobites were real, that the universe is billions of years old, that the earth goes around the sun, and that electricity is electrons, not voodoo. I also agree that carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, ozone, and other substances are greenhouse gases, and that reducing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will reduce the greenhouse effect that they cause. I watched Mr. Wizard, too, and I am not here to dispute whether force equals mass times acceleration, or whether energy equals matter times the speed of light squared.

No, the claim I make here is much more serious than the denial of these facts would be. I am saying, in short, that scientists today, with rare exceptions, do not do science at all. They do sociology. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), for instance, science lurches and stalls through a series of paradigm shifts, with the behavior of scientists themselves being the real dark matter moving research and consensus. And Karl Popper, were he alive today, might be interested in applying the falsifiability criterion to wild speculations such as Hansen’s and Folger’s. The line between science and pseudoscience might lie much closer to the latter than many in the general public suspect.

I began this review by arguing that climate is complex. What we need, then, is a science capable of investigating it, and real scientists, for a change, who can rise above herd behavior and try to figure out exactly what is going on with all of those 1.09 x 1044 molecules in our atmosphere. What we do not need are any more quacks or snake oil salesmen who see science as a bandwagon and scientists as responsible for keeping everyone on board. On that note, Friedrich Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (1952) would be a good place to start for learning the key difference between science and scientism, or the ill-starred attempt to bend science towards less noble ends than truth. Perhaps the next edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing will heed some of Hayek’s sound advice and feature much more writing of a scientific nature. But at the very least, let us hope that it has much fewer comparisons of honest dissenters—those who truly want empirical facts and dispassionate interpretations—to bookburning Nazis.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2RgAHIF Tyler Durden

Researchers at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have developed tiny elastic robots that can morph into various shapes depending on their surroundings.

The group of researchers – led by Selman Sakar at EPFL and Bradley Nelson at ETH Zürich – were influenced by bacteria to design smart, biocompatible microrobots that are highly flexible and can reach hard to get areas in the body; they stand to revolutionize the targeted drug delivery industry by making it possible to deliver medication to any area of the body.

“Because these devices are able to swim through fluids and modify their shape when needed, they can pass through narrow blood vessels and intricate systems without compromising on speed or maneuverability. They are made of hydrogel nanocomposites that contain magnetic nanoparticles allowing them to be controlled via an electromagnetic field,” said EPFL, in a statement.

In a report published in Science Advances, the researchers described how they designed the robot’s shape so that it can efficiently travel through fluids that are dense, viscous or moving at accelerated speeds.

The group integrated intelligence, in which the robot’s physical being is adaptive to the surrounding. The bots are constructed with an origami-based folding design which allows it to deform to the most efficient shape for any given situation. Once inside the body, the robots can either be controlled by an electromagnetic field or they can be left to make their own path to the targeted area.

“Our robots have a special composition and structure that allow them to adapt to the characteristics of the fluid they are moving through,” said Selman Sakar,  Assistant Professor, Institute of Mechanical Engineering, EPFL, in a statement. “For instance, if they encounter a change in viscosity or osmotic concentration, they modify their shape to maintain their speed and maneuverability without losing control of the direction of motion.”

Watch these tiny microbots in action as they travel through the human body to the targeted area. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2sLhcOJ Tyler Durden

Authored by Jeff Charles via Liberty Nation,

To the left, a MAGA hat isn’t a head cover; it’s a badge of evil…

The last few years have seen a dangerous shift in America’s cultural climate, especially when it comes to the expression of political beliefs. In the past, Americans could engage in heated debates over the issues while still maintaining a semblance of civility. But now, political discourse has been turned on its head, and it is unlikely that the nation will see a return to normalcy anytime soon.

The days when individuals could communicate their political leanings without fear of reprisal have morphed into an environment in which an article of clothing can invite attacks so vicious that lives can be upended. The story of the Covington High School students who became targets of a rabid left-leaning media mob is only the latest in a series of occurrences that demonstrate what can happen to a person for simply wearing a “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) baseball cap.

Political Expression Has Become Dangerous

Since President Trump began his campaign, progressives in the media have homed in on his supporters, smearing them as ignorant bigots who are working to build an American Third Reich. As a result, those who voted for the president have been subject to harassment and, in some cases, violence.

A man was pepper-sprayed by Antifa for wearing a MAGA hat.

Last year, a Texas 16-year-old was accosted in a restaurant for wearing a MAGA hat. A 30-year-old man verbally assaulted the young fellow, ripped the hat from his head, and threw his soda into the teenager’s face. In 2017, a New York man was denied service at a bar because he sported the infamous red cap.

It is also important to remember the numerous instances in which far-leftist protesters showed up at conservative rallies to physically assault the participants. The left has managed to take an act of political expression and use it as a weapon against those who oppose progressive ideas. To the wearer of the MAGA hat, they are simply expressing support for a political movement. To the progressive left, it is an identifier, a way to pinpoint evil.

How Did This Happen?

Many individuals, both on the left and the right, have contributed to the tense political atmosphere America is experiencing today. But it is evident that the primary culprit is the establishment media, whose members have sown division and resentment through their biased reporting, and the majority of Americans are aware of the role the press has played in pitting one group against the other. A recent study revealed that people believe that the media is more divisive than President Trump, who is constantly maligned for his aggressive rhetoric.

The Fourth Estate has used its various platforms to treat conservatives as if they are both ignorant and evil. Instead of portraying right-leaning Americans as individuals who simply disagree with progressives, they have chosen to launch a malicious campaign. Several outlets have attracted clicks and views by using extremely loaded language to describe President Trump and his supporters; comparisons to dictators like Hitler have become almost commonplace in the reportage of the most popular news outlets.

It is for this reason that many on the far left do not see an article of clothing when confronted with a MAGA hat; they see a symbol of oppression. Some have likened the cap to the swastika or white hood. Many of those on the left who are portraying conservatives as fascists are fully aware that their accusations are inaccurate. Put simply, they are lying.

However, because of the influence of the media, there is a significant number who truly believe they are opposing oppression when they attack people for wearing the wrong headgear. For this reason, they can easily justify implementing a nationwide smear campaign against high school students who committed the sin of wearing a MAGA hat. It is why they have no problem with doxing or even assaulting Americans who support the president.

The only solution to this problem is for reasonable people on both sides to call out those who dehumanize anyone with differing political beliefs. But it is individuals on the far left who are going to extremes to harm conservatives, and this will persist as long as they are allowed to do so without being checked by their own.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2DzFMbl Tyler Durden

Some professions have a better reputation for honesty than others.

Mistrust is pretty common in everyday life, whether its questioning a doctor’s honesty or ethics regarding a diagnosis or blaming the salesperson when your “new” used car breaks down after one day and 30 miles on the road. So Statista’s Niall McCarthy raises the question: what professions do Americans regard as the most honest and ethical today?

Gallup examined the issue and released an interesting poll showing that nurses are the most trusted occupation in the country. They came top of the trust league for the 17th year in a row with 84 percent of respondents rating them very high or high for honesty and ethical standards.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The healthcare sector scored high on honesty in general with doctors and pharmacists also among the top-three with 67 and 66 percent respectively. Even though law enforcement has attracted criticism over a spate of police shootings, police officers are still considered honest by a majority of Americans.

The same can’t be said for members of Congress, however, who are rock bottom with 58 percent of the U.S. public considering them dishonest. Car salespeople are also down towards the bottom of the ranking with 44 percent of people considering them unethical or dishonest.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Wdg8R0 Tyler Durden

Authored by Richard Ebeling via The American Institute for Economic Research,

The philosopher George Santayana is credited with the phrase “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Never was that truer than today in the face of the reborn belief in some notion of a “democratic” socialism and its companying idea of government-directed planning and redistribution. It’s as if the entire experience of the 20th century has been erased from the memory of humankind.

Almost every conceivable form of “socialism” was tried over the last 100 years. There has been Marxian socialism in the form of Soviet-style fully nationalized economies with strict and comprehensive five-year government central planning. There was national socialism in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, with private enterprise placed under total government control with Nazi four-year central planning. There was Mussolini’s Italian fascism, under which private businesses and workers were forced into cartels and trade unions with government oversight and command of prices, wages, production, work conditions, and trade. (See Günter Reimann, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism [1939], and Walter Eucken, “On the Theory of the Centrally Administered Economy: An Analysis of the German Experiment” [1948].)

There was British “democratic” socialism under the post–World War II Labor-party government, with nationalized industries, socialized health care, and central planning. There was a French version under the name of “indicative” planning, under which the government manipulated prices and production incentives to direct capital and labor where the central planners thought they should go. (See John Jewkes, Ordeal by Planning [1948], Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Problems of Socialist England [1949], and Vera Lutz, Central Planning for the Market Economy: An Analysis of the French Theory and Experience [1969].)

There have been government planning through regulations and redistributions of wealth through fiscal policy. This regulatory-redistributive model of government oversight and directing of social and economic outcomes grew out of the discovered and admitted inescapable limits and shortcomings of more-direct government planning and control of economic affairs.

Costs and Consequences of Socialism-in-Practice

The human cost experienced from the extreme forms of socialism-in-practice goes beyond most of our imaginations. Tens of millions of people — ordinary, unarmed, and innocent men, women, and children — were starved, tortured, shot, or worked to death in slave-labor camps in the name of building that bright and beautiful paradise on earth that the communists, fascists, and Nazis all promised would belong to those they had designated the righteous and justly deserving social class, national group, or racial tribe. (See my article “The Cost of Socialism in Power.”)

British democratic socialism foundered on the discovery that even in a democracy, government socialist planning entails imposing commands on everyone that succeed in only making life stagnant, dull, and poor for most in society. Indeed, this is how we have ended up with highly regulated economies combined with often-extensive networks of income redistribution and social safety nets.

Centralized planning did not work and usurped a high degree of everyday decision-making from the citizenry in virtually every corner of the society. So, there was a step back: regulated businesses still possessing degrees of discretion over the direction of much of their enterprises in the pursuit of profits, and market-earned incomes that were then modified through the tax code to transfer sums of money and various goods and services into the directions those in political power considered superior to those generated by a more free market. (See my articles “Barack Obama and the Meaning of Socialism” and “Obama’s ‘Middle Way’ Between Capitalism and Socialism Means Less Liberty.”)

Memories Lost and Socialist Dreams Reawakened

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the admitted failure of government central planning and its accompanying brutality around the world threw socialism into disrepute and seemingly out of the arena of public policy debate. This has been reversed following the financial crisis of 2008-9 and its aftermath, with it being classified and condemned as a new demonstration of the failure of capitalism. In its wake, socialist ideas have been gaining a new rebirth among academics and the media pundits.

Not that all the socialist sympathizers had really disappeared after the end of Soviet socialism. They had simply and mostly silently sulked in the corners of higher education and various other intellectual circles, not knowing how to fully get away from the embarrassment of socialism’s disastrous history during the 20th century. The last 10 years have slowly been giving them a new lease on life.

This has been made easier with the passage of time and with a new and younger generation that has no living memory and less of an interest in understanding what socialism-in-practice really led to, in spite of all the promises and rhetoric with which it covered itself during its heyday of coming to power in various places around the world. (See my article “Disaster in Red: The Hundredth Anniversary of the Russian Socialist Revolution.”)

Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the Democratic party’s primaries in 2016 demonstrated the renewed attractiveness of the “democratic”-socialist idea. Millions were attracted to his promise of a beautiful social and economic future, if only government took a far greater directing and redistributing hand in everything in American society. (See my articles “‘Democratic Socialism’ Means a Loss of Liberty” and “‘Liberal Socialism’ Another False Utopia.”)

A Green New Deal Means Central Planning

Now additional voices for a new socialism are on the public scene, such as the recently elected Democratic-party representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Even before being sworn in to the House of Representatives in early January 2019, she and others presented a proposal for a special and select congressional committee for the preparing and implementing of a Green New Deal.

Make no mistake, this is a plan for the introduction of comprehensive government planning over every facet of American social and economic life. Arguing that the world is facing an environmental Armageddon due to global warming, the time for doing nothing or relying upon carbon taxes to reduce use of fossil fuels or business regulations to influence how private enterprises produce  goods and services, they say, is behind us.

Action must be taken now to change how and what Americans produce and consume over the next decade. There must be developed “a detailed, national, industrial, economic mobilization plan.” It must be “driven” by the federal government in “partnership” with business, labor, “stakeholder” groups, indigenous peoples, and communities all across the land, for a radical and rapid transition to a fully carbon-free environment.

A Carbon-Free Road to Social Justice

This must be done in conjunction with commitments and goals for “social, economic, racial, regional, and gender-based justice and equality.” Labor unions must have a prominent place, with the ability to direct wages and employment conditions for workplace justice in the pursuit of a post-carbon economy. The federal government should take equity positions — that is, total or partial direct ownership — in businesses, industries, and sectors of the economy as a means to hit the target of radical environmental change.

The goal is to have a “100 percent” fossil fuel–free economy within 10 years. All businesses and residential structures will have to be dramatically made over to environmentally friendly renewable sources of energy. Where and what is produced will have to be commanded by the federal government for both industry and agriculture.

At the same time, this grand and comprehensive central planning of American society to save the planet can also serve as “an historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic opportunity available to everyone participating in the transformation” of the country.

This will include more government-sponsored and government-provided education and skills training that will include “job guarantee programs to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.” Government plans and programs will be especially targeted to help end “deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth”; and “without limitation” there will be those redistributions and government investments needed to lift up “marginalized” groups in various parts of the country.

How will all of these activities be successfully funded? This proposed Green New Deal agenda would have its costs covered not only by the usual federal and other taxes, with emphasis on the need to especially tax “the rich.” No, the proposal calls for using “a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, [and] public venture funds” to ensure that the profitable returns expected from the central plan’s implementation come back to the Treasury for selected future tax cuts and for even more government investments in the future.

The New Socialists Want to Be the Central Planners

The congressional committee that is proposed to develop and submit the detailed and concrete elements of the Green New Deal plan would also have the authority to direct and oversee its implementation. In other words, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her collaborators sitting on such an approved congressional committee want to have control over what would be an American version of the Soviet Union’s GOSPLAN — that is, a government agency responsible for the total central planning of the United States.

Central planners are always grandiose in their visions and impatient in getting to work to remake society in their own image. Our new American socialists are no different in this than their ideological collectivist cousins were in other parts of the world over the last century.

The actions and investments of individuals and private enterprises are too small and unorganized. Redesigning all of America in such a short time to save the planet and finally establish “social justice” in all its aspects requires, they assert, “massive” levels and speeds of investment, along with a government-size time horizon of decades that encompasses the entire society without exception.

Only government, guided by those who know and understand what has to be done, and when and where, can handle such a vast undertaking, they insist. The task our new socialists have appointed for themselves is the relocating of industries, reshaping of agriculture, transforming of how work is done with what types of energy sources, and reorganizing of social life according to a vision of social, racial, and gender “justice.”

It all conjures up images of those Soviet five-year central plans with industrial centers created in the middle of desolate nowheres, and huge canals connecting mighty rivers, and all built with the hands of “class-enemy” slave laborers — or the giant Nazi construction projects of autobahns crisscrossing Germany and larger-than-life sports stadiums to sit tens of thousands of cheering followers of “the leaders” who were building a new world based on racial identity politics, not much different from the premises of our new tribe-based American socialists and progressives. (See my article “An ‘Identity Politics’ Victory Would Mean the End to Liberty.”)

The Hubris of Our Would-Be Central Planners

The hubris just oozes from every presumption according to which these American central planners just know what needs to be done and why everyone else must cheerfully, enthusiastically follow the commands of our would-be national-socialist führers. The plan for this Green New Deal shows its totalitarian premise in each of its proposed elements. No corner of the economy would be exempt from the green planners’ control. Every human association and status in society would be subject to modification as determined by the social-justice warriors in power.

The transformation of America must be done within 10 years if the planet is to be saved from irreparable environmental damage, they assert. The planners are confident that in 2020, the Democratic party will not only retain its control over the House of Representatives, but also capture the Senate as well as the White House. Then it will be “all power to the democratic socialists.” The plan will be ready for immediate implementation. They are in a hurry, and there is no time to waste.

Once Democratically Chosen, No Reversing Socialism

But what happens to democracy after that? What if “the people” have second thoughts in election years 2022 or 2024 or 2026 or 2028? What if other voices challenge the premises and the policies of the Green New Dealers? If planetary existence and social justice for all time are at stake, can our democratic socialists allow the fickle and wrong-headed voting decisions of some of the people to alter the collectivist course that has been taken?

Surely, it would be irrational to permit the central plan to be dismantled, to backslide into chaotic and petty profit-motivated self-interest, to undo all that the revolution had been attempting to achieve. The socially just people’s will could not be allowed to be reversed because of some people’s misinformed and misguided voting whims under the influence of sinister interests swaying them against their true and real interests.

Oh, we have heard all this before, and no doubt, if they were to come to power, we would hear it all once more. But, but … it can’t happen here! Think again. The logic of central planning undermines the institutions and the spirit of liberty. By concentrating power and decision-making in the hands of those in government, socialist central planning first weakens and then eliminates autonomous centers of choice and association.

Property Rights and Personal Choice

One of the most essential aspects of private property rights is that it creates potential centers of control and discretion outside of the clutches of those in political authority. Private property in functioning free markets enables sources of employment and income independent of the government. The individual does not have to worry about loss of a government job, or his government-supplied income and benefits, or his chances for personal betterment due to any disagreement with or peaceful opposition to the policies and practices of the state.

Competitive, free markets provide avenues for a plethora of ways for multitudes of people to simultaneously follow diverse ends with alternative means considered better than those selected by others in society. Mistakes and second thoughts concerning what goals and purposes to pursue and how best to do so may be modified in many different ways by different people at different times, without needing to persuade or gain the electoral agreement of enough others through a voting process. (See my article “Political Planning vs. Personal Planning by Everyone.”)

Central Planning Means Centralized Decision-Making

But this is exactly what our new American socialists are impatient with and want to do away with. There needs to be one master hierarchy of values, with one centrally guiding and implemented master plan to bring it to fruition, with all in the society accepting and making their own personal wishes and desires subordinate to it.

What they really want is a version of “democratic centralism” — that is, an inner circle of people ideologically motivated by the same general collectivist purposes and ideals who bargain over and divide the social spoils for the identity-politics-based factions and interest groups that they, respectively, represent, with no interference from the ignorant “reactionary” and supposedly race- and gender-bigoted individuals and groups who don’t understand the nature of a real “people’s democracy.”

The role of these uninformed masses, who must be constantly subject to government “re-education,” is to produce the wealth and output that the Green New Deal planners need to pursue their power-lusting dreams. And don’t worry, if they cannot plunder enough wealth through taxation to cover the costs of their social-engineering schemes, they say they will turn to the Federal Reserve to create all the paper money they will need to pay for all that they want to do. Welcome to the possibility of a Venezuela-style hyperinflation on the back of a stagnant economy built on the political insanity of those who claim to know how everyone should live under the central planners’ agenda for a new, carbon-free world.

These are dangerous ideas that threaten anew the foundations and functioning of what remains of personal freedom and free enterprise in the United States. The Green New Dealers’ self-righteous fanaticism and ideological enthusiasm for a collectivist America should not be underestimated. Understanding their misguided political assumptions and the damaging economic consequences that would follow from their coming to power is essential if a “green” road to serfdom is to be avoided.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WgIsCh Tyler Durden

Nearly five years after a hedge fund billionaire set a new record by paying nearly $150 million for a Hamptons manse in what was, until earlier this week, the most expensive home ever sold in the US, the Hamptons property market is cratering as luxury real estate markets, including Manhattan and Greenwich struggle with a widening chasm between offers and bids.

According to Bloomberg, the number of unsold homes on the market in the Hamptons has reached its highest level in the 12 years since data-keeping by appraiser Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate began. Would-be buyers have apparently decided that their money is better off in stocks (or maybe in cash) after the Trump tax reform killed the SALT deductions. Home purchases during Q4 tumbled a staggering 35%, the biggest drop since 2009, while the median price was stagnant at $995,000. Meanwhile, for the homes that did sell, most were in the lower-end of the market – that is, homes priced between $500,000 and $1 million.

Still, sellers have been reluctant to lower their prices.

With so much inventory on the market, sellers have little choice but to drop their prices. But though it sounds a touch self-serving, brokers would like any potential buyers to know: If this isn’t the bottom of the market, we’re probably pretty close.

“Sellers are going to start to reduce, and then similar properties will all start to reduce, and then you’ll see a number of transactions take place,” she one broker in a phone interview. “If you’re a buyer right now, there’s some great deals out there.”

Though, to be sure, it’s impossible to tell when the bottom is in…but if this isn’t the bottom, it sure as hell looks like it.

“It’s hard to tell when you’re at the bottom – you don’t hear a thud,” she said. “I think the sense among brokers out here is, yes, we’re at the bottom, and now is probably a good time to encourage your buyers to make a move.”

Despite the flood of inventory, some pockets of strength remained in the Hamptons luxury property market: For the top 10% of sales, prices rose even as sales declined, according to Corcoran Group. Homes in the category traded for a is category sold for a cool $6.5 million on average.

Meanwhile, in East Hampton village, one of the hottest villages in the Hamptons, sales for more than $5 million doubled, driving a 67% jump in the median for the neighborhood to $5.1 million, Corcoran said. Some 15 homes were bought in the village in 2018, up from 14 in the year prior.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2RQNGFZ Tyler Durden

Bernie Sanders, 77 years young, is giving it one more try.

Three years after fighting a surprisingly competitive Democratic primary race against Hillary Clinton which as leaked emails from the DNC revealed was rigged against him from the start, the Vermont socialist is making another run for the White House.

According to two sources quoted by Yahoo News “with direct knowledge of his plans”, Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist plans to announce his presidential bid “imminently.”

According to Yahoo, while Sanders had been considering a bid for months, he was supposedly emboldened by early polls of the race which have confirmed America’s growing infatuation with socialism, and have consistently showed him as one of the top candidates in a crowded Democratic primary field.

In particular, the source said Sanders was heartened to see numbers indicating he is one of the leading candidates among African American and Latino voters, two groups he was perceived as struggling with in 2016.

Furthermore, the source also alluded to recent polls that showed Sanders as the most popular politician in the country, which they attributed to the base and name recognition he built with the prior presidential bid. “What the senator has this time that he didn’t have last time is he is the most popular elected official in the country right now,” the source said. “That’s light years away from 2016, when very few people knew who he was.”

According to the report, Sanders’ bid will begin with an exploratory committee, while a former staffer said Sanders has been building out the infrastructure he would need for a White House bid.

“He’s already talking to staff and there are people he’s hiring. They’re nailing down contracts with vendors. … All the movement is there for him to run,” the ex-staffer said.

While Sanders was ultimately defeated by Clinton in the last primaries, the result of what leaked emails revealed was a corrupt process made to ensure Bernie loses, his campaign reshaped the Democratic Party. Sanders ran on a progressive platform that included a focus on eliminating income inequality, on campaign finance reform and an ambitious “Medicare for All” health care proposal. Those principles have become centerpieces for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and several Sanders-backed candidates won elections last year.

Many of Sanders’ socialist views have been espoused by the person many consider the future face of the socialist democratic party: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

However, Sanders’ impact on the Democratic Party went beyond his political vision. The primary battle between Sanders and Clinton was contentious, with Sanders allies contending that Clinton’s campaign was working in conjunction with the Democratic Party establishment to prevent a Sanders victory. These battles cemented divisions in this party that linger on as the 2020 election approaches.

After President Trump’s victory over Clinton in 2016, and thanks to the “Russian” hacking of the DNC, Sanders and his allies pressed for reforms to the Democratic National Committee that would make the party’s primary process more open and inclusive of what Sanders termed “the working people and young people of our country.”

Finally, although he will be entering an extremely crowded Democratic field, Sanders who would be 79 in his first year in office if elected president, is starting from a formidable position. Early polls of the race have consistently showed Sanders as one of the top candidates, probably due to the base of support he established in 2016. Sanders allies also believe his prior run could give him a head start organizing in key early primary states.

Quoted by Yahoo News, Pete D’Alessandro, Sanders’s Iowa state coordinator for the 2016 race, said he was confident the senator would be able to build on the grassroots support and infrastructure he established in 2016 if he made another run.

“This was a movement. It still is a movement,” D’Alessandro said.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2CKtXNW Tyler Durden

Authored by Jim Carey via GeopoliticsAlert.com,

Now that the latest term of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has started and the western powers and their proxies refuse to recognize the Bolivarian government, the imperial states are in a mad dash to find a new face for the Venezuelan opposition. Now it seems that man has been found and the race is on, with state after state anointing the 35-year-old engineer Juan Guaidó.

Guaidó, now being called the “interim President” by everyone from Jair Bolsonaro, the Organization of American States (OAS), to Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau is the current president of the Venezuelan National Assembly. However, according to the states looking for a regime change in Venezuela, Guaidó isn’t just head of the parliament but also the rightful leader of Venezuela.

Guaidó has become a fast-rising star in the political opposition which has led the anti-Maduro National Assembly an opportunity to make political hay and possibly get outside assistance. The opposition acted on this chain of events Tuesday when the National Assembly declared Guaidó the interim President and said he is in charge of organizing new “legitimate” elections.

Putting a new face to the Venezuelan opposition then immediately allowed for all sorts of anti-Maduro actors use Guaidó as their man to rally around.

So now that there is a new imperial point-man inside Venezuela the real question is, what happens next?

There are two likely outcomes to the rise of Guaidó, one of which is contingent on him succeeding and the other which would be another complete failure for the imperialists.

Guaidó launches his campaign today following several days or organizing protesters at rallies in Caracas. The protests have already started to turn violent as of this writing with at least four dead and the opposition calling for the military to “rise up” against the Bolivarian government.

This is all backed by countries like Canada, European nations and sham imperial bodies like the Organization of American States (OAS), which also encourage regime change and now want Guaidó as the man to lead it. Surprisingly, US President Donald Trump was one of the few holdouts who had yet to recognize Guaidó as President but finally caved today.

Guaidó himself has also made promises that should the imperialists allow him to become president and his government to take over they would be welcomed back into the international community. The faux president has also made promises that under his leadership Venezuela would “easily” receive debt relief and loans. At the same time they’re doing this, the opposition also continues to push through measures to freeze the state’s assets, punishing average Venezuelans more in order to entice into turning on Maduro.

This kind of financial manipulation by the opposition coupled with the protests starting to say are essentially an insurrection against a state sponsored by the imperial powers. While protests aren’t necessarily “warfare,” the calls on the military to revolt also show that the opposition doesn’t just want to use civil disobedience but they’d be fine with a violent civil war.

Civil war may be one possible outcome of this latest anti-Maduro frenzy but there is also the possibility that these protests – like those in 2017 – fail. If Guaidó is looking to be president he obviously can’t have this happen or he’ll likely end up like Leopoldo Lopez, Washington’s last golden boy and fellow party member with the “interim President.”

Much like Guaidó, Lopez led protests that became violent and saw protesters causing damage meant to cripple Venezuelan infrastructure for extended periods of time. The problem for López is his little “uprising” failed, he was held accountable for encouraging the violence, and is now on house arrest.

If Guaidó and the empire fail again the “interim President” can likely look forward to the same fate.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FPIagn Tyler Durden

NVIDIA Research is using artificial intelligence (AI) to enable breakthroughs in robotics that solve real-world problems in the kitchen.

The new NVIDIA AI Robotics Research Lab in Seattle has recently debuted its ‘kitchen manipulator’ robot that uses AI to identify ingredients and completes cooking tasks.

The goal of the lab is to develop the next generation of robots that can one-day cook meals from humans.

Nvidia’s kitchen robot is one of several other robots in development at the semiconductor firm.

“Collaborative robotics, we might even call it the holy grail of robotics right now,” Nathan Ratliff, a distinguished researcher at Nvidia, explained. “It’s one of the most challenging environments to get these robots to operate around people and do helpful things in unstructured environments.”

The “kitchen manipulator” uses AI to monitor its surroundings. It can detect and track objects, as well as remember where doors and drawers are in the kitchen, Nvidia said.

If the robot is completing a task, it can even open and close drawers to retrieve an object.

“We want to develop robots that can naturally perform tasks alongside people,” said Dieter Fox, who is the lead reasearcher on the project, in a statement. “To do that, they need to be able to understand what a person wants to do and figure out how to help her achieve a goal.”

After the robot scans the objects in its surroundings, that data is then used to generate “continuous perceptual feedback” of where they are if moved. That information enables the robot to make “real-time, fast, reactive, adaptive and human-like motion,” Ratliff said.

The goal for the robot is to effectively wash dirty dishes, retrieve ingredients and cook alongside humans.

“One of the most challenging collaborative domains is the kitchen environment,” Ratliff explained. “So we’ve chosen that as a test bed so we can develop a lot of these technologies, study the system in this space and take a lot of what we learn and apply them across the board to these other collaborative domains.”

The robots could also play a role in factories, hospitals, and helping people with disabilities. 

However, for now, it seems that NVIDIA Research has their eyes on disrupting the kitchen, more specifically, the installation and implementation of robot chiefs that will undoubtedly disrupt service industry jobs.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UiS90T Tyler Durden