Showing posts with label Social Engineering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Engineering. Show all posts

Saturday, January 20, 2018

How to avoid fake news: Stop getting your news from Facebook, that's how

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Wednesday, December 13, 2017

“We cannot afford to lose funding for law enforcement officers in exchange for a socially responsible investment policy.”





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Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Why have California's pension funds fallen so far short of their projected returns? Part of it is that they base investment decisions on their political beliefs.



The day he was sworn in to the California Assembly, freshman Bay Area Democrat Ash Kalra filed his first piece of legislation: Assembly Bill 20, which would force the state’s two largest public employee retirement funds, CalSTRS and CalPERS, to divest from companies involved in building the disputed Dakota Access pipeline.

The bill, if it were to become law (and it shouldn’t), wouldn’t stop the project from being completed. The Army Corps of Engineers has already given final approval to the remaining section of the pipeline. It would, however, blow a multibillion-dollar hole in the pension funds — and the public pocketbook, because state and local taxpayers would be left to fill that hole....
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Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Donald Trump's right — the system is rigged. Need proof? Look at Common Core



Despite the fact that their work would affect every child in America, deliberations took place behind closed doors. In fact, all the discussions and standards writing were sealed by confidentiality agreements. Parents were barred from attending CCSSO meetings on Common Core.

The education publication School Reform News tried for ten weeks to get permission to attend a CCSSO meeting on Common Core — but was denied.

"The public has a right to know the laws that are going to affect them and their families," observed Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency organization. But with Common Core, "it's a black box."

And when the Common Core standards were released, the Obama administration dangled $4 billion in front of state policymakers to push them to adopt the standards pronto.

States often signed onto Common Core without public input. Ze'ev Wurman, former senior education policy advisor in the George W. Bush administration, noted, "There was no discussion, no public debate."

And who benefits from this secret transformation of American education?
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Sunday, June 12, 2016

Many American cities are dominated by far Left activists, and this works well for influencing local city politics, but when it comes to rural America, the exurbs, and many suburbs, the Left is getting crushed electorally. Democrats are losing county council seats, state senate and representative seats, and congressional seats all over the country in areas outside of our biggest cities, and the Left cannot tolerate this loss of power.



What happened yesterday is another example of why Americans are mad and aren’t going to take it anymore. It is the sellout of principles by Republican Senators that created the backlash that produced Donald Trump. Voters believe that Trump won’t sell them out.

Here are the circumstances. Obama, further unconstitutionally extending the powers of the Federal Government into areas it was never intended to function in, has decided that wealthy suburbs don’t have enough Democrat votes. Democrats have power and influence in urban areas, but they are losing power in the suburbs and exurbs. Democrat local officials in the non-urban areas are losing elections to Republican local candidates. The Democrats perceive this as a problem for the future and want to fix it by putting more Democrat votes in the suburban and exurban areas.

Obama is instituting a new rule to put low-income housing in middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods to change the voter demographics.

Senator Mike Lee introduced a measure in the Senate to defund and stop implementation of this terrible rule. Instead of jumping on board, as they should have, a bunch of sell-out Republicans, afraid of being labeled racist and pro-wealthy, supported an alternative bill offered by Senator Susan Collins which does nothing to defund or stop the implementation of the rule.

Are Republicans angry at the “Establishment?” You bet. This is why Trump.

...Here’s what happened. The Obama administration has been quietly pushing a new rule, which would effectively build low-income housing in middle and upper middle-class neighborhoods. The rule goes by the name Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing or AFFH and, shockingly, stipulates that not only are people entitled to government subsidized housing but that people are entitled to government subsidized housing in neighborhoods which the government chooses, regardless of the wishes of the residents of those neighborhoods.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the far Left is hell-bent on decimating the American cities they monopolistically run and then transplanting those failed policies into prosperous American neighborhoods, some sell-outs within the Republican Party have decided that they are going to play along.
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Thursday, September 17, 2015

When we first wrote about this idea two years ago, it really seemed like an Orwellian joke – the fact that the government was establishing a task force dedicated to studying how it could get you to do what it thinks is best for you.



As Richard Williams wrote for Politico at the time, “Congress did not pass legislation authorizing such activity; this is something dreamt up by bureaucracies to force their own preferences on citizens, whether by combating obesity or discouraging procrastination when it comes to saving for retirement.”

But the Obama administration never lets a little thing like legislation get in his way, right? No, he just signs it into effect via executive order.

As the Daily Caller reports, on Tuesday, “President Obama announced a new executive order which authorizes federal agencies to conduct behavioral experiments on U.S. citizens in order to advance government initiatives...."
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Monday, September 7, 2015

University of Tennesse President DiPietro nixes gender-neutral pronoun recommendation. Takes it off UTK website



University of Tennessee President Joe DiPietro informed the UT Board of Trustees on Friday that a university newsletter article advocating the use of "gender neutral" pronouns such as "ze" for "he" and "she" for some students will be removed from UT-Knoxville's Office for Diversity and Inclusion's website.
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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Remember the university that threatened to punish students for writing “illegal alien”? Not happening anymore



Over the weekend, several Washington State University syllabi were leaked showing professors banning words like "male," "illegal alien" and "people of color," while threatening to punish students for using them.

But on Monday, WSU administrators stepped in and told the professors that they could not ban the words nor punish students for using such language, as it would violate free speech rights.

"We are working with these faculty members to clarify, and in some cases modify, course policies to ensure that students' free speech rights are recognized and protected," WSU President Daniel J. Bernardo said in a statement. "No student will have points docked merely as a result of using terms that may be deemed offensive to some. Blanket restriction of the use of certain terms is not consistent with the values upon which this university is founded.

At least three professors teaching women's studies or multi-culture courses distributed the syllabi....

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Saturday, August 1, 2015

Senator Mike Lee has just introduced a bill to defund President Obama’s Power Grab



Senator Mike Lee has just introduced a bill to defund President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation

"Every American should be free to choose where to live, and every community should be free to zone its neighborhoods and compete for new residents according to its distinct values. The diversity of America’s neighborhoods – from dense cities to wide-open rural communities to suburbs in between – is a treasure that we need to preserve. We don’t need a National Zoning Board. Washington should let Americans "govern local."

...Yet it would be foolish for local governments to rely on congressional efforts to defund AFFH. For now, localities wishing to avoid a de facto federal takeover need to consider turning down HUD grant money. Sen. Lee’s press release on his AFFH defunding bill rightly notes problems in HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program (CDBG). But there’s no time to wait for reform. Localities need to consider turning down HUD money right now.

A new website, Obamazone.org, provides a way for you to find out what your locality already accepts in the way of CDBG money. The site features news about opposition to AFFH and helpful videos as well. While CDBG is the largest HUD grant program by far, it’s important to keep in mind that there are several other smaller HUD grant programs, and taking even a dollar from any one of them leaves a locality vulnerable to de facto federal takeover.

Turning down HUD money is the smart play right now. If AFFH stands, however, it will not do as a long-term solution. The citizens of every locality in the country are taxed to fund HUD. Turning down the grants picks their pockets. If AFFH stands, efforts to cut funding for CDBG will have to begin. For now, however, the safest play is to turn down HUD money and press Congress to pass the Gosar and Lee bills defunding or canceling AFFH.







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Friday, July 10, 2015

California: The terms “husband” and “wife” have been deleted from California’s marriage law under a bill signed into law Monday by Gov. Jerry Brown.





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Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Obama to Nigerian Christians: Change Laws on Abortion, Homosexuality If You Want Protection from Boko Haram

◼ A Catholic Bishop from Nigeria has leveled an explosive charge against President Barack Obama over his failure to adequately help Nigeria in the African nation’s fight againt the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram that might explain why Obama has let Boko Haram slaughter Nigerian Christians and rape and enslave Christian girls. - Jim Hoft/Gateway Pundit

Bishop Emmanuel Badejo spoke ◼ in Rome to Aleteia, saying of the Obama administration:
“The United States actually said it would help Nigeria with Boko Haram only if we modify our laws concerning homosexuality, family planning, and birth control.”
A Wall Street Journal article about an interview with Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan published last week described “various issues” supposedly keeping the Obama administration from providing more support to Nigeria in its fight against Boko Haram, but did not mention the morals issues claimed by Bishop Badejo....

In August 2014, then U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman(R-TX) made a similar charge to Bishop Badejo’s, saying the Obama administration was withholding aid to Nigeria in the fight against Boko Haram in part over Nigeria’s “social policy.”

The charge was denied by a State Department offical at ◼ a recent House hearing.

...A Reuters article on Western criticism of the law noted that Nigeria not being dependent on Western financial aid gave those governments little leverage to pressure Nigeria. If Bishop Badejo is correct, President Obama has decided the leverage he has is to punish Nigeria by letting Boko Haram slaughter Christians and rape and enslave Christian girls.
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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Unless the California Air Resources Board takes action soon, motorists could be hit with a 76 cent per gallon gas tax increase in January.


◼ ENVIRONMENT: Gas prices fueling debate - The Press Enterprise via Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association
◼ LIKE Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association on FACEBOOK

Come Jan. 1, fuel producers will have to buy credits to cover auto emissions. Industry representatives said the consumers will bear the cost of those credits.

California drivers can expect to pay 16 to 76 cents per gallon more once the cap-and-trade changes are in effect, according to Fed Up at The Pump, a coalition of fuel producers and business groups that calls the upcoming cap-and-trade change a hidden tax.

“Now is not the time for California’s environmental bureaucrats to play social engineers and price out consumers who need to fill up their gas tanks to make a living,” read an issue summary on the Fed Up coalition’s website.
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Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Feds paid $4.9 MILLION to create a hypothetical utopian with plans of a United Nations ‘youth movement’ to help usher in a ‘new world order’ by 2070

◼ Feds Paid $4.9 Million to Create Hypothetical Utopian Climate Change Future - Washington Free Beacon

The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave nearly $5 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s actions on climate change, including a utopian future where everyone rides a bike and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.

The government has awarded $4,911,961 for the project, which is slated to run until March 2016 and for which the school has created a website suggesting different possibilities of what Yahara, a Wisconsin watershed, will be like in 2070.

In the scenario where Americans “shift our values,” people live in hippie-like communes after “youth culture” convinces the world to give up their cars and eat vegetarian....

Rosa celebrates a court decision that forcibly took property from wealthy individuals as a required step to place the community above the individual.

“Even though most Yaharans had become more willing to undertake serious conservation measures, the willingness was not universal, especially when certain sacrifices were required,” she tells her granddaughter in the story. “To create the preserve, Grandpa had to convince several wealthy residents to give up either some of their property or their control of it.”

When some individuals refused, a coalition took them to court, which unanimously ruled in favor of building a community beach.

“It was a glorious victory!” Rosa says. “Oh, how we celebrated! It symbolized how far we’d come in putting the good of our communities and our environment before the desires of the individual. The triumph was proof the Great Transition had arrived.”

...The University of Wisconsin-Madison project is similar to the $5.6 million the NSF awarded to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an earth destroyed due to climate change.
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Sunday, December 15, 2013

People are pawns to be moved around on a large board. We needed these people here, so liberty and choice can be jettisoned for them.


◼ Uncle Obamacare wants YOU! - Neoneocon

We said they could keep their plans? Tough. We said later that the plans that were cancelled as a result of Obamacare were only the “junk,” substandard ones? Well, guess what: we lied. Tough again.

It’s for the greater good, after all. As the august Nancy Pelosi would say, embrace the suck.
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Monday, August 12, 2013

The One-Plan-to-Rule-Them-All — Or the Chinafication of the Bay Area

◼ It is designed to ram “sustainable development” down the thoats of all the counties and cities of the Bay Area whether they or their seven-million citizens like it or not. Now, this blog has already explained that we’re suing to stop this plan with this lawsuit because it’s illegal and environmentally ill-considered. - James Burling/Pacific Legal Foundation

But what might be even more interesting than the legal infirmities is the striking parallel between the imposition of “stack-and-pack” housing on the hapless masses in the Bay Area and the helpless masses in rural China. It’s not a communist versus capitalist thing and its not even a grand conspiracy thing – it’s just the mind set of planners everywhere.

There is the omnipresent disdain for those boobs (like me) who actually want to live in the dirty countryside (China) or the sterile suburbs (United States.) The urban-centric planning elites apparently want to breed more urban elites by creating more urban living. The problem is that people who want to raise families would prefer not to raise them in crime-infested high density housing projects in cities run by dysfunctional city governments. The correlation between crime and density is real, the sport of corruption in city governments is blatant, and the good sense of parents to escape to the ‘burbs is irrefutable.

So what’s a planner to do? It’s easy. In China the planners have the power of the police; in the United States the planners have the “police power.” In China you can make people move by forcing them out of their rural shacks at gunpoint while in the United States you can simply keep people from building new suburban tract homes through “sustainable” zoning – which is what the Bay Area Plan is all about....

Emerging from the horrors of the planned economies of the Soviet Union and Germany, Friedrich von Hayek wrote his classic “Road to Serfdom” in the early 1940s. His thesis was simple: for a planned economy to operate it must operate by force through the power of the state. In China, the peasants have moved from feudal serfdom to the serfdom of totalitarian communism and now to the serfdom of new urban planning. In the Bay Area, we’re moving from free market housing development shaped by supply and demand to what?
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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Federal 'nudge squad' led by 20-something wunderkind gears up to change Americans' behaviors – for our own good

◼ When does a nudge become a shove? - Daily Mail

Americans may find out in coming years, as the federal government is setting up a 'behavioral insights team' to tinker with the way we accomplish everything from saving money and staying in school to losing weight and becoming more energy-efficient....

In the U.S., however, there's no indication that the White House's 'nudge unit' will be anything other than a government enterprise.

That may not bode well for the Obama administration, given the cautionary tale posed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose long-ridiculed ban on large-size fizzy drinks has officially fallen flat.

An appeals court ruled Tuesday that the city's Board of Health didn't have the constitutional authority to limit how much soda can go into a restaurant's cup.

The measure was originally hailed as a perfect example of 'nudge' paternalism that would subtly change behaviors without preventing the truly thirsty from buying two cups.

But the ruling will set a precedent that opens up such government interventions to legal nannying of its own from industries whose bottom lines are affected when bureaucracies try to tweak what ordinary people do, and how they do it.
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Friday, June 14, 2013

Barack Obama's "Social Innovation" Slush Fund

◼ The phony-baloney statistics that SIF bureaucrats tout to show how many have been "served" simply demonstrate the Nanny State "entrepreneurs'" real agenda: maximizing the number of government dependents and rewarding social welfare operatives. - Michelle Malkin/Townhall

The Obama administration's politicization of charity -- or the "Solyndra-ization of philanthropy," as the Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock calls it -- has created a permanent taxpayer-backed pipeline to Democratic partisan outfits masquerading as public-interest do-gooders. There's nothing "innovative" about underwriting the same failed dependency-inducing community organizing fronts while persecuting others based on ideology.

It's self-SERVE-ing Chicago business as usual.
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Monday, January 7, 2013

Mandates, Regulation and ‘Rights’

◼ Health Insurers Raise Some Rates by Double Digits - New York Times

◼ What was causing the problem to which ObamaCare was supposed to be the solution? If it was not clear before, it is becoming more so, now that the alleged solution is making the problem worse - The Other McCain

Government policies were causing the artificial scarcity of “affordable health care” (a glittering generality) and the new policies known as ObamaCare are aggravating the problem because they are, in effect, just more of the same. We had a lot more “affordable health care” before government decided that health care should be “free” (i.e., subsidized by taxpayers) for some patients, and then states began to mandate and regulate how employers and health-insurance companies should provide coverage to those paying their own premiums....

The free-market system is distorted and artificial scarcity is caused by what amount to government efforts to control prices. Dressed up in the language of “rights” and “fairness,” and promising to rid us of our woes, liberalism’s solutions inevitably create new problems.

Have you noticed that good intentions are becoming increasingly scarce? It’s a supply-and-demand problem, because liberals have lately been so incredibly busy paving the road to hell....
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Monday, September 10, 2012

Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools

◼ link - Stanley Kurtz/Wall St. Journal

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists....

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement....

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

◼ Figures. Chicago Teacher’s Union President Linked to Former Communist Party Chief and Barack Obama - Jim Hoft/Gateway Pundit

More Hope and Change…
Mike Klonsky, an Obama supporter and former associate of the radicals who formed the terrorist group the Weatherman, received a $175,000 grant from the William Ayers/Barack Obama-led Annenberg Challenge to run the Small Schools Workshop....

So it should come as no surprise that Mike Klonsky, the former Communist Party leader, is a huge supporter of Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers’ Union. Chicago teachers went on strike today for the first time in 25 years despite the fact that the average teacher salary in Chicago is $74,839 a year.

◼ U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading - CNS News
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The gasoline trap

◼ It takes heavy fuel to transform a nation. - John Hayward at Human Events

We went from $1.84 gas at the time of Obama’s inauguration, to $3.56 ($4.19 in Eureka) and climbing today, but it took a little while to get there, so panic hasn’t quite broken out at the pumps.

Over the long term, high gas prices fuel the “transformation” of the populace, which has always been one of Obama’s most important stated goals. For one thing, it’s easier to hide a few more cents of tax in $4 gas than $2 gas. More insidiously, expensive gas begins changing public expectations about the ability to travel, and the ability of average people to afford automobiles. For an example of the former, look at the blossoming trend of stories about “staycations” as summer approaches. That’s a vacation where you don’t actually go anyplace. The Associated Press wrote about them over the weekend.

Soon you’ll begin seeing carefully placed stories about how wonderful staycations are. You’ll hear about the stress of packing the family into a car or airplane for a long journey, versus the marvelous relaxation of camping out in the backyard, or connecting with one another over kitchen-table games. Remember how the media started writing about “funemployment” when Barack Obama got his hands on the economy? Meanwhile, two months after her previous luxury vacation, Michelle Obama whisks the kids off to go skiing in Aspen.

◼ Lowest Regular Gas Prices in the Last 36 hours in Eureka, CA - californiagasprices.com
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