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Congo children work hard so YOU can drive an electric car

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html

We should keep investigating

They say that marijuana legalization is bad, but...

According to the Colorado Department of Public Safety 2016 http://cdpsdocs.state.co.us/ors/docs/reports/2016-SB13-283-Rpt.pdf -Total revenue from taxes, licenses, and fees increased from $76,152,468 in 2014 to $135,100,465 in 2015 (+77%). Excise tax revenue dedicated to school capital construction assistance was $35,060,590 in 2015. - Colorado’s property crime rate decreased 3%, from 2,580 (per 100,000 population) in 2009 to 2,503 in 2014. -Colorado’s violent crime rate decreased 6%, from 327 (per 100,000 population) in 2009 to 306 in 2014. -The total number of marijuana arrests decreased by 46% between 2012 and 2014, from 12,894 to 7,004. Marijuana possession arrests, which make up the majority of all marijuana arrests, were nearly cut in half (‐47%). Marijuana sales arrests decreased by 24%, while arrests for marijuana production did not change appreciably (‐2%). Marijuana arrests that were unspecified, meaning the specific reason for the arrest was not noted by law enforcement, went down by 42%. -As a share of all arrests in Colorado, marijuana was responsible for 6% of all arrests in 2012 and 3% in 2014. -The number of marijuana arrests decreased by 51% for Whites, 33% for Hispanics, and 25% for African‐Americans. The marijuana arrest rate for African‐Americans (348 per 100,000) was almost triple that of Whites (123 per 100,000) in 2014. Other jurisdictions that legalized the recreational marijuana industry have experienced similar declines in violent crime. In Washington State, violent crime rates decreased by 10 percent from 2011 to 2014. Portland, Oregon, saw crime rates drop since legalizing the recreational marijuana industry as well.
https://coloradopolitics.com/despite-claims-data-show-legalized-marijuana-not-increased-crime-rates/

"Pipe of peace"

Free people are immune to famine

"Never Again " By R L Rummel http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NH.HTM By the very nature of freedom, a free people are immune to one of humanity’s worst disasters, a famine.

In total, communist (Marxist-Leninist) regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the twentieth century killed in combat around 35 million. Communists, when in control of a nation, have murdered over three times the number that have been killed in combat in all wars, including the world wars.

And what did this greatest of human social experiments, communism, achieve for its poor citizens at this most bloody cost in lives? Nothing. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social, and cultural disaster. And that around 35 million people escaped communist countries as refugees was an unequaled vote against communist utopian pretensions.

There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology: No one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a government has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives and welfare will be sacrificed. The Unifying Cause of Democide: Power What connects all these cases of democide is this: as a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal wishes, or to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. Here, power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has full authority, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing the members of an elite feel is warranted.

All this provides a solid, life oriented argument for freedom: Freedom preserves and secures life. That which preserves and protects human life is a moral good. And, as I have shown, freedom is already a moral good for promoting human welfare and minimizing internal political violence. I now will add to this list the moral good of saving human lives. It is based on two facts: democracies throughout history have never, or virtually never, made war on each other. And the odds of this fact being a matter of chance are millions to one. The solution, therefore, is to spread democracy throughout the world.

Free people create a wealthy and prosperous society. When people are free to go about their own business, they put their ingenuity and creativity in the service of all. They search for ways to satisfy the needs, desires, and wants of others. The true utopia lies not in some state-sponsored tyranny, but the free market in goods, ideas, and services, whose operating principle is that success depends on satisfying others.

People rarely do things for others because they are completely selfless—we set apart and admire those rare Mother Theresas who are. Rather, almost all act out of self-interest, and it is therefore better to create a society in which self-interest leads to mutual betterment, rather than one in which a small coterie of fanatics exert their own selfinterest at the expense of the lives and welfare of others.

No democratically free people have suffered from mass famine. “Give a starving person a fish to eat and you feed him only for one day; teach him how to fish, and he feeds himself forever.” Yet teaching is no good alone, if people are not free to apply their new knowledge—yes, teach them how to fish, but also promote the freedom they need to do so. Surprisingly, the incredible economic productivity and wealth produced by a free people and their freedom from famines are not the only moral goods of freedom, nor, perhaps, even the most important moral goods. When people are free, they comprise a spontaneous society the characteristics of which strongly inhibit society-wide political violence.

Freedom greatly reduces the possibility of revolutions, civil war, rebellions, guerrilla warfare, coups, violent riots, and the like. Most of the violence within nations occurs where thugs rule with absolute power. There is a continuum here: The more power the rulers have, and the less free their people, the more internal violence these people will suffer. Keep in mind that throughout the world, people are essentially the same. It is not that the people of any culture, civilization, or nation are by nature any more bloodthirsty, barbaric, power-hungry, or violent than those of another. What makes for peace within a nation is not national character, but social conditions that reduce tension and hostility between people, lessen the stakes of conflict, cross-pressure interests, and promote negotiation, tolerance, and compromise. Such are the conditions created by democratic freedom. The more a people are free, the greater such conditions inhibit internal violence. Surely that which protects people against internal violence, that which so saves human lives, is a moral good. And this is freedom.

What is true about freedom and internal violence is also so for this mass democide: The more freedom a people have, the less likely their rulers are to murder them. The more power the thugs have, the more likely they are to murder their people. Could there be a greater moral good than to end or minimize such mass murder? This is what freedom does and for this it is, emphatically, a moral good. There is still more to say about freedom’s value. While we now know that the world’s ruling thugs generally kill several times more of their subjects than do wars, it is war on which moralists and pacifists generally focus their hatred, and devote their resources to ending or moderating. This singular concentration is understandable, given the horror and human costs, and the vital political significance of war. Yet it should be clear by now that war is a symptom of freedom’s denial, and that freedom is the cure.

Three points bear repeating. First: Democratically free people do not make war on each other. The diverse groups, cross-national bonds, social links, and shared values of democratic peoples sew them together; and shared liberal values dispose them toward peaceful negotiation and compromise with each other. It is as though the people of democratic nations were one society. This truth that democracies do not make war on each other provides a solution for eliminating war from the world: globalize democratic freedom.

Therefore the second point: The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the wars between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely such wars become.

And third: The more freedom the people of a nation have, the less bloody and destructive their wars. In short: Increasing freedom in the world decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our history, without causing a greater evil, must be a moral good. And this is freedom.

What is clear is that the less free the people of a nation are, the more we should beware of the intentions of their rulers. In other words, it is not the democracies of the world that we need to defend against. Were these dedicated people to spend even half this effort on promoting freedom and human rights for the people of the most powerful dictatorships that have or may soon have such weapons—for instance, China, North Korea, and Iran—they would be striking at the root cause for the risk of nuclear attack.

The power of freedom to end war, minimize violence within nations, and eradicate genocide and mass murder almost seems magical. Enhancing, spreading, and promoting human rights and democracy are the way to enhance, spread, and promote nonviolence. In conclusion, then, we have wondrous human freedom as a moral force for the good. Freedom produces social justice, creates wealth and prosperity, minimizes violence, saves human lives, and is a solution to war. In two words, it creates human security. Moreover, and most important: People should not be free only because it is good for them. They should be free because it is their right as human beings. Now, to summarize this whole book, why freedom? Because it is every person’s right. And it is a moral good—it promotes wealth and prosperity, social justice, and nonviolence, and preserves human life.

Sweden vs Iraq

DNC IT worker was trying to flee the country after wiring $300,000 to Pakistan

Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s top information technology (IT) aide was arrested Monday attempting to board a flight to Pakistan after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to that country.

Imran Awan, a Pakistani-born IT aide, had access to all emails and files of dozens of members of Congress, as well as the password to the iPad that Wasserman Schultz used for Democratic National Committee business before she resigned as its head in July 2016.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/25/wasserman-schultzs-it-aide-arrested-trying-to-flee-the-country/

"The only right you have is not to get shot if you cooperate"

The police report would claim it all kicked off at 7:38 a.m., but Bob Harte later thought it had to be earlier.

His 7:20 a.m. alarm had just yanked him awake. Got to get the kids — a boy in seventh grade, a girl in kindergarten — ready for school. Then he heard, like a starter’s pistol setting everything into motion, the first pounding on the front door of his home in Leawood, Kan., a bedroom suburb south of Kansas City. It was thunderous. It didn’t stop. Should I get up? Bob thought. Should I not? Sounded like the house was coming down, he would recall later.

Wearing only gym shorts, the stocky 51-year-old left his wife in bed and shuffled downstairs. The solid front door had a small window carved at eye-level, one-foot-square. As he approached, Bob saw the porch was clogged with police officers. Immediately after opening the door, seven members of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) pressed into the house brandishing guns and a battering ram. Bob found himself flat on floor, hands behind his head, his eyes locked on the boots of the officer standing over him with an AR-15 assault rifle. “Are there kids?” the officers were yelling. “Where are the kids?”

“And I’m laying there staring at this guy’s boots fearing for my kids’ lives, trying to tell them where my children are,” Harte recalled later in a deposition on July 9, 2015. “They are sending these guys with their guns drawn running upstairs to bust into my children’s house, bedroom, wake them out of bed.”

Harte’s wife, Addie, bolted downstairs with the children. Their son put his hands up when he saw the guns. The family of four were eventually placed on a couch as police continued to search the property. The officers would only say they were searching for narcotics.

Addie had a thought: It’s because of the hydroponic garden, she told her husband, they are looking for pot. No way, Harte said, correctly reasoning marijuana wasn’t a narcotic. And all this for pot?

But after two hours of fruitless search, the officers showed the Hartes a warrant. Indeed, the hunt was for marijuana. Addie and Bob were flabbergasted — all this for pot?

“You take the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all the rights you expect to have — when they come in like that, the only right you have is not to get shot if you cooperate,” Harte told The Washington Post this week. “They open that door, your life is on the line.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/28/well-never-be-the-same-how-a-familys-hydroponic-tomato-garden-led-cops-to-raid-their-home/

Why It’s Hard to Take Democrats Seriously on Russia

Today’s liberal Russia hawks would have us believe that they’ve always been clear-sighted about Kremlin perfidy and mischief. They’re displaying amnesia not just over a single law but the entire foreign policy record of the Obama administration. From the reset, which it announced in early 2009 just months after Russia invaded Georgia, to its removal of missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland later that year, to its ignoring Russia’s violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (while simultaneously negotiating New START) and its ceding the ground in Syria to Russian military intervention, the Obama administration’s Russia policy was one, protracted, 8-year-long concession to Moscow. Throughout his two terms in office, Obama played down the threat Russia posed to America’s allies, interests and values, and ridiculed those who warned otherwise. “The traditional divisions between nations of the south and the north make no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War,” Obama lectured the United Nations General Assembly in 2009, a more florid and verbose way of making the exact same criticism of supposed NATO obsolescence that liberals would later excoriate Donald Trump for bluntly declaring.

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It's great that we have "low unemployment" in Britain

On paper, Britain is supposed to be doing well — growing economy, low unemployment. So why did Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party get so many votes at the last election? (Answer: People still feel poor, their wages are not rising, and 1 in 7 workers is out of work.) Why did a majority of people vote for Brexit? (Answer: the economy for men is basically still in recession, and men don't like losing their economic power, so this was a good way of "taking back control.") And why are so many people trapped in the "gig economy," making minimum wage? (Answer: Because the true underlying rate of unemployment means companies can still find new workers even in a time of "full employment.")

http://www.businessinsider.com/unemployment-in-the-uk-is-now-so-low-its-in-danger-of-exposing-the-lie-used-to-create-the-numbers-2017-7

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