New York Lynch Mob

I had dinner last night in El Quijote, a wonderful Spanish restaurant next to the fabled Hotel Chelsea.  Although I work one day a week in New York City, I rarely spend time there because my wife and I prefer our neighborhood in the Kingston-Woodstock-Saugerties-Phoenicia corridor in the eastern Catskill Mountains.  Because my cousin was visiting, though, I took a bus down, and we had a nice dinner in Chelsea. 

I came early and had a martini at the bar, when a young man, probably around 30, walked in and ordered a drink.  He told me that he is an unemployed piano worker, and he used to work in the Steinway piano factory.  I happen to have grown up near the original Steinway factory in Astoria, Queens, and we got into a conversation.  

I suggested that he consider moving to North Dakota, where the jobs are plentiful.  Truck drivers in North Dakota are making $80,000, according to the Bismarck Tribune, and a Williston politician has told me that people who get off the bus in Willistion, which is in western North Dakota, find a job within six hours.  The reason, of course, is the oil boom brought on by hydraulic fracturing, fracking, and horizontal drilling.  These technologies involve going down two miles into the earth, then turning the drill at a 90 degree angle, horizontally. High-pressure water mixed with a chemical solution breaks up the shale rock and releases oil or natural gas.  

According to Hannah Coman,* since fracking was invented in the 1940s, there have been about a million fracking applications with about 1,000 reported cases in the five states where fracking has occurred, Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In other words, fracking is safer than driving a car. 

That is, the five states where fracking has occurred have a combined population of 36.6 million, according to the 2010 census, so there’s a probability of .027% (1,000/36,600,000) of an incident.  In contrast, there were 6.4 million car accidents in 2005 compared to 208 million licensed drivers in 2008. The median age was 37.2, and assuming a starting age for driving of 18, Americans experienced about 19.2 x 6.4 million = 125 million car accidents over their 19.2 driving years; 125 million / 208 million is a 60% probability.  In other words, car accidents are 2,222% more likely than fracking accidents. 

Nevertheless New Yorkers are convinced, undoubtedly by the media, that fracking is a great evil.  Most don't know what it is or why it's evil. They just know that it's evil. 

When the young man asked me why there were so many jobs, I said that there was a great deal of oil extraction because of the fracking in North Dakota.  He suddenly went ballistic, and he started screaming at me: "I will NEVER be involved with fracking. Fracking is evil. I hate fracking."  I suggested that he do a little reading on the subject, and he answered, "I've read on it . You should read on it."  I asked him whether he had learned about it from Youtube video or The New York Times. He didn't respond. I added, "OK, I'll remember you as the guy who preferred unemployment to fracking." 

I then sat down with my aunt, to whom I described this interaction. "I hate fracking," she said. I don't think that she could cite a clear reason either.  

New York is a city in which the City Council has called Wal-Mart's donations to charity "dangerous dollars" and "toxic money." It is a city governed by a lynch-mob mentality, where conformity to national socialist** rumors is a rule, a cornerstone of a culture governed by lockstep, illiteracy-inducing public schools, which indoctrinate the city's population in the city's national socialist ideology.  Never mind that fracking has been done for 70 years; never mind that natural gas has always been obtained using fracking. Fracking is evil, according to  New York's national socialists. 

New York has become a place that I'd rather avoid. The people, indoctrinated and intolerant, don't interest me;  the politics upsets me.  The food is good, but I'm past the age at which I can afford the calories. When the jury comes in on the outcome of the Fed's recent tripling of the money supply, I don't think I want to be anywhere near New York City. I can envision the city's national socialists hoisted by their own petard, blaming George W. Bush for all their own bad decisions.

*Hannah Coman, “Balancing Our Needs for Energy and Clean Water: The Case for Applying Strict Liability in Hydraulic Fracturing Suits.”

**In popular American parlance, followers of Hegel and the German historical school of economics had been called "liberals" and now call themselves "progressives." Neither term is accurate. They are national socialists, with the same intellectual heritage that Hitler's Nazi Party had.

Obama Impeachment Idea Suggests Idiocratic Rule

I just received an email from former congressman Allen West, who is looking to impeach Obama.  Obama is not the problem, and impeachment is not the solution.  America's problems are deep, and they stem from government bloat, money printing, and special interests ranging from the food, banking, and healthcare lobbies to the government-union and environmentalist lobbies. The problems result from too much regulation, too much spending, too much government suppression, too much subsidization of the rich, too high taxes, too many government programs, and too much public greed. 

Both parties are at fault. Impeachment would be a diversion, not only because the Democratic Senate will never find Obama guilty of anything but also because impeachment will not solve a thing. The Republicans are as socialist as the Democrats.


I just wrote a report on North Dakota, and North Dakota's Republican history is largely one of a big-government Republican Party led by what was called the Nonpartisan League, a spinoff of the state's Socialist Party that came to dominate state politics and the state's Republican Party until the 1950s.  The claim that the Republican Party is the party of small government is so far from reality that its existence reminds me of the Mike Judge film, Idiocracy.

>Friend – I wanted to make sure you didn't miss this.

GOP Congressman Lou Barletta just announced that he thinks there may be enough "yes" votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Barack Obama!

Now – more than ever – we need to get the Guardian Fund's impeachment survey into the hands of every conservative in America. Can you help me?

Please make an emergency donation of $5 or more right away by clicking on this link to help me promote this critical survey on the impeachment of Barack Obama.

Make no mistake – Obama is ignoring the Constitution, our laws, and the system of checks and balances that safeguard this country.

He's committed high crimes and misdemeanors and it's time to kick him out of office.

Are you with me?

Thanks,
Allen

New York Now a Toxic City

Bigotry takes many forms.  One form of bigotry involves intolerance of others' political views or economic behaviors. Such bigotry can be as violent as racial or religious hatred.  Dissidents in big-government states have been prevented from working, have been incarcerated, have been tortured, and have been killed.  Examples include the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when communists were prevented from working in the film industry; the suppression of the Soviet Union and China, which often involved incarceration in prison camps, torture, and murder; and the  suppression of dissidents, along with Jews, Gypsies, and uncooperative Catholic leaders, in Nazi Germany.* 

New York increasingly exhibits political bigotry.  The New York Post reported on June 4 that 26 of 51 New York City Councilmen wrote a letter to Wal-Mart demanding that the firm stop giving charity in New York.  The Post reports that Wal-Mart had announced $3 million in gifts to New York this year. It adds, "Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called the donations “toxic money,” and accused Walmart of waging a “cynical public-relations campaign that disguises Walmart’s backwards anti-job agenda."

Rather than Wal-Mart's charity being toxic money, New York has become a toxic city. It is New York that destroys jobs and destroys wages through its inept regulatory regimes, specifically including the state ban on fracking, whose harms are vastly exaggerated. The high cost of regulation in New York has driven hundreds of corporate headquarters out of the city.  When I was a child, a quarter of the industrial firms still had headquarters there. Because of the policies of jobs-destroying politicians like Melissa Mark-Viverito, three quarters of the headquarters are gone.
 
*When I visited the Dachau concentration camp in 1975, I learned that many Catholic priests had been imprisoned there along with Jews.  American universities today are frequently anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, just as Hitler and Stalin were.

New York Times Finds That Brooklyn College Grads Have Trouble Finding Jobs

The New York Times  has published an article about the difficulty that Brooklyn College business program students, in effect the students whom I teach, are having trouble finding jobs.  That is not surprising because the program does little to identify what jobs are available and what the program can do to offer skills that specifically target the job market that the students face.  My response to the Times is as follows:

Dear Editor:

Thank you for “Degree? Check. Enthusiasm? Check. Job? Not So Fast” (New York Region, June 8, 2014), concerning the inability of Brooklyn College grads to find jobs.  Over the past decade one or two Brooklyn business faculty have proposed that the college establish an objective outcomes assessment system to measure  job placement,  but Brooklyn College has resisted.  The public ought to demand that higher educational institutions publish measures not only of job placement but also of objectively measured performance improvement in skill areas like writing, mathematics, and interpersonal skills. In order for Brooklyn College to improve the job placement outcomes that you describe, the first step for us educators is to objectively know what the outcomes are.  The second is to deliver competencies to our students that enable them to do better. The Brooklyn business program has resisted objective measurement; you have done it for us. 

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.