The WUWT Hot Sheet for August 16th, 2013

@ur momisugly Tom in Florida;
I’m also from FL, by the by.
Anyway, don’t be so sure about the inevitability of tyranny. Strange things can and do happen, and hummanity has a way of surprising everyone.
After all, G Washington could have been a king, and the rest of those guys nobles, and precisely no one would have batted an eye. That’s the way the world had worked for centuries, and it wouldn’t have struck anyone as out of the ordinary.
Instead they decided to try something different and resist the temptation of a crown.

You push a man too far, and he’ll push back. Even a harmless old lady will fight if you’re hurting her grandchildren.
A man fighting for his life is much more dangerous than a man fighting for his pay.

Why do comics do that to his chin? An exageration of his face would do the opposite. Looking at an Obama headshot right now and thinking, if I were going to draw a recognizable comic distortion of this guy I see:
-Little or no chin
-Very round head
-Thin neck
-Long, thin, curly lips
-Giant teeth
-Little ears that stick out sideways
They get the teeth right, but miss the rest.
I’d like to build a collection of MBA two-axis diagrams, x = cartoonist political lean, y= subject personality’s political lean. Lewandowsky?

@ur momisugly Philosophy Science (@ur momisuglyPhilosoScience)
Obama is like a teenager experimenting with whiskey and firearms. He’s trying to channel forces he has no hope of controlling.

During his (almost obsessive) lying about Benghazi, I realized that Obama was beginning to go off the rails. This isn’t going to be pretty, but I don’t think these wine-and-cheese types are really cut out to be dictators. Instead, they expect that we’ll all submit and everything will be OK.
Plus, they’ve bet the farm on AGW of all things! So what happens when their fantasies fail to materialize? That will be a lot of egg to wipe off. Egg enough to drown in.
No, they act like a bunch of arrogant bastards, but at the same time they’re little people spinning out of control because they’re way, way out of their depth.
(Shows you what a university education can lead to these days.)

[snip . . site rules . . mod]

@SAMURAI, Outrageous Ampersand, milodonharlani, et as. –
With der Fuehrer’s increasingly aggressive usurpations of congressional and judicial authority, have we not a situation parallel to both (1) Hitler, in the first months after he was named chancellor of Germany, appointed through an entirely democratic process; and (2) Egypt’s Mursi, also democratically elected, but a brazen tyrant withal? Democratic processes can still produce a tyrannical regime, a lesson we’ve been way too slow to learn – and that is clearly what is happening here.
Unfortunately, in situations like this, constitutional processes are almost certain to fail, because the political class controls them and prevents them from being exercised. Therefore, a coup cannot be ruled out here, any more than in Egypt, unless one is willing to surrender freedoms once and for all
I too believe that a possible solution may reside with the states: as I noted before, they could block Schutzstaffelgruppenfuehrer McCarthy’s actions by declaring them invalid and of no force or effect because unconstitutional, pursuant to the Tenth Amendment. That might force the federal government either to declare martial law or otherwise intervene militarily – or back off, if they want to avoid a bloodbath. I would hope that if der Fuehrer put the military in that position, it would side with the people instead of the regime.
AGW fanaticism is only the tip of the iceberg in all this. It is really only the public face of a movement whose agenda and objectives are far deeper and more sinister

Tom J on August 16, 2013 at 1:44 pm
[snip . . site rules . . mod]
Oops.

Congratulations Willis and Anthony for mention in the Vancouver Sun:
http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/Carbon+taxes+poor/8789954/story.html\
I was going to post a reply to Greg’s comment, but I don’t do Facebook.

Outrageous Ampersand says: @ur momisugly August 16, 2013 at 9:44 am
…..the entire global financial system will collapse. And a massive chunk of food supplies will be compromised. One hungry desperate person is a tragedy; 5 billion of them is Judgement Day.
These fools are playing with forces they can’t hope to control.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are correct. Energy and Food, two of the forces these idiots are playing with both at the same time. Everyone here is aware of the constant push for a carbon tax and ‘Green Energy’ The other problem is the attack on our food supply from rising energy costs and the sudden implementation of nasty red tape. Suddenly the US food supply is not looking quite so good.
The USA produces ~ 25% of the World Food supply and we export a lot of it.

March 16, 2012
….Last year, the U.S. exported a record $137 billion worth of food. Indeed, food has always been one of America’s leading exports, with grains accounting for the vast majority of products shipped.
But lately, the U.S. has been exporting a lot more non-bulk value-added foods like meats, fruits, vegetables, poultry, and nuts. Processed foods like food ingredients, beverages, frozen foods, and dairy accounted for $50 billion alone in 2011….
http://www.foodlogistics.com/article/10657446/how-to-feast-on-the-us-food-export-boom-without-fear-of-credit-risk

In 2011, 96 percent of U.S. crop farms were family farms, and they accounted for 87 percent of the value of crop production. There is a major problem looming called the Food Safety Modernization Act which will be hitting farmers about now.
A bit about the Author of the following two articles:
“Hans Bader is Counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law.” link

Food Safety Modernization Act harms small farmers and safety innovation
… As the FDA puts “in place a massive overhaul of the nation’s food safety system,” due to the Food Safety Modernization Act, “Few groups have expressed more frustration than tree fruit farmers, who grow apples, pears and a variety of other produce. They complain that the FDA’s approach, in some ways, defies common sense.” The 2010 law is proving far more costly than its supporters promised it would be, in order to get Congress to pass it.
The “Food Safety Modernization Act would impose only modest costs on farmers, or so we kept being assured when it passed in 2010.” But many orchard growers now face tens of thousands of dollars in costs, notes the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson. As he points out, the law’s unexpected costs have caused a furor in some farming communities, and the Town of Brooksville recently became the “ninth in Maine to pass symbolic ‘food sovereignty’ resolution [See Jordan Bloom, The American Conservative; Food Renegade (Dan Brown of Blue Hill)].”
“The FDA has issued two proposed rules to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act enacted in 2011,” notes Brian Wolfman of Public Citizen, who provides details and links. “The costs to fruit and vegetable growers for complying with the newly proposed produce safety regulation have been estimated at more than $30,000 annually for large farms and about $13,000 per year for smaller farms,” reports The Grower. As Olson, a veteran legal commentator, observes, this could be an enormous burden for some farmers: “How much do typical US farm households make in a year, you may wonder? According to U.S. government figures (here and here, for example) a large proportion of smaller family farms make little or no profit, and are instead supported by the off-farm earnings of family members.”….
At one point, liberal journalists who supported the law made blatantly false claims about its reach, claiming it wouldn’t reach any small farms that didn’t sell across the state lines. That false claim, parroted by a left-leaning “fact-checker,” was explicitly contradicted by Section 406 of the bill, which stated that “In any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction shall be presumed to exist” even for farms that do not sell any produce across state lines…..

OH DARN! so they did manage to slip in the *&^$@ur momisugly Commerce Clause. That is really really bad news.

…Ignorance about the law’s broad reach (and how it will be construed by the courts) has thwarted opposition to the bill… For example, a newspaper claims the bill “doesn’t regulate home gardens.” The newspaper probably assumed that was true because the bill, like most federal laws, only purports to reach activities that affect “interstate commerce.” To an uninformed layperson or journalist, that “sounds as if it might not reach local and mom-and-pop operators at all.” (The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, has sought to forestall opposition to her bill by falsely claiming that that “the Constitution’s commerce clause prevents the federal government from regulating commerce that doesn’t cross state lines.”)
But lawyers familiar with our capricious legal system know better. The Supreme Court ruled in Wickard v. Filburn (1942) that even home gardens (in that case, a farmer’s growing wheat for his own consumption) are subject to federal laws that regulate interstate commerce. Economists and scholars have criticized this decision, but it continues to be cited and followed in Supreme Court rulings, such as those applying federal anti-drug laws to consumption of even home-grown medical marijuana. Indeed, many court decisions allow Congress to define as “interstate commerce” even non-commercial conduct that doesn’t cross state lines….. http://www.examiner.com/scotus-in-washington-dc/trojan-horse-law-the-food-safety-modernization-act-of-2009

And just to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, especially if you were aware of the Premises ID/National Animal ID battle and the sneaky way the government signed up your property WITHOUT permission and placed you in a data base they refused to remove you from.

…The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food is promoting the Utah Garden Challenge in order to collect information about independent food production for the USDA.
The Utah Garden Challenge is a voluntary contest to register 10,000 gardens. The data mining project has a broad interest in any “resource” who is growing food…
http://www.morphcity.com/home/117-utah-garden-challenge-for-suckers

USDA: Join the People’s Garden Movement Register Your Garden

Is your garden benefiting the community, incorporating sustainable practices and a collaborative effort? If yes to all three criteria, congratulations on growing a People’s Garden!
Regardless of type – vegetable, beautification, wildlife, or other – new and existing gardens can receive the designation of a People’s Garden….

Collaboration is a joint effort of multiple individuals so your family could be considered a collaboration. If you give away food to your neighbors, family or friends it is collaboration, and who hasn’t received Zucchini: the vegetable from hell from a neighbor.
I wonder how many will ‘register’ their gardens….

DirkH says:
August 16, 2013 at 9:41 am
Outrageous Ampersand says:
August 16, 2013 at 9:38 am
“@DirkH
Ah, but remember the recent Supreme Court ruling: citizens have no standing to sue the government over policy. ”
Then who has?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The States. But they are also getting told by the US Courts to SHUT …. UP! So we are now in a neat little box. Citizens can not sue and states can not sue on their behalf so where does that leave us? Our second Amendment rights….
Oh I forgot those have been done away with too or at least some of them, “Anti-Occupy” law ends American’s right to protest. Obama is busy working on the last one. Kerry says US [Obama] will sign UN treaty on [small] arms regulation despite lawmaker opposition From the point of view of international Law that binds the US to the treaty.
“U.S. law distinguishes what it calls treaties, which are derived from the Treaty Clause of the United States Constitution, from congressional-executive agreements and executive agreements. All three classes are considered treaties under international law; they are distinct only from the perspective of internal United States law…..”
“This [Supreme] Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty.” ~ Reid v. Covert, October 1956, 354 U.S. 1, at pg 17 <a

Can the states sue the federal government for exceeding its constitutional authority?
According to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the answer is no. Last year, that court dismissed Virginia’s lawsuit challenging Obamacare, on the grounds that the state had no interest in the lawsuit above and beyond the interests of its citizens, and states aren’t allowed to sue just on behalf of their citizens. States can only sue if they have some unique interest as states.
In the latest issue of the University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy, I argue otherwise. I contend that states should have the right to sue the federal government for exceeding its constitutional boundaries if in doing so, it conflicts with a state law, such as the Health Care Freedom Act. After all, states already have the right to challenge federal laws that contradict state laws on a variety of other subjects. If the federal government says that states can’t regulate hunting or fishing within their boundaries, for example, the states can sue because the federal government is interfering with the state’s constitutionally reserved sovereignty. The Fourth Circuit acknowledged that, but said that that rule didn’t apply because the Health Care Freedom Act didn’t regulate individual action or run a state program. But as I contend in my article, states aren’t just limited to regulating individual action or running state programs. They also have the authority (reserved by the Tenth Amendment) to articulate and enforce individual rights, which is what the Health Care Freedom Act did. And that means that they should have the power to intervene to defend their own interest as states to protect their citizens.
After all, that’s basically what happened in McCulloch v. Maryland, one of the central decisions in American constitutional law…which the Fourth Circuit completely ignored….

“Many companies will need to purchase new computers to run Windows 8.”
No, as a couple of other people have already pointed out, they merely need to download and install one of the many free versions of Linux optimised for older PCs. Personally I recommend Mint XFCE.