Fair Trade- The ethical way to oppress the poor

I’ve always been suspicious of “Fair Trade” products as a simplistic way to make us feel better about eating chocolate or drinking coffee while causing more problems than they solve.

From spiked!

It’s official: Fairtrade screws over labourers

A new study exposes Fairtrade for what it is – a Western vanity project that impoverishes those it’s meant to benefit.he world’s ethical shoppers are still reeling this week after a report revealed that Fairtrade programmes are of little benefit to those working on farms in the developing world.

 

The government-funded study published by SOAS, a part of the University of London, was conducted over a four-year period in Uganda and Ethiopia. It showed that labourers on farms that are part of Fairtrade programmes are usually paid less and are subject to worse working conditions than their peers on large commercial farms, and even other small farms that are not part of Fairtrade programmes. Professor Christopher Cramer, the study’s main author, said: ‘Fairtrade has not been an effective mechanism for improving the lives of wage workers, the poorest rural people.’

The study also found that the ‘social premium’ incorporated into the price of Fairtrade products, which is meant to be used to improve infrastructure in poor communities, is often misspent. In one instance, researchers found that modern toilets built with this premium were in fact for the use of senior farm managers only. The report also documented examples of health clinics and schools set up with social-premium funds that charged fees that were too high for the labourers they were intended to benefit.

Read the full article here

Selfies won’t stop Boko Haram

Andrew Bolt

MAY092014(8:10am)

 
 

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Monster Hunter Nation doubts a film star holding a sign will stop Boko Haram from enslaving schoolgirls: 


I did a lot of research on human trafficking and modern slavery before Mike Kupari and I wrote Swords of Exodus. It is a horrible, evil, and surprisingly gigantic thing. One thing I’m fairly sure of about the kind of people who do that sort of thing for a living, is that they really don’t give a s..t about a bunch of American movie stars taking pouty selfies of themselves holding up signs with hash tag give our girls back. The disapproval of fat, soft, Americans on Facebook really doesn’t move them. They care about getting paid or getting killed, that’s about it. The self-righteous pouting is useless.

For the idiot libprog pussies with the selfies, the world is a violent place, filled with violent men. If you actually want something to be done about these evil people, maybe you shouldn’t bitch, whine, and moan every time our military takes action against evil people….

This kidnapping event made the news, but this sort of thing happens every day somewhere in the world. You’re shocked and outraged about this, but that just shows how little you know about the subject. There are plenty of outrageous acts of evil out there to choose from. You can take useless photos of yourself holding up a sign, but it will do nothing other than prove to your fellow idiots that you care so hard…

But if your selective outrage is really up in arms about this one, movie stars with the hash tag, I’ve got a simple solution for you. Take some of your millions of dollars and hire some mercenaries to go into Africa to shoot all the members of Boko Haram. I wonder how that would trend on Twitter. #gurkhaskillscumbags

The Left’s avoidance of the real issues here is startling. Last night on The Project former Democrats leader Natasha Stott-Despoja summed up the lessons to be learned from the kidnapping of more than 200 girls by an Islamist terrorist group that has declared war on Christians, murdered thousands of civilians and massacred boys whose “crime” was to go to school. According to Stott-Despoja, this should remind us that slavery was bad and girls’ education was important. No word about the dead schoolboys. And certainly no mention – again – of Islam.

This kind of thing is too much even for some stalwarts of the Left:

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The Guardian, too, is now angry with its fellow travellors – although even it is still shy of the word “Muslim”:


Writers are typing with one eye over their shoulder: watching their backs to make sure that no one can accuse them of “demonising the other”.

 

Full article here

Hey gay rights fascists: in spite of your Mozilla victory, you will still lose- Matt Walsh

Matt Walsh writes:

Hey gay rights fascists: in spite of your Mozilla victory, you will still lose

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Dear gay rights militants, dear progressive tyrants, dear liberal fascists, dear haters of free speech, dear crusaders for ideological conformity, dear left wing bullies:

You will lose.

I know you’ve got legions of sycophants kowtowing to you these days, and the rest you’ve set out to destroy — but you will lose.

So, you’ve tracked another dissident and skinned him alive. You’ve made an example ofBrendan Eich, and now you dance joyously around his disemboweled carcass. You have his head on a spike, and you consider this a conquest in your eternal crusade to eradicate diversity and punish differing opinions. You launched your millionth campaign of intimidation, and now another good man has been dragged through the mud, to the sounds of taunting and jeering and death threats.

You found out that the CEO of Mozilla gave a few dollars to support a pro-traditional marriage ballot measure several years ago, and you proceeded to publicly tar and feather him until he was forced to ‘resign’ in disgrace.

You again chose to forgo debate, in favor of coercion and bullying.

You again attempted to end the ‘gay rights’ argument by defrocking your opponent.

Hey, good for you.

Enjoy the spoils of your cowardice.

It won’t last.

Read the rest of the article here

Debunking the IPCC Report in one Sentence

The fear factory has been working over time this week with the latest report of the IPCC Working Group 2 which tries to work out the implications of climate change on life and everything.

Jo Nova puts the fear to rest with one sentence:

 

We could spend hours analyzing the new IPCC report about the impacts of climate change. Or we could just point out:

Everything in the Working Group II report depends entirely on Working Group I.

( see footnote 1 SPM, page 3).

Working Group I depends entirely on climate models and 98% of them didn’t predict the pause.

The models are broken. They are based on flawed assumptions about water vapor.

Working Group I, remember, was supposed to tell us the scientific case for man-made global warming. If our emissions aren’t driving the climate towards a catastrophe, then we don’t need to analyze what happens during the catastrophe we probably won’t get. This applies equally to War, Pestilence, Famine, Drought, Floods, Storms, and Shrinking Fish (which, keep in mind, could have led to the ultimate disaster: shrinking fish and chips).

To cut a long story short, the 95% certainty of Working Group I boils down to climate models and 98% of them didn’t predict the pause in surface temperature trends (von Storch 2013) . Even under the most generous interpretation, models are proven failures,  100% right except for rain, drought, storms, humidity and everything else (Taylor 2012). They get cloud feedbacks wrong by a factor 19 times larger than the entire effect of increased CO2 (Miller 2012). They don’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale (Anagnostopoulos 2010 and Koutsoyiannis 2008). They don’t work on the tropical troposphere (Christy 2010,  Po-Chedley 2012, Fu 2011, Paltridge 2009). The fingerprints they predicted are 100% missing.

 

Read the full article here

WordPress Ate My Blog

OK so I exaggerate a little.

 

It appears there is some change so that when I copy text from my word processor into the blog, all the end of line, line feeds, whatever they are called these days, disappear.

 

From having too much white space, I now have too little as blank lines disappear.

A Life-Size LEGO Car You Can Actually Drive | Australian Popular Science

A Life-Size LEGO Car You Can Actually Drive | Australian Popular Science.

A Life-Size LEGO Car You Can Actually Drive
Gregory Mone

at 04:40 AM 21 Mar 2014

Comments 0
 Reckless Ride  <br/> A total of 256 pneumatic LEGO Technic pistons drive four radial engines, which turn the driveshaft and power the oversize rear tires. The car can reach 18 mph—but there are no brakes.
Reckless Ride
A total of 256 pneumatic LEGO Technic pistons drive four radial engines, which turn the driveshaft and power the oversize rear tires. The car can reach 18 mph—but there are no brakes.
IMAGE BY Chris Sammartino
DIY //

The Super Awesome Micro Project, a full-size car made of 500,000 LEGOs, sprung from an unlikely partnership between Romanian tinkerer Raul Oaida and Australian investor Steve Sammartino. The two met over Skype in 2012, and since then, Sammartino has helped Oaida raise money for his ambitious projects, including a jet-powered bicycle. After they saw a video of a Ferrari 599 GTB made of LEGOs, they set out to build something grander. “If you’re going to make a LEGO car,” Sammartino says, “you might as well make it a hot rod.” Oaida spent 18 months constructing the compressed-air-powered vehicle and then shipped it to Australia for a test drive. The throttle and steering wheel snapped off, and a few high-pressure air hoses blew, scattering LEGOs everywhere. Oaida’s quick fixes got it running again, but Sammartino thinks the seats still need work. “It might be the most uncomfortable car in automotive history,” he says.

 

 

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.