Jan 09

Universal Basic Income Fails Again

Massive New Study finds UBI makes Households POORER

California. December 2024. A massive government-funded study of Californians who received “universal basic income” (UBI) finds that the program did little to help poor households. The study was conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

While being given ~$500 per month in free money, participants only ended up $100 richer and smoked more cigarettes.

The study gave about $500 per month to 695 households over two years in Compton, California. Another 1,402 were designated as a control group. The findings: (2/10)

“Receiving guaranteed income had no impact on the labor supply of full-time workers, but part-time workers had a lower labor market participation by 13 percentage points.” (3/10)“

Income (excluding the transfer) was reduced by $333 per month on average relative to control households, and expenditures were reduced by $302 per month.” (4/10)

“At the same time, average non-housing debt balances declined by $2,190 over 18 months relative to the control group, although the drop is not statistically significant.” (5/10)

“We find a significant improvement in housing security, but no overall effects on indices of psychological and financial well-being.” (6/10)

[…]

“The list experiments show strong evidence of relative reductions in IPV, weak evidence of reduced alcohol consumption, and moderately strong evidence of relative increases in tobacco consumption.” (9/10)

Jan 08

Systematic failure of peer review in climate science

The failures of so-called peer review in climate science journals has been given insufficient attention. But an article in the recent edition of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, “Climate Denialism,” by Tinus Pulles, highlights this problem. Scientists whose findings differ from the government-approved narrative have always had great difficulty getting their findings into peer reviewed journals. This is because of the flood of government research money in academic “science.”

Recently a petroleum scientist named Andy May penned an article in an academic journal laying out the basis for skepticism of the government’s catastrophic-global-warming-by-manmade-CO2 narrative. May’s article was quickly attacked by a government-funded professor, Tinus Pulles. But although May identified “20 clearly false statements and three additional problematic statements in Tinus Pulles’ article, the editors of the journal failed to address the misstatements or even publish May’s list.

May writes:

What is puzzling is I was asked to peer review this paper months ago and I sent in the review in October. Nearly all the errors you will see in the list below were pointed out then, yet they remain in the paper. To nearly everyone familiar with climate science literature and our paper, these errors are obvious. I find it more than a bit alarming that even the grammatical errors I pointed out in the paper last October are still in it. Why such a flawed paper was published is a mystery. Peer review is not working as intended.

Pulles appears to believe that dangerous human-caused climate change is an undisputed fact. He also repeatedly conflates “climate change” with “dangerous man-made climate change.” Human-caused global climate change has never been observed, either directly or statistically, only modeled. The paper is critical of our paper from earlier in the year (May & Crok, 2024), but that paper makes it clear that human-caused climate change is not an existential threat and the incidence and magnitude of recent extreme weather events have not exceeded expected natural variability as shown in the recent IPCC AR6 WGI report on page 1856 and elsewhere.

See here.

Dec 31

Just one Postal worker stole $750,000 from the mail.

According to The Gateway Pundit, a North Carolina postal worker was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing over $750,000 in U.S. Treasury checks, including tax refunds, Veterans Affairs benefits, and Social Security disability payments.

Zerion Marcos Franklin, a government postal worker, was pulled over while driving his private car by a cop in June 2024. The cop “noticed drug paraphernalia in plain view. A subsequent search revealed not only 47 U.S. Treasury checks but also marijuana packaged for sale, a loaded 9mm handgun, and over $22,000 in cash.”

Franklin quickly pled guilty. 

Dec 31

US Postal Service has lost $100 Billion since 2007

Since 2007, the USPS has reported staggering losses exceeding $100 billion. In the last fiscal year alone, the agency hemorrhaged $9.5 billion—a sharp increase from the $6.5 billion loss reported in 2023, as noted by Reuters. See here.

The agency enjoys every conceivable advantage in the marketplace. It has a monopoly. It owns and controls some of the nation’s most valuable and prestigious real estate–including strategic locations at the heart of America’s urban areas. It pays no employment, income, corporate, or property taxes.

Yet USPS loses billions annually. It pays its “workers” so much that THOUSANDS of people apply for every opening.

Now there is increasing discussion even among political officials regarding privatizing the “Service.”

Dec 27

US Government Held Terrifying Meetings with Big Tech in May 2024

Washington, D.C. May 2024. There are new revelations of secret government control over Big Tech. Marc Andreessen, a tech billionaire and venture capitalist, described a “horrifying” meeting with the Biden Administration that cemented his decision to endorse Donald Trump for president.

See here.

“Andreessen is a towering figure in Silicon Valley, with many investments in start-up tech ventures.” He states that Biden administration officials explicitly discouraged entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from pursuing artificial intelligence (AI) startups.

Andreessen said the government was seeking to consolidate AI development into the hands of a few government-aligned corporations while shutting out startups and entrepreneurs. This is so the US government will have total control of the development of the technology.

Government officials said they were “reviving Cold War-era tactics to suppress knowledge and innovation by classifying AI’s foundational mathematics.”

Marc Andreessen:
We had meetings in DC in May where we talked to them about this, and the meetings were absolutely horrifying. We came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.


AI is a technology that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, “Don’t start, don’t do AI startups. Don’t fund AI startups. It’s not something that we’re going to allow to happen.

They’re not going to be allowed to exist. There’s no point.” They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we’re going to basically wrap them in a… I’m paraphrasing, but we’re going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We’re going to protect them from competition, we’re going to control them, and we’re going to dictate what they do.

Then I said, “I don’t understand how you’re going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there, and it’s being taught everywhere.” They literally said, “During the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn’t proceed.”

Marc Andreessen:
If we decide we need to, we’re going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. I said, “I’ve just learned two very important things because I wasn’t aware of the former, and I wasn’t aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter.”

Dec 10

British government is citing “temperature data” from 103 non-existent measuring stations.

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

London. December 7, 2024. Wattsupwiththat.com reports (from Chris Morrison of the Daily Skeptic) that the U.K. Met Office is “inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites.” But “[f]ollowing massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims.”

Now “the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages”.

Significant modifications have been made to the new page, designed no doubt to quash suspicions that the Met Office has been making the figures up as it went along. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991-2020 has been replaced with the explanation that the page “is designed to display locations that provide even geographical coverage of the U.K., but it is not reflective of every weather station that has existed or the current Met Office observation network”. Under the new page the locations are still referred to as “climate stations” but the details of where they are, exactly, have been omitted.

The cynical might note that the Met Office has solved its problem of inventing data from non-existing stations by suggesting that they now arise from “locations” which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed, or indeed exist today. If this is a reasonable interpretation of the matter, it might suggest that the affair is far from closed.

Again we are obliged to the diligent citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to the unannounced Met Office changes and providing a link to the previous averages page on the Wayback Machine. The sleuthing Sanders has been on the case for some time, having discovered that three named stations near where he lives, namely Dungeness, Folkestone and Dover, did not exist. The claimed co-ordinates for Dover placed the station in the water on the local beach as shown by the Google Earth.

See here.

Dec 10

Congressman: The US Postal Service is so undependable that I won’t use it to mail a check anymore

During a December 2024 hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Congressman Rich McCormick (R-GA) said that the USPS was so untrustworthy that businesses no longer use the government mail service to mail checks.

Almost every single business I know that wants to send a check out won’t use the U.S. Postal Service anymore. I won’t use the U.S. Postal Service anymore. That’s on your watch. The two major decisions I’ve seen you make, which is on the distribution centers and on employee rate hiring, have done nothing to mitigate this in real-time ways. I don’t understand why you give yourself an A Grade, as you just stated when it comes to the delivery we have.

[…]

Your reputation is done. Whether you admit it or not, in the military, if I have a skipper who things are going bad for, they’re a good military officer. But you know what we do when things go wrong repeatedly? We relieve them. You know what you do when a CEO repeatedly fails in that business model falls apart? Nobody wants to use that business anymore, and it becomes non-profitable. You fire them. You know what we do in government when organizations fail over and over and over again and become unaccountable and are not going in the right direction.

As McCormick continued to criticize DeJoy, the postmaster general covered his ears and said, “You’re talking to yourself.”

The lawmaker mocked DeJoy by covering his own ears and stated, “I hope you got that on camera. This is the response that the postmaster just gave Congress. When he doesn’t like what he hears. Literally covered his ears and gave himself the grade of A.”

Nov 09

CDC Planned Quarantine Camps Nationwide, document reveals

Jeffrey Tucker’s Brownstone Institute has uncovered a previously overlooked CDC report indicating the “independent agency” intended to construct concentration camps nationwide in 2020 and 2021 to quarantine Americans during the COVID panic. “No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse,” writes Tucker.

Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. But the plan collapsed when too many Americans asked too many questions about the CDC’s exaggerated claims.

The plan “was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.”

“On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel. “

The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy. 

 “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”

Further: “to minimize external contact, each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”

See here.

Nov 02

“Mainstream” “news” is no longer mainstream. Or news.

A typical Alex Jones Infowars daily broadcast may get 2 million listeners. Joe Rogan’s podcast often receives 12 million viewers or listeners. Dan Bongino’s radio show gets some 8.5 million listeners daily. Even ‘B-list’ independent personalities such as Steven Crowder regularly have hundreds of thousands of daily viewers.

But “mainstream” news (ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.)–which have uniformly been promoting ever-bigger government for years–is losing market share by the month. Fewer viewers are interested in hearing obvious pro-government propaganda.

As ‘mainstream’ ‘journalism’ has been increasingly taken over by advocates of expansive, intrusive governments (i.e., Democrats), the public regards journalism with ever-greater distrust.

There appears to be a direct, strong correlation between the % of reporters who are Democrats and readers’ trust in journalism. With each decade, Democrats have increased their control over American news media. And with each decade, Americans’ trust in news media has declined.

Americans now trust news media less than ANY OTHER INSTITUTION. They trust it even less than Congress. A very large percentage of Americans–millions of news readers–now believe that whatever the news media tells them must be false.

A survey has found that only 3.4% of American journalists identify as Republican, compared to 36.4% who identify as Democrat and 51.7% as Independent. The survey also indicated a steep decline in the number of Republican journalists over the last several decades, which has coincided with record high levels of Americans saying they do not trust the media.

The Syracuse University study was first conducted in 1971 and was repeated roughly every 10 years thereafter. The first survey found that 25.7% of journalists said they were Republican. In 1982, the number plunged to 18.8%, and in 1992 it further fell to 16.4%. In 2002, the number of Republican journalists increased slightly to 18%. But by 2013, the number nosedived to 7.1%, and even this low number was cut in half by 2022 at 3.4%.

See here.

Last October, Gallup found that a record high 39% of Americans say they have no trust in the media. A few months prior, a Rasmussen Reports poll found that 58% of voters think that “bias in the news media is getting worse,” with only 13% saying the issue is “getting better.” The poll also found a stark difference between the views of Republicans and Democrats, with 68% of GOP voters saying that bias is worsening, while only 42% of Democrats saying the same.

The American public’s trust of the media has in fact reached such a low level that at least half say that national news organizations are intentionally attempting to mislead, according to a Gallup/Knight Foundation poll released last February.

Oct 23

Almost 40 Percent of 2013 Web Pages have Disappeared’

Pew Research Center finds the internet is more temporary than many believe.

When Online Content Disappears

38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later

ByAthena Chapekis,Samuel Bestvater,Emma RemyandGonzalo Rivero

How we did this

The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.

A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:

  • A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
A line chart showing that 38% of webpages from 2013 are no longer accessible
  • For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:

  • 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
  • 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:

  • Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.
  • Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.