Sep 09
The Agence France-Presse (AFP), the world’s oldest news agency (which is affiliated with the French government) is teaming up with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) (a branch of the British government) and other news organizations in a global initiative to combat nongovernment and anti-government news (which they call “misinformation.”) See here. These government news bureaus …
Sep 01
Government claims it needs propaganda authority to fight “fake news” A truly Orwellian government press release disguised as a news story appeared on Bloomberg News on August 31, 2019. “Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation …
Jul 23
This should have been front page news worldwide, but it received almost no coverage. Last week, during a hearing on Google censorship, a prominent psychology professor named Dr. Robert Epstein testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution that Google’s search engine is shifting millions of votes toward the most pro-government political candidates …
Apr 02
Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee recently announced his Democratic candidacy for the Presidency. Inslee makes stopping ‘climate doomsday’ his feature issue. But Anthony Watts has broken the story behind Inslee’s climate catastrophe campaign. As Governor, Inslee makes serial announcements of new ‘groups’ that generally do not in fact exist (they are websites), but which somehow have …
Feb 16
Many people are aware that the socialist government of Illinois is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But few know the details. An editorial in the Chicago Tribune recently laid bare the horrifying state of Illinois finances. Illinois has been paying such lavish benefits to government workers that State pensions are tapped out. Workers are …
Nov 07
The Montana and federal constitutions supposedly guarantee equal protection of the laws. Yet governments everywhere place campaign restrictions on private sector political campaigns. Such regulations do not apply to government advocacy. Campaign finance regs infringe on the speech and press rights of the (nongovernment) citizenry, forcing private citizens to disclose to government every penny raised …
Apr 30
The above chart was generated by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and published on Marketwatch.com. It shows the overall price changes of certain products between 1997 and 2017. As you can see, government-subsidized goods (college tuition and books and medical treatment) have increased at rates much higher than inflation. Meanwhile, ‘tech’ products such as TVs, …
Feb 19
Government claims about climate change seem to be closely linked to government claims about “campaign finance.” Every claim of campaign finance reformers is untrue. Election outcomes are barely correlated with campaign ad spending; and to the extent there is any correlation, it is likely that political success (or perceived likely success) CAUSES the spending rather …
Dec 25
In 2010 the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down a small number of “campaign finance” laws–or at least their application–on First Amendment grounds. Trusters of government went into hysterics. They claimed the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations are people, and that the Supreme Court had pronounced that money is speech …
Dec 20
Remember last week in the run-up to the FCC’s vote to overturn the prior FCC’s “net neutrality” takeover of the internet (from 2 years ago)? “Mainstream” (meaning government-approved–and approving) media news reported that the public supported the 2015 government takeover of the internet and opposed the current FCC’s vote to overturn the prior FCC’s vote. …
