Feb 13
Sea ice in the southern hemisphere is at THE HIGHEST LEVEL EVER MEASURED.
In the Northern Hemisphere, sea ice is currently at a 10-year high. According to Danish measurements, the Arctic sea ice pack has been increasing for five years and is now greater than it has been since 2005.
Feb 13
Socialism is a curse that should be wished only on one’s worst enemies. Any society that embraces it will eventually become sick and weak.
Venezuela was developing and prospering rapidly during the 1980s and ’90s. Then the country went hard-line socialist.
Venezuelans are accustomed to severe shortages of cooking oil, diapers and other staple products. But those hoping to buy what they could find got a new unpleasant surprise this week.
Now the Venezuelan government is rationing electricity. See here.
Feb 12
Libertarians have long identified NASA as among the most unnecessary of federal government programs and agencies.
It is axiomatic that the private sector could achieve NASA’s space-exploration goals far more cheaply and effectively than the agency does.
Now, NASA is wasting increasing segments of its budget on proving the government’s manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 theory.
See here for details.
Feb 12
Governments everywhere benefit from central (government) banking. Central banking allows governments to extend their alleged “benefits” without directly and immediately taxing their oppressed subjects. Essentially, governments are able to game a society’s cost/benefit analysis and appear more attractive.
But it is all a lie. Government deficit spending means that government currencies are constantly being debased.
Now, increasingly, government banks are setting “negative” interest rates: you pay the bank to keep your money, rather than the other way around. See here.
Feb 11
A pair of hapless bartenders are being criminally prosecuted for felonies. Their alleged crime? Transporting some Wisconsin craft beer into nearby Minnesota and offering it for sale at a Minnesota bar.
Feb 11
Scientists for BP (formerly British Petroleum) carefully analyzed carbon dioxide demands, needs, and outputs in the developing world. See above.
(The red line indicates the CO2 level desired by the dreamers at the 2015 Paris Climate conference; the designation OECD stands for “Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,” or the industrialized, mostly-western countries. “Non-OECD” countries are generally developing countries.)
The BP scientists concluded that it is inevitable that developing societies will need fossil fuels in greater amounts in the future.
This demand will cause CO2 levels to increase steadily over the next generation. And no legal agreements or treaties are likely to alter this inevitable trajectory.
Feb 09
At least 375,000 retired Americans are now receiving their Social Security checks overseas. See here.
Many countries are now freer than the U.S., and their costs of living are much lower. While U.S. programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare have driven health care prices higher and higher, medical treatments of the highest quality can be found at low costs in foreign countries.
Feb 09
In 1998 some government documents were declassified which showed that the government was plotting mass murders of the American people in 1961.
The 1961 plan, known as “Operation Northwoods,” was designed to get the American people to support a war against Cuba. The highest generals and admirals in the U.S. military were planning to crash airplanes (disguised as Cuban) into buildings, sink American cruise ships, and have federal agents dress up as Cubans and mow the American people down with machine guns on the streets of Miami.
All twelve members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on Operation Northwoods. These were the very men who held the keys to the highest-level filing cabinets in the Pentagon. The men at the top of the “national security” hierarchy were the greatest threat to America’s true national security.
The only thing that stopped them was President Kennedy, who refused to sign off on the murder plan. Kennedy even fired Alan Dulles, the CIA mastermind behind the secret plots to get the U.S. into war with Cuba.
Two years later, Kennedy was conveniently assassinated in Dallas. Incredibly, Alan Dulles became the leading member of the Commission “investigating” the Kennedy assassination.
Feb 08
Almost all business regulation harms the poor and small businesses and helps the biggest industry leaders.
And in the big picture, even the good ol’ boys are harmed. Look at the above graph (courtesy of CNBC, see here). It shows that the overall value of the banking industry is about the same as it was in 1996–two decades ago.
Not only has overregulation kept small banks from starting and thriving. But even the big banks who ‘benefit’ from the regulation have not truly benefited. The industry hasn’t grown in 20 years.
Feb 08
“Deregulation” is one of the great phantoms of our time. Pro-government pundits and presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders repeatedly claim that private-sector influence in political elections has produced “deregulation” in American industries.
Yet regulation is easy to measure. One can count pages, paragraphs, sections, enforcement budgets or actions, etc. There has been no deregulation anywhere, in any industry in America in decades.
When pressed, socialists like Bernie Sanders point to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act during the 1990s by Bill Clinton.
But the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (which merely prohibited investment banks from doing commercial banking) was 37 pages long. It has been replaced by thousands of pages of banking and finance laws and regulations. The Dodd-Frank Act alone runs 848 pages, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act runs another 66 pages. And many thousands of pages of internal regulations have been generated by these acts.
