Spokesmen for Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors at a recent conference that “they stand to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East.”
Dec 13
Forest Fire Burn Acreage Has Plummeted Since the 1930s
It is frequently said that forest fires are increasing. Some who claim this attribute it to manmade global warming.
The reality is that the total U.S. acreage burned by forest fires has plummeted since the 1930s. See here.
Dec 10
Lone profitable Obamacare insurance co-op losing millions
Every government policy that subsidizes health care increases demand without increasing supply, causing prices to rise.
Thus, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA program and the ACA (“Obamacare”) have all made health care more expensive. In turn, the poor (who are sometimes mentioned as the supposed beneficiaries of such government programs) find medical care more and more expensive.
Now we learn that the only insurance co-op firm which made a profit from Obamacare last year (2014) is on track to LOSE MILLIONS this year. See here.
The firm, “Community Health Options” headquartered in Maine, plans to stop offering medical coverage in 2016. Already half of the 23 insurance co-ops which started up to serve Obamacare patients have collapsed. All are losing money.
Stay tuned!
Dec 10
Climate Hysteric Michael Mann Speaks at Montana State University
by Roger Roots, 12/10/2015
An amazing spectacle of doublespeak, smoke, and mirrors took a stage at Montana State University in Bozeman on December 9, 2015. At taxpayer expense.
Dr. Michael Mann, the overbearing pro-government climate scientist at the heart of the 2009 Climategate scandal, was invited by MSU faculty to lecture a large public audience. Mann’s speech was the capstone to a two-day extravaganza at MSU, with expensive, glossy global-warming literature and signage throughout.
Mann presented his case for manmade climate change in a wholly one-sided manner. At least twice, Dr. Mann claimed that global temperatures have increased precisely as predicted by the government-funded climate modelers of the 1990s. Mann showed a chart on a large screen with a line purporting to be a temp prediction model created decades ago by his friend James Hanson. He then overlaid this line with a wriggly line purporting to be the actual temps of the past 20 years. The lines appeared to correlate closely.
Mann must know, of course, that more than 100 climate models predicted temp trajectories that were later shown to overestimate actual temps by 2 to 3 times. Even the most accurate temperature predictions of the 1990s-era modelers have been shown to have overestimated global warming by more than a standard deviation. The crowd at MSU were left in the dark about these basic facts.
Dr. Mann also spun a tale of persecution for mainstream climate scientists, pointing to various subpoenas and demands for his emails by politicians over the years. He failed to mention the larger phenomena of skeptics being fired, persecuted, and denied grants and promotions.
He glossed over the scandal regarding his deceptive “hockey stick” temperature graph of 2005 that was once on the cover of the UN’s IPCC report. Researchers later found that Mann had discarded all data that disputed the catastrophic-global-warming theory of the IPCC.
Questions from the crowd seemed so “softball” in nature that I was tempted to guess that the questioners were pre-selected. I had my own hand in the air but was never offered the microphone. The first questioner asked Mann about his hope for the future. The second questioner asked Mann if he thought social scientists should play a role in promoting the hysteria of global warming. (Mann said yes.)
Dec 10
Public High School Shuts Down “Conservative” Speech Because it “Crossed the Line”
America’s youth concentration camps , er . . . public schools, offer very little education, but provide a great deal of government-supremacist indoctrination. Facts about the relationship between capitalism and prosperity are deemed too radical to be presented to impressionable minds. Students are taught to seek all blessings from the state and its omnipotent ministers.
Here is shocking video of a public high school administrator shutting down a “conservative” lecture mid-speech in a Chula Vista, California high school. The administrator claimed the lecture–by annoying “conservative” speaker Ben Shapiro–“crossed the line.”
Ben Shapiro had been invited onto the high school campus by a “conservative” student club, Young Americans for Freedom. The club had gone through channels, applied to the administration, and filled out the proper paperwork.
But Shapiro said that poor people who win the lottery “disproportionally end up poor again” (a well-known phenomenon, shown by numbers of studies). The reason poor people stay poor, continued Shapiro, “isn’t that they don’t have money; it’s because they suck with money.”
At this point, the Administrator had heard enough and barged toward the podium to stop Shapiro’s talk. The video can be seen here.
Dec 09
France has become anti-Muslim police state
It is unfortunate that today’s Muslim societies are authoritarian strongholds where there is little due process of law (in the Anglo-American sense).
It is even more unfortunate that France–one of the great fountains of liberty over the past 1000 years–appears to be embracing an almost-Islamic level of authoritarianism, ironically aimed at suppressing the French Muslim population.
According to John Stossel, a Halal-Mexican restaurant near Paris “was raided by upwards of forty police armed with rifles and clad in body armor, helmets, and riot shields” in the week after the recent Paris terror attacks.
“After terrifying diners, who were ordered to sit still and not touch their phones, officers proceeded to the basement, where they smashed several doors with battering rams, reportedly in search of a ‘hidden prayer room.'”
The restaurant owner asked them not to break down doors because he would simply unlock them, but he was ordered to “lay on the floor and stay silent.” The raid did not find weapons or anything “linked to terrorist activities.”
Read Stossel’s column here.
Dec 08
Lysander Spooner University Planning New Glacier Photography Dates
After the success of our September 2015 Glacier Research trip, we are planning new glacier photography field trips in the northern Rockies.
Many people do not realize that there are hundreds of glaciers in the Rocky Mountains around Livingston, Montana.
Here is a website detailing the numbers of glaciers and perennial snowfields in the Crazy, Beartooth and Absaroka Mountain ranges. There are 57 glaciers and perennial snowfields in the Crazy Mountains, and 401 glaciers or perennial snowfields in the Beartooth and Absaroka mountain ranges (about 35% of the total number in Montana).
Some of these glaciers are within 30 miles of Livingston, Montana.
We are seeking to coordinate glacier-hunting trips on the following dates:
December 26, 2015: The day after Christmas and the first Saturday after the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. We will meet in front of the Coffee Crossing coffeehouse in Livingston at 9:00 a.m. and embark for the local Crazy Mountains by 9:35 a.m. Bring cross-country skis, snowshoes and/or snowmobiles and dress for freezing (Everest level) conditions. If there is sufficient interest, we may snowcamp overnight.
Then, on Saturday May21, 2016, just before the average date of last spring frost in Livingston, Montana, we will meet in front of the MT Cup Coffee Shop (around the corner from the Coffee Crossing) at 8:30 a.m. and embark around 9:00 a.m. for further glacier hunting. This will be an overnight backpacking trip.
We are also aiming to add a glacier-hunting trip in the Beartooth Mountains on July 16, 2016, just after the average date of last Spring frost in Cooke City, Montana. (We will meet at 8:00 a.m. at the Cooke City visitors center and museum and embark around 8:30.)
Check out any zip code on this website, which tells you the average date of first freeze and last freeze for the location.
Dec 08
Lost? Need Directions? Ask a Man
Fascinating psychological research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology suggests that male brains are better at judging directions than female brains. See here.
The research involved MRI scans of brain activity.
Dec 06
Hatred for Wal-mart Reached a Climax in Puerto Rico
Wal-mart, America’s largest private employer and retailer, is a frequent target for those who hate markets and worship the state.
Witness this “documentary” on the megaretailer, frequently shown in union halls, schools and colleges by socialist-leaning professors. Like Michael Moore’s film “Roger and Me,” its target can do nothing right. In “Roger and Me,” General Motors is despised for being in Flint, Michigan—and then despised for moving away.
Similarly, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price chastises Wal-Mart for forcing its workers to work too many hours, or having them work too few; for enriching its own shareholders, and for impoverishing the shareholders of “mom and pop” stores which charge higher prices than Wal-Mart.
For years, governments have sought to devise legislation to slay the beast of Wal-Mart. Earlier this year (2015) Puerto Rican legislators passed a law tripling (from 2 % to 6.5 %) a tax on goods imported from offshore affiliates to local companies with gross revenues of more than $2.75 billion. The law was clearly aimed solely at Walmart: an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder.
According a lawsuit filed by Wal-Mart, the new tax will cost “an astonishing and unsustainable 91.5% of its net income.”
Dec 04
How Government Regulation Crushed Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company
In 1844, Lysander Spooner launched a mail company called the American Letter Mail Company. Spooner’s company competed directly with the U.S. Postal Service, delivering letters and parcels between major cities in the eastern United States at a lower price than the government’s rates. Spooner’s company had offices in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and delivered letters for 6 and ¼ cents per ounce, or twenty letters for a dollar. This significantly undercut the government’s rate of 12 cents per letter.
Spooner designed a ‘hub’ system between the major offices (similar to the system that was later developed by Federal Express and UPS). Upon receiving mail shipments at the hub offices, regional carriers would scurry across regional landscapes by railroad, steamboat and on foot. Soon, Spooner’s mail company was more efficient—and cheaper—than the U.S. Mail.
Spooner’s success was not lost on the U.S. government, which had previously held something of a monopoly. The U.S. government went after Spooner with a vengeance. U.S. Marshals descended on Spooner’s Philadelphia office and arrested office manager Calvin Case, on the ground of conveying letters contrary to the laws of Congress.
By 1851, after a brief legal battle, the government forced Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company out of business.
Spooner’s experience is the experience of thousands—perhaps millions—of poor Americans who have seen their dreams shattered by government regulation.
There was one positive outcome, however. U.S. Post Office was compelled to lower its rates significantly. Such is the nature of competition in a marketplace.
