Oct 22
America’s colleges are the least free places in the country. Virtually every major American university–and perhaps every GOVERNMENT university–provides a campus upon which opinions which challenge or criticize the state or the state’s government-focused theology are suppressed.
Surveys show that college students overwhelmingly indicate fear of holding non-government-approved opinions.
See this video by Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
Oct 22
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has surveyed America’s colleges and found that 55 percent of them impose speech restrictions on students. See their website.
These colleges clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech, purport to censor “offensive speech” (meaning, generally any antigovernment thought), or restrict “free speech” to a campus “zone.”
FIRE’s survey did not factor in private, religious schools, which expressly promote a religious view (as is their constitutional right).
FIRE has struggled and litigated against campus censorship for years, and has achieved some success. (When the organization started, 79 percent of colleges imposed censorship codes on students.)
Oct 21
Socialism is a curse that one should wish only on a hated enemy. All societies which embrace it become sick and weak.
Gary North has a new column about the death of a major socialist city: Chicago. See here.
“The four major employers in Chicago, in this order, are these: the federal government, the public schools, the city, and Cook County.”
Oct 21
It is by far the greatest danger to First Amendment freedoms in American history: the modern “campaign finance reform” movement.
Every claim used to promote government controls over political campaign ads is untrue.
Here is a Reason.com article about Wisconsin political police–who raid people’s homes under cover of darkness and regularly tell those under investigation that they are not to tell anyone of the investigation.
This type of “gag order” policing was well-known in the Soviet era, and was a major component of the USA Patriot Act enacted in 2001.
Oct 21
Julian Simon (1932 – 1998), Professor of Business Administration at the University of Maryland. Scan of a BW print. Unknown shoot date. Scanned 7/30/2009. Please credit photo to the University of Maryland.
(Pictured above: visionary and futurist Julian Simon)
After a century of needless regulation, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of violent arrests of drivers for traffic violations, the era of driverless cars is upon us.
Dozens of private firms, including Tesla, Apple, Google, GM, Honda and many others, are already producing driverless-car prototypes which are already traveling on American roadways.
There are occasional stories of crashes and near-misses (see here, for example), but driverless cars will soon be safer than human-driven cars.
When this happens, the American police state will be perplexed about how to proceed against the people.
Oct 21
Snow season is coming early in 2015. Killington Ski area–one of the largest in the eastern U.S.–is opening early due to early snow. See here.
Oct 20
More details are emerging regarding the torture and interrogation warehouse used for years by the Chicago Police Department. See here.
At least 6,000 “suspects” were arrested and taken to the warehouse over the years. The Chicago PD maintained NO BOOKING RECORDS at the site, and thus hid arrestees from lawyers and their families while the arrestees were illegally interrogated, pressured to snitch on others, and/or tortured.
Inmates were not allowed to use a telephone.
More than 80 percent of detainees were Black.
Arrestees were booked–again, without any records–and detained in the interrogation facility for days at a time, often before being taken to actual, official, jail facilities.
The revelations reveal a general collapse of law and constitutional due process, and an apathy by members of the legal profession regarding basic civil liberties.
Oct 20
Political observer Michael Barone watched the recent Democratic debate very closely. His conclusions are here.
The Democrats vying for President talked a great deal about “income inequality,” but offered few solutions to this alleged problem. A constant theme among current Democrats (and government trusters generally) is that “the rich” must be taxed more; and their wealth must be redistributed to “the poor,” to make things more “equal.”
But Barone points out that the current IRS burden already falls mostly on the rich. In fact, the U.S. tax burden is already the most “progressive” (meaning anti-rich) in the modern world:
current rates are the most progressive in the advanced OECD countries. The Scandinavian countries praised by Sanders have value-added (meaning sales) taxes around 25 percent.
Oct 16
France’s government has been pushing the manmade-climate-change-by-CO2 agenda extremely hard. France is organizing the upcoming Paris climate conference in which the world’s western governments will once again push for more socialism and control.
In June 2014, Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, summoned the country’s main weather presenters and told them to mention “climate chaos” in their forecasts.
Now France’s government-owned TV network, “France 2,” has fired the best-known weather expert in France, Philippe Verdier, for criticizing the claims of manmade-global-warming alarmists. The London Telegraph story is here.
Verdier has recently authored a book accusing global-warming-alarm promoters of “taken the world hostage” with misleading data.
Mr Verdier said: “Every night I address five million French people to talk to you about the wind, the clouds and the sun. And yet there is something important, very important that I haven’t been able to tell you, because it’s neither the time nor the place to do so.”
He added: “We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change – a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear.”
Afterwards, according to Verdier, “I received a letter telling me not to come. I’m in shock,” he told RTL radio. “This is a direct extension of what I say in my book, namely that any contrary views must be eliminated.”
Oct 15
An interesting new poll by Gallup: those voters who have the most knowledge of current events and government policies have the greatest contempt for government.
As the Libertarian Party writes:
“The fundamental finding is that Americans who know the most about how Congress operates are not only the most negative about Congress in general, but also about the Republicans and Democrats in Congress specifically. This reinforces the general conclusion that criticisms of Congress — and the partisan leaders in Congress — are based on a realistic assessment of what these entities are doing rather than a lack of awareness of or interest in what they are doing.”
