Sep 19

In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government falsely arrested thousands of innocent Americans

surveilcops

Under common law, any cop (or anyone else, for that matter) who arrested another person without probable cause to believe a crime was committed was AT LEAST liable for false arrest. (Actually, under 19th-century common law, actual guilt and not mere probable cause was the standard.)

But after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. government “called in” 80,000 foreign nationals for “special registration,” sought out some 8,000 for involuntary “interviews,” and detained 5,000 men without charge. NOT ONE OF THESE INDIVIDUALS STANDS CONVICTED OF ANY CRIME related to terrorism or national security.

If America’s civil rights laws worked properly, the agents of government who committed these acts should have been punished with judgments, penalties and fines totaling millions of dollars.

Yet the government was never punished.

Source: David Cole & Jules Lobel, “Less Safe, Less Free” 10 (2007).

Sep 16

As western societies choke innovation with high taxes and government controls, Asia’s millionaires become world’s richest group

prosperity

Europe and its colonies–especially British colonies–led the way in global prosperity and innovation between the 1600s and the 1900s. Small governments, constitutional law, and the industrial revolution led the people of the West to lead the world.

Now a new report indicates that Asian societies–especially those in southeast-Asian nations that have mostly rejected socialism and high taxation–are producing most of the world’s millionaires. See here.

“The combined wealth of Asia Pacific’s super rich will surpass its 2014 total of $15.8 trillion and overtake that of their North American counterparts — currently the world’s richest group with a shared wealth of $16.2 trillion last year, the study said.”

Sep 15

University of California To Ban “Expressions” of “Intolerance” (Don’t Laugh at the Doublespeak)

fspeechzone

We’ve seen this coming for a long time. Governmental Correctness codes at public colleges have been repeatedly struck down as unconstitutional by courts; yet the socialist-totalitarians who command and control America’s government universities continue to seek to enact speech censorship codes to suppress suspicion or distrust of expansive government or its sacred theology. Marxism and central planning good; libertarianism, social Darwinism or structural functionalism bad.

Today’s censors seek to turn campuses into zones where individualist, pro-free-market, or antigovernment ideology is banned–under the guise of fighting “intolerance.”

Now the University of California–a public institution subject to the Bill of Rights–is seeking to ban “expressions” of “intolerance” (don’t laugh at the doublespeak). See here. This proposal would govern not only UC-Berkeley, but all of the Satellite UC campuses–thus covering hundreds of thousands of students.

The proposed official language is carefully crafted to extoll the virtues of “academic freedom.” But there is the problematic insertion of the word “expressions”:

Everyone in the University community has the right to study, teach, conduct research, and work free from acts and expressions of intolerance

The moment one walks upon a government or government-supported college campus today, one enters a world of diminished freedoms and higher costs. Today’s college students walk on eggshells and pay higher costs for everything from parking to sandwiches (ironically, due to government subsidies). See here.

The government-university quest to eliminate “intolerance” is mostly a mask for the banning of libertarian thought. Students must chant messages disavowing any notion that societies function best without government interference.

Sep 15

NASA Now Admits that Antarctic Sea Ice is at an ALL-TIME HIGH

snowfield

It couldn’t be worse timing for the upcoming UN conference on manmade global warming. NASA’s website now admits that the amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is at THE HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE RECORDS HAVE BEEN KEPT.

The NASA website is here. Read how the NASA public relations staff seek to explain away this problem while continuing to cling to the government’s manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 claims. It makes for fascinating entertainment.

Sep 15

Illinois: a failed state

police

Writer and economist Stephen Moore, a native Illinoisan, writes that:

* Nearly one of three state tax dollars in Illinois now goes to paying pensions for retired municipal and state employees.

* The Illinois government recently announced that its treasury had insufficient funds to pay off the State’s lottery winners.

* Illinois was the home of such iconic mega-employers as Caterpillar, Sears Roebuck and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But today, “the rich” are fleeing for Florida, Arizona and Texas.

* The City of Chicago is now at “junk bond” status with regard to further credit.

See Moore’s column here.

Sep 14

New York Times: Climate-Change “Deniers” Will Bring World Genocide

holocaust 2

An astounding op-ed “review” appeared in yesterday’s (Sunday, Sept. 12, 2015) edition of the New York Times. Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, wrote what is apparently a summary of his new book: “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.”

The review is here. The Amazon link to the book is here.

In a snapshot of outrageously inaccurate interpretation of world history and events, Snyder claims that “deniers” (he means the inquisitive or skeptics) of the government’s manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 theory are leading the world toward global genocide in the same manner as the Nazis in Germany and the Hutus in Rwanda led their societies toward genocide.

Snyder gets so many facts wrong in such a short essay that one can only marvel at the selection process at work in the Yale University History Department. Yale, like most other government-supported universities, practices widescale discrimination and repression of individualist, antigovernment thought. See here.

Snyder claims the Nazis’ antagonism toward Jews was somehow related to Nazi desires for more land and the Nazi government’s suspicion that Jews were somehow in the way of such land expansion.

Snyder claims the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s was mostly attributable to squabbles over farmland.

The New York Times piece illustrates the sad state of scholarship and reporting in America’s once-proud institutions of letters and journalism.

The manmade-global-warming scare is mostly a product of socialist ideology, modeling by government-supported climate scientists, and government “adjustments” of past temperature records to make the past seem colder than thermometers actually recorded. See here.

Sep 14

The U.S.–once a low-tax haven–now causes many to renounce U.S. citizenship over taxes

FED_dees

CNBC reports on the relatively new phenomenon of tax exiles who flee America’s current high tax rates. The U.S. currently has the world’s highest corporate tax rates and substantially higher-than-average personal income taxes. See our earlier report here.

See the CNBC story here.

The urge to renounce U.S. citizenship is increasingly strong among high-earners who produce income overseas as well as domestically. In recent years, the U.S. government has been aggressively taxing Americans who hold money in foreign bank accounts.

“More Americans renounced their citizenship and terminated their long-term residency in the first three months of the year than ever before, courtesy of the crackdown in foreign tax rules.”

Sep 12

Initial research shows minimum wage increases in Seattle and San Francisco have cost thousands of jobs

suffering

Supporters of minimum wage laws are often hopelessly illiterate regarding basic laws of economics.

In recent election cycles, however, advocates of minimum-wage hikes have won some huge “victories” in such cities as Seattle and San Francisco. The Seattle City Council, for example, imposed a $15-per-hour minimum wage on all employers in the city last year.

Now there is sufficient data to show that these big hikes in the minimum wage have cost thousands of people their jobs. See here.

And it is a myth that minimum wage earners elsewhere in the United States are generally struggling to survive and need government to force their employers to provide a “living wage.”

· Only 11.3 percent of workers who earn the minimum wage live in households officially defined as poor.

· A whopping 63.2 percent of workers who earn the minimum wage are second or even third earners, living in households with incomes equal to twice the poverty line or more.

See here.

Sep 12

Ridesharing is safer than taking cabs

government-great-fiction-bastiat

For decades, the act of driving a cab has been preposterously overregulated. Government hacks in almost every jurisdiction have enacted stupid laws and policies requiring government licensing and approval of all cab companies. In many states, cab companies are ridiculously regulated as “public utilities” like water and electricity. Cab companies, in turn, have paid off politicians to keep these corrupt systems going and to keep out competition.

The ubiquity of handheld devices such as I-Phones, however, has spurred innovation. People seeking a ride can simply punch into an “app” and contact other people who happen to be driving a car in the same direction. It is known as “ridesharing.”

Now, after just a couple years of widescale ridesharing in some cities–and the rise of ridesharing companies such as Uber–we have enough data to compare such ridesharing operations with traditional government-licensed-and-approved cab companies. See here.

1) Uber is serving poor neighborhoods better than government-approved taxis, providing more rides than taxis to people from neighborhoods with lower-than-average-household-incomes.

2) It is safer for drivers to work for a ridesharing company compared to a taxi company. Taxi drivers carry cash and are attractive targets for robberies; Uber drivers are paid electronically through the “app,” and do not engage in cash transactions.

3) Uber and other ridesharing firms also cut down on drunk driving, and thus save lives. They provide additional options for people seeking rides after drinking at bars and restaurants. See this report.

Despite this growing data, government-licensed cab companies are presently lobbying heavily to get their uncle government to ban ridesharing.

Sep 09

Arctic Ice Has Increased by Hundreds of Miles in Past 3 Years

polar bear

Numerous manmade-global-warming alarmists predicted a decade ago that Arctic sea ice would disappear by 2015. Yet climatologist Steven Goddard says “The Arctic has gained hundreds of miles of ice over the past three years, much of which is thick, multi-year ice.” See here.

Goddard’s post also provides links to headlines and “news stories” in which prominent “experts” and “leaders” predicted Arctic ice would disappear during summer by 2015.