Jan 04
The U.S. Postal Service loses $5 to $7 billion annually. It pays its workers too much; and thousands of people apply for every opening.
Managers of the pension program for the USPS’s millionaire retirees have not been contributing much to the pension fund over the past 20 years, due to the horrendous fiscal condition of the “Service.” See here.
Jan 02
Dr. Peter Ridd is the world’s foremost authority on the Great Coral Reef and the effect of climate on corals. Dr. Ridd’s research found that Pacific coral reefs are healthy and thriving.
Unfortunately for Professor Ridd, this conclusion conflicts with the official government position (expressed in government documents such as UN IPCC reports) that the world’s coral reefs are collapsing, weakening, dead or dying due to climate change.
Ridd was fired from his professor position at James Cook University in 2018. Ridd appealed and prevailed, but the Australian government is appealing to Australia’s highest court.
Now Ridd is out with a new–potentially more astonishing–report. For all the global talk and hysteria over climate change, government agencies have not reported any data regarding the Great Barrier Reef in FIFTEEN YEARS!
Government-favored scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) have claimed that the coral reefs are declining 1 percent per year due to manmade climate change. “According to the AIMS curve, growth should now be 30% lower than it was in 1990 – a disastrous fall.”
Ridd’s research suggests the reef’s size is essentially unchanged. Why hasn’t AIMS published any data more recent than 2005?
Dec 29
[Exact time and place to be announced. WE’RE WORKING ON IT!!]
Speakers Include:
K.C. Blunt:
American urban survivalist
“Knife Fighting for Personal and Home Defense” (with demonstration of knife-fighting techniques and skills)
Michael Elliott:
Las Vegas Freedom Activist
“Good Citizens are the Worst Citizens: The Losing Strategy of Compliance”
Bryon Watkins
Correctional Officer turned Prisoner,
[Topic to be announced]
Scottie Hotchstetter
[Title to be announced]
Evol Love:
Founder of Justice Travelers
“Being Too Effective: Journalism and Assassination”
Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.
“Climate Skepticism 101: What Everyone Should Know”
AND . . . a super special guest lecturer!
Dec 29
Learn Liberty calculated average likely “returns on investment” upon retirement from Social Security.
The Social Security program was launched by the U.S. government during the 1930s with millions of dollars of pro-government propaganda. (Criticism of the program within the federal government was censored.)
During the 1980s, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein found that Social Security DECREASED the savings of the average American by 30 to 50 percent. This had the impact of DECREASING overall GDP by at least 3 percent–meaning that the country as a whole is discernibly poorer today than it would have been without the parasitic program.
The Social Security program provides returns of around 1 percent above inflation. Average returns from average investments (in the stock market for example) would yield at least 5 percent.
This means that a hypothetical average worker would retire with a nest egg of $900,000 if not for Social Security. The average worker is robbed of some $600,000 by the program.
Dec 29
From the Wall Street Journal: “Despite being consistently rated as the “happiest state” in the nation, Hawaii is experiencing its third straight year of negative migration. Some 35,000 residents moved to the mainland from 2015-18.”
“At 11% the state’s top marginal income-tax rate is second only to California’s. A 2018 study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy determined that the state’s general excise tax—a sales tax substitute—raises the effective tax rate on low-income households to about 15%. According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, Hawaii has the nation’s heaviest sales-tax burden as a share of personal income.”
“[I]t takes three to five years to get permission to build a home in Hawaii—and that’s when things are “fast tracked.” At normal speed, according to University of Hawaii law professor David Callies, it can take a decade to get a house built.”
Dec 28
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Get ready for some astounding statistics:
Murder rates have generally declined across America since the 1990s. But one city—Baltimore—has set its all-time per capita homicide rate in 2019.
Newspapers ponder the cause. It isn’t population density. Baltimore has LOST population since the 1980s as its most productive citizens have fled the city’s high taxes and regulations.
It isn’t poverty. Baltimore-area median household income is among the highest in the U.S. The surrounding state of Maryland has a higher median household income than the U.S. average. Maryland has the SECOND-LOWEST percentage of people living below the poverty line.
It certainly isn’t lack of law enforcement or government surveillance. Baltimore is UNDER MORE SURVEILLANCE THAN ANY OTHER U.S. CITY.
Baltimore’s secretive “Gorgon Stare” surveillance grid captures data from thousands of surveillance cameras and databases and crosslinks this data so that government has access to almost every citizen’s movements in real time. Baltimore has surveillance planes and drones in the air above the city every minute of every day.
A CITY DROWNING IN GOVERNMENT
The answer may be too much government. Baltimore is practically a government money pit.
Baltimore residents are among the richest beneficiaries of money from the federal government. And Maryland as a whole ranks third (3rd) among states with the highest per-capita net returns from the federal government (which easily surpasses the high taxes transferred TO Washington by Marylanders).
The state receives more federal spending per capita in nonmilitary programs than any other.
Dec 28
Government agencies have been caught hundreds of times ‘adjusting’ temperature records to make the past seem colder than it was measured by thermometers. This makes the present seem warmer by comparison and supports governments’ arguments that governments must become more powerful to “do something” about the alleged problem.
Now a peer-reviewed paper in Earth Systems and Environment has documented that the “Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level” (PSMSL), a government agency in Liverpool, England, has been adjusting historical data regarding sea levels in the Indian Ocean. The government adjustments have made it seem that sea levels in India rare rising.
In fact, sea levels near India are quite stable and have been for a century. In fact there has been a slight decrease in sea levels in India during the period.
“To put it simply, these PSMSL “scientists” have been arbitrarily changing their data in order to create the illusion of a problem that doesn’t actually exist,” according to Dr. Albert Parker and Dr. Clifford Ollier.
Dec 24
A new report in Reason Magazine documents the way government impositions everywhere decreased the rate of housing construction in the U.S. during the past decade.
“The 2010s will end up with the lowest number of housing units started in 6 decades, by a wide margin.” This is causing (1) home prices and rents to increase–especially in the most regulated areas, (2) an explosion of homelessness–especially in the most regulated areas, and (3) a rapid expansion in commute times–especially in the most regulated areas.
California provides the most glaring example. In 1975 “the Golden State issued 131,732 housing permits” with a population of 21.5 million residents. In 2018, by contrast, Californian authorities permitted only 117,892 new units of housing for the state’s nearly 40 million residents. Californians must now commute much further and pay much more for housing. Homelessness and wealth inequality have exploded despite the California legislature spending more money on these problems than any other State.
“The question isn’t whether government regulation has constrained supply. Rather its which government regulations have restricted supply the most.” Zoning, environmental, prevailing wage, and historical preservation laws have all contributed.
Government regulations now account for about a third of the price of most housing.
Dec 23
All is fair in love and war, it is said.
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) was founded by Grover Norquist in 1985. Norquist’s mission was to ask politicians—especially Republican politicians—to sign a pledge that they would always oppose all tax increases. Those who refused to sign were generally defeated in Republican primaries by those who signed.
By 2012 Norquist was one of the most powerful—and hated—men in Washington. Government trusters despised him. 60 Minutes ran a story proclaiming Norquist was the secret mastermind of the Republican Party.
By 2013, the GOP’s neocon establishment targeted Norquist with rumors that Norquist was secretly a member of the Muslim Brotherhood—and that Norquist’s pledge was, unbeknownst to the signers, some kind of “sharia” pledge. This theme was repeated by CIA-linked neocons such as Glen Beck, Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes.
(Glen Beck’s multimillion-dollar media empire suffered a steep decline in viewership soon after Beck began pushing these themes.)
Recently, a Nevada-based writer named Denise Mraz has also picked up these apparently-CIA-derived talking points, claiming that politicians who sign the pledge to oppose tax increases are secretly or unknowingly giving “consent for Sharia Compliance.” (You can’t make this stuff up!)
The basis for the Norquist=Muslim-Brotherhood claim: the fact that Norquist married a beautiful Palestinian-American named Samah Alrayyes in 2004. (Although the pair had a Christian wedding in the Weston United Methodist Church in Weston, Massachusetts.) Norquist has also launched some libertarian-conservative outreach efforts aimed at the Muslim community.
Dec 22
From the beginning of the FISA Court, critics predicted it would become an embarrassment. New revelations show this was an understatement
Libertarian journalist and civil rights activist Glenn Greenwald dismantles the recent Inspector General report in The Intercept. According to the IG report, the FBI routinely cuts corners in its FISA Court pleadings. Moreover, the IG report shows that the “mainstream” media has been complicit in the abuses.
The secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court system was created by Congress in 1978 amid claims that investigations involving top-secret, classified, information are best conducted behind closed doors by trusted government-loyalist judges and government officials.
The FISA Court is a government tribunal without any press coverage or private-sector input.
In 2018, only 1 of 1,080 requests for government wiretap applications were rejected by the FISA Court. In most years there are NO rejections.
According to Greenwald:
It’s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a secret Pentagon program in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks – coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.
But now it’s all out in the open. It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters.
All of this has meant that U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the FBI.
