Oct 02
The crazed, powermad dictator of Turkey, Erdogan, has asked the public to report any unfair price hikes in Turkish stores.
Government marauders will then raid the stores, taking the inventory, said Erdogan. See here.
Predicted headline next month: “Hundreds of Turkish retailers close.”
Sep 29
Virtually every claim of socialist economists is false.
One major claim of socialists is that the largest corporations have near total control over human affairs, and are able to control their destiny by manipulation of politics and markets.
Yet studies show that only a small handful of the corporations in the Fortune 50 were there just 25 years ago.
The false claim of total market control by major corporations was a central theme of pro-government professor John Kenneth Galbraith in his bestseller The Affluent Society (1958), Galbraith and other Ivy League pro-government economists called for government control and intervention to stop large corporations from becoming too controlling.
At the time Galbraith wrote his famed book, Sears, A & P, and JC Penney were America’s largest retailers.
Today Sears is a penny stock. And JC Penney has been in and out of bankruptcy discussions for years.
The A & P grocery chain (“The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company”), which from 1915 through 1975 was the largest grocery retailer in the United States (and until 1965, the largest U.S. retailer of any kind), ceased supermarket operations in 2015.
Sears–which was at one time America’s largest retailer and largest employer– has lost $11.7 billion since 2010, its last profitable year, and sales have plunged 60% in that time. It has fewer than 900 stores, down from a combined 3,500 US stores when Sears and Kmart merged in 2005.
The price of a share in the Sears corporation fell below one dollar this week.
Sep 27
by Dr. Roger I. Roots, founder, Lysander Spooner University
On Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018, I happened to read an advertisement in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle about a visiting expert professor who would be giving a lecture that very evening. The title of the lecture was: “Visiting lecturer to discuss challenges and opportunities for feeding a growing population on a warming planet.”
I ended up attending the lecture, which was well attended. The visiting professor, Paul West, co-director and lead scientist of the Global Landscapes Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, gave a nice talk on global trends in agriculture, the release of greenhouse gasses from different crops, and prospects for the future.
I’m sure his research is well-funded by government research grants–and his approach is to call for more central planning of the world’s agricultural development (of course).
At the end of the lecture I asked him the question: what major world crop is declining due to climate change? (I knew that almost all global crops are seeing INCREASING, NOT DECREASING yields despite recurring claims that global warming is about to cause global crop failures.)
Dr. West had difficulty with the question. He asked back: “Do you mean ‘already.’?” I said yes. “Already.”
He fidgeted a bit; and the audience could sense the question was a sensitive one.
Then Dr. West responded that there was a pending (apparently unpublished, or about-to-be-published) paper somewhere that suggests that “maize and soy” yields are declining due to “climate change.”
Well at least I got an answer.
Immediately afterward, I googled around a bit for crop-yield data on maize and soy. It turns out that both soy and “maize” (corn) yileds are predicted to be AT RECORD LEVELS this year (at least in the U.S. which is the major soy and corn producer). See here.
Maybe the now-secret, unpublished paper will shed more light on the subject.
STAY TUNED!
Sep 27
The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) will no longer show any content which might cast doubt on the government theory of catastrophic-manmade-global-warming-by-CO2. See here.
The government network has pronounced that the issue is settled and no debate will be allowed.
This despite the fact that ice in the arctic has been growing steadily over the past few years, glaciers in Glacier National Park are growing, raw temperatures across the U.S. have been going steadily down, and rates of extremely hot days in North America have been declining.
The BBC now joins other organizations and institutions which ban the open discussion of climate change. The LA Times, for example, has had a policy in place for a decade which prohibits letters to the editor which question the government theory. The Portland, OR school district bans any and all educational materials which mention any skepticism regarding the theory. Youtube now posts asterisks on videos which question or challenge the government theory.
Sep 22
Alex Jones predicted this years ago. The internet is constantly changing, and tech firms are increasingly bowing to political powers. Googe’s Eric Schmidt recently told an audience that his company is currently building a ‘second internet’ by designing a censored, pro-government search engine, primarily for the Chinese government.
The new government-friendly internet will initially be much larger than the ‘free’ internet because China and its satellite community has more captive viewers and computer users than the western world.
Of course, the rapid rise in alternative media sources illustrates that top-down, elitist control of the internet will quickly be surpassed by the free internet.
Sep 22
Heavily-armed DEA S.W.A.T. teams are in the practice of raiding medical and dental offices, threatening doctors and dentists, and getting them to sign away their right to prescribe medications. See this August 2016 report by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“Thousands of medical professionals have quietly signed away their rights to prescribe narcotics — and, in many cases, their careers” after federal law enforcement agencies raided their clinics and offices.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained the startling information through Freedom of Information Act requests.
“From 2011 to 2015, the Drug Enforcement Administration accepted the surrender of 3,679 prescribing licenses nationwide, and revoked another 99.”
In Kentucky some two percent of all doctors have surrendered their prescribing rights die to these secret operations.
Sep 18
An astounding Reason Magazine article reports that a majority of LAPD cops and LA City firefighters are “retiring” at a young age as “disabled” millionaires. The City’s “Defined Retirement Option Plan” (DROP), allows police and firefighters, eligible for a pension equaling 90 percent of the average of their final years’ pay at age 50, to keep working and receive their full retirement and salary.
(And frequently, the Departments promote cops and firefighters to a lucrative “chief” position in their final year to maximize the pay analysis for their pension.)
After signing up for the “DROP” program, some police and firefighters then take disability leave and are paid while they stay at home recovering from their “injuries.” They can often be seen at elite country clubs and casino resorts golfing and gambling away while on “disability.”
The LA Times’ analysis found that “more than a third (36 percent) of police officers who entered the program went out on injury leave. At the fire department, it was 70 percent.”
Sep 16
Socialists and government trusters are seeing all of their proposed policy ideas implemented in Venezuela. And the results are predictable.
The South American socialist regime has driven out most productive industries. Inflation is way above 200 percent. Starvation and disease are rampant. Basic commodities cannot be found. Millions have fled. Men die in brutal fights over coins. Women prostitute themselves on the streets for water, fruit, toothpaste, or diapers.
Now, in an effort to fight inflation, the Venezuelan dictatorship has ordered that all stores (which have been mostly nationalized) must give their employees a 60 percent pay increase. And the stores are forbidden from raising prices. Anyone caught criticizing the new policies is subject to imprisonment.
The new impositions are crushing retailers. Some 40 percent are now closed and refusing to operate. (Next the government will likely decree that the store managers are slaves and must reopen.) See here.
Sep 06
The “mainstream” (meaning government supporting and supported) media continue to report that manmade global warming is quickly melting the ice in the Arctic away to nothing.
But a careful analysis of satellite records seems to indicate that this year’s Arctic “melt season” is already over. Unless there is an unforeseen sudden rise in temperatures in the very near future, August 31 may have been the last day for Arctic ice to melt this year.
If so, 2018’s melt season is the shortest on record. Arctic ice (and North American snow cover generally) have been growing over the past several years.
Sep 06
New York City’s famed Wall Street produced thousands of millionaires during the era of American capitalism and freedom.
But years of socialistic government, regulation, and taxation have taken their toll on the Big Apple. Many multi-millionaires have fled New York City for freer shores and states. And New York’s high rates of taxation and business regulation prevent the poor from rising into prosperity like in generations past.
Now Hong Kong has surpassed New York City as home to the most ‘super rich’ business owners. Some 10,000 billionaires with net worths of at least $30 billion now make their home in Hong Kong, while New York City is home to only 9,000 such persons. See here.
