Jun 24
It finally happened. The legislature and governor of a state (Hawaii) have approved a gun registry for all residents who possess firearms.
Hawaii signed a bill Thursday to become the first state to enter gun owners into an FBI database that will automatically notify police if an island resident is arrested anywhere else in the country.
Jun 23
Abstract vector color map of Great Britain country coloured by national flag
Lift a glass for self determination! It appears the courageous Brits have chosen to exit the European Union.
There is hope!
Jun 23
The U.S. government has been bolstering the powers, privileges and immunities of federal employees for years.
Career federal employees now get 8 weeks of PAID vacation annually. They are paid around twice what a private sector worker in the same field would make (and this does not include the paid vacation!).
Federal workers are increasingly immune from lawsuit, and are protected in a thousand ways from their angry constituents.
There are now more non-military government employees who carry guns than there are U.S. Marines. See here.
Jun 23
Overregulation by government, near-zero interest rates, student loan debt, and near all-time-low savings rates have devastated home ownership rates.
Home ownership is at its lowest in nearly 50 years, falling to 63.7 percent in 2015. It’s a “decade-long slide” that “is unprecedented in American history,” according to an annual report released Wednesday by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. See here.
The growth of student loan debt has also contributed. Today’s college grads already–in essence–have a mortgage to pay for, thanks to the Student Loan Program, which subsidizes demand and causes tuition costs to rise.
Jun 21
Financial Times recently reviewed the economic problems facing America’s lower-class males. Males of prime working age have abandoned work, as regulation and the criminal justice system have taken their tolls. See here.
“Between 6 and 7 per cent of the prime-age male population was in prison at some point during their lives in 2008.”
Jun 20
Infowars.com has broken a story wherein a U.S. intelligence or military contractor has posted a Craigslist ad seeking “actors” for an upcoming military “exercise.”
Infowars notes that the “exercise” appears to be timed to coincide with the Democratic National Convention and speculates that the military-industrial complex may seek to stage a false flag ‘terror’ attack of some kind to make Bernie Sanders supporters look bad.
Who knows?
Jun 20
It is an age-old claim: that dissenters and critics of government are traitors guilty of sedition.
For months, the government of Turkey has been prosecuting children, reporters and even comedians who criticized the government.
Now Turkish prosecutors have arrested three prominent free speech advocates. See here.
Jun 20
Headlines have blared nationwide about this past weekend’s extremely high temps in the Americans southwest. A dominant theme has been government predictions that temps in Phoenix, Yuma, Palm Springs and Death Valley will approach or set all-time records. (This, of course, would mean that the all-time high temp records for the United States were predicted to fall.)
But thus far, actual temperatures have been merely abnormally high. Very few records have been broken or even threatened.
As Tony Heller writes, “June temperatures over 117F used to occur quite frequently in that area, but this was the first one in many years.” See here.
Jun 15
Government agencies in charge of keeping historic temperature records claim they occasionally “adjust” the temperature records to fix problems with bad thermometers, etc.
For example, NOAA officials will point to places where a thermometer system was malfunctioning. They will then claim that the official records of past years have been “adjusted” to fix the problem.
But data analyst Tony Heller has shown that the “adjustments” have tended to make the past colder and the present warmer. “In the case of US temperature adjustments, they are made to exactly match the increase in CO2. Junk science doesn’t get any worse than that.“
Jun 15
Health care and higher education have much in common in modern America.
Both are promoted as “rights” by government trusters. And government has promoted programs to “help” the poor obtain their products and services by subsidizing such goods with taxpayer inputs.
Both industries have seen annual price increases higher than the rate of inflation for decades.
Now, after passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which was intended to make health care more affordable for the poor, the Associated Press is reporting that cost increases will average 11 percent next year. See here.
