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I wrote in 2017 that class warfare in the 1950s did not work because well-to-do taxpayers could choose to earn less, evade taxes, or avoid taxes.

In this video, Brian Domitrovic elaborates on the failure of confiscatory tax rates.

Let’s dig deeper into this topic, and we’ll start with this table from a 2012 article by James Pethokoukis.

It shows that income tax revenues during the 1950s were lower than they were in the 1960s (after the Kennedy tax cuts) and the 1980s (after the Reagan tax cuts).

Here’s some of what he wrote to accompany the table.

1950s tax rates actually generated less tax revenue than subsequent periods of lower rates. From 1950 to 1963, income tax revenue averaged 7.5 percent of GDP; that’s less than in the Reagan years when rates were being slashed. This could suggest that rates are right around the Laffer Curve equilibrium point in the current economy. …And, of course, an ultrahigh tax rate on an initially small slice of the population…would neither raise very much revenue nor do anything to create jobs. And look at what just happened in Great Britain. Their Independent Fiscal Oversight Commission—which reviews all of the budgetary assumptions—just ruled that cutting the top rate of tax from 50 to 45 was revenue neutral, implying the revenue maximizing rate is in that range. The Brits don’t have state income taxes, which implies by extension that our revenue maximizing federal rate is lower than theirs—a whole lot lower than 70, 80, or 90%. Back to the 1950s? Forget it.

In a 2023 article for the Foundation for Economic Education, Rainer Zitelmann also explains that the high tax rates didn’t produce high revenues (gee, I think there’s a way of describing this insight).

Left-wing politicians who demand higher taxes on the rich argue that the United States has, in the past, prospered when tax rates were very high, proving that high taxes do not harm the economy. …In the 1950s and early 1960s, the top federal personal income tax rate in the US was a horrendous 91 percent… Interestingly, the actual percentage paid by the top 1 percent of earners in the US was only 16.1 percent in 1962, when the top marginal rate was 91 percent. However, in 1988, when the top rate was only 28 percent, the percentage paid by the top 1 percent of earners had risen to 21.5 percent! …This seems paradoxical, but it is logical, because it is not only the tax rate that is decisive, but the amount of income that is actually taxable. …So the myth that the US experienced strong economic growth when the top marginal tax rate was high is false.

The bottom line is that the economy sputtered in the 1950s because of high tax rates and tax revenues languished for the same reason.

P.S. While the 1950s were bad, President Franklin Roosevelt actually tried to impose a 100 percent tax rate in the 1940s (and that’s not even the worst thing he advocated).

Following the news that Elon Musk is considering taking legal action against the ADL over its role in ad boycotts, a new article in Public underlines the links between censorious NGOs like ADL and state security agencies.

The post Government Intelligence And Security Agencies Behind NGO Demands For More Censorship by Twitter appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

BRAVE NEW WORLD:

"Bioethicist", S. Matthew Liao: In order to tackle "climate change", humans should be genetically modified to be intolerant to meat.

"If we eat less meat, we could significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Now, some people would be willing to eat less meat, but they… pic.twitter.com/0kM4I8mnf0

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) September 5, 2023

(Via SDA.)

Helicopters flying over the search area are broadcasting a recording of Cavalcante's mother's voice "in an effort to facilitate his peaceful surrender," a Pennsylvania State Police official said. 

EH, A LOT OF STORIES ARE UNRAVELING THESE DAYS: The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.

According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.

The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.

At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data have gotten far more precise. And now new data from the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in the model, not in the data.

Two serious issues with the standard model of cosmology would be concerning enough. But the model has already been patched up numerous times over the past half century to better conform with the best available data — alterations that may well be necessary and correct, but which, in light of the problems we are now confronting, could strike a skeptic as a bit too convenient.

The science wasn’t settled, as it turned out. It never really is.

YES, OUR RULING CLASS IS CORRUPT, DISHONEST, OVERWEENING, AND INCOMPETENT: Pete Buttigieg is just a symptom of a vastly larger crisis. “Make a note of how they aren’t ‘advocating for a complete erasure of cars.’ Instead, they want the government to ‘re-direct the U.S. from relying on private motor vehicles.’ The word ‘private’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. In other words, they won’t be getting rid of all cars. Just your cars. Your private cars. Just like they won’t be getting rid of all planes. The military will still need jets (sold by the military-industrial complex and paid for by your taxpayer dollars). And important people like John Kerry will still need their private jets because they are very busy. But you don’t need to fly. . . . So Pete Buttigieg, who was given a position at the Department of Transportation based on nothing more than the claim that ‘he always liked cars,’ no longer wants you to have a car. But he’s going to have a car. And his preferred method of travel is via private jets now that he’s cashing in as a Washington insider with the Biden administration.”

They should be afraid of angry mobs. But they aren’t. Why not?

Nearly all of the alleged anthropogenic link to climate change can be removed simply by exchanging and/or replacing biased temperature and solar activity data sets.

A new study authored by 37 scientists in the journal Climate finds using rural-only Northern Hemisphere temperature data (i.e., removing artificial, non-climatic urban heat effects) reduces the post-1850 warming trend from 0.89°C per century to 0.55°C per century.

Further, using a total solar irradiance (TSI) dataset neglected by the IPCC (Hoyt and Schatten, 1993, updated to present) allows TSI to explain up to 87% of modern warming.

Variations in cloud cover, albedo, and natural ocean circulations may also be factors arising from internal climate variability that could explain modern climate changes.

In summary, then, much of modern global warming’s alleged link to human activity may have been formulated by selecting data that align with the hypothesis, and neglecting or dismissing data which do not.

Image Source: Soon et al., 2023

 

By James D. Agresti September 1, 2023 Correction appended Overview After ignoring smoking gun emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop for more than two years, the Washington Post has finally reported they exist and are authentic. However, the paper’s lead “fact checker” Glenn Kessler, continues to deny that Joe Biden engaged in bribery and obstructed justice—even though the emails prove that he did. While weaving this tale, Kessler unwittingly raises issues that cement Biden’s guilt and implicates the Washington Post in burying the evidence. The Context In April 2014, while Joe Biden was the vice-president, he traveled to Ukraine and publicly promised its legislators that the U.S. would help Ukraine increase its fossil fuel production. In the very same month:

• the owner of the largest private natural gas company in Ukraine—a notoriously corrupt oligarch named Nikolai Zlochevskyi—appointed Hunter Biden and one of Hunter’s business partners to the company’s board.

• the company began making a series of payments totaling at least $3.3 million to a Delaware corporation that gave $708,312 directly to Hunter and $2.5 million to entities associated with Hunter.

• the oligarch’s London bank accounts were seized in a money laundering investigation.

• Hunter sent an email to his business partner claiming that “we will not and cannot intervene directly with domestic policy makers” while setting up a secret communication channel: “Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.”

This and other incriminating emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop—falsely labeled as “Russian disinformation” by Joe Biden and the media—have been broadly and indisputably verified as authentic. The Smoking Gun Emails One year later in April 2015—after the oligarch’s company had paid the Delaware corporation at least $2 million—one of the oligarch’s top executives met with Hunter and Joe Biden at a restaurant near the White House named Café Milano. Despite multiple emails proving the meeting happened, the Biden campaign, Kessler, and numerous media outlets casted doubt on this fact until a photo and testimony from one of the attendees confirmed that both Bidens dined that night at Café Milano with the gas company executive and several of Hunter’s other business partners. Seven months after that in November 2015, the same executive sent a graphically incriminating email to Hunter and his partners in which he:

• told them to “proceed immediately” with getting “high-ranking US officials” to “visit” Ukraine and convince “the highest level of decision makers” to “close down” all “cases/pursuits against” the oligarch.

• identified the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General” as two of their “key targets.”

• reminded them that ending these criminal cases was the “true purpose” and the “ultimate purpose” of their “engagement” and “all our joint efforts.”

Hunter’s partners then discussed the executive’s email among themselves while making clear that Hunter and anonymous high-ranking U.S. officials would handle the matter, writing:

• “I would tell” the executive that we “deliberately” didn’t mention the names of the top U.S. officials who will shield the oligarch from prosecution “to be on the safe and cautious side.”

• “Hunter, You need to deliver that message.”

Hunter then replied to the executive, “Looking forward to getting started on this,” and Joe Biden proceeded to do exactly what the emails specified word-for-word:

• Almost “immediately” after the Hunter wrote that he was “getting started,” the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine announced eight days later that “Vice President Biden”—a “high-ranking US official”—“will travel to Ukraine” within a month.

• During that trip, Biden pressured “the highest level of decision makers” in Ukraine to fire the nation’s chief prosecutor by singling out “key targets” in the email. Biden threatened Ukraine’s president and prime minister that he would withhold a U.S. billion-dollar loan guarantee unless the “state prosecutor” was fired. “If the prosecutor is not fired,” warned Biden, “you’re not getting the money.” Biden then bragged, “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”

• The replacement prosecutor—who Biden called “solid”—then agreed to drop all criminal charges against the oligarch if he paid back taxes and penalties. This led the oligarch to praise the deal, saying that it would allow his company to increase “production” and “attract international companies to Ukraine.”

Given the crystal clear words of these emails, the actions of Joe Biden align with textbook definitions of bribery, extortion, and obstruction of justice. Yet, the Washington Post’s chief “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler, is denying these implications. The Post Knew Even though Tucker Carlson exposed the first of the smoking gun emails in October 2020, the establishment media completely ignored Carlson’s report and the entire cache of related emails for the next 31 months. During this media blackout, Just Facts found the replies from Hunter and his partners, proving beyond a reasonable doubt in August 2022 that Joe Biden obstructed justice and engaged in bribery. For nearly a year after that, Just Facts asked dozens of journalists, editors, producers, commentators, and elected officials to address this evidence, but few would. Among those who did were the Bongino Report, radio hosts Eric Metaxas and Rich Valdes, and Just Facts’ syndication partners like the Heartland Institute, Grabien, the Tennessee Star, the Thinking Conservative, Issues & Insights, and Zenger News. Then in July 2023, Fox News answered the call with an explosive article featured at the top of its website with quotes from Republican lawmakers like these:

• “There can be no doubt about Burisma’s motives for paying Hunter Biden millions despite his lack of industry expertise, it’s right there in black and white.” – Senator Chuck Grassley

• “Putting personal interests ahead of American interests is not just a dishonor of the office, but treasonous. It is a major scandal unprecedented in the annals of our history and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee will investigate and expose as much of the ugly truth as possible.” – Congressman Paul Gosar

• “Our President is compromised, he should resign and be forever condemned, and the Democrat Party should begin rebuilding itself.” – Congressman Clay Higgins

This prompted the Washington Post to finally acknowledge the emails existed, the first and only major news outlet besides Fox and the New York Post to do so. In the WaPo’s article, Kessler reported that the “explosive” emails were “verified by two security experts,” hyperlinking to a March 2022 article in the Post as proof of this. This 2022 article reported that the experts verified “some” emails “from Hunter Biden’s work” with the “Ukrainian energy company” but that the:

Post’s review of these emails found that most were routine communications that provided little new insight into Hunter Biden’s work for the company.

That statement is an abject falsehood, as evidenced by the actual content of the emails. These facts show that the Post was aware of the smoking gun emails and knew they were authentic for at least 16 months. Yet, the Post described them as “routine” and failed to report what they contained, effectively burying them. Nevertheless, Kessler begins his piece by painting Republicans as disingenuous. He does this by writing that “Republican lawmakers expressed outrage” over the “email chain” even though “Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, devoted an entire show to this email in October 2020.” Kessler claims this proves “the Hunter Biden saga apparently can be endlessly recycled for maximum impact.” To the contrary, Google shows that the media ignored the email chain unearthed by Carlson and Just Facts so broadly that no members of Congress publicly commented on them before the recent Fox News article—more than two years after the existence of the laptop was revealed by the New York Post. Kessler is also wrong that Carlson devoted an “entire show” to the email. In reality, Carlson spent a portion of one segment on it, or about a seven minutes. More importantly, Kessler fails to note that Carlson only reported on the first email in the chain, which reveals that the gas company executive wanted Hunter and his partners to stop the criminal cases against the oligarch. The rest of the emails uncovered by Just Facts prove that Hunter and his partners:

• agreed to do what the executive wanted.
• concealed the names of top U.S. officials who would protect the oligarch to “be on the safe and cautious side.”
• wrote that only Hunter could credibly promise to convince the officials to protect the oligarch.

This isn’t the end of Kessler’s misinformation. Kessler’s Counterfactual “Bottom Line” Remarkably, Kessler claims that Joe Biden demanded the firing of the prosecutor not because he was prosecuting the oligarch who was enriching Hunter but because he wasn’t pursuing the oligarch “aggressively” enough. Kessler says this is “the bottom line” while ignoring these facts that contradict his story:

• Other emails from Hunter’s laptop prove that the previous prosecutor was aggressively pursuing the oligarch while Hunter was secretly trying to stop him:
  • In May 2014—months before the smoking gun emails above were sent—the very same executive wrote to Hunter, “We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions” against the oligarch by a party “represented in the government by the General Prosecutor” and another person.
  • One day later, an attorney at the law firm where Hunter worked instructed the executive to email her “directly with all communications related to the current politically motivated attacks” and “include in the ‘Subject’ line of the email ‘Attorney-Client Communication: Privileged & Confidential’ as I have done above. This will help protect as confidential our communications about such important and sensitive issues.”

• Months before any information about Hunter’s laptop became public, an informant reported to the FBI that he personally spoke with the oligarch several times in 2015–2019, and the oligarch stated that:
  • the current chief prosecutor (Viktor Shokin) was conducting an investigation that “would have a substantial negative impact” on his business, but Hunter Biden “will take care of all of those issues through his dad.”
  • he saved “recordings” and “documents” that prove he was “coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure the Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired.”
  • “it costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden.”
  • “he did not send any funds directly to the ‘Big Guy’,” and therefore, it will take investigators “10 years to find” the “illicit payments to Joe Biden.”

How Washington Works Kessler also asserts that Joe Biden was merely following the orders of his underlings at the State Department when he threatened to withhold U.S. support from Ukraine. “Biden was carrying out a policy developed at the State Department,” declares Kessler, and “it’s important to remember that Biden, even though he was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine, did not have a free hand to implement policy as he wished. That’s not how it works in Washington.” Kessler’s narrative about how Washington works is directly refuted by a 2015 State Department memo prepared for “Vice President Biden’s Meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko” on December 7–8. The memo—written two weeks before Biden’s visit to Ukraine—bluntly tells him, “You will sign our third billion-dollar loan guarantee and publicly announce FY 15 U.S. assistance for the first time: $189,035,756.” Yet, in his own words, Biden told Ukraine’s president and prime minister at that meeting, “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” This was not an idle threat. In opposition to what the State Department told Biden to do in this meeting, he withheld the loan guarantee until six months later in June 2016—or three months after the president of Ukraine forced the chief prosecutor to resign. The State Department memo did call for the removal of Shokin, but not as a condition of receiving the loan guarantee. This doesn’t even slightly exonerate the Bidens because emails from Hunter’s laptop show he had been lobbying the State Department for more than a year to protect the oligarch. In the same May 2014 exchange in which the gas company executive asked Hunter for help with stopping the prior prosecutor, the attorney who told the executive to keep their communications confidential also wrote to the executive, “I recommend that you authorize me to take the following actions to begin communicating” on your company’s “behalf with the U.S. government.” Among the actions she offered to take were these:

• “Contact the Bureau of Energy and Ukraine Desk officials at the State Department to introduce them to” your company and “explain” the “current situation, which will include the issues you’ve emailed me about today.”

• Reach out to “Carlos Pascual, the top US energy diplomat,” who:
  • is “Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs at State.”
  • “was formerly US Ambassador to Ukraine (’00–03).”
  • is held “in high regard” by Hillary Clinton (the prior Secretary of State), former President Bill Clinton, and John Kerry,” the Secretary of State at the time the email was sent.

• Engage “a key U.S. registered lobbyist” named “David Leiter,” who:
  • was “Secretary of State Kerry’s Chief of Staff when Kerry was in the U.S. Senate.”
  • was “a political appointee at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Clinton Administration.”
  • “is close to Secretary Kerry and his staff.”
  • “is also very close to people in other US government agencies (Commerce, Treasury, etc.) as well as Congress.”

This written record reveals how Washington really works. Politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists manipulate U.S. policy for the benefit of themselves, their families, their clients, and their political allies. And they get away with it because major media outlets like the Washington Post don’t report the actual facts to the public. Just Facts has identified 11 other misleading statements in Kessler’s piece, but there’s no need to beat a dead horse. More than enough facts have proven that Kessler and the Post are untrustworthy brokers of information on this matter. The same applies to other so-called fact checkers, government officials, journalists, editors, and tech executives who have systematically misled the public about this staggering scandal. Correction (9/19/23): An earlier version of this article conflated the actions of two separate chief prosecutors.

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: San Francisco’s Homeless Ticking Time Bomb.

At any given moment, on any given day, there are around 8,000 people sleeping on the streets of the city — one of the wealthiest, per capita, in human history. Once acquainted with the basic facts of the crisis, including the incredible sum of money dedicated to solving the problem, the average San Franciscan concludes the city must be run by morons. How else, with billions of dollars, have city leaders failed to provide a few thousand temporary beds? Even with supportive services, the numbers don’t add up. This is because the average person assumes the small cabal of activists who run the city’s bloated homeless industrial complex want to temporarily shelter and rehabilitate the homeless. They do not. In fact, they are ideologically opposed to the concept. . . .

This year, San Francisco allotted $672 million to its Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), whose stated mission is to “make homelessness in San Francisco rare, brief, and one-time.” Since its inception in 2016, the HSH’s budget has tripled; in total, it has received over $3.3 billion in public funds. Yet the number of people on the streets continues to grow. HSH estimates that, on any given night, around 4,400 people sleep on the city’s streets and 3,400 sleep in shelters, putting the total number of homeless people in San Francisco at around 7,800, up over 20 percent from 2005. Where is all the money going? Is well over half a billion dollars not enough to provide temporary shelter and emergency care for all 3,400 people sleeping in tents, blankets, and cars on San Francisco’s streets? Is it not enough to improve the appalling hygienic conditions that once led a UN rapporteur to compare Downtown’s encampments to Mumbai’s slums?

San Francisco’s homeless problem is too lucrative to be solved.

#JOURNALISM: Farhad Manjoo writes a story about the Kia Boys without mentioning the Kia Boys.

As Manjoo sees it, the thefts and related problems (car crashes, armed robbery sprees, etc.) are entirely the fault of the manufacturers for making these cars so easy to steal. But he notes, ruefully, that another culprit is getting some of the blame. If you’re guessing he’s talking about the thieves, you guessed wrong. . . .

Not mentioned at all in these paragraphs or anywhere else in his column are the car thieves. All of the fault is placed on inanimate objects, i.e. the “theft-prone cars.” No responsibility is placed on the people driving this trend. This strikes me as pretty perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with progressive thinking on crime.

I think there’s a pretty clear reason why he’s leaving out the people responsible. Because the “Kia Boys,” as they’ve been described, are young teens, often black, who are stealing cars for fun and for social media cred. Contrary to what Manjoo claims, TikTok isn’t just providing dry information on how to steal the cars, it’s the platform where the “Kia Challenge” went viral. It’s where thieves post highlights of their joyrides in stolen cars to impress other kids. . . . In this clip, they admit they started stealing the cars because it was trending on TikTok. Watch and then tell me the responsibility should primarily fall on the car manufacturers. What about the kids doing this? What about their parents who seem to be completely absent? What about TikTok for making this into a social media game and a competition? Even the older men in the neighborhood point out that there is no accountability for these kids even when they are caught. So what about the courts and judges who give them a pass? If the car companies deserve blame that should come after a long line of other people involved.

Pretty much what we’ve come to expect from our brave “journalists,” though Farhad’s generally been better than this. Those Kias shouldn’t have been wearing such short skirts.

FDA: “YOU ARE NOT A HORSE.” JUDGE DON WILLETT: “FDA is not a physician.” Doctors’ ivermectin lawsuit against the FDA revived.

“Even tweet-sized doses of personalized medical advice are beyond FDA’s statutory authority.”

TRY THAT IN A SMALL TOWN VILLAGE: ‘We don’t need police’: the New Forest village taking the law into its own hands: At the village with the most unsolved burglaries in the UK, shopkeepers are turning to vigilante-style tactics. “A level of basic interest [from the police] would be nice.”

Ultimately, police exist not to protect the public from criminals, but to protect criminals from the public. Meanwhile, this article blames budget cuts for inadequate policing, but I note that British police have time to go after people for Facebook posts, and after children who make politically incorrect statements.

JOHN TIERNEY: No Masks, Please, We’re Rational.

EVERYTHING GETS HACKED: Hackers have discovered a loophole to ‘jailbreak’ Tesla’s paywall-blocked driving features, saving them thousands.

SDVs basically mean that some Tesla features, which are already built into the cars, are locked behind a paywall, requiring customers to pay extra if they want to use them. Some features in this category include a heated steering wheel, footwell lights, an “acceleration boost,” or the brand’s $15,000 Full Self-Driving feature.

Now, a group of hackers has discovered a way to “jailbreak” those paywalled features, and it looks like Tesla can’t do anything about it.

The team of hackers from Germany — a security researcher and three Ph.D. students — figured out a way to trick Tesla’s Media Control Unit (MCU) into thinking that certain purchases had already been made.

The reason that Tesla is powerless to stop it is that the MCU operates using a computer processor made by another company, called AMD. The hack targets AMD’s technology instead of Tesla’s proprietary tech.

In order for Tesla to stop this hack from spreading, it would have to physically swap out the MCUs in its cars with a new type of processor. That said, it’s possible the practice could invalidate warranties or other software updates if ever detected by Tesla, as is often the case with mobile phone and video game hardware.

If you ever took a jailbroken Tesla into the dealer for service, you’d definitely have some ‘splainin to do.

OUCH: Trump’s Donor Money Just Plummeted by $101 Million — What Happens to Election Funds If They Go Negative?

Save America, the leadership PAC founded by former President Donald Trump, has less than $4 million cash on hand, after siphoning over $101 million to pay legal fees for Trump and his allies since the beginning of 2022, reports the New York Times.

Mid-year tax filings for PACs provide awareness about presidential campaign funding and how those funds are being used. In Save America’s case, money that could be going to necessary campaign needs or political work, is being spent overwhelmingly on the former president’s and his associates’ pending legal cases.

According to its mid-year Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing, the Save America PAC has spent approximately $25 million in the first half of 2023, $21.6 million of that went to legal fees.

This is the direct (and intended) result of the Democrats’ coordinated legal campaign against Trump.

AND YET THE LIE WILL PERSIST:  No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada.

A report from C40 Cities – the green globalist gang chaired by London Mayor Sadiq Khan – has suggested a daily 44g meat allowance and rations lower than in the Second World War.

The post Sadiq Khan’s Green Globalist Gang Suggests Daily 44g Meat Allowance and Rations Lower Than Second World War appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

I know we call the site "Not the Bee," but sometimes we have to break the rules and report on literal bees!

Remember when there were questions about the mass graves of Native American children at assimilation schools in British Colombia?

UNEXPECTEDLY:  Ex-CIA agent who signed ‘spies who lie’ letter tried to hide Twitter job after Post cover.

THAT’S A BIG .07%: After Rise In Adjunct Faculty Of Color From 9.52% To 9.59%, ABA Finds Baylor Back In Compliance With Accreditation Diversity Standard.

IF YOU’RE A TWITTER* USER AND ARE SO INCLINED, PLEASE “LIKE” AND RETWEET THIS:  I’ll be sending targeted “quote tweets” to California legislators after this underlying tweet starts getting a decent number of “hearts” and retweets.    Yes, I wish we lived in a day that Twitter was not the most effective way of getting a state legislator’s attention.  But … well … times being what they are  …

*X.  I’m quite fond of the illustrious Mr. Musk, but I wish the name were still Twitter.

By the way, the underlying WSJ editorial is great.

Red Alert—The Cal Legislature’s ACA7 purports to create an “exception” to Prop 209, but in fact it guts it.

The voters already rejected this kind of race discrimination in 2020 with Prop 16. Don’t make us do it again.https://t.co/nLMt6HHhET

— Gail Heriot (@GailHeriot) August 31, 2023

 

 

PRIORITIES: Pentagon Officials Frantically Worked To Finalize Climate Plan During Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal, Emails Show.

YOU’LL SIT IN THE DARK, BE COLD, AND EAT THE BUGS: Millions Of Brits Told Not To Heat Homes At Night As Part Of ‘Net Zero’ Climate Goals. “Chris Stark, head of the CCC, wants ordinary citizens to turn off their electric heaters (heat pumps) at night as part of a wider drive to deliver ’emissions savings,’ which includes a shift away from gas boilers – which Chris, a hypocrite, still has.”

IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME: Whitmer Administration Used ‘Calculated’ Scheme To Hide Sensitive Email From the Public, Lawsuit Says. “Michigan energy department consultant Andy Leavitt in September 2021 emailed a top adviser to Whitmer to express ‘some major red flags’ with the administration’s response to a lead water crisis in southwestern Michigan, which Leavitt compared to a similar crisis in Flint, Michigan. But Leavitt’s initial message was not written in English—the consultant used letters in the Greek alphabet in place of English ones, a move that ‘appears to be calculated to conceal the statements,’ a June court filing in a class action suit against Whitmer’s government argues. Leavitt’s use of Greek letters means his email would have been excluded from any public records request for government communications that contain the word ‘Flint.'”

Plus: “The apparent scheme to hide sensitive conversations from public records requests comes years after Whitmer promised to bring transparency to the Great Lakes State as governor. In Michigan, the governor’s office is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, a policy that Whitmer promised to reverse during her 2018 campaign.”

Of course.

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: Does History Have A Replication Crisis? “If the lack of replication or reproducibility is a problem in science, in history nobody even thinks about it in such terms. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone systematically looking at the same sources as another historian and seeing if they’d reach the same conclusions. Nor can I think of a history paper ever being retracted or corrected, as they can be in science.”

Well, there’s Michael Bellesiles, who lost his job over a fraudulent history of the right to arms in America. Though I recently ran across a U.S. Court of Appeals opinion that cited his work, with no mention of the fraud.

The historic Gadsden flag is at the heart of a controversy involving a twelve-year-old boy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The child was removed from the school due to a patch on his backpack featuring the flag. The school district defended the action and claimed that, despite its historical symbolism, it is now considered racist and connected to slavery. Not only is the flag a historical image originally unconnected to slavery, but the action (in my view) contravenes core free speech protections.

The flag was designed by Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina in 1775 as a symbol of the defiance of colonists to British rule. (Some trace the origins of the flag earlier to a design by Benjamin Franklin). Featuring a timber snake, it affirmed the view of the colonists that they would not be stepped on by overbearing British officials and troops.

While Gadsden would become a brigadier general in the Continental Army, he gave the flag to Commodore Esek Hopkins who later adopted it as his flag as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Navy.  For the revolutionaries, it embodied the essence of the war: they were the victims of the British overstepping their authority and treading upon the rights of the colonies.

The historic image is still cherished by many, including those who see it as a symbol of defiance of individual citizens to overreaching government action.

That was the view at The Vanguard School in Colorado Springs. A video on the social media platform X, shows the 12-year-old elementary school student being removed from class.

A staff member explained that the image is now deemed “disruptive to the classroom environment” and that it has “origins with slavery.” The boy’s parent is told that the child must remove the patch before he can return to school.

The staffer tells the parent to speak with Jeff Yocum, the director of operations at the school.

Yocum reportedly cited research by a graphic design professor at Iowa State University Paul Bruski, who declared the flag as now a symbol of hate:  “Because of its creator’s history and because it is commonly flown alongside ‘Trump 2020’ flags, the Confederate battle flag and other white-supremacist flags, some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate – or even racism.”

Yocum also reportedly cited a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruling involving a Postal worker, which found that while the flag “originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context,” despite its “historic origins and meaning of the symbol, it also has since been sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages.”

We previously discussed how the EEOC reinstated a case in 2016 of an employee objecting to another employee wearing a cap with the symbol.

Clearly, symbols can have different meanings for different people. I disagree with Professor Bruski, but respect his right to raise such objections. The question is whether others respect the right of those with opposing views, including viewing this flag as an important and inspiring symbol of the American Revolution.

The censorship of the image strikes me as a clear denial of free speech rights for this student. I obviously do not agree with the historical interpretation, but I am far more concerned about the constitutional interpretation of the school district allowing such censorship of images.

It is an ironic moment for a flag that symbolized the resistance to overbearing government actions and the denial of core rights in the American Revolution.

Update:

Today the school district reversed its decision and will now allow the student and the flag back into the school:

From Vanguard’s founding we have proudly supported our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the ordered liberty that all Americans have enjoyed for almost 250 years. The Vanguard School recognizes the historical significance of the Gadsden flag and its place in history. This incident is an occasion for us to reaffirm our deep commitment to a classical education in support of these American principles.

At this time, the Vanguard School Board and the District have informed the student’s family that he may attend school with the Gadsden flag patch visible on his backpack.

MATT TAIBBI: YouTube Censors Us Again.

A year ago, this site had to throw a public fit to resolve a preposterous controversy involving videographer Matt Orfalea and YouTube. The issue centered around the above video, “‘Rigged’ Election Claims, Trump 2020 vs. Clinton 2016,” which despite total factual accuracy was cited under its “Elections Misinformation” policy. YouTube in July of last year demonetized Orf’s entire channel over his content, saying “we think it violates our violent criminal organizations policy.”

As you will see if you click now, the above video, as I argued to Google, could not possibly be violative of any “misinformation” guideline, as it was comprised entirely of “real, un-altered clips of public figures making public comments.” After both Orf and I tantrumed in public — there’s not much else to do in these situations — YouTube sent Matt the “Great News!” that “after manually reviewing your video, we’ve determined that it is suitable for all advertisers”:

We thought the matter was settled.

This week, Orf discovered the video had been re-classified as problematic by a new “human reviewer,” who declared it in violation for “harmful or dangerous acts” that “may endanger participants.” Potential problems, the reviewer determined, included “glorification, recruitment, or graphic portrayal of dangerous organizations,” by which I can only presume they mean former Bernie voters like Orf and myself whose political homelessness apparently constitutes a threat.

“Dangerous” in this context just means “dangerous to the politico-media-academic complex’s narrative.”