Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand

25 April 2017

Fake News Practiced by All the Media

Is a reduction of federal government spending for a few days by 13% really a government shutdown? Of course not, though that was all that happened the last time Congress did not agree on a new budget authorization in time.  Especially not when government spending is at least four times that of a legitimate government abiding by the principle that its proper function is only to protect every American individual's right to life, liberty, self-ownership, property, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, freedom of speech and press, the freedom of self-defense, the right to the ownership of one's own labor and the fruits it produces, the freedom to trade and to contract, and the pursuit of one's own happiness -- all while free from others, including the government, initiating the use of force against the individual.

Yet once again, such a trivial prospective reduction in government spending on the 100th day of the Trump administration is being called a government shutdown.  Fox News, CNN, ABC, and NBC are all guilty of this alarmist, Yellow journalism.  It is a lie that promotes interest in their broadcasts. They clearly believe they are promoting their own self-interest with a lie.  Americans should be angry about this misrepresentation of the facts by our Fake News media.

07 April 2017

The EPA lied -- nobody died by Steve Milloy

For years Steve Milloy has challenged the EPA on its claims about how deadly small organic particulates are.  His recent opinion piece to the Washington Times is most interesting.  See here.

Steve Milloy says:
In April 2012, I broke the news that EPA had been quietly conducting human experiments with certain outdoor pollutants that EPA had claimed were, essentially, the most toxic substances on Earth. EPA had repeatedly claimed since at least 2004 that any level of inhalation of fine particulate matter emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes could cause death within hours or days. The old, young and sick were most vulnerable, according to EPA.

To prove their assertions that fine particulate matter was so deadly, the EPA paid the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina to expose human subjects to fine particulate matter and even chlorine gas to try to do them harm.  Recently, the National Academy of Science had to admit that no one died and no harm was established by the illegal tests. Yes, the EPA was intentionally trying to harm people, though it had told the test subjects that they would not be harmed.  It apparently really did think that fine particulates were very dangerous and it was willing to expose people to what it claimed was deadly concentrations of fine particulates to prove they were right.  Only the fact they were not right prevented the EPA from killing the test subject people.

Milloy says:
So when the first Obama EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, testified to Congress that “Particulate matter causes premature death. It does not make you sick. It is directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” that was a lie, one compounded by her next false claim that particulate matter kills about 570,000 Americans per year. When the second Obama EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, wrote to Congress; chief outside EPA science adviser Jonathan Samet wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine; and EPA-paid university researchers working with the American Heart Association said that there was no safe exposure to particulate matter those too were lies. 
As it turns out, the only time EPA told the truth about particulate matter was when it told its human guinea pigs that the experiments were harmless. Meanwhile the Obama EPA used the phony killer particulate matter scare — backed by almost $600 million in utterly fraudulent scientific research and fueled with secret scientific data — to virtually wipe out the U.S. coal industry, severely harming coal miners, their families and their communities.

The EPA has also claimed that carbon dioxide, the basis for life on Earth, is a pollutant. It also has claimed that mercury from coal-fired power plants is deadly, with no evidence that this is true and no explanation for the failure to evacuate huge areas of the USA where the natural sources of mercury dwarf any possible emissions from coal-fired power plants.  See here and here.  This is also the government agency that incompetently released contaminants from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River.

What do you do with such a wrongheaded, dishonest, and dangerous government agency? You fire its employees, put it under new management, and hire new people who are rational and competent.  You make it a much smaller agency with highly limited powers.  At least this is what one would do if one wanted a rational, competent, and reasonably benevolent government. 

05 April 2017

Susan Rice -- "I leaked nothing to nobody."

OK, Susan, so you leaked nothing to nobody.  But did you leak something to somebody?  Or did you simply put the private, sensitive information on Americans into the hands of so many people that you could be sure that someone would leak that sensitive information?  Was the reason for doing this to put the information into the hands of so many people that any leak that did occur would be harder to trace back to a particular person, thereby further encouraging partisan, political leakers?  Would you risk such an action without the approval of Obama?

Why do you remember unmasking this information about Americans now when you claimed to know nothing about such information one month ago?

It was just a riot caused spontaneously by an Internet video unfriendly to Islam by a crazy Middle Eastern Christian, right?  Its your story and you are sticking to it no matter how heavily armed the Benghazi attackers were.

Bowe Bergdahl was a hero?  Oh, really?

The only reason national security would be put in the hands of such a wrongheaded, low-character person is because the man at the top wanted a perfectly pliable, unethical political henchman, No, henchperson.