Taxes

The Beatles - Taxman
The Beatles

Quotes about taxes stolen from Flares into Darkness:

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.

- Calvin Coolidge -

What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.

- Thomas Paine -

A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.

- Anonymous -

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

- Albert Einstein -

We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.

- Leona Helmsley - 

The Real Problem

Federal Budget

 From Why Firing 9% Of The Federal Workforce Didn't Move The Needle:

The total federal payroll— every salary, every benefit, for every civilian federal employee (excluding the military)— comes to about $336 billion a year— less than 5% of total federal spending.

In other words, you could fire every federal employee tomorrow— every bureaucrat, every regulator, every paper-pusher in Washington— and 95% of the spending would continue as if nothing happened.

That’s because around 60% of the budget is mandatory spending— Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid— programs that pay out automatically based on laws that were passed decades ago. Congress doesn’t vote on these expenditures each year. The checks just go out.

The Heart of the Blob

CIA Headquarters Langley Virginia

I'm pretty sure there is thread, nay a string, a stream, a river of rot running through the CIA. There are probably some upright individuals in there, but when you have so much rot flooding the hallways, being upright likely means you will be swept away.

James Howard Kunstler has A Modest Proposal that starts like this:

You must wonder: what exactly has CIA Director John Ratcliffe been doing over in Langley, VA, lo these many months since things changed bigly in Swamptopia? Does he wander the hallways of that giant black box howling ineffectually. . . sit barricaded in his office playing sudoku. . . or is he doing what needs to be done: methodically uncovering and disassembling the diabolical racketeering operation that the agency has become?

One thing for sure: you have heard next to squat coming out of his mouth all year. Mr. Ratcliffe is playing a close hand in a dangerous game and I tend to think that he is for-real. Very few Americans know what really goes on backstage at the CIA, but just say they try to whack the director — that would be checkmate on them. The agency would not survive the arrests of its personnel. And, anyway, Mr. Trump is moving swiftly now to shut down the engine of its nefarious activities.

The CIA, you understand, is the beating heart of the Deep State (a.k.a. the blob). The Democratic Party and the Never-Trump RINOs are its errand boys. And that is why a ten-year-long coup has been running to smash Trump and Trumpism. “Joe Biden” was a piece of furniture thrown out of the truck that the CIA was driving to escape the scene of the crime. “Joe Biden” was under threat of blackmail the whole four years he haunted the Oval Office, having run his own petty racketeering operation to keep his miserable, extended, sick family in beach houses.

Post Office Delivery Van

The Grumman LLV Has Finally Reached The End Of Its Mail Delivery Days — Revelations w/ Jason Cammisa
Hagerty

I didn't realize the LLV was that old, but it doesn't really get a lot of attention. It's like it's part of the scenery, eternal and unchanging. You might think that a standard production vehicle could do the job as well, or better, but United Parcel Service also builds their own custom designs. The fun part is that after Jason gets done telling you all about the LLV, he takes it for a spirited ride, just like he does when he makes a video about a sports car. Hooo, baby!

Other Hagerty posts.

The first honest American president

United States President Donald Trump shows an interior rendering of the new White House ballroom in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 22, 2025 [Aaron Schwartz/EPA]

I am not sure I appreciate what this guy says, but I can't say he's wrong either:

The first honest American president by Eric Reinhart

Trump’s shameless corruption is not a deviation from American history but its fulfilment.

Every era of American government has had its scandal. Trump’s innovation is to make scandal itself a governing philosophy. Although it is tempting to see the Trump regime’s corruption – its open profiteering, its use of the state as an instrument of vengeance and self-enrichment – as a perversion of American democracy, the truth is more unsettling: it’s a mirror. The difference between Trump’s era and those before it is not the presence of corruption, but its visibility and the nation’s collective incapacity to feel scandalised by it.

For decades, corruption in the United States was moralised as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate system. From the rail barons and company towns of the 19th century to the revolving door of Wall Street and Washington in the 20th and 21st, American capitalism has always depended on the conversion of public office into private profit. When politicians became lobbyists and habitual inside traders, when corporations wrote legislation, when government bailouts were given to bank executives and political donors, when hospital executives grew rich on public subsidies while their workers and patients sank into precarity, the mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise. The neoliberal order taught us to equate virtue with success and to see moral worth in market value.

Fancy Words

Came across stories recently about a couple of Trump's executive orders. 

One order is Restoring Gold Standard Science. The story on The Daily Sceptic used the word falsifiable which I haven't heard in a coon's age:

Scientific results must be falsifiable, computer models must be explainable and negative results available.

I asked Google for a definition:

A falsifiable statement or theory is one that can be proven false by an observation or experiment. This is a key characteristic of scientific theories, distinguishing them from non-scientific ideas. Falsifiability means it's possible to identify a situation where the statement is demonstrably incorrect. 

Maybe this will reduce the number of bogus scientific papers. Seems a fair number of scientific papers are being retracted:

• MAHA report cites nonexistent studies; RFK Jr. threatens publishing access; can ‘zombie papers’ be killed?
• Whistleblowers flagged 300 scientific papers for retraction.
• Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles

The second order is FIGHTING OVERCRIMINALIZATION IN FEDERAL REGULATIONS:

The purpose of this order is to ease the regulatory burden on everyday Americans and ensure no American is transformed into a criminal for violating a regulation they have no reason to know exists.

The part I like is that the feds must now show mens rea, i.e. criminal intent, in order to convict someone. Right now there are a zillion regulations that you could be convicted of, even though you didn't even know they exist.

• Trump Administration Clarifies Criminal Enforcement Priorities
• Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations
• Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations

Naturally there are a bunch of useless blowhards out there ranting about how these orders are going be end of us all. Ignore them.

Federal Deficit

Federal Deficit

This is graph is a little odd, looks like everything is going down when everyone knows the debt is going up. Now look at the scale along the left hand edge and you will see that zero is at the top. So now it makes a little more sense. It's a little hard to read at the scale here. Click to embiggenate and that should make if legible.

Anyway, notice the green line, the one that descends the fastest, the one that goes from 750 billion to 2750 billion in three months. What's that all about? That was the $2 Trillion economic rescue package passed by Congress back in 2020. Thanks COVID lockdown.

Lunacy on Parade

SWAT team at CIA Headquarters - Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

I just had to laugh when I saw this headline:

SWAT Team On Scene At CIA Headquarters Over ‘Barricade’ Situation by Ryan Saavedra

I mean, WTF?  CIA headquarters, bastion of National Security, has got loose screws running around, um, er, loose? You don't suppose this has anything to do with Trump releasing the JFK assassination files yesterday, do you? No, it couldn't possibly be, could it? I dunno, we'll have to wait and see. It might be a really good show.

Illegal Immigration

Illegal Immigration

Seems like Illegal Immigration can be a hanging offense. The Hansen case was decided in 2023.

With the amount of corruption and waste that DOGE is uncovering, it makes me wonder who was minding the store. Evidently no one. It's like whatever security there was, was hired by the crooks to make sure no one noticed that they were letting in boatloads of aliens while simultaneously shoveling money out the back door.

Mafia

Schneier on Security reposted an essay was written with Davi Ottenheimer that originally appeared in Foreign Policy. It takes a very negative view of what DOGE is doing. It's garbage. But looking through the comments I found this one that I think is pretty great.

Shoal Creek • February 13, 2025 8:59 AM

You’re assuming that government (any government) is legitimate. It’s not. Governments are basically racketeering gangs that fight each other for territory and try to give people the illusion that they chose to voluntarily participate. Mafias are just as legitimate, but without as much gaslighting. When a mafia starts to self-destruct, let it. It likely needs to be destroyed any way.

 

Censorship versus Free Speech

Stolen entire from Racket News. The linked article has a couple of YouTube videos. Presumably, this post is a transcript of those videos.

My Statement to Congress

Opening remarks on John Kerry, European speech law, and USAID before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, February 12th, 2025

Matt Taibbi

Feb 12, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified before your Weaponization of Government Subcommittee, Democratic members called us “so-called journalists,” suggested we were bought-off “scribes,” and questioned our ethics and loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things: one, there is no digital censorship, two, if there is digital censorship, it’s for our own good.

I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. No way the party I gave votes to all my life was now pro-censorship. Then last year I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talk to the World Economic Forum. Speaking about disinformation, he said “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to our ability to “hammer it out of existence.”

He complained that “it’s really hard to govern” because “people self-select where they go for their news,” which makes it “much harder to build consensus…”

I defended Kerry when people said he “looks French,” but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants are “self-selecting” their own media. What’s next, letting them make up their own minds?

“Building consensus” may be a politician’s job, but it’s not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media’s job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem.

This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have already adopted draconian speech laws. We’re surrounded. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society.

Ranking member Raskin, you don’t have to go as far as Russia or China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an Online Safety Act that empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like “false communication” or causing “psychological harm.” Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas.

These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws.

Take USAID. Many Americans are in an uproar now because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to Congress about training “hundreds of thousands of people” in journalism. Her views are almost identical to Kerry’s.

She gave a talk about “building trust and combatting misinformation” in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a “really beautifully unified Covid-19 message,” vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when “mixed information on vaccine efficacy” got out, hesitancy ensued.

We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote “unity” or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.

Bourgault also once said that to fight “bad content,” we need to “work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists” and “really try to focus our ad dollars” toward “the good news.”

Again, if you don’t know the fastest way to erode “trust” in media is by having government sponsor “exclusion lists,” you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476 million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long list of agencies. Collectively they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think-tanks, research, “fact-checking,” “anti-disinformation,” commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, censorship.

It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.

Is there “right-wing misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.

Obviously, some of you lack that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see with their own eyes.

You sold us out, and until these “rather tiresome” questions are answered, this problem is not fixed. Thank you. 

Poverty

Living in the projects taught me the REAL reasons people stay poor—and it's not what you think
Ed Latimore

Very good. Don't think I've ever heard poverty explained this way.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Tariffs Versus Free Trade

U.S. President Donald Trump signs executive orders on the first day of his second term, Jan. 20, 2025. Credit: White House. - Daniel Torok

Lots of fuming and teeth gnashing over tariffs these days. This professor from Missouri argues tariffs can beneficial. Makes sense to me.

Raising Wages and Preserving Social Cohesion: President Trump and the Unseen Benefits of Tariffs - Emir J. Phillips

Though sometimes dismissed as antiquated economic measures, tariffs have great advantages when seen holistically. Critics point out possible rising consumer prices, but a closer look shows that tariffs not only boost wages but also conserve vital skills, support social stability, and help to offset the negative consequences of unemployment. In a close-call cost-benefit study, tariffs are indispensable even if the consumer cost matches wage gains since their long-term social and economic advantages exceed their negatives.

Strategic use of tariffs allows countries to not only attain economic resilience but also achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth—a concept firmly anchored in the background of American economic policy. Under leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, the Whig Party accepted tariffs as a pillar of national progress. Lincoln’s advocacy of protective tariffs served to finance infrastructure, boost industrial development, and guarantee young, aspirational America’s economic independence—not to mention win the Civil War.

Consumer Costs vs. Worker Gains: A Socio-Economic Calculation

A common argument against tariffs is that they raise prices for consumers, eroding disposable income. While this is partially true, research suggests that the wage increases resulting from tariffs often offset the additional consumer costs. A study in The Review of Economics and Statistics (Autor et al., 2020) found that U.S. manufacturing tariffs implemented between 2018 and 2019 resulted in measurable wage increases for domestic workers, even as they marginally increased consumer prices. Crucially, these wage increases helped stabilize industries that might otherwise have collapsed under foreign competition oftentimes where unions are illegal (Communist China and Communist Vietnam) and these workers in “Worker Soviet States” have tawdry labor rights.

In industries protected by tariffs, workers are more likely to retain and hone their skills, which would otherwise atrophy due to job displacement. The loss of employment in skilled trades leads to a deterioration of the workforce’s capabilities, creating long-term structural weaknesses in the economy. A displaced worker may never regain their previous earning potential, as demonstrated in research published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Jacobson, LaLonde, & Sullivan, 1993), which found that displaced workers often experience persistent earnings losses, even after re-employment.

Truth is, tariffs effectively act as a counterbalance to the “race to the bottom” in global labor markets, where corporations exploit cheap overseas labor at the expense of domestic workers. By imposing a cost on imported goods, tariffs incentivize companies to invest locally, fostering a virtuous cycle of job creation and wage increases. This dynamic is particularly critical in sectors like manufacturing, where wages have historically supported middle-class stability.

That's just the introduction. You can read the whole thing here.

Note - the photo was included in the linked article, but I couldn't copy it from there, so I asked Google. Google turned up multiple copies, so I copied it from a site that would let me. The story on that site has nothing to do with tariffs, but I linked to it anyway, just to give them credit for posting the image.

P. S. I wonder who the guy standing next to the Donald is. He's not getting enough credit for his role in keeping the mob under control.

Sturgeon

Jay Woiderski (left) presents a trophy to Austin Dreifuerst, who was crowned the 2025 Black Lake Sturgeon Shivaree King. Photo courtesy Jay Woideroski

All I know about sturgeon is that they are big fish, and that's where caviar comes from. Don't think I've ever seen either one, much less eaten any. But I'm old, it could have happened. The fish in the photo weighed 78 pounds, which is a chunk.

I'm posting this because of the weirdness of the sturgeon fishing season at Black Lake in Michigan. The department of fish set the opening time and then closed it by notifying all the registered sturgeon fishermen by text message. Each time someone caught a fish, they had to notify the government that they had done so, also by text message. When the government got their 7th notice, they closed the season. It took 17 minutes.

Gotta keep a tight rein on the planet's apex predators or they will kill everything.

OutdoorLife has the story. Via The Shekel.

House Shenanigans

Great stuff from Knuckledraggin My Life Away. Follow the link for the whole story.

The CR That Wasn't by T. L. Davis

Interesting few days in congress and actually a good class on government corruption. The ugly sausage-making of the system is completely exposed by these shenanigans. Trying to back the people into a corner, the resident GOP/POS Speaker Mike Johnson attempted to dump a 1,547 page “continuing resolution” (CR) which should contain a few lines of text stating simply that current funding will be extended for a specific period of time. Instead it included a pay raise for Congress, funding of a key part of the government censorship of the people and a defense for the January 6 committee from investigation.

The leadership of the House: Johnson, Scalise, et al praised it as a tough but fair bill. It wasn’t, it was pork. It wasn’t even particularly good for the GOP. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and other conservative bloggers and influencers rose up against it. This is the key point, this was the people rebelling against a horrible omnibus bill disguised as a CR, not the dictates of Musk, Ramaswamy or Trump.

 

The Chris Boden Prison Story - It Gets Better

The Chris Boden Prison Story - It Gets Better
Chris Boden

I've watched numerous short videos by this guy and he's pretty entertaining, if you like technical stuff. This is the first long video of his that I've watched. If you don't like the Federal Government you probably shouldn't watch this as it will likely make your blood boil.

There are other people with the name of Chris Boden out there. Google turned up a sports commentator and a football coach.

Wikipedia has a page about this Chris Boden, the bitcoin gangster.

Portland Oregon City Council

City of Portland District Map Plan

The City of Portland is changing the way city commissioners are elected. Used to be a city wide election, but now they are going to have three commissioners from each district. We shall see if it makes any difference.

Assange

Stolen entire from Aljazeera, mouthpiece of Qatar Islamists.

Julian Assange enroute from London to Australia

Iraq to NSA spying: The biggest revelations by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks unearthed documents ranging from conflicts within the US Democrats to toxic waste dumping in West Africa. 

By Al Jazeera Staff 25 June 2024

On Monday, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was released from prison after fighting a legal battle spanning more than 14 years.

In 2006, Assange launched the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, a platform that allows users to anonymously submit secret, classified documents and videos. The most recent publication by the platform was in 2021.

The New York-based Nation magazine reported in January 2024 that Assange said WikiLeaks was no longer able to publish documents since potential whistleblowers were thwarted following his imprisonment, United States government surveillance and funding cuts.

During the years it functioned, the whistleblower platform published classified documents that had been never seen before – embarrassing governments, causing diplomatic standoffs and forcing policy changes.

Here is a look at 10 such leaks by the platform:

Report about toxic waste in the Ivory Coast

In 2009, WikiLeaks released the Minton Report that exposed how an internal report commissioned by Singapore-headquartered multinational company Trafigura concluded that its dumping of 540,000 litres of toxic waste, including harmful chemicals, in the Ivory Coast potentially led to “burns to the skin, eyes and lungs, vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death”.

The United Nations reported that 108,000 people were affected by this dumping of waste.

Cablegate

In 2010, WikiLeaks started building out its Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD), which is a growing collection of 3,326,538 US diplomatic cables between American diplomats posted to 274 consulates and embassies from 1966 to 2010, and their colleagues and bosses, including back home at the State Department.

In the first round of these leaks, 250,000 cables were released to the public – arguably the single largest such dump of confidential documents ever released.

The leaks included embarrassing details of how US diplomats perceived some of their foreign counterparts and nuggets of conversations where foreign officials, including many in high positions today, expressed frustrations with their own governments.

Afghanistan war files

In October 2010, the whistleblower site released 90,000 classified documents on the US war in Afghanistan.

The United States launched the Afghanistan war in 2001, following the September 11 attacks that year, finally withdrawing its forces from the country in 2021.

The documents painted a picture of the war – and the US struggle against the Taliban – that was very different from the public posture of confidence adopted by Washington.

Iraq war files

Also in October 2010, WikiLeaks made public almost 400,000 secret US files on the Iraq war.

In 2003, the US government under President George W Bush invaded Iraq.

The documents, from 2004 to 2009, showed that the civilian deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were much higher than the numbers being reported. The leaks represented the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.

Collateral murder – Iraq helicopter video

Among the most prominent of WikiLeaks revelations, in April 2010, was the release of video footage showing a US Apache helicopter attack which killed a dozen unarmed people, including two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

The video, filmed from the chopper’s cockpit shows a US missile strike and shooting on a square in a Baghdad neighbourhood in July 2007, according to WikiLeaks.

The Guantanamo files

In April 2011, WikiLeaks released secret documents spanning thousands of pages to select US and European media outlets.

These documents unearthed how the Geneva Conventions were being violated routinely in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The documents, dating from 2002 to 2008 showed the abuse of 800 prisoners, some of them as young as 14.

At least 150 of these prisoners were found to be innocent Afghans or Pakistanis who were rounded up as part of frantic intelligence gathering and then imprisoned for years, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the so-called “war on terror”.

The Syria files

In July 2012, WikiLeaks began making public two million emails from 680 Syrian political figures and ministries working with the Bashar al-Assad regime between August 2006 to March 2012.

The emails unearthed the involvement of European companies in the surveillance and crackdown on Syrian civilians. One such company was Italian-government-owned Selex, which continued to expand its contract with the Syrian police, despite sanctions.

The emails also exposed how PR company Brown Lloyd James (BLJ) was paid to engineer a now-deleted Vogue article about al-Assad’s wife Asma, according to WikiLeaks.

NSA spying

In 2015, the whistleblower website released details of illegal intercepts from the US electronic spy organisation, National Security Agency (NSA).

In a series of publications released from 2015 to 2017, WikiLeaks said the US, using the NSA, was also routinely spying on foreign officials from Japan, the European Union, Israel, Germany and Brazil.

Additionally, the whistleblower said the NSA intercepted communications between former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

WikiLeaks said that the NSA was not only spying on international politicians but also civilians. In 2017, it tweeted that the NSA could hack Pakistan’s mobile networks.

Sony Pictures hack

In 2015, WikiLeaks released at least 170,000 emails and more than 20,000 documents from a 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The leak was around the same time Sony was set to release the film about a fictional American plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The emails also revealed that female celebrities such as Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were paid less than their male counterparts in the 2013 crime comedy film American Hustle.

US Democratic Party emails leaked

In 2016, WikiLeaks exposed 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the US Democratic Party national leadership.

The emails exposed that even though the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the party’s principal committee, pledged impartiality in the 2016 presidential race, it appeared to act against Bernie Sanders in favour of Hillary Clinton.

The leaks resulted in the resignations of five top DNC officials including the chair, CFO, CEO, communications director and finance director. Clinton accused WikiLeaks and Assange of colluding with Russia to raise questions about the credibility of the US election process. She lost the 2016 presidential race to Donald Trump.

I am glad Julian was released. I always thought the charges were bullshit and I still think so. The US Federal Government seems to be in the hands of idiotic maniacs, or maybe it's maniacal idiots. Somebody needs to bring the smack down on those useless fools.

Bureaucracy

Stolen entire from David Warren's Essays in Idleness 

Publishing & perishing

Ludwig von Mises was not, to my mind, strictly an economist. He was a moralist, and a practical philosopher, his chief object being the destruction of bureaucracy. It is not a “necessary evil,” but necessarily an evil, done like the others under cover of good. Mises is understandably hated by all socialists and progressives. In addition to its rhetorical attack, his book Bureaucracy (1944, revised 1962) documented the rise of bureaucratic agencies controlling public life throughout Europe and America. It showed that the “profit motive” paradoxically advances the public interest, in almost every case; that the “non-profit motive” is not only counter-productive, but apparently, politically ineradicable. Over time, bureaucracy stifles not only individual freedom, but the adaptability of society itself, leading to its decline and ruin.

This, and Mises’ chef-d’oeuvre, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, fell into my hands as a teenager, and made me an exponent of the “Austrian School.” Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) was another guide along the road not taken, or rather taken only briefly, by the allies after World War II. Such books helped to make me continuously unpopular, among budding Leftoids, from the age of fifteen. Since, I have done some supplementary reading, to make my attitudes more ghastly to them. My preference for liberty, beauty, goodness, truth, have cost me many popularity contests: for the “progressives” invariably prefer plausibility, subterfuge, and lies.

But there are rewards for resisting them: for instance, the satisfaction one feels that Javier Milei is eradicating the bureaucracy of Argentina (where it had been laid on especially thick), and others in their stations (Nayib Bukele, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders) dispatching bureaucracies elsewhere. This is encouraging, as is the rightwing sweep in trans-European elections yesterday. Note: the method of “cutting back bureaucracy” consists not of a few minor trims, but of the permanent, outright closure of entire government departments.

Even more I enjoy subtle developments in “science,” where bureaucratic takeover has made most public scientific enterprises dishonest and innately alarmist. The international “global warming” climate fraud continues to be Exhibit A; the Wuhan Batflu event, Exhibit B. Both monstrosities are the product of self-interested government strategy and funding.

More generally, the “non-profit” pursuit of academic science produces crooked, fund-grubbing results in the overwhelming majority of cases. I am delighted to see that the big American publisher, Wiley, has had to shut down nineteen of its scientific journals, and withdraw 11,500 scientific papers, to cut its losses from lawsuits. For it is, sometimes, still possible to expose falsity in the courts.

We look forward to an age that follows “follow the science.”

 Word of the day: chef-d’oeuvre - masterpiece

NPR Political Apparatchiks

The Free Press has a story:

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. by Uri Berliner

It's a fine story, Uri goes through a long list of stories that NPR (National Public Radio) screwed up in recent years. Okay, but why? Near as I can make out the place was infected with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

The fish rots from the head, so who was in charge of this place?

Wikipedia has a list of CEOs:

List of presidents/CEOs

• Donald Quayle (1970–1973)
• Lee Frischknecht (1973–1977)
• Frank Mankiewicz (1977–1983)
• Douglas J. Bennet (1983–1993)
• Delano Lewis (1993–1998)
• Kevin Klose (1998–2008)
• Vivian Schiller (2009–2011)
• Gary Knell (2011–2013)
• Paul Haaga (2013–2014)
• Jarl Mohn (2014–2019)
• John F. Lansing (2019–present)

Funny, Wikipedia has a page about all of them except the last one: John F. Lansing. Actually he's not last, Katherine Maher was appointed as new CEO in January.

Lansing was a big wheel at USAGM (U.S. Agency for Global Media). Apparently retired now. Mahler is a Biden appointee, so I expect she is just as worthless as Biden, well, except for pumping out more hard left bullshit.

Via The Shekel