90 Miles From Tyranny

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Thursday, November 24, 2016

PROPERTY RIGHTS SAVED PILGRIMS FROM STARVATION


Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog hosted by the Washington Post, revisits the story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth and how instituting private property rights saved the community from ruin.

There is much to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. One lesson of the holiday that we should try not to forget is how the Pilgrims were saved from starvation and misery by private property rights. Economist Benjamin Powell summarizes the story here:

Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did.

In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on equality and need as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. Governor William Bradford, in his 1647 history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that this system was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. The problem was that “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced.

Faced with potential starvation in the ...

Happy Thanksgiving

May everyone enjoy Thanksgiving this year with someone they love.

Morning Mistress

Hot Pick Of The Late Night

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Girls With Guns

Trump at NASA: Hasta la Vista Climate Fraud and Muslim Outreach…

NASA’s top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt has warned President-Elect Donald Trump that the planet just won’t stand for having a fully-fledged climate denier in the White House.

Good luck with that one, Gavin. Or “Toast” as we’ll shortly be calling you…

Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), told the Independent:
“The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to deny it, you can appoint people who don’t care about it into positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on this.”
Unfortunately, Schmidt doesn’t feel so strongly on the issue that he is prepared to offer his resignation:

Asked if he would resign if the Trump administration adopted the most extreme form of climate change denial, Dr Schmidt said this was “an interesting question”. It would not cause him to quit “in and of itself”, he said.
“Government science and things generally go on regardless of the political views of the people at the top,” Dr Schmidt said. “The issue would be if you were being asked to skew your results in any way or asked not to talk about your results. Those would be much more serious issues.”
Schmidt’s principled position on skewing results is somewhat ironic given that skewing results is what he...

Hate Hoax: Another Student Fakes Mugging Claim by Trump Fans

Another student at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has hoaxed a racist hate crime attack, local police have confirmed.

More than a week after the 2016 Election, a man on the BGSU campus claimed he had been pushed to the ground and robbed, all while the two perpetrators allegedly called him a racial slur.

The university’s vice president for student affairs, Thomas Gibson, put out a statement based off a local police investigation where he confirms that the alleged attack did not actually happen, The Blade reported.

It is still unclear whether or not the student will be charged for falsifying a police report.

The hate crime hoax is the second incident on the BGSU campus alone.

Breitbart Texas reported on an alleged incident where a black, female student claimed three white male President-Elect Donald Trump supporters had thrown rocks at her.

After a week-long police investigation, the student’s allegations turned out to be a hoax, as cell tower records indicated she was not in the location claimed at...

DOJ fines Denver Sheriff Dept. for excluding noncitizens when hiring

The Denver Sheriff Department will accept a penalty from the Department of Justice after a federal probe found it wrongly made U.S. citizenship a job requirement during a recent hiring spree.

The sheriff's department — the biggest sheriff's office in Colorado — will pay a $10,000 fine after it required applications for deputy sheriff jobs to be U.S. citizens when hiring from the beginning of 2015 through March 2016. The department went on a hiring spree of 200 deputies as part of its ongoing reform.

The department will also have to go through old applications to find applicants who were eliminated because of their citizenship status and reconsider them for future jobs.

The Justice Department made the announcement on Monday, saying the sheriff's department violated the...

Morning Mistress

Hot Pick Of The Late Night

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Girls With Guns


Keith Ellison Headlined Fundraiser For Muslim Activist Who Called For Palestinians To Embrace “The Jihad Way”

They smear Steve Bannon, a great friend of Israel, while this operative led Hamas rallies. The enemedia silence about Ellison shows that their outrage over Bannon’s supposed “anti-Semitism” is entirely feigned and hypocritical. They don’t care about Jews. They just care about bashing Trump.

“Keith Ellison Headlined Fundraiser For Muslim Activist Who Called For Palestinians To Embrace ‘The Jihad Way,’” by Chuck Ross, Daily Caller, 11/21/2016 (thanks to Christian):

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the favorite to take over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, campaigned in 2009 for a Libya-born activist who once called on Palestinians to embrace “the jihad way” in order to get free of Israeli control.

The activist, Esam Omeish, a former candidate for Virginia state delegate, has also praised one of the founders of Hamas and commended the work of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Omeish’s positions had been publicized when Ellison, the first Mulsim [sic] ever elected to Congress, headlined the July 2009 fundraiser for Omeish, who served as president from 2004 to 2008 of the Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group.

“The very fact that you have ran a honorable campaign in this heated primary shows victory. Don’t stop working, lay it all on the line,” Ellison said at the event, according to Omeish’s campaign website.

Photos from the event show Ellison chatting with Omeish and other activists, such as Nihad Awad, the founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Progressive liberals, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have pushed for Ellison to be named as head of the DNC. But Ellison’s critics have pointed to his links to extremist organizations such as...