Confessions of a Colorado Conservative: October 2021

Friday, October 29, 2021

Here are some inspiring words from Albert Einstein

Here are some inspiring words from Albert Einstein:

“I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”

"Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world."

“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

"A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Our separation from each other is an optical illusion."

“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

“We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”

“When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”

“The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.”

“The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.”

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”

“I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.”

"The common idea that I am an atheist is based on a big mistake. Anyone who interprets my scientific theories this way, did not understand them."

"Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper."

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology.”

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

"I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future."

7 Insane Things I Just Learned About How U.S. Elections Are ‘Rigged’

Remember, admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery.

By Joy Pullmann

October 29, 2021

The extent to which corporate media rigs elections for Democrats has been rigorously documented since at least Tim Groseclose’s 2012 book, “Left Turn.” In that book, the political scientist concluded through data-driven analysis that media bias on average shifts the electorate 20 points to the left on a 100-point political worldview scale. Without media bias, he argued, the average American state would be as Republican-leaning as Texas or Kentucky, and those two states would be even more conservative.

Media bias was highly visible even before Rush Limbaugh made it a regular feature of his top-rated radio show that became nationally syndicated in 1988. As the Trump era dawned, however, media coverage moved from biased to outright propaganda.

Corporate media went from picking left-friendly frames and omitting facts that reinforced right-leaning views about public affairs, as Groseclose documented in 2012, to outright mass hoaxing of voters by 2016. While hyperventilating about the minority of Americans who believe conspiracy theories like QAnon, leftist media not only inflamed but also outright fabricated conspiracy theories that the majority of Democrat voters believe.

For example, in 2020, a majority of Americans — including 81 percent of self-described “liberals” — believed the lie that Donald Trump committed treason for Russia. That claim was disproven by a two-year, Democrat-populated special counsel investigation that spent $32 million to find no evidence for this hoax, which effectively hamstrung a president from pursuing what voters put him in office to accomplish.

This corporate media smear machine was only one of the numerous unfair advantages Democrats exploited in the 2020 elections. My colleague, Mollie Hemingway, just put out a new, bestselling book that also documents things like big tech hiding election-shifting news from voters and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg embedding Democrat get-out-the-vote operations inside local election offices — which are supposed to be nonpartisan! What’s more, all these cheats affixed into our nation’s election machinery haven’t been scrubbed away, not by a long shot.

While I work with Mollie and am highly aware of media corruption since it’s our bread and butter here at The Federalist, she still had many surprises for me inside “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Here I’ll share a few things she reports in the book that made me gasp out loud.

1. The DNC Controlled All Poll Watchers for 40 Years

I had to read this section of the book two or three times to absorb what it was saying. I couldn’t believe it could possibly be true. Yet it is: “Shockingly, the 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations.”

What? Next sentence: “For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systemic advantage over its Republican counterpart: the Republican National Committee had been prohibited by law from helping out with poll watcher efforts or nearly any litigation related to how voting is being conducted.”

This section in chapter 1 goes on to explain how such an insane thing could be real. Essentially, after Democrats accused Republicans of cheating in a New Jersey race in 1981, a judge banned the RNC from poll-watching and voting litigation everywhere in the country, then kept re-upping the order until 2018, when it finally expired three years after he died.

This handicapped Republicans for almost 40 years while Democrats were free to do things Republicans couldn’t, like give boosts to their voters all along the voting process and track them extensively, challenge ballots, document irregularities, and sue over election disputes. By 2020, then, Mollie writes:

Democrats had spent the last forty years perfecting their Election Day operations while everyone at the Republican National Committee walked on eggshells, knowing that if they so much as looked in the direction of a polling site, there could be another crackdown. As a result, there was no muscle memory about how to watch polls or communicate with a presidential campaign.

That’s a pretty big handicap walking into the election chaos of 2020, in which Americans filled out an unprecedented 65 million mail-in ballots, which are known not only for their margin of error, but also for being structurally biased towards Democrats.

2. Lazy Voting Biases Elections Towards Democrats

Also made clear throughout “Rigged” is that lazier and sloppier elections strongly advantage Democrats. This means long election seasons, mail-in balloting, and loose ballot behavior such as mailing millions and opening dropboxes all tilt elections towards Democrats.

As Mollie writes, “the vote-by-mail system was becoming a major part of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operation. Regardless of fraud and other concerns, the press saw the success of the mail-in ballot effort in Wisconsin for what it was: an effort to turn out more Democratic voters.” Republican voters, she shows, prefer to vote in person because they want to make sure their votes are reliably counted.

Why Republicans would ever allow voting procedures that structurally advantage their opponents is, to put it bluntly, only understandable as self-hatred. Democrats would never, ever do that, because they actually want to win.

3. Facebook Bought Joe Biden the Election

In 2020, Facebook’s interference in the election was a one-two punch. Mollie notes: “[Mark] Zuckerberg didn’t just help Democrats by censoring their political opponents. He directly funded liberal groups running partisan get-out-the-vote operations. In fact, he helped those groups infiltrate election offices in key swing states by doling out large grants to crucial districts. That funding was the means by which [Democrat] activists achieved their ‘revolution’ and changed the course of the 2020 election.”

Elsewhere in the book, Hemingway notes that Facebook executives have boasted that they can shut off 80 percent of the traffic to any link they want. Facebook and Google blacklisting of conservative news sites such as The Federalist, The Daily Caller, and Breitbart has been documented since 2017.

Atop this were what’s been termed “Zuck Bucks,” the nearly half a billion dollars Zuckerberg gave to essentially fund a shadow elections system that again structurally advantaged Democrats. To list just a few things the book shows Zuck Bucks facilitated: literally designing mail-in ballots and their envelopes; sending partisan activists to “help” local elections offices in conveniently located swing districts; “fix” unclear or illegal mail-in ballots; designing absentee balloting instructions; and collecting absentee ballots.

The details are breathtaking. Mollie gives so many facts about the partisan tilt and effectiveness of Zuckerberg’s grants to local elections offices that it truly leads one to conclude Zuckerberg flat-out bought the election for Joe Biden.

4. The United States Has Republican No-Go Zones

I’d also never heard about this shocking story that illustrates the extent to which political repression is tolerated within the Democrat Party. In her chapter about the 2020 Summer of Riots, Mollie writes:

In 2017, Portland canceled its annual Rose Parade after violent threats from Antifa, which objected to the Multnomah County Republican Party’s being included as one of the many civic groups marching in the parade. Forget Trump; it was unsafe for even an ordinary Republican to walk down the streets of Portland. And in canceling the parade, [Portland Mayor Ted] Wheeler effectively conceded that Antifa ruled the streets.

Mollie later quotes former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr describing how Antifa — a violent group implicated in actual domestic terrorism — “use[s] legitimate demonstrations as a host body.” “Further,” Mollie writes, “they operated in liberal cities in blue states where local authorities were both reluctant to stop them and unwilling to help federal law enforcement go after them.”

In other words, Democrats are willing to concede the safety of Americans’ lives, limbs, and property to ideological allies, even when those allies openly commit violent crimes and threaten more.

5. The FBI Is Systemically Biased Towards the Left

In discussing why Antifa is allowed to threaten peaceful American citizens with violence, Mollie uncovers one of the political problems with addressing this: The FBI is systemically biased on behalf of the left. “[T]he agency had long focused its attention on right-wing extremists and was ill-equipped to deal with threats from the left,” she notes.

Yes, this is the nation’s top law-enforcement agency that helped hatch the Spygate plot to frame a Republican president. Politically biased — you think? Mollie writes further:

…Even though decades had passed, the FBI was still skittish about the criticism it had received for infiltrating radical left-wing groups in the ’60s and ’70s.

The inaction in response to Antifa certainly helped take the pressure off Biden [in the 2020 campaign], who never had to answer for the bricks flying through windows, rampant looting, toppling of statues, and assaults on innocent business owners that defined urban life throughout the summer of 2020. To do so would have been to confront an uncomfortable truth — the Democratic Party and its allies have been tolerating, encouraging, and mainstreaming political violence for decades.

6. It’s No Longer Media Bias, It’s Media Lies

As my opening to this essay explains, I’m aware media bias has been transcended by outright propaganda. In her book, however, Mollie makes an excellent point about this after detailing other cases proving this shift.

She makes it in relation to what I’d call a relatively minor offense — The New York Times publishing a Trump-smearing piece from an anonymous author it described as a “senior administration official,” meaning “someone in the upper echelon of an administration.” Of course, it turned out this person wasn’t any such thing. He was just a mid-level bureaucrat.

After giving the truly asinine details of that story, Mollie makes this comment:

If the New York Times was willing to lie about how high-level an anonymous source was for its very high-profile September 2018 information operation, what lies was it willing to tell about all the other anonymous sources it used? And if this is how one of America’s biggest newsrooms operates, readers are right to ask how much other papers and media outlets were willing to lie in support of their anti-Republican narratives.

If you don’t believe it already, after you read Mollie’s book, you will come away with the inescapable conclusion that Trump was right when he called corporate media “the enemy of the people.”

7. Mail-In Balloting Is More Outrageous Than Anyone Can Imagine

“Up to a quarter of a million votes were cast in Wisconsin’s presidential election without any identification check at all,” Mollie writes on page 66. I already knew a lot about how error-riddled mail-in voting is — I wrote about that when few would. But just encountering this new fact and realizing this represented just one swing state was another mind-blowing moment for me about just how corruption-enabling and confidence-destroying are vote-by-mail-tainted elections.

There are many more shocking things in Mollie’s book, and I’m not even done. I just started the Hunter Biden chapter, and holy mackerel. Until I read further, a few thoughts.

Republicans expect to win a wave election in 2022. How many points will they have to beat Democrats by to prove it? How many dubious ballots will be produced or negotiated away by partisan election workers or judges? How many urban areas run by Democrats will produce suspicious numbers of ballots that outweigh the votes in the rest of their states? How many Republican voters will stay home because they can’t trust elections run by some of the loosest rules in the developed world?

We shouldn’t even have to be asking these questions right now. If Republicans genuinely want to win elections — and that is sadly in doubt — they have no choice but to use whatever power they have to make those elections trustworthy again. That means in-person voting, with ID, for everyone except the truly disabled, and returning to an election day, not an election season.

The left and their media are going to lie about Republicans no matter what they do, so they might as well get secure elections out of the never-ending smear cycle. Republican voters don’t believe the media anyway, so why do any of their elected officials? Remember, admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Check out her recommended classic Christmas picture books, "The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar," and her bestselling ebook, "Classic Books for Young Children." Sign up here to get early access to her next full-length book, "How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You." A Hillsdale College honors graduate, @JoyPullmann is also the author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books.

Against the Billionaire Tax

A new proposal from Congress is inefficient and dangerous.

Aswath Damodaran

October 27, 2021

Politics and law

Economy, finance, and budgets

Citing inequality and the perception that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes, Joe Biden made two promises during his presidential campaign: he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year in income, and he would ensure that the top 1.8 percent of the population, as well as corporations, pays up. Hence the administration’s infrastructure and social-spending legislation raised a significant portion of revenues from changes in tax rates for the wealthiest individuals—raising the top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, adding a surtax on capital gains for those making more than $1 million in income, and raising corporate tax rates from 21 percent to 28 percent. But after objections from Senator Kyrsten Sinema last week, these proposals ran aground.

Now a replacement proposal seems to be gaining traction: the billionaire tax, which appears to be targeted at the several hundred people who own more than $1 billion in assets or have had income of more than $100 million for three consecutive years. The intent is to tax unrealized gains on their assets each year.

Congress has an amazing capacity to write bad tax legislation, but this proposal sets a new standard. First, it’s micro-targeted. As a general rule, broad-based taxes—those affecting most people—are more likely to deliver predicted revenues than those that affect a narrow subset of the population. The billionaire tax is about as narrowly focused as tax law gets. One may have little sympathy for the 700 or so billionaires affected by these taxes, but one should also recognize that these individuals also have the most resources to minimize the effect of these laws. An army of tax lawyers, accountants, and investment vehicles is being created while the law is written, and that army may also be providing input on its actual form.

Next, the proposal seeks to tax capital gains and losses. The basis used for computing taxes can have implications for revenues from the tax code, ranging from sales (with value-added and sales taxes) and income to capital gains. Sales taxes will yield more predictable revenue for the government than income taxes, which will yield more stable revenues than capital-gains taxes. Capital gains come from stock-price changes, which are far more volatile than income earned by taxpayers. That income, in turn, changes more on a year-to-year basis than the value of the assets someone owns. California’s tax revenues, for instance, are significantly more volatile than Florida’s because the Golden State taxes capital gains as ordinary income.

The new feature of this law is its attempt to tax unrealized capital gains on assets. This raises two practical problems. First, liquidity: if the billionaire tax will apply to such assets as real estate and fine art and not just to stocks and bonds, it will be hard for the individuals being targeted to sell their holdings in the open market and get enough cash to pay, since these non-traded assets are often illiquid. Taxpayers owning non-traded assets will need appraisers to revalue these assets every year. That’s great for the appraisal business, but it’s almost guaranteed to create a hotbed of litigation around the appraised values. Second, despite a decade of rising stock and bond prices, assets can still stagnate or drop in value for extended periods. Some have talked airily of being allowed to claim unrealized losses as deductions, but how exactly would that work? And given legislators’ estimates that this tax will deliver about $200 billion in revenues, what are their assumptions about how the market will do over the next decade? Stocks and bonds have had a good run, but history suggests that extended bad times are inevitable. In the 2000s, stocks declined over the course of the decade; if that happens again, the billionaire tax may generate no revenue at all.

The proposal will also have side effects for other tax revenues. If paying the billionaire tax changes the tax basis for assets—as it should, since they are being marked to market and taxed—then when these stocks are ultimately sold, less in capital-gains taxes will be collected. If this proposal represents an attempt to circumvent the current inheritance step-up windfall, it does not fix the core problem. It would mean the billionaire tax merely moves forward the collection of taxes in time.

Ultimately, this is a wealth tax—albeit on incremental, not total, wealth. The administration’s effort to avoid using the words “wealth taxes” to describe this proposal is sophistry. Put simply, this proposal favors people with inherited wealth who are invested in non-traded assets and mature businesses and hurts people invested in publicly traded equities in growth companies, many of which they have started and shepherded to success. If that is the message that the tax law writers want to send, they should have the decency to be up front about it.

The history of tax law is a history of unintended consequences. The problem with this law is that the consequences are entirely predictable and mostly bad. You and I, though we are not in the billionaire’s club, will face them. If there is a billionaire tax on unrealized gains, some or even many of these billionaires will have to sell portions of their asset holdings to pay taxes due, pushing stock prices down. If you are an investor with a preference for founder-run companies because they have fewer conflicts of interest, you may see founders reducing their holdings sooner at these companies as a consequence of this law. I’m not sure how privately held businesses will be treated for computing the billionaire’s tax, but if the law contains a carve-out for these businesses or non-traded assets, some rich founders may well choose to take their companies private again.

For those who view the tax code as an instrument to deliver pain, the only consolation prize will be that punishment is being meted out to those who “deserve” it the most. That is a booby prize. Democratic lawmakers face a tough task, but good intentions about improving the safety net do not excuse the writing of tax laws that prove inefficient at collecting revenues, ineffective even in their punitive intent—and potentially dangerous for the rest of us.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Oct. 28, 1965: The last piece of the Arch is fitted into place. See the stunning construction photos

Tim O'Neil

The Gateway Arch is strikingly simple in design — a sweeping curve of stainless steel rising 630 feet above the ground. Its 142 welded pieces are equilateral triangles, one of nature’s most durable forms.

But there was nothing simple about building it.

The Arch is embedded deep into limestone bedrock and held in place by foundations made of 26,000 tons of concrete, more than 2,000 truckloads. The engineers had to be precise in measurements and calculations, from their drafting boards to fitting the last piece. Much was at stake — a “miss” of the two legs at the top would be a mortifying and expensive embarrassment, to say the least.

The triangles, known to the workers as “cans,” were double-walled structures of carbon steel inside and stainless steel exterior skin. For the first 312 feet, workers poured concrete between the walls and ran continuous reinforcement rods. Above that height, welds held everything together.

The engineers and iron workers knew their stuff. Each time a can was installed, engineers would measure the tips to a tiny fraction of a degree. Then the iron workers would grind, shim and weld the next can to keep the legs true. When the final piece was installed on Oct 28, 1965, the legs were only three-eighths of an inch off, making for an easy fit.