Category Archives: Conspiracies

The End of the U.S. Postal Service?

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And so Saturday mail comes to an end. Is anyone really that surprised? No competition = No reason to innovate or improve service. Where’s Lysander Spooner when you need him?

Here’s more on the U.S. Postal Service ending Saturday deliveries at Fox News:

The U.S. Postal Service plans to announce Wednesday that it will end Saturday mail delivery, in one of the most significant steps taken to date to cut costs at the struggling agency.

A source familiar with the decision confirmed the plan to Fox News.

Under the proposal, the Postal Service will continue to deliver packages six days a week. The plan, which is aimed at saving about $2 billion, would start to take effect in August.

(See the rest at Fox News)

Sandy Hook Conspiracy: Crisis Actors at Work?

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Professional crisis actors…missing weapons…a second shooter…donation pages created before the massacre? Was there a Sandy Hook conspiracy?

Nothing is out of the realm of possibility, but the theories I’m hearing are needlessly complicated. It’s difficult to imagine so many people involved in such a wide-reaching scam. Why go to all that trouble? The FBI has a long history of luring crazies into fake terrorist plots. Taking a page out of their book, it would be far easier to rile up a local psychopath, turn him loose on the school, and then look the other way. Presto! Another “lone gunman” plot with few loose ends to tie up.

Still, if you’re interested in the professional crisis actors theory, here’s more from Fellowship of the Minds:

At issue is whether professional “crisis actors” are going beyond mere simulation of mass casualty events (what the Denver-based group VisionBox Crisis Actors say they do) to actually impersonate real-life people caught in the news of recent massacres, notably the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012.

(See the rest at Fellowship of the Minds)

Happy Birthday Income Tax (Now, go away already!)

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It’s been one hundred years since the modern income tax was created, via the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Back then income tax rates ran from 1% for annual incomes over $3, 000 to 7% for annual incomes over $500,000 (that’s $11.6 million in today’s dollars!). Current tax rates run from 10% to 39.6%. Meanwhile, the income tax code has gone from a hefty 400 pages to a whopping 44,000 pages. My how times have changed. Here’s more from Delaware Online:

Pop Quiz: What book has more than 7 million words in multiple chapters, attempts to influence our behavior toward good ends, is complex and often contradictory, and requires interpretation by learned studiers of its texts to distill its basic principles for the masses of us for who this tome is supposed to provide benefit? It’s not the King James version of the Bible. It’s the current United States Tax Code.

The giveaway: While the U.S. Tax Code has more than 7 million words, The Bible is a relatively slim pamphlet at only 774,746 words. It wasn’t always this way. In 1913, the year the personal incomewe now labor under was instituted, the number of pages contained in the entire Tax Code stood at 400 (most of those dealing with tariffs). The Bible actually was longer at 1,291 pages.

As of 2010, the United States Tax Code stands at a whopping 71,684 pages (according to CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter, though in fairness, that includes repealed or modified portions of earlier versions of the tax code. The current, live portion runs a mere 44,000 pages.) The original 1913 Tax Form 1040 blissfully topped out at a rate of 7 percent – the “fair share” due of the uber rich in the eyes of then President Woodrow Wilson who obviously never had been a community organizer at any point in his career…

(See the rest at Delaware Online)

Student Loans: Crisis…or Conspiracy?

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Over the past few months, reports of a “student loan crisis” have erupted throughout the United States. But is this really a crisis? Or a student loan conspiracy of epic proportions?

The Student Loan Conspiracy?

We first visited the student loan issue back in October 2011. To put it simply, the high cost of college and a difficult job market has “created a generation of heavily indebted students with few means to pay back their loans.”

Now, we have some new information to kick around. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the average student holds $23,300 in student loan debt. Breaking it down, about 43% of all students have loan balances less than $10,000. The rest owe more than $10,000. Amazingly enough, 27% of eligible payers “have past due balances.”

There are two pieces to this conspiracy. First, why is college so expensive? And second, why do so many people spend so much money pursuing college degrees? We talked a lot about the first question in October. So, we wanted to focus more on the second one this time around.

Why is College so Popular?

America’s intense pursuit of college degrees in a curious phenomenon. Not only are degrees ultra-expensive, but students appear to get poor value for their money. According to Richard Arum’s and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 36% of U.S. college students show “no significant gains in learning” after four years of college. Even worse, there seems to be a mismatch between the skills acquired in college and the skills required for navigating the real world.

So again, we must ask, how did we get into this situation? Why are high school graduates spending money they don’t have in order to obtain college degrees that do shockingly little to prepare them for the real world?

The answer, in our view, is Griggs v. Duke Power. During the 1950s, Duke Power restricted black people from working in all departments except for the low-paying Labor department. In 1955, they started requiring high school diplomas for certain positions.

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Duke Power ended its race-based hiring policies. Instead, it instituted IQ tests. At the time, black people were less likely to hold high school diplomas. They also performed worse on the IQ tests. Thus, they were selected for Duke Power positions at a far lower rate than white candidates.

I won’t go into the particulars here. But eventually, a man named Willie Griggs filed a class action lawsuit against Duke Power Company. The case made its way through the legal system. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled against Duke Power. In doing so, it prohibited the use of general IQ tests when screening applicants, regardless of whether there was an actual intent to discriminate. In order to pass muster, IQ tests were required to be a “reasonable measure of job performance.”

“…in 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling (Griggs v. Duke Power) saying that if companies use aptitude testing to screen potential employees, they must be prepared to show that their tests are precisely calibrated to the needs of the job. Otherwise, they will be guilty of employment discrimination if their tests screen out minority workers who might have been able to do the work. Rather than face discrimination suits by the federal government, most employers started using a less precise but legally safe method of screening applicants—college degrees.” ~ George C. Leef, Why on Earth Do We Have a Student Loan Crisis?

Griggs vs. Duke Power had far-reaching impact. It largely ended the practice of aptitude tests. But companies still needed a way to screen job applicants. So, they turned to college degrees, “even for jobs that could easily be learned by anyone with a decent high school education.” As a result, college enrollments (and student loans) exploded.

“In 1940, just 10% of high school graduates went to college. By 1970, that number was at 40%. And by the 1990s, it had risen to 70%. That’s because a college degree has become little more than a ‘signaling game.’ By attending college, students “signal” to potential employers that they’re smart, hard-working, and easily trained. The ability to send that signal to employers, which was once accomplished via aptitude tests, is the sole reason that most students attend college in the first place.” ~ David Meyer, The Student Loan Conspiracy?

Guerrilla Explorer’s Analysis

General aptitude tests aren’t perfect. In fact, they’re heavily flawed. In Griggs vs. Duke Power, it was discovered that those who’d passed aptitude tests and held high school degrees performed their jobs at the same level as those who’d failed the tests and didn’t hold degrees.

So, why don’t employers just create new aptitude tests that are “reasonably related” to individual jobs? The biggest reason is the threat of lawsuits. Even a well-crafted aptitude test could backfire in this respect. It’s far easier to just use college degrees as a screening mechanism and avoid the lawsuit risk altogether.

And that’s unfortunate. Aptitude tests hold significant advantages over college degrees. They’re cheap, quick, and can be tailored to fit individual jobs. College degrees are ultra-expensive, ultra time-consuming, and ultra-unfocused. So unfocused in fact, that the 1971 ruling should have invalidated college education screening as well.

“Recall that the problem in Griggs was that the specified requirements for job applicants were not clearly and directly related to the actual demands of the work. If challenged, could employers who have set the college degree as a requirement show that it has anything at all to do with the ‘business necessity’ of the employer or are ‘job-related’? That is very doubtful. Employers have grown to rely upon a new credential that is imperfect and probably rules out many qualified candidates. If the EEOC and the courts were to scrutinize the college degree requirement, they might well conclude that it has a ‘disparate impact.'” ~ Bryan O’Keefe and Richard Vedder, Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing

The Student Loan Conspiracy isn’t a deliberate one. But the unintended consequences of Griggs vs. Duke Power have been highly destructive all the same. Many people waste years of their lives and accumulate thousands of dollars in student loan debt just to be eligible for basic jobs.

Companies will always need a way to screen potential employees. We here at Guerrilla Explorer don’t favor aptitude tests or anything else for that matter. We just think companies should be allowed to screen in whatever fashion they choose rather than fearing discrimination lawsuits. Without that lawsuit risk, however, we think many employers would switch to specifically-designed aptitude tests. Perhaps then, the Student Loan Crisis would finally come to an end.

The Mysterious Space Plane?

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On March 5, 2011, the U.S. Air Force launched the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle into low Earth orbit. After more than a year in space, it’s finally returning to Earth. But what was it doing up there in the first place?

What is the X-37B Space Plane?

The current X-37B mission is scheduled to end in mid-June. It’s the second of at least three such missions. The first one took flight on April 22, 2010 and landed December 3, 2010. A third mission is expected to launch later this Fall.

We don’t know much about the X-37B. We know it generates power via a solar panel. We also know its payload bay is roughly the size of a pickup truck bed. We know it contains new technologies which are being tested. But its exact purpose and the nature of its payload remain a mystery. In fact, no one outside the Air Force seems to know what it’s doing in space. But hey, at least we know it’s been a success.

“Although I can’t talk about mission specifics, suffice it to say this mission has been a spectacular success.” ~ General William Shelton, Commander of Air Force Space Command

So, there’s that. Anyway, numerous conspiracy theories regarding the X-37B’s true purpose have arisen to fill the void. Here’s just a few of them:

  1. Space Bomber: This would seem like the most logical choice. However, the X-37B is an orbital vehicle, not a suborbital one. And shifting orbital planes apparently requires a great deal of thrust and thus, fuel. Then again, the X-37B has been floating around for over a year so this might not be such a big deal.
  2. Spy Plane: In January, an article in Spaceflight magazine claimed the X-37B was secretly spying on China’s Tiangong 1 space laboratory. However, this has been widely criticized. They only cross orbits in two places. So, if the X-37B is spying on Tiangong, it’s pretty limited. At the same time, some conceptual artwork of the space plane shows a small telescope. And the X-37B’s orbit takes it over numerous countries in the Middle East. So, a spy plane seems like a decent possibility.
  3. Testing Spy Satellites: This is an offshoot of the “Spy Plane” theory. It’s bolstered by the fact that the X-37B passes over the same region every four days, a pattern suggesting “U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.”
  4. Anti-Satellite Technology: According to Bill Sweetman, editor-in-chief of Aviation Week’s Defense Technology International, the X-37B might include “more than one way to put an enemy satellite out of orbit.” He specifically mentions the possibility of spraying an enemy satellite with black paint, and thus causing it to overheat.
  5. Space Experiments: Perhaps the X-37B is just an experimental vehicle, testing materials to see how they operate when exposed to space.

Of course, the X-37B could also be something else entirely, something completely outside the realms of our imagination. There’s just no way to be sure. So, for now, all we can do is continue to speculate as to the X-37B’s true purpose…as well as why it requires such intense secrecy.

The Threat of Happiness Research?

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Two days ago, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) relaunched its “Better Life Index.” According to it, women are generally happier than men and Australia is the happiest country (assuming all categories are equally-weighted). But does happiness research pose a threat to society?

What is Happiness Research?

Happiness research has exploded over the last few decades. The idea is to quantitatively measure happiness as well as what makes people happy. This allows for all sorts of comparisons between groups as well as nations.

Happiness research tends to treat individuals with a broad brush. But happiness is entirely subjective. Different people have different preferences. Some people value money derived from work more than leisure time and vice versa. The Better Life Index attempts to deal with this fact. It allows users to personalize their indexes based on how much they value eleven separate categories: community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, housing, income, jobs, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance. So, this would appear to be a marked improvement.

Cardinal Utility – The Fatal Flaw of Happiness Research?

Unfortunately, the Better Life Index doesn’t deal with the underlying problem. Happiness research depends on something known as cardinal utility. Cardinal utility holds that personal preferences can be accurately measured by a third-party. However, cardinal utility is an outdated view. No one believes it…no one except happiness researchers that is.

Take the Better Life Index. It asks people to self-report how much they value various categories. However, a stated preference don’t necessarily equal a demonstrated preference. What’s the difference? A stated preference is saying you’d take a pay cut to have more leisure time. A demonstrated preference is actually following through on it.

“The concept of demonstrated preference is simply this: that actual choice reveals, or demonstrates, a man’s preferences; that is, that his preferences are deducible from what he has chosen in action. Thus, if a man chooses to spend an hour at a concert rather than a movie, we deduce that the former was preferred, or ranked higher on his value scale.” ~ Murray Rothbard, Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics

Actions speak louder – much louder – than words. There are several ways stated preferences can mess up happiness research. First, people alter their preferences all the time. So, even if a person creates an “accurate” Better Life Index, he might change his mind when it comes time to make an actual choice. Second, a person might think they prefer doing one thing. But when presented with a choice, that same person might do something else entirely.

“In vacuo, a few consumers are questioned at length on which abstract bundle of commodities they would prefer to another abstract bundle, and so on. Not only does this suffer from the constancy error, no assurance can be attached to the mere questioning of people when they are not confronted with the choices in actual practice. Not only will a person’s valuation differ when talking about them from when he is actually choosing, but there is also no guarantee that he is telling the truth.” ~ Murray Rothbard, Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics

Guerrilla Explorer’s Analysis

So, maybe happiness research isn’t all that accurate. So what? It’s just for fun right? Well, maybe not. It might seem innocuous, but there’s a dark side to it. Politicians and bureaucrats from around the world are taking a page out of Jeremy Bentham’s book and claiming public policy can be used to engineer societal happiness.

“The most commonly cited statistic in happiness economics is the rule that somewhere between $40,000 and $110,000, a higher salary doesn’t buy much more joy or satisfaction. Many people draw the bright white line at $70,000. This provides a strong utilitarian impulse to raise taxes on the rich, who apparently can’t buy much happiness with their extra millions, and to funnel the money to the poor to bring them closer to $70,000. … But one reason why incomes differ is that some people care more about making money than others.” ~ Derek Thompson, The New Economics of Happiness

We barely understand happiness. And we certainly can’t measure it with any type of accuracy. So, the idea that politicians and bureaucrats can engineer it is an illusion. But that won’t stop them from trying. In the end, the research that is supposed to be improving lives might just end up ruining them.

“Apologists for Marxism have made myriad excuses for their ideology’s failure to provide the same standard of living and liberty as was enjoyed in capitalist nations. Until recently, few have been so brazen as to claim that lowering living standards and curtailing freedom were the intended consequences, let alone that people would be happier with less of either. … Limiting choice, reducing wealth and lowering aspirations are now openly advocated as desirable ends in themselves.” ~ Christopher Snowdon, The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-Checking the Left’s New Theory of Everything

For Further Reading: The Trojan Horse of Happiness Research by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The Hunt for Bin Laden’s Corpse: Part III

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Did Osama Bin Laden die in Pakistan? Was his corpse stuffed into a rubber-lined canvas body bag, weighed down with lead, and then buried in the North Arabian Sea? Or was he secretly transported back to the United States?

Where is Osama Bin Laden’s Corpse?

Back in June 2011, treasure hunter Bill Warren was attempting to raise $400,000 to locate and excavate Bin Laden’s body, which the U.S. government claimed had been buried at sea. We’ve been skeptical about his chances…highly skeptical.

“Warren plans to use side-scanning radar to locate the body bag. The problem with his strategy is obvious. The Arabian Sea is gigantic and side-scanning sonar is a slow, tedious process. Finding a corpse in it is like finding a needle in a haystack…a haystack that measures 1.5 million square miles.

Perhaps even more problematic are the limitations of side-scanning sonar. Even shipwrecks, with their hard edges and solid structures, are difficult to discern from the natural underwater landscape. Distinguishing something as small and with as little acoustic resonance as a corpse is next to impossible, even when taking into account two-hundred pounds of lead in the body bag. And the deeper the corpse lies, the harder it will prove to find.” ~ David Meyer, The Hunt for Bin Laden’s Corpse

Warren recently resurfaced for an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. And he claims to have struck pay dirt.

Guerrilla Explorer’s Analysis

Unfortunately, we’re still skeptical. Warren has had little luck soliciting donations on his website, apparently raking in just $15 from a single donor. So, it seems probable he’s just trying to drum up some attention to fund his hunt.

We also find it hard to believe Bin Laden was buried at sea in the first place. That story never made much sense. It seems far more likely he was secretly transported back to the United States. But, we’re holding out hope for Warren. Maybe he really will find the body and put an end to all the crazy Bin Laden conspiracy theories…

But we wouldn’t count on it.

Telepathic Soldiers?

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Not to be outdone by DARPA’s never-ending list of sci-fi projects, the U.S. Army has decided to step up its game. In the next five years, it plans to spend $4 million in taxpayer funds in order to develop real-life telepathy.

Synthetic Telepathy?

The U.S. Army’s version of telepathy is called Synthetic Telepathy. It bears some resemblance to the style of telepathy seen in the popular Metal Gear Solid 4 video game. But where Metal Gear relied on nanotechnology, this real-world telepathy relies on mind-reading.

Here’s how it works. Soldiers wear helmets containing electrodes. The electrodes read electrical activity in the brain and identify code words. Those code words are then relayed back to a central computer before being dished out to other soldiers in the field. Currently, computers are able to identify 45% of the code words. By 2017, the U.S. Army hopes that number will be closer to 100%.

Guerrilla Explorer’s Analysis

Incidentally, this project first received funding back in 2008. At the time, researchers estimated Synthetic Telepathy would take 15-20 years to develop. It appears they’ve progressed fast enough to shave 6-11 years from that original mark.

At least some soldiers seem pleased by the development. On the other end of the spectrum, civil libertarians are worried about how it could be used by governments against their own citizens. It’s difficult to say exactly how this new telepathy technology will impact our lives. But one thing seems certain. Synthetic Telepathy is coming…and it’s coming quickly.

Nuclear Warheads…on American Streets?

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Next time you’re on the highway, look out…you just might find yourself driving next to a truck bearing a nuclear warhead.

Nuclear Weapons…on American Streets?

Here’s more on nuclear weapons being carried on American streets from Mother Jones:

“Is that it?” My wife leans forward in the passenger seat of our sensible hatchback and points ahead to an 18-wheeler that’s hauling ass toward us on a low-country stretch of South Carolina’s Highway 125. We’ve been heading west from I-95 toward the Savannah River Site nuclear facility on the Georgia-South Carolina border, in search of nuke truckers. At first the mysterious big rig resembles a commercial gas tanker, but the cab is pristine-looking and there’s a simple blue-on-white license plate: US GOVERNMENT. It blows by too quickly to determine whether it’s part of the little-known US fleet tasked with transporting some of the most sensitive cargo in existence.

As you weave through interstate traffic, you’re unlikely to notice another plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer rolling along in the right-hand lane. The government plates and array of antennas jutting from the cab’s roof would hardly register. You’d have no idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead with enough destructive power to level downtown San Francisco.

(See Mother Jones for more on nuclear weapons being transported over American streets)

The Kony 2012 Conspiracy?

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A few weeks ago, Invisible Children launched its now-famous Kony 2012 video, which has garnered over 84 million hits on YouTube to date. But is there a sinister motive behind this video?

The Kony 2012 Conspiracy?

The stated purpose of the Kony 2012 video is to make Joseph Kony, a Ugandan guerrilla leader, a household name for his war crimes against children. A worthy goal, it would appear at first blush. But new evidence suggests a darker conspiracy afoot, driven by powerful U.S. interests connected to Kony 2012. Apparently, these interests wish to gain control over Africa’s incredible wealth of natural resources. Here’s more on the Kony 2012 conspiracy from Global Research:

The hidden agenda in Uganda, Central Africa and the Horn of Africa is the conquest of oil and strategic mineral resources. Going after Joseph Kony and protecting Ugandan children is a cynical smokescreen, a pretext for a “humanitarian intervention” in a region where US sponsored “civil wars” (Sudan, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia) have in the course of the last 20 years resulted in more than eight million deaths:

“Through AFRICOM, the United States is seeking a foothold in the incredibly resource rich central African block in a further maneuver to aggregate regional hegemony over China. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is one of the world’s largest regions without an effectively functioning government. It contains vast deposits of diamonds, cobalt, copper, uranium, magnesium, and tin while producing over $1 billion in gold each year. It is entirely feasible that the US can considerably increase its presence in the DRC under the pretext of capturing Joseph Kony.” (Nile Bowie, Merchandising and Branding Support for US Military Intervention in Central Africa, Global research, March 14, 2012)

(See Global Research for more on the Kony 2012 conspiracy)