After intimate pat-down, she wonders how much privacy must we give up to fly safely?

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A Transportation Security Administration screener told MacFarlane she would have to undergo a full-body pat-down by a female officer. Late for her flight and with no option other than to be searched in private, MacFarlane agreed.

The pat-down, done over her clothes, explored her breasts, crotch and buttocks.

“I did not imagine that she would ask me a few times to spread my legs wider and in fact touch my vagina four times with the side of her hand,” MacFarlane later wrote in a complaint to the TSA.

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They're Using Bernie Madoff Math To Hide A Crisis

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Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Politicians are always generous with other people’s money… until it runs out.

Near the peak of the late-’90s tech bubble, California’s legislature passed the largest pension increase in its history.

Today, with as much as $750 billion in unfunded public pension debt, California has one of the worst pension situations in the country. But it’s far from alone.

Illinois has a staggering $250 billion in unfunded pension obligations. State pension plans in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and many other states are taking on water, too.

Unfunded public pension liabilities in the US have surpassed $5 trillion.

Taxpayers Are Stuck With the Bill

There used to be a simple formula for a secure retirement. American workers would work for a big company for decades. Then, at a certain age, they were eligible for a monthly pension check… for life.

Once common, pensions have virtually disappeared from the private sector. Today, less than 4% of companies offer them. It’s another vector in the devalued standard of living of the average American.

Essentially, only government employees get pensions now.

The government isn’t subject to the same constraints as the private sector. So it has no problem promising benefits it can’t afford to pay.

That’s because government revenue doesn’t come from the voluntary exchange of goods or services. It comes from taxes, which it extracts via coercion.

Politicians only care about the next election. So there’s no way to hold them accountable in the long term.

They automatically do the most expedient thing in the short term, like promising extravagant pension benefits. In the long term, their successors have to deal with the consequences.

Naturally, not one of the politicians who voted for California’s record pension increase is still in office.

It’s bad enough that politicians give themselves and other state employees extravagant retirement benefits and stick the taxpayers with the bill.

But the story gets worse…

Government pension plans use all sorts of accounting wizardry that would land someone in the private sector in prison.

Bernie Madoff Math

The single most important number for a pension plan is its assumed rate of return. This is the rate the plan’s investments are expected to make.

As in other areas of life, the government takes special privileges here. It uses accounting practices that the private sector can’t—not legally, anyway.

Essentially, government pension plans choose whatever rate of return they’d like.

Lawrence McQuillan—a senior fellow at the Independent Institute—says that government pension plans “work on the assumption that they’re going to generate returns 25% higher than Warren Buffett every single year into perpetuity.”

These assumptions are totally disconnected from reality.

Government pension plans overestimate investment returns using unrealistically high rates of return. They routinely pull numbers out of thin air.

The results they come up with are insane.

In effect, this artificially shrinks a pension fund’s liabilities, making it look more solvent than it really is.

In other words, the government is using Bernie Madoff math.

This lets politicians contribute less money than the fund needs to be truly solvent. That, in turn, frees up money to bribe constituents for votes, or do whatever else the politicians want.

On average, government pension plans assume about a 7–8% rate of return (even after years of underperformance).

False Assumptions

 

A recent study found that the average 2016 return for a public pension was an awful 0.6%, compared to an average assumed return of 7.6%.At those assumed rates, a dollar invested today would double in around nine years. This rosy assumption allows a pension plan to say, for example, that $25,000 in the fund today will cover a $50,000 obligation in 2026.

California’s public employee pension plan is the largest pension plan in the US. It recently voted to reduce its assumed rate of return from 7.5 to 7% over three years.

The move—which doesn’t go nearly far enough—generated enormous political controversy.

Lowering the rate of return to a more realistic number, if even slightly, means politicians would need to contribute more to a pension fund. That means drastic spending cuts or higher taxes elsewhere.

This is why, in most cases, it’s politically impossible for a government pension plan to stick with anything close to realistic assumptions.

The Biggest Financial Bubble in World History… and Pensions Are Still Broke

In the ’50s and ’60s, government pension funds were, on average, over 90% invested in bonds and cash.

Most importantly, they were structured so that assets matched future liabilities. It was conservative, and it made sense.

That’s not how public pensions look today.

Matching liabilities with safe fixed income investments has become impractical, thanks to the Federal Reserve and the historic bubble it’s created in the bond market.

The economy has been on life support since the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed has pumped it up with unprecedented amounts of “stimulus.” This has created enormous distortions and misallocations of capital, especially in the bond market.

Think of the trillions of dollars in money printing programs—euphemistically called quantitative easing (QE) 1, 2, and 3. In short, the Fed created trillions of dollars out of thin air and used them to buy up bonds, creating an epic bubble.

Meanwhile, with zero and even negative interest rates in many countries, rates are the lowest they’ve been in 5,000 years of recorded human history.

What’s happening in the bond market could not happen in a free market. It’s only possible in the current “Alice in Wonderland” economy created by central bankers.

This is not hyperbole. We’re really in uncharted territory. (Interest rates were never lower than 6% in ancient Greece and ranged from 4 to over 12% in ancient Rome.)

Allegedly, the Fed has done all of this to save the economy.

In truth, it’s warped the economy and turned the bond market into the largest financial bubble in human history.

This, of course, affects pensions.

First, today’s artificially low interest rates make it very difficult to match future liabilities with income from bonds at a reasonable cost. So pensions have had to turn to riskier assets like stocks, real estate, and alternative investments.

With interest rates near all-time lows, bond prices are at an all-time high. That benefits pension plans because it pumps up asset values and makes the funds look more solvent.

But, even with the bond market in a historic bubble…

Even with the stock market at all-time highs and more overvalued than almost ever…

And even with the Bernie Madoff math…

Public pensions are still insolvent.

Despite the eye-watering returns in the bond and stock markets over the past 10 years, pension liabilities have still gone up.

According to Moody’s:

The optimistic "best case" of cumulative 25% investment return would reduce net pension liabilities by just 1% through 2019 year-end because of past bad investment returns and weak contributions. Meanwhile, the "base case" scenario of 19% returns would see net pension liabilities rise by 15%.

This is an unsolvable problem.

Many public pensions are hopelessly insolvent. It will all be apparent in the next market downturn, which probably isn’t far off.

I think we’re headed into an enormous crisis.

Unfortunately, most people have no idea how to prepare.

I think everyone should own some physical gold. Gold is the ultimate form of wealth insurance. It’s preserved wealth through every kind of crisis imaginable. It will preserve wealth during the next crisis, too.

But if you want to be truly “crisis-proof,” there's more to do…

How will you protect yourself when this crisis explodes? New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and I just released a PDF guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download it now.

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Want to PISS OFF the establishment? Radically Reduce Your Expenses So You Can Change Your Life

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Al Gore's latest scaremongering film

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I was surprised to discover that Al Gore’s new movie begins with words from me!

While icebergs melt dramatically, Gore plays a clip of me saying, “‘An Inconvenient Truth’ won him an Oscar, yet much of the movie is nonsense. ‘Sea levels may rise 20 feet’ – absurd.” He used this comment from one of my TV shows.

The “20 feet” claim is absurd – one of many hyped claims in his movie.

His second film, “An Inconvenient Sequel,” shows lower Manhattan underwater while Gore intones: “This is global warming!”

My goodness! Stossel doubts Al Gore’s claim, but pictures don’t lie: The 9/11 Memorial is underwater! Gore is right! Stossel is an ignorant fool!

But wait. The pictures were from Superstorm Sandy. Water is pushed ashore during storms, especially “super” storms. But average sea levels haven’t risen much.

Over the past decade, they have risen about 1 inch. But this is not because we burn fossil fuels. Sea levels were rising long before we burned anything. They’ve been rising about an inch per decade for a thousand years.

In his new movie, Gore visits Miami Beach. No storm, but streets are flooded! Proof of catastrophe!

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his latest book, “No, They Can’t Why: Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

But in a new e-book responding to Gore’s film, climate scientist Roy Spencer points out that flooding in “Miami Beach occurs during high tides called ‘king tides,’ due to the alignment of the Earth, sun and moon. For decades they have been getting worse in low-lying areas of Miami Beach where buildings were being built on reclaimed swampland.”

It’s typical Al Gore scaremongering: Pick a place that floods every year and portray it as evidence of calamity.

Spencer, a former NASA scientist who co-developed the first ways of monitoring global temperatures with satellites, is no climate change “denier.” Neither am I. Climate changes.

Man probably plays a part. But today’s warming is almost certainly not a “crisis.” It’s less of a threat than real crises like malaria, terrorism, America’s coming bankruptcy, etc. Even if increasing carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere were a serious threat, nothing Al Gore and his followers now advocate would make a difference.

“What I am opposed to is misleading people with false climate science claims and alarming them into diverting vast sums of the public’s wealth into expensive energy schemes,” writes Spencer.

Gore does exactly that. He portrays just about every dramatic weather event as proof that humans have changed weather. Watching his films, you’d think that big storms and odd weather never occurred before and that glaciers never melted.

In his first movie, Gore predicted that tornadoes and hurricanes would get worse. They haven’t. Tornado activity is down.

What about those dramatic pictures of collapsing ice shelves?

“As long as snow continues to fall on Antarctica,” writes Spencer, “glaciers and ice shelves will continue to slowly flow downhill to the sea and dramatically break off into the ocean. That is what happens naturally, just as rivers flow naturally to the ocean. It has nothing to do with human activities.”

Gore said summer sea ice in the Arctic would disappear as early as 2014. Nothing like that is close to happening.

Gore’s movie hypes solar power and electric cars but doesn’t mention that taxpayers are forced to subsidize them. Despite the subsidies, electric cars still make up less than 1 percent of the market.

If electric cars do become more popular, Spencer asks, “Where will all of the extra electricity come from? The Brits are already rebelling against existing wind farms.”

I bet most Gore fans have no idea that most American electricity comes from natural gas (33 percent), coal (30 percent) and nuclear reactors (20 percent).

Gore probably doesn’t know that.

I’d like to ask him, but he won’t talk to me. He won’t debate anyone.

Critics liked “An Inconvenient Sequel.” An NPR reviewer called it “a hugely effective lecture.” But viewers were less enthusiastic. On Rotten Tomatoes, my favorite movie guide, they give “Sequel” a “tipped over popcorn bucket” score of 48 percent. Sample reviews: “Dull as can be.” “Faulty info, conflated and exaggerated.”

Clearly, Nobel Prize judges and media critics are bigger fans of big government and scaremongering than the rest of us.

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Psychologists Who Developed CIA Torture Reach Secret Deal To Avoid Trial

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The two psychologists credited with creating the CIA’s torture program have reached a confidential settlement with victims of the brutal techniques. 

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Tesla Is The World's 4th Largest Automaker (Despite Only Selling 76,000 Cars In 2016)

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It’s been another breakout year for Tesla. Over the course of 2017, the company’s market capitalization has soared beyond those of major manufacturers like Ford, GM, BMW, Honda, and Nissan. This thrust can be partly attributed to the company’s Model S, which reigns supreme as the top-selling plug-in electric car worldwide in 2015 and 2016.

But, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, more importantly for Tesla, this massive momentum is based on the company’s much-anticipated future performance. Investors and analysts eagerly anticipate progress as the company ramps up production of the more affordable Model 3, and many also strongly believe that Elon Musk brings an “X Factor” that could translate into future returns.

In today’s charts, we look at Tesla’s ascent in valuation to become the #4 ranked automaker globally, and also the #1 maker in America. We also show why the value assigned to Tesla’s astonishing valuation may be premature, at least based on conventional metrics.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

 

TESLA’S RAPID ASCENT

In the opening months of 2013, Tesla was just starting to plan deliveries for its Model S. At the time, the company was worth a mere $3.9 billion – just 7% of the value of Ford.

Since then, Tesla’s value has skyrocketed to make it the most valued auto company in North America:

Despite only producing 76,230 vehicles in 2016, Tesla is now the biggest of the “Big 3” – and this puts a lot of pressure on the company to live up to the vast expectations held by investors and media.

THE SPECULATOR’S GAMBIT

With so much hype and value assigned to expectations of future performance, Tesla and its enthusiastic investors are in a potentially tough spot.

Even though it is the most valued car company in the United States, Tesla is much less impressive by more conventional metrics:

The company has just a fraction of the employees, vehicle deliveries, and revenue of its competitors. Tesla also treads a similar path to Amazon, in that it will likely take a while for the company to ever post a profit.

Here’s another look, this time showing Tesla’s metrics as a percentage of GM’s:

Tesla is producing less than 1% as many cars as GM, but is worth more in market value.

That’s not to say that Tesla will not ultimately live up to expectations – but it does put into perspective the risk of banking on these future returns.

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Reporter Who Exposed BBC Pedophilia Cover Up Found Dead

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Liz MacKean, the former British investigative reporter who exposed Jimmy Savile and the culture of pedophile protection at the BBC, has been found dead. She was 52. MacKean worked at the BBC until she quit in 2013 after executives decided to ban her groundbreaking and brave investigation into predatory pedophile Jimmy Savile in order to protect him and other pedophiles.

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Why Lincoln memorials are being targeted

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Many people are scratching their heads wondering why Abraham Lincoln has been singled out as a target in the leftist crazy frenzy against all symbols Confederate.

It actually makes sense in a strange way.

Of course, I was once possessed of the deranged mind of so-called “progressive,” but bear with me nonetheless.

Everyone is thinking, “OK, it’s one thing to reignite the War Between the States by attacking the historical symbols of the South and slavery, but why would the mania extend to the president of the Union and the guy who delivered the Emancipation Proclamation?” Let me explain.

Lincoln was a Republican.

But not only was he a Republican, like Donald Trump, he was the first Republican president. And, not only was he the first Republican president, he’s a real-life symbol of the fact that Confederates were all – 100 percent of them – Democrats!

The same nut jobs unceremoniously tearing down historical statues all over the country are nearly 100 percent Democrat, too. And the politicians encouraging them and cheering them on are almost 100 percent Democrat as well.

So, it could be a way for them – consciously or subconsciously – of blurring that distinction. The defenders of slavery at the time of the Civil War were all Democrats. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan was merely the military wing of the Democratic Party.

Republicans were the ones who abolished slavery, imposed Reconstruction of the South, for better or worse, and went on to lead the march toward civil rights and equality in the 1960s. Martin Luther King was a Republican – and the generation of African-Americans up to that period were overwhelmingly Republican voters. That’s why the opposition to voting rights came, almost exclusively, from Democrats.

Do you think the idiots tearing down statues know this history?

I doubt it, knowing the state of education in America today. But I’m pretty sure their leadership does.

What the angry mobs do know, or think they know, is that America is evil. And because America is evil in their minds, tearing down all of American history is not only justified, but a courageous act of defiance. These are people who disrespect the American flag as much as they dishonor the Confederate flag.

And, ultimately, that is what this maniacal hysteria is all about.

You see, in the so-called “progressive” mind, America – all of it – was built on the backs of slaves. Ultimately, there’s little difference between the kind of slavery experienced in the 19^th century and the kind that is experienced under 21^st-century capitalism.

It is literally one and the same in the hearts and minds of today’s leftists.

I know this is hard to believe because you would never hear verbalized like this in the Big Media, dominated as it is by leftists. You won’t hear it in academia, which is also dominated by leftists. That’s why I have to make these obvious observations.

There won’t be any stop to this rampage against history. Because it’s more than a war on history. It’s a war on reality – the reality of the fact that Donald Trump is actually president.

The left cannot accept it.

You will note, if you have been paying attention, this conflagration coincides with a dearth of any more Russian collusion conspiracy mongering. It’s been replaced – totally – by an uprising. It’s been replaced with efforts by the left to link Trump with white separatism, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and fascism.

Ironically, of course, the methodology of this insurgency is identical to the tactics of Nazis, the Klan and the fascists the Antifa crowd, the Black Lives Matter crowd and the other leftists tearing down statues claim to hate.

Get Joseph Farah’s latest book, “The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age,” and learn about the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith and your future in God’s Kingdom

Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact media@wnd.com.

 

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Plenty of Science Shows That Men and Women Are Just Programmed Differently

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Why aren't there more women criminals?! Men in jail outnumber women by a ratio of 14-to-1. We male stutterers outnumber women, too.

This isn't fair! We need more affirmative action! These disparities must be caused by sex discrimination because everyone knows there are no real differences between genders.

After all, Google fired engineer James Damore for daring to suggest that there is a biological reason men dominate tech leadership.

Google's CEO said: "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive."

Then the media lied about what Damore wrote.

The Washington Post: "women may be genetically unsuited" for tech jobs.

CNN: "women are not biologically fit."

But Damore never said that.

New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post and even Forbes called his memo "anti-diversity." The Atlantic worsened it to an "anti-diversity screed."

But it wasn't "anti-diversity." "I value diversity," Damore wrote, saying he is "not denying that sexism exists."

It certainly wasn't a "screed." It was a thoughtful argument suggesting that "not all differences are socially constructed ... (M)en and women biologically differ."

Can't have that.

The enlightened media quickly explained, "Differences between men and women are slim to none" (CNBC) and "major books have debunked the idea of important brain differences" (Recode).

Wow. "Major books"!

This is absurd. Of course, there are big differences!

I didn't always understand that. My Princeton professors taught me that differences are caused by sexism. Boys are encouraged to achieve, girls to nurture. If we socialize equally, they said, just as many girls will want to go to monster truck rallies and become CEOs. Boys will nurture and more will take up ballet.

Some of it happened. Men did become more nurturing. More women became CEOs.

But no amount of government force and corporate "diversity, integrity, governance" programs will equalize the numbers.

Plenty of science shows that men and women are just programmed differently. Google banning talk about that is appalling. (Though owners can do as they like with their companies.)

When I was at ABC News, I did a TV special titled "Boys and Girls Are Different."

On the show, the Kinsey Institute's former director explained that right after birth, males and females behave differently: "Males startle more... Give a little puff of air on their abdomen, they (are) much more likely to startle." And females move their lips more than males.

Infant girls usually sit up without support before boys; boys crawl away from their caretakers sooner. This happens before parents, or society, have much influence.

Even male baby monkeys like playing with trucks more than female monkeys do.

When I reported that, I got a taste of the Damore treatment.

A 20/20 correspondent confronted my TV producer in the ladies room, asking, "How could you have worked on that disgusting show?"

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem said gender differences shouldn't even be researched. She told me it's "anti-American, crazy thinking."

"Aren't women, in general, better nurturers?" I asked.

"No," answered Steinem. "Next question."

At the time, fire departments had just dropped strength tests to help female applicants. One critic of the change complained that instead of being carried out during a fire, now she would be dragged downstairs, her head hitting each stair. Steinem responded, "It's better to drag them out ... Less smoke down there."

This is nuts.

It was also nuts more recently when tennis commentator John McEnroe was attacked for saying that if Serena Williams played with men she'd be ranked "like 700."

Why is this even controversial?

Men and women are simply different, and we should acknowledge that difference.

Yes, America was extremely sexist just 50 years ago. It was taboo for women to smoke, wear pants in public or to go a bar alone. A woman couldn't get a credit card without a husband's or father's signature. Really.

Today, though, company heads are less likely to be female not simply because of sexism but because women are less crazy than men—less likely to be career-obsessed or to take stupid risks for money. That's also a reason there are fewer women in jail. Is that a bad thing?

Women live longer, have more friends, create better work-life balances.

Social engineers may dream of a society where genders are exactly equal. But it's not going to happen. Companies and governments trying to force it will just make life worse.

COPYRIGHT 2017 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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Government schools intentionally making children dumber?

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WASHINGTON – It’s no surprise to hear that America’s education system is in disarray, with Common Core dumbing down young students, faith absent from education and underpaid teachers increasingly unfit to serve as effective educators.

But all of that is by design, contends Alex Newman, an international journalist and co-author of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

He recently appeared on the “Revealing the Truth with Rabbi Walker” Web TV show to discuss the issue.

Newman believes the government education system is not built to educate but to create obedient, unlearned drones who are subservient to authority.

“It’s really the education system that is at the foundation of what eventually emerges as culture, politics, government and all the rest of it,” Newman began. “Education is where we went wrong, so if we’re going to fix this, education is the place to be involved.”

Newman was educated at an array of top private schools but realizes his academic upbringing was irregular.

“On the other end of the spectrum [from private schools], you have what’s going on in the government schools. It’s worse than a bad education: It’s a system deliberately designed to handicap the individual.”

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

According to Newman, government schools work to produce illiteracy, dumb down students and spread an atheistic worldview. Government education, he said, leads to “a hatred toward truth, objective reality and moral principles.”

Newman believes this is no accident and that the entire system is set-up to fail students “by design.”

While elites send their children to private schools for superior education, the vast majority of Americans are stuck in government schools. Average Americans are thus often left behind due to their educational upbringing and are unable to be as successful as the moneyed elites.

Furthermore, Christians and children of other faiths in government schools often find their beliefs under attack, especially those who are devout adherents.

A major cause of the dysfunction of government schools? A 19th century politician named Horace Mann.

“Horace Mann was actually opposed to Christianity; he was a Unitarian. He wanted to get Christ out of everything,” Newman explained.

Mann was appointed secretary of the board of education of Massachusetts in 1837 and from then on introduced the “Prussian Model” of education to government schools.

The model focused on “constant obedience and loyalty to the state,” according to Newman, and was in opposition to the original purpose of education in the United States, which focused on literacy to promote reading the Bible.

Mann spread his ideas across the country.

In the later 1800s, John Dewey solidified secular education in the United States.

Dewey, a socialist and atheist, Newman noted, was funded by a number of wealthy donors and spread his ideology to the colleges that educated teachers. Over 50 years, Dewey’s philosophy gradually gained prominence across the United States.

Dewey believed that “schools should teach secularism” and that they should “not worry as much about teaching reading and math,” Newman said.

Dewey’s philosophy ultimately infected the Department of Education at its founding in 1979.

Americans have become “dumber and dumber” with each successive generation, according to Newman, a claim backed by statistical data.

“Fifty-five percent of Americans are either illiterate or functionally illiterate,” Newman said. “This is essentially building a prison around children.”

Newman stressed again that this is all “by design.”

He believes the public education system threatens conservative values everywhere by creating voters that are unable to think for themselves.

“We can fight the political battles, but if we lose on the education front, this is all a moot point,” he said.

“If we don’t put the brakes on this, our society is not going to last.”

Newman contends the nation must return to effective methods of teaching the skills of reading and writing, and to teaching proper morals and values in schools. He sees promise in many of the small, independent Christian schools around the country.

Newman thinks Trump appointee Betsy DeVos has been a mixed bag so far as secretary of education, and he was more impressed during Trump’s campaign when he promised to abolish the Department of Education.

“Rather than focusing so much on charter schools,” Newman said, “Betsy DeVos should be focused on abolishing her department.”

That would lead to education being organized at the state or local level, allowing far greater freedom of ideas as well as superior teaching methods in the classroom.

If politicians can successfully abolish the Department of Education, “We will no longer have this top-down, centralized, one-size-fits-all model called ‘Common Core.'”

While Newman is optimistic about the future of American education, he realizes it will not be easy.

“This is going to be a very long term process,” Newman concluded.

Watch the full in interview:

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

 

 

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