By Evelyn Pyburn

As we see, in our own fair cities, massive apartment buildings towering above the streets for blocks and blocks, looking more like prison walls than a place to live, we have to realize that life has changed for each and every citizen in the United States. And, it is a dilemma of our own making – the cause for which our “leaders” are stubbornly refusing to correct even though they have accurately identified the cause.

I recall watching movies filmed in other countries with scenes of shoebox style apartment buildings lining streets for huge quadrants of a city – stark and dreary and depressing places — and I thought “that’s because their standard of living is so far below that of ours in the US.” Seeing the same thing now in the US as the acceptable solution to a nationwide housing shortage, has to be for the same reason. We are being pushed into a lower standard of living.

All the other reasons that are often given, such as development costs, rising costs of construction, supply line shortages, etc. point to but one problem – artificial disruptions in the market – disruptions that are caused by centralized planning and political manipulations. That conclusion is inescapable, if one understands that the free market is inexorable. The free market responds to “supply and demand” faster than the blink of an eye, if not artificially prohibited by regulators and politicians. In fact, if one watches closely, one sees that keeping up with rapid market changes is the biggest challenge for those trying to control it.

So the question: “Why isn’t the market responding to the huge, huge demand for housing?” There is only one answer, market barriers, which means but one thing — government.

That was in fact the answer that the special committee established by Montana’s governor came up with, after studying the matter. Regulations!

The conclusion should not have been surprising if one listens to builders and contractors and industry professionals. At every opportunity, for many, many years, they have proclaimed as much. During the last effort to “re-code” building regulations in Billings, input from the building industry was essentially shut out in favor of those who use the codes to achieve goals other than affordable or “safe” housing. For them the codes are not there to serve housing or traffic safety, but to fulfill quests for power over others, esthetic wishes, ideologies, and partisan goals of bureaucrats. They are imposed from the top down, without regard to cost, property rights, or any other kind of loss to the consumer.

No one should be surprised at the committee’s conclusion about over regulation, but what is astounding is how little they recommended for change. While building codes — mandating the placement of every board and nail, building shapes and size, fencing and landscaping — easily fill volumes of legal language, the committee found very little that should be changed in that area. Basically, their biggest conclusion was that regulations need to be changed so that builders can more easily build the high-rise, shoebox, wall apartments, which seems to be the future envisioned of how peons should live. No more quaint little cottages on tree-lined streets with flowers and picket fences, with children and pets and neighbors playing and visiting in the yards.

Shoebox apartments are NOT what consumers are demanding, but it is what the regulators of supply are insisting we accept. This is not the market place at work. It is government controlling the people. Given a free market, and the freedom to innovate, create and experiment, and protection of property rights, there is no doubt that the building industry would solve the housing crisis in a nanosecond. The free market ALWAYS works. But first it needs to be free.

By Evelyn Pyburn

A plea for more fellowship in politics is nothing new. I have heard people calling for less “partisanship” for years and have understood part of it – or at least what I hope they mean – but there is another aspect I don’t think is wanted by some people. It is that, which seems more threatening, today, than it has for some decades.

Understanding and tolerating the views of fellow citizens is absolutely essential in a country in which freedom is promised to every individual citizen. So that — I not only “get,” but I would agree with it. But, when they seek “unity,” that could be far more difficult.

Asking for a compromise on a tax rate is doable, or the speed limit, or the boundaries of a precinct, but how do you compromise when the opposition is calling for your annihilation? Exactly how do the Jews of Israel compromise with Hamas demanding their total destruction? Does that mean agreeing to the killing of only half their population? Is that the kind of compromise expected of Israel? Just to get along?

It’s like being asked to compromise with someone who plans to shoot you. What kind of a compromise would you strike? About what kind of gun he should use?

That impossible compromise of two diametrically opposed positions is why there were early predictions that the fundamental principle of the US Constitution — declaring that all men are to be equal in a country that practiced slavery — would eventually lead to a civil war. The prognosticators understood that ideas are powerful and even a few words on a piece of paper hold great significance. Also, they understood that there was no way to compromise about how much of a slave’s life should be free. They are either free or they are not.  Our founders knew all this, and yet they wrote the Constitution as they did. Freedom for the individual was a principle they believed important enough to the future of civilization that they were willing to fight for it.

Just think about the injustice of compromising fundamental issues. When someone is simply defending themselves or their property and are asked to compromise with the aggressor, such an agreement is most assuredly to the benefit of the aggressor at a cost to the defender. The defender against aggression will always lose unless he stands strong.

It is a contradiction to justice and a violation of a citizen’s rights. It’s a fundamental over which compromise is not possible, and it is the conflict that usually lies at the basis of most political conflicts today.

The specifics of all our disagreements vary greatly, from how we get our medical care to what kind of stove we can use in our kitchens. Whether we must ride a bus or drive an electric vehicle. The pending conflicts at issue could fill a book, and basic to all of them is the threat of the use of FORCE.

Why ever should the issue of whether the planet is getting warmer be a political one? It is only political because of the threat of the use of FORCE. For the most part, those who disagree are not resisting the conclusion of those who believe it, they are resisting the use of FORCE, which is really the primary goal of the whole debate. Those claiming to believe the planet is warming want to FORCE their ideas and solutions on others.

So how does a society bring about change? There’s a magic little word – it’s called persuasion. Rather than FORCE, you persuade. Rather than addressing the opposition with a club, you address their mind. One is the tool of the caveman the other of civilized society.

Rather than coerce manufacturers to build electric vehicles and then FORCE citizens to buy them, you build the car and build a market – a FREE market – in which the product is refined and its benefit can be demonstrated and consumers are persuaded that it is a better product. The process happens a thousand times a day and it works – if indeed the product is valid. If it is not valid, then what is the point?

Ahh, but there is a point, power over others — brute FORCE. Although the desirability of it is inexplicable.

As a political issue – as an issue that pertains most often to governments – we should not be surprised that this conflict exists. After all, government is FORCE. Government by definition is the legalized use of force. Advocates for a civilized society concluded long ago that the only legitimate use of force is in self-defense or in the defense of others. The men who wrote the US Constitution believed that that principle is one upon which government should also function and they wrote laws meant to deliver that end in our relationships, one with the other, and most especially with how government interacts with citizens.

We should also not be surprised that there are people who do not agree – people who covet power and are more than willing to use it against fellow human beings, even if it is only about what light bulb they should use.

So, if you are among those who just want us all to get along, you should first understand that it is the threat of the use of FORCE that is dividing us, not the many nuances of debates. I might have an opinion about what kind of stove you should use in your kitchen, but we really have no conflict until I attempt to FORCE you to use a specific stove.

If harmonizing while holding hands and singing kumbaya is the goal, then decide what you really think about using FORCE against your neighbor. If one is truly sincere in striving for greater harmony among people, drop any advocacy that relies upon the government pointing a gun at innocent citizens and demanding their obedience. Getting along will not only be achievable, it can be guaranteed. And, who knows what amazing things might truly be achieved.

By Evelyn Pyburn

With all the wrangling we encounter about words—what’s appropriate, what’s not, what a word means, and even if we dare speak words – if you think that is just an accidental manifestation in our society – think again.

To attack our language, to make communication difficult if not impossible. To create confusion and to intimidate, is a front line tactic of collectivists —socialists, communists, etc. To undermine society and the strength of the individual, really can be just a matter of words.

“The confusion and vagueness of terms always found in collectivist theories is not accidental; it is a reversion to the mental and verbal limitations of the primitive society it advocates, the inability to think in abstract terms,” writes Isabell Paterson, in God of the Machine, a 1968 book that explains why the Constitution works.

While most people use words to communicate, collectivists use words to create confusion. They want human beings to be cogs in a machine where no language is necessary, says Paterson.

Crippling our ability to communicate clearly or to articulate ideas is but one part of changing the words we use and the terms of their use, it is also used to subtly convey a concept — to infiltrate society with unchallenged perceptions.  A good example is the change of the word employee to “team member.” It is almost anathema to be called an employee any more  – you are a “team member.” The change underscores the collective as being more important than an individual. It diminishes individual achievement, automatically forcing the sharing of it with less productive members of a group. It also diminishes the role of the employer and what they must achieve in order to be an employer.

Paterson also underscores how the suspension of the real meaning of words allows people to speak utter nonsense without challenge, and advance concepts that make no sense. The example she gives is the claim that “All property is theft.” The definition of property is something that is owned. If it is not owned it is just something in nature. Theft presupposes rightful ownership – the forcible taking of something that is the property – ie. owned – by someone else.

Those who make such nonsensical utterances pay no attention to the meaning of words… they assign their own meanings. They would probably attempt to claim that the collective owns it – that it belongs to everyone — again, paying no heed to the insanity of such a concept, to the fact that words mean something. In practicality when everyone owns it, no one owns it. When no one owns it the government has total control. Aha, might that not be what they really advocate?

And we all have become aware of how words can suddenly change in their meaning and in unexpected ways. For example “woke” was self-adopted by those who wanted to claim they identify with a group but didn’t want to exactly say they were “politically correct,” which held its own negative connotations. But while “woke” was meant to be a positive change for obedient followers, it kind of boomeranged into a negative. Its meaning was far too well understood by many people, and now those who coined the term are begging that it no longer be used.

Of course, there is the most glaring way in which words are changed, to suddenly mean negative things about race so those caught unaware can be accused of racism. It is done as a political tactic even when those being “protected” object – such as the political agenda that forced the changing of the name of the Washington Redskins to Commanders because Washington Redskins was perceived as being a racist slur – apparently by those who were not Native American, because there is now an effort by Native Americans – by the “Redskins” — to try to undo the name change.

Of course language is always changing most often as a consequence of things that change our lives – other than collectivists. Your great grandparents would undoubtedly have no idea what you mean to hear you say you are going to “google” someone.

The term “I figure” or “I calculate” emerged in the early days of American life, as more everyday people entered business and used math as their means of earning a living – they really were “figuring” and “calculating” in this Capitalistic society.

So if in this new age world you don’t know what to say to some people, just grunt.

— “they only block the sun.”

by Evelyn Pyburn

Just because it’s not likely to get nearly the public recognition that opposition views routinely get, this editorial is to emphasize two news reports about how much we should be concerned about global warming.

Not so much, it seems. Certainly, not so much that we should give up heat, food and life as we know it. And, most certainly, not enough to give up our freedom to choose how we want to live.

The Epoch Times reports focus on the fact that global warming is not the “settled science” that we are frequently told. There are in fact a lot of very smart people who have other points of view… they just don’t get much of a platform to say so.

We have all witnessed it– the media and politicians call them “climate deniers” and ridicule them to a degree that most people with doubts or questions learn to say nothing, which is exactly the purpose.

Following the end of the recent court case of children suing the state for denying them a clean environment, there were articles in which advocates gloated that so successful has the terrorization been, that the state’s attorneys never once even suggested that there might be doubt about the veracity of global warming claims.

One of those “deniers” is a 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate, John Clauser, who has pointed out that the hysteria about supposed climate warming is at the very least hugely overstated, if not outright deceitful. Clauser is not only a Nobel Prize recipient for his contributions to quantum mechanics, he holds degrees from Caltech and Columbia University, and served in roles at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, he was honored with a portion of the Wolf Prize in Physics.

But more than that, he has read climate change research, which brought him to conclude that those living in fear of becoming crispy critters are “misguided” because researchers  have ignored a key variable, an oversight he calls “sloppy science.”

There is no “climate emergency,” says Clauser, as do another 1600 educated professionals who signed the World Climate Declaration organized by Climate Intelligence, which says “climate change science is not conclusive, and that the earth’s history over thousands of years shows a consistently changing climate.”

After studying the research of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society, Clauser says the scientists “miss the mark on the critical role of clouds in the climate system.” He says, “cloud cover has a profound effect on the earth’s heat input… clouds are reflecting a massive amount of light back out into space.”

Clouds! What could be more obvious about weather? It’s hard to believe they could be overlooked.

Clauser stated, “As a physicist, I’d worked at some excellent institutions— Caltech, Columbia, Cal Berkeley—where very careful science needed to be done. And reading these reports, I was appalled at how sloppy the work was. And in particular, it was very obvious, even in the earliest reports, and all carried on through to the present, that clouds were not at all understood. … It’s just simply bad science.” 

Clauser referenced a book by Obama’s science advisor, Steve Koonin, in which Koonin noted the inconsistency of the IPCC’s 40 computer models, emphasizing their inability to explain the past century’s climate and suggesting that these models lack a crucial piece of physics.

Clauser said that Al Gore in his film, “The Inconvenient Truth”— “insists on talking about a cloud-free earth. . . That’s a totally artificial Earth.” Clauser said that satellite images show that clouds can cover “five to 95 percent of the Earth’s surface.. . The cloud cover fraction fluctuates quite dramatically on daily -weekly timescales.”

Clouds regulate the Earth’s temperature, serving as a “cloud-sunlight-reflectivity thermostat” that “controls the climate, controls the temperature of the earth, and stabilizes it very powerfully and very dramatically,” asserts Clauser. With two-thirds of the Earth being oceanic, the ocean becomes instrumental in cloud formation.

The article reports: Minimal clouds result in heightened sunlight exposure to the ocean, triggering increased evaporation and subsequent cloud formation, resulting in more clouds. .. abundant clouds reduce this sunlight, thus curbing evaporation rates and cloud formation, resulting in fewer clouds …This balance acts like a natural thermostat for the earth’s temperature…and has a vastly greater influence on Earth’s temperature than the effect of CO2 or methane… “this cloud-reflectivity mechanism might overshadow CO2’s influence by more than 100 or even 200 times.”

Koonin’s book reads that just a 5 percent rise in cloud cover can largely counterbalance the temperature effect of doubling atmospheric CO2. 

Clauser stated that this oversight, “is a rather egregious breach of honesty by the U.S. government by NOAA, . . . This worry about CO2, the worry about methane, the worry about global warming, is all a total fabrication by shocked journalists and or dishonest politicians.”

Clauser is not alone in his views.

The Global Climate Intelligence Group’s “World Climate Declaration” has been signed by 1,609 scientists and informed professionals, who say far more blatantly that “the ‘climate emergency’ is a farce.” When asked why they signed the statement “they all stated a variation of ‘because it’s true,’” reported Epoch Times.

The declaration’s signatories include Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, meteorologists, professors, and environmental scientists worldwide.

“I signed the declaration because I believe the climate is no longer studied scientifically. Rather, it has become an item of faith,” Haym Benaroya, a distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers University.

Ralph Alexander, a retired physicist and author  of “Science Under Attack”, said, “The earth has warmed about 2 degrees F since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but that hardly constitutes an emergency—or even a crisis—since the planet has been warmer yet over the last few millennia.”

Edwin Berry, a theoretical physicist and certified consulting meteorologist, said “public perception of carbon dioxide is that it goes into the atmosphere and stays there. They think it just accumulates. But it doesn’t.” He said carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for about 3 1/2 years. And, while we are led to believe that human activity contributes about one-third of the total, it is only 5 to 7 percent. In explanation, IPCC claims that the CO2 humans emit is different from that which nature emits and the human CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

But, a human carbon dioxide molecule is exactly identical to a natural carbon dioxide molecule.

“The belief that human CO2 drives the CO2 increase may be the biggest public delusion and most costly fraud in history,” Berry said. He said the deception is all about money and control.

“All climate model predictions have been wrong,” claims Benaroya. He said that the “push” to declare a climate emergency is about “”power and money, but also larger political forces.”

As for the United Nations’ push for net-zero CO2 by 2050, Alexander said: “It’s a complete waste of time and resources and may well impoverish many Western economies. China and India are not playing along in any case, which makes the whole effort meaningless.”

Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology and the Alfred P. Sloan professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated that the issue was never one of science but of politics. He says, “The only purpose of the policies is to make the society poorer. And if you’re poorer, you’re less resilient. So if you believe CO2 is an existential threat and your policies are doing nothing to prevent it but are making you less resilient, one would have to ask, are you a pathological sadist?”

The article quotes dozens of noted scientists, all of whom express doubts about global warming predictions – and be assured you have probably never seen any of their names in any media, especially not to the degree of Al Gore, who is no scientist at all.

Said one scientist, “the claim that 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming isn’t truthful.”

When asked what concerns him most about the current narrative, Larry Bell, an architect known for designing and crafting inhabitable buildings for space, and an endowed professor at the University of Houston, said “I care about how climate hysteria, and how misinformation, drives policy. And these policies are driving our foundational bedrock policies that determine our economic well-being. They determine our national defense mastery—we won’t run a Navy on ethanol. We’re not going to run an Air Force on extension cords. It’s just absolutely insane. People think of climate as science. No, it’s not. It’s the big lever of government. It’s big globalism. And it ain’t favoring the U.S.”

Even if there is a “climate emergency” we as individual citizens need our freedom to deal with it – unless you trust your life to our political leadership, because that is where we are headed.