Cigarette tax revenue plunges as smokers buy outside New York

Cigarette tax revenue plunges as smokers buy outside New York | New York Post
Albany has really blown it — tax revenues from cigarettes are up in smoke.
New York state cigarette tax collections have plunged by about $400 million over the past five years, according to figures and estimates from the office of New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
And New York has also lost $1.3 billion in uncollected state cigarette taxes each year from alternative sales, according to a separate study.
The state is taxing far fewer packs, as smokers evade taxed packs, shop across state lines or buy smokes from Native American merchants to avoid punitive NY taxes. 
A typical pack in New York costs $10.60 or more, including the nation’s highest state excise tax, $4.35.
In Gotham, smokers are slapped with an extra $1.50 per pack on top of the state tax. (On top of that, there’s federal excise tax of $1.01, and an 8 percent sales tax of almost 80 cents, using our example.)
Not surprisingly, say experts, sales of taxed cigs in New York are off by 54 percent in the past decade, which is also cutting into the profits of local store owners peddling smokes.
In that same period, about 19 percent of New Yorkers stopped smoking, a pace well below the huge sales dip.
“The Germans call it ‘schadenfreude’ when you take pleasure from another person’s misfortune,” noted Dan Mitchell, a tax expert at the Washington DC-based Cato Institute, commenting on the New York smoking tax fiasco.
“Normally, I would think people who feel this way have a character flaw.
“But not in this case,” he added.
“I confess that I get a certain joy from this story because politicians are being punished for their greed.
I like the fact that they have less money to waste.”

Sam's Club CEO Is Paying Dearly For Anti-White Comments, Learning The Hard Way About Racism ⋆ US Herald

Sam's Club CEO Is Paying Dearly For Anti-White Comments, Learning The Hard Way About Racism ⋆ US Herald:

"Why would any CEO of a major international chain speak publicly and on the record to the media and insult and decry white males when a large part of your customer base happens to be those same “white males?”

Subsidies for Cooking Oil

Subsidies for Cooking Oil - WSJ:
"How many millions of taxpayer dollars does it take to create a new cooking oil?
Government-backed Solazyme is among the companies working to provide the answer.
After gorging on federal grants to make fuels that car drivers don’t want, alternative-energy companies are now trying to feed their creations to American consumers.
Bon appetit!
The Journal reports that Solazyme, which in 2009 received more than $20 million in grants to build a refinery for automotive fuel, is now selling an algae-derived oil for cooking.
Readers may recall Amyris as one of the “green tech” darlings backed by Al Gore and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins that was destined to revolutionize the energy economy.
Now it’s focusing on facial moisturizers and cosmetics.
But only after blowing nearly $25 million from an Energy Department grant on a biofuels demonstration project.
Sapphire Energy received more than $100 million from the Obama Administration, “but it decided over the past two years to shift its focus toward nutritional supplements like Omega-3, a fatty acid,” notes the Journal.
Along with its foray into cooking oil, Solazyme is also offering “whole algae flour,” which is intended to replace ingredients like butter and eggs in traditional recipes.
We’re reminded of the “Saturday Night Live” skit about the dessert topping that doubled as a floor wax.
If the former alt-energy crowd can make it in the wilds of the real economy, so much the better.
We’d be even more encouraged if Washington would cut off the green subsidies and leave venture capital to people investing their own money."

History for December 28

History for December 28 - On-This-Day.com
Woodrow Wilson 1856 - 28th U.S. President - More information here - Today in U.S. President History, John Molson 1763 - Beer brewer, founder of Molson Beer, Martin Milner 1927 - Actor (Route 66, Adam 12, Columbo) 


Maggie Smith 1934 - Actress (Lettice & Lovage), Edgar Winter 1946 - Musician (Edgar Winter’s White Trash), Denzel Washington 1954 - Actor (Glory, Malcolm X, The Hurricane) 


1732 - "The Pennsylvania Gazette," owned by Benjamin Franklin, ran an ad for the first issue of "Poor Richard’s Almanack." 


1836 - Mexico's independence was recognized by Spain. 


1937 - The Irish Free State became the Republic of Ireland when a new constitution established the country as a sovereign state under the name of Eire. 


1945 - The U.S. Congress officially recognized the "Pledge of Allegiance." 


1956 - After five years on television, the last "Ding Dong School" was aired on NBC-TV. 


1964 - Initial filming of the movie "Dr. Zhivago" began on location near Madrid, Spain. The movies total running time is 197 minutes. 


1973 - The Chamber of Commerce of Akron, OH, terminated its association with the All-American Soap Box Derby. It was stated that the race had become "a victim of cheating and fraud." 


1973 - Alexander Solzhenitsyn published "Gulag Archipelago," an expose of the Soviet prison system. 

Iran Switches Tactics...Implements New Strategy Against The US That Could Impact Everyone

Iran Switches Tactics...Implements New Strategy Against The US That Could Impact Everyone:

"A researcher at the cyber-security firm Cylance discovered that critical files from a company he identified as Calpine Corporation — which reportedly operates 82 power plants in 18 states and Canada — were illegally accessed in a breach that began around August, 2013, and may be ongoing. Brian Wallace says the compromised information included passwords, diagrams, and sensitive engineering designs of power plants; at least one stolen file was reportedly marked “Mission Critical.”

Poor nations are poor because of the lack of capitalism, not because of it

Poor nations are poor because of the lack of capitalism, not because of it - AEI | Pethokoukis Blog » AEIdeas:
Why are the wealthiest nations so much richer than the poorest nations?  
Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann explains what’s behind global inequality and poverty:

So there are these enormous differences in productivity that make the productive places rich and the unproductive places poor. The poor people are not being exploited. They’re being excluded from the higher productivity activities. It’s not that the capitalists are taking a very large share of what they produce. It’s just that they produce very little in the first place. … 

Poor places are characterized by the absence of capitalist firms and by self-employment, employment: these are small peasants and farmers or owners of small shop. In these settings, there are no wages, there’s no employment relationship. There are no pensions. There is no unemployment insurance. The trappings of a capitalist labor market do not exist.

While Marx thought that capitalism, as a form of organizing production, would take over the world, poor countries and regions are characterized by the absence of capitalism, of capitalist forms of production. So the question we should ask ourselves is why did capitalism not succeed in these regions, leaving huge differences in productivity between the places where it succeeded and the places where it did not? The answer we have found is that modern capitalist production requires the simultaneous access to many different inputs.

“Inputs” can mean many different kinds of networks: water, electricity, urban transport, roads, the educational system, banking, Internet. I would also include economic freedom as a pretty important input, the ability to take risks and innovate without government preemptively quashing you or taking all your profits. Not exactly sure the degree to which the other stuff matters with that political economic input.

As Deirdre McCloskey elegantly states it, “The modern world was made by a slow-motion revolution in ethical convictions about virtues and vices, in particular by a much higher level than in earlier times of toleration for trade-tested progress — letting people make mutually advantageous deals, and even admiring them for doing so, and especially admiring them when, Steve-Jobs-like, they imagine betterments.”...

Coco Chanel a.k.a. Agent F-7124 - Westminster: Nazi Spy

Coco Chanel a.k.a. Agent F-7124 - Westminster: Nazi Spy:
"The anti-semitic Nazi story recently revealed in Sleeping with the Enemy by Hal Vaughan, is in fact, denied by the current House of Chanel.
Representatives say that Coco Chanel was merely involved in a love affair with a German aristocrat and that she had Jewish friends.
Nazi documents found within the French and British Defense Ministries verify the truth of it all. Chanel was an active agent of the Abwehr – a Nazi intelligence organization..."
Fascinating story!

Limbaugh: 'Islam Is a Conquest Ideology - Not Even a Religion' - Breitbart

Limbaugh: 'Islam Is a Conquest Ideology - Not Even a Religion' - Breitbart:

"According to Limbaugh, not properly defining Islam for the sake political correctness will be to our own detriment.

Partial transcript as follows:

Can I be honest with you about, say ISIS, or any other jihadist Islamic organization? It’s not about revenge.  You might think it is because they’re out dealing with who they consider to be infidels.  But the reason they’re such a threat and need to be taken seriously is that militant Islam, jihad, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, you name it, they are conquerors, folks."

The Natural Condition of Humankind

The Natural Condition of Humankind | Intellectual Takeout:
"In The Sword of Imagination, Russell Kirk has a beautiful line about the natural condition of man.
It is a strong reminder that while our civilization seems strong and our freedoms are cherished, they must always be nourished and cultivated in each generation.
Here’s the line:
“Order, justice, and freedom are garden plants; the natural condition of humankind is that of the jungle.”

If you’re looking for context, below is the paragraph from which that sentence came:
“Much of what is called history records the fruits of original sin. Even the daughters of emperors exist only precariously. Order, justice, and freedom are garden plants; the natural condition of humankind is that of the jungle. In the year 316, Diocletian, who had been master of the world, was compelled to starve himself to death in his palace. In the year 1969, President Nixon was triumphant; five years later, his enemies would pull him down. It was a wonder … that a tolerable human society could subsist at all. Prescription, custom, and convention enable generation to link with generation; but the cake of custom was being trampled under foot near the end of the twentieth century, much as the cake of custom had been broken about the beginning of the fourth century. All [I] could do was to remind some thinking people of such hard truths, and to brighten the corner where [I found myself].”
Yes, order, justice, and freedom require hard work and generational cooperation to maintain. 
We shall see if we can keep the traditions alive through the 21st century. "

14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines Litter the United States

14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines Litter the United States | American Elephants
The towering symbols of a fading religion, over 14,000 wind turbines, abandoned, rusting, slowly decaying. 

When it is time to clean up after a failed idea, no green environmentalists are to be found. 
ind was free, natural, harnessing Earth’s bounty for the benefit of all mankind, sounded like a good idea. Wind turbines, like solar panels, break down. 
They produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them.  

The wind does not blow all the time, or even most of the time. 

When it is not blowing, they require full-time backup from conventional power plants.

Without government subsidy, they are unaffordable. 

With governments facing financial troubles, the subsidies are unaffordable. 

It was a nice dream, a very expensive dream, but it didn’t work.

California had the “big three” of wind farm locations — Altamont Pass, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio, considered the world’s best wind sites. 

California’s wind farms, almost 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity ceased to generate even more quickly than Kamaoa Wind Farm in Hawaii. 

There are five other abandoned wind farms in Hawaii.
When they are abandoned, getting the turbines removed is a major problem.
They are highly unsightly, and they are huge, and that’s a lot of material to get rid of.

Unfortunately the same areas that are good for siting wind farms are a natural pass for migrating birds. 
Altamont’s turbines have been shut down four months out of every year for migrating birds after environmentalists filed suit. 

According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society 75-110 Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-Tailed Hawks and 333 American Kestrels are killed by the turbines every year. 

An Alameda County Community Development Agency study points to 10,000 annual bird deaths from Altamont wind turbines.
The Audubon Society makes up numbers like the EPA, but there’s a reason why they call them bird Cuisinarts.

Palm Springs has enacted an ordinance requiring their removal from San Gorgonio Pass, but unless something else changes abandoned turbines will remain a rotting eyesores, or the taxpayers who have already paid through the nose for overpriced energy and crony-capitalist tax scams will have to foot the bill for their removal.

President Obama’s offshore wind farms will be far more expensive than those sited in California’s ideal wind locations. 

Salt water is far more damaging than sun and rain, and offshore turbines don’t last as long. But nice tax scams for his crony-capitalist backers will work well as long as he can blame it all on saving the planet.

Walther Model 4

Noon-toon

Kerry Tells Iran Obama Can Sidestep This New Law...Then He Gets A COLD Dose Of Reality

Kerry Tells Iran Obama Can Sidestep This New Law...Then He Gets A COLD Dose Of Reality:

"Yet again, the Obama administration is kowtowing to Iran — acknowledged to be the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world — while simultaneously attempting to circumvent a new law just passed by Congress to protect Americans from radicalized Muslims intent on doing harm."

Hillary Clinton’s Vulgarity Makes Trump Look Like Shakespeare!

Hillary Clinton’s Vulgarity Makes Trump Look Like Shakespeare!
I was astonished that Hillary Clinton wept as she decried bullying, after Donald Trump’s used of the word “schlong”.

A woman who is seeking the office of “Commander-in-Chief” should really show a little more intestinal fortitude.

The act is laughable, because her own use of profanity is so notorious that there are whole books on the subject!

A California friend, Bill Monroe, offers this example.

Hillary’s vulgar and nasty language is well documented. To directly quote her: ‘F**k off! It’s enough that I have to see you ****-kickers every day, I’m not going to talk to you too!! Just do your G*damn job and keep your mouth shut.’

(From the book American Evita by Christopher Anderson, p. 90 – Hillary to her State Trooper bodyguards after one of them greeted her with “Good Morning.”)

That is not the only tome that documents Clinton’s legendary temper. Another book,Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary Clinton, recounts an episode with Obama as the target ofone of her grand tirades.

Clinton requested a meeting with Obama, against the advice of hubby Bill Clinton, believing “she was being persecuted for minor, meaningless violations,” author Edward Klein writes.

Clinton initially took a friendly approach during the meeting and Obama reacted as if he didn’t know what she was talking about, the book claims.

“He was almost being deliberately dense,” a Clinton source said. “It really angered her.”

Clinton lost her temper and called the president by his first name in an emotionally driven break with White House decorum, according to the book.

“What I want for you to do is call off your f–king dogs, Barack!” Clinton allegedly barked at Obama, according to Klein’s account, which cited sources close to Clinton and Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

Obama got off lightly compared to her husband, according to an episode described in a third book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.

[Author Kate Andersen] Brower gave an interview with CNN in which she is laughing and smiling while telling the story of Hillary Clinton’s violent, bloody attack on her husband the President of the United States.

Apparently, spousal abuse is funny if committed by a feminist icon running for president.

An example of how the political press is playing this comes from Politico, which published a lengthy book excerpt that left out Hillary’s alleged bloody attack on Bill.

Politico did lead with the ‘lamp throwing’ incident which as the Clinton defenders might say, is ‘old news’. But Politico left out the damning alleged criminal attack.

If there is a description that Donald Trump used that should really trouble Hillary, it involved her lack of stamina.

“One thing with Hillary, she doesn’t have the strength or the stamina to be president. She doesn’t have it,” Trump said at a Wednesday-night campaign rally in Manassas, Virginia.

“You ever see Hillary? And I said, ‘She doesn’t have the strength, she doesn’t have the stamina,'” Trump later said.

NYC businesses face $250,000 fines for violating new gender pronoun regulations

NYC businesses face $250,000 fines for violating new gender pronoun regulations | The American Mirror:
New York City quietly issued new regulations on employers and landlords shortly before the Christmas holiday in an effort to accommodate transgender residents, and the new rules come with stiff fines for violators — willful or otherwise.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights implemented Local Law No. 3 (2002); N.Y.C. Admin. Code § 8-102(23) and issued the Gender ID Interpretive Guide, claiming the new rules reflect “that transgender people face frequent and severe discrimination such that protection from discrimination is ‘very often a matter of life and death.’”
“Refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment,” the new guide reads.
“Gender is defined as one’s ‘actual or perceived sex and shall also include a person’s gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression,’“ the new ban reads, “‘whether or not that gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to that person at birth.’”
The guide notes, “Some transgender and gender non-conforming people prefer to use pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers, such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir.”
...The offers several examples of violations, including:
a. Prohibiting an individual from using a particular program or facility because they do not conform to sex stereotypes.
For example, a women’s shelter may not turn away a woman because she looks too masculine nor may a men’s shelter deny service to a man because he does not look masculine enough....
f. Forcing a transgender or gender non-conforming person to use the single-occupancy restroom.
Violations of the myriad regulations come with hefty fines.
“The Commission can impose civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct,” according to the new law.

Trying to Hide the Rise of Violent Crime

Trying to Hide the Rise of Violent Crime - WSJ:
Progressives and their media allies have launched a campaign to deny the ‘Ferguson effect’—but it’s real, and it’s increasingly deadly for inner cities.
Murders and shootings have spiked in many American cities—and so have efforts to ignore or deny the crime increase.
The see-no-evil campaign eagerly embraced a report last month by the Brennan Center for Justice called “Crime in 2015: A Preliminary Analysis.”
Many progressives and their media allies hailed the report as a refutation of what I and others have dubbed the “Ferguson effect”— cops backing off from proactive policing, demoralized by the ugly vitriol directed at them since a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., last year.
Americans are being asked to disbelieve both the Ferguson effect and its result: violent crime flourishing in the ensuing vacuum.
In fact, the Brennan Center’s report confirms the Ferguson effect, while also showing how clueless the media are about crime and policing.
The Brennan researchers gathered homicide data from 25 of the nation’s 30 largest cities for the period Jan. 1, 2015, to Oct. 1, 2015. (Not included were San Francisco, Indianapolis, Columbus, El Paso and Nashville.)
The researchers then tried to estimate what 2015’s full-year homicide numbers for those 25 cities would be, based on the extent to which homicides were up from January to October this year compared with the similar period in 2014.
The resulting projected increase for homicides in 2015 in those 25 cities is 11%. 
(By point of comparison, the FiveThirtyEight data blog looked at the 60 largest cities and found a 16% increase in homicides by September 2015.)
An 11% one-year increase in any crime category is massive; an equivalent decrease in homicides would be greeted with high-fives by politicians and police chiefs. Yet the media have tried to repackage that 11% homicide increase as trivial.
Several strategies are employed to play down the jump in homicides.
The simplest is to hide the actual figure..."

BOMBSHELL: Obama Panicking After Secret Files on ISIS Fighter's Phone Reveals Shocking Truth

BOMBSHELL: Obama Panicking After Secret Files on ISIS Fighter's Phone Reveals Shocking Truth:

"The website claimed that a dead militant’s phone reportedly had information on it proving that Turkish intelligence and the Turkish government were supporting the terrorists.

“The mobile phone was found with one of the killed ISIL leaders in the Northern parts of Salahuddin province two days ago,” Jabbar al-Ma’mouri, a commander of the Iraqi volunteer forces, reportedly said."

North Korea Upgrades Its Long-Range Nuclear Missile

North Korea Upgrades Its Long-Range Nuclear Missile:
"North Korean scientists and engineers have made several major recent improvements to the KN-08  intercontinental ballistic missile that point to a simpler design with greater reliability, analysts at the website 38 North report.
The authors say that physical changes made between 2012 and 2015 will give the North Koreans a better missile, but one that won't be ready before 2020.

History for December 27

History for December 27 - On-This-Day.com
Johannes Kepler 1571, Louis Pasteur 1822, Sydney Greenstreet 1879 


Marlene Dietrich 1901, Lee Salk 1926, Gerard Depardieu 1948 


1831 - Charles Darwin set out on a voyage to the Pacific aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin's discoveries during the voyage helped him form the basis of his theories on evolution. 


1845 - Dr. Crawford Williamson Long used anesthesia for childbirth for the first time. The event was the delivery of his own child in Jefferson, GA. 


1900 - Carrie Nation staged her first raid on a saloon at the Carey Hotel in Wichita, KS. She broke each and every one of the liquor bottles that could be seen. 


1938 - The first skimobile course in America opened in North Conway, NH. 


1945 - The World Bank was created with an agreement signed by 28 nations. 






1947 - The children's television program "Howdy Doody," hosted by Bob Smith, made its debut on NBC. 


1979 - Soviet forces seized control of Afghanistan. Babrak Karmal succeeded President Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown and executed.


2002 - North Korea ordered U.N. nuclear inspectors to leave the country and said that it would restart a laboratory capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.