Videos

@johanknorberg in “Power to the People”, a must see documentary on energy

Yesterday I came across a very good link to the “Free To Choose TV” website, which I had never heard before. And what a great positive surprise this was!

This website hosts many different documentaries on topics I like such as economics and economic inequality, energy, freedom and history.

The documentaries are all free to watch, and in fact the website links to the YouTube videos which are free to be linked directly to, for easier consumption of the content on any device.

This evening I had some spare time, and I decided to watch the energy documentary “Power to the People” written and conducted by Johan Norberg, who currently works at The Cato Institute.

Norberg is the author of the book “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future” which was also featured in a very interesting book presentation event at Cato.

What I did not know is that Norberg had also worked in the energy field by creating the documentary “Power to the People”, which is a must-see for anyone who is interested in understanding more about energy, not only on the technical domain, but also for the economics involved with energy harnessing, production and distribution, and the impact of energy poverty on the communities which to this day still do not have access to electricity.

The documentary has a very negative view of the infamous German “Energiewende” and its damaged imposed to the society, including the loss of private and historic property due to increasing need to rely on lignite coal in Germany, after the inexplicable decision to shut down perfectly healthy nuclear power plants there due to a tsunami on the eastern coast of Japan.

Do yourself a favour. Watch it. You will understand energy a whole lot more than what you do today.

@RubinReport on the interview with @Nero on campus at UCLA last week

I have discovered Dave Rubin and his “Rubin Report” not long ago, when Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute was his guest on the show, and the two had a great interaction. Truly a great interview, well worth watching!

After watching the show with Yaron Brook, I watched a few more interviews, and found the episodes with Milo Yannopoulos. He was a guest twice, once in October 2015 and more recently in March 2016.

Both interviews with Milo were a big eye opener for me. It is not common to see a left-leaning liberal like Dave Rubin entertain a pleasant and fruitful discussion with a classical liberal and libertarian like Milo Yannopoulos, and do it in a fun way, disagreeing when it’s time to disagree, and agreeing when both views are in sync.

What a breath of fresh air! No wonder Dave Rubin is very much at odds with the current “regressive left”, as he likes to call it, full of political correctness, which is another way to spell bullshit, and full of one-way lies. Because, let’s face it, today’s left does a lot of things which, had they been done by someone on the right, would make them cry bloody murder.

Basically, he is upset and sick of seeing the left apply double standards on everything they do, and is trying hard to make more people understand that this is very wrong, and is only playing in Donald Trump’s favor for the upcoming US Presidential elections this coming November.

Want more proof of the many wrong things the leftists do? Then just watch and listen to what Dave Rubin said regarding the event he and Milo had at UCLA a few days ago:

This comment from Dave Rubin clearly remarks the issue the left is facing, and not only in the US:

A group of these protesters created a human wall to stop people from getting inside. Apparently they’re opposed to Trump building a wall, but not opposed to building one themselves.

This is precisely why I will never be able to subscribe to the ideas of this kind of left. They are always in favor of double standards, what is valid for the others is never valid for them.

And when a left-leaning liberal like Dave Rubin highlights these things so clearly, maybe there is hope that something will finally change in this world.

Donald Trump “America First” energy plan speech

Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican party for the 2016 US Presidential elections, was recently in Bismarck, North Dakota.

He spoke at the Petroleum Conference there, and focused almost solely on his energy plan, which appears to be very much pro-energy, and more specifically pro-fossil fuels, without forgetting also nuclear and renewables, which still play an important role.

While this article on Breibart reports the key points raised by Trump in his energy speech, I have been listening to the whole 42 minutes long video you can find below, and started to form a clearer idea on who Donald Trump really is.

There are a lot of things Trump says I disagree with, but overall the speech is quite interesting as his actions if elected President would be heavily dependent on fossil fuels and very much against the “climate change” measures which have been hurting already many economies and many citizens, especially the poorer ones.

One has to wonder whether Alex Epstein has been involved in the preparation of this plan; a lot of the things Epstein wrote in this oped on Forbes seem to have been taken onboard in the preparation of Trump’s speech in Bismarck, ND.

If Trump would win the 2016 US Presidential elections, energy could play a very different role in the future of the United States of America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq7FuNnCrUQ

Yaron Brook @yaronbrook on PBS for “Equal is Unfair”

Yaron Brook was interviewed by PBS during his book launch tour for “Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality”, which he coauthored with Don Watkins.

The book is very much worth reading, and will guide you thru the many fallacies of the different ways the left is using to attack capitalism and the free-market, attacks to which the right seems to be completely unable to respond to. Luckily Brook and Watkins give us all the required information to counter such attacks in the book.

This video interview is very clear and very much worth watching. 8’25” well spent, if you care about spreading the truth about why income inequality is NOT the issue that the left wants you to believe it is.

@yaronbrook and the best minimum wage explanation

I find myself mentioning Yaron Brook again on my blog again, this time to link a YouTube video which, though it’s precisely 4 years old, is still very much right and applicable today.

The topic being discussed is the minimum wage, which has once again become a topic mentioned a lot by the media due to continuous mentions of this issue by Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont running for the Democratic nomination to the 2016 US Presidential elections, and also because very recently California and other states have once again increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

This very same topic has also been discussed at length in the most recent episode of the Yaron Brook show on AM 560 The Answer.

Yaron Brook’s view is very clear; the government has no rights to set prices on anything. Not on goods, not on bread, not on people’s hourly wages. It was tried many times, under communism, under socialism, under different kinds of collectivistic societies like the current one in the USA, and it never worked.

In fact, making the minimum wage higher does the exact opposite, as it prices OUT of the market those who can only work for fewer dollars an hour. They will remain unemployable and thus unemployed, and the state will subsidize them to remain in that pitiful condition.

The video is very much worth watching, and reflecting upon.

@elanjourno and a great explanation of islam and jihad

Those who follow me have probably noticed that over the past few months I have started to follow much closer the work being done at the Ayn Rand Institute, which I find remarkable in many different ways.

I discovered it thru Alex Epstein, the author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels”, a must-read book on energy and its importance for the development of our society.

Then I discovered Don Watkins, author of a very interesting book titled “Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government” coauthored with Yaron Brook. Very much worth reading.

And of course this led me to Yaron Brook, who I have already mentioned in another post.

Now, I have come across an 8-minutes video which is by far the clearest and most comprehensible description of why we are now facing this religious war from islamists targeting the west. Elan Journo hits the nail on the head. This video is very much worth watching. I think you will share with me how dangerous religions are. All religions, none excluded.

 

@mlevchin Max Levchin on the future of blockchain and bitcoin

Max Levchin, one of the founders of PayPal and a very successful entrepreneur and investor in many different startups in the Silicon Valley, was recently on stage at the South by Southwest conference (SXSW2016) in Austin, Texas.

He had a very interesting keynote speech in general, but the one thing I though I would share came just at the very end, with a question from the audience about blockchain.

Levchin spoke of both blockchain and bitcoin, and he clearly has been following both trends since early on in the game.

Still, he claims he is very bearish on bitcoin, also due to the recent harsh discussions around features and directions of the bitcoin protocol, while at the same time he is definitely more bullish on what blockchain can bring to many different businesses.

The answer is just 2 minutes long, and is definitely worth listening to:

@yaronbrook great quote on poverty and inequality

I find myself more and more drawn to the ideas exposed by Yaron Brook, Executive Directory of The Ayn Rand Institute.

Yaron has a great show and podcast which can be found online at BlogTalkRadio. It is very much worth listening to if you want to hear a different point of view, that of someone very distant from both the conservative and liberal trite nonsense we keep hearing all the time. And I am not even counting the populists things that both Sanders and Trump keep telling over and over during this very painful campaign for the 2016 US Presidential elections, coming up in only 7 and a half months.

Yaron and his colleague Don Watkins, also working at the Ayn Rand Institute, are about to release a book I very much look forward to reading, titled “Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality”, so as one can imagine his views are pretty clear on the fact that the inequality paranoia always put forward by the leftist does not resonate much at all with Brook and Watkins.

Yaron Brook was recently a guest on a panel at the 2016 National Student Symposium on Friday, February 26, 2016, at the University of Virginia School of Law. Out of the many things he said during the event, this statement of his, less than one minute in length, is very much worth listening to:

I think it’s worth nothing, maybe this is the most underreported story of the last 30 years, over the last 30 years, 1 billion people have come out of poverty according to the United Nations, not an organization I usually cite for statistics, 1 billion people around the world have come out of poverty, 1 billion people. We should be dancing in the streets instead of complaining about inequality. The reason nobody celebrates this is because not one of those 1 billion people came out of poverty because of government programs. They are out of poverty because of capitalism in places like India and to the extent that China has adopted it, in Taiwan, and South Korea. And that’s something, global inequality is actually shrinking because other countries are adopting the free market.

I totally, completely share the view exposed so clearly by Yaron Brook here.

Don Boudreaux guest at the @JohnStossel show

The FOX show Stossel, hosted by John Stossel, which I watch online every now and then, often has very good guests.

This time it’s the turn of Professor Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University, a frequent guest of Econtalk, one of the best podcasts on economics that I listen to regularly.

The episode is very much worth watching, as Prof. Boudreaux hits the nail on the heads by dispelling a lot of wrong myths on economy which are often used by politicians during their campaigns. Unfortunately so.

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4740129848001/stossel-01222016-econ-myths/