Australia’s Gun Laws and Homicide: Correlation Isn’t Causation

Australia's Gun Laws and Homicide: Correlation Isn't Causation

• 

03/21/2019Ryan McMaken

In the wake of the March 15 New Zealand shootings, advocates for new gun restrictions in New Zealand have pointed to Australia as "proof" that if national governments adopt gun restrictions like those of Australia's National Firearms Agreement, then homicides will go into steep decline.

"Exhibit A" is usually the fact that homicides have decreased in Australia since 1996, when the new legislation was adopted in Australia.

There are at least two problems with these claims. First, homicide rates have been in decline throughout western Europe and Canada and the United States since the early 1990s. The fact that the same trend was followed in Australia is hardly evidence of a revolutionary achievement. Second, homicides were already so unusual in Australia, even before the 1996 legislation, that few lessons can be learned from slight movements either up or down in homicide rates.

A Trend in Falling Rates

As noted by legal scholar Michael Tonry,

There is now general agreement, at least for developed English-speaking countries and western Europe, that homicide patterns have moved in parallel since the 1950s. The precise timing of the declines has varied, but the common pattern is apparent. Homicide rates increased substantially from various dates in the 1960s, peaked in the early 1990s or slightly later, and have since fallen substantially.

This was certainly the case in the United States. US homicides hit a 51-year low in 2014, falling to a level not seen since 1963. This followed the general trend: peaking in the early 1990s, and then going into steep decline. And yet, we can't point to any new national gun-control measure which we can then claim caused the decline. In fact, the data suggests gun ownership increased significantly during this period.

Source.

Australia followed the same pattern, although national homicide data collection was spotty before the early 1990s:

Source: Standardized homicide rates per 100,000 population, four English-speaking countries, various years to 2012. See "Why Crime Rates Are Falling Throughout the Western World" by Michael Tonry.

Part of the reason that the collection of homicide data in Australia is so recent a phenomenon is because it has tended to be so rare. Politically, it simply wasn't a national priority. Australia is a small country, with only a few more million people than Florida, spread out over an entire continent. In the relatively high homicide days of the early 1990s, Australia's homicides totaled around 300. This means in a bad crime year, in which homicides increase by only 20 or 30 victims, it could swing overall rates noticeably.

This brings us to our other problem with using post-1996 homicide data as definitive proof of anything. The numbers are too small to allow us to extrapolate much. As data analyst Leah Libresco wrote in 2017 in The Washington Post:

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths...

This doesn't stop many reporters in mainstream outlets from claiming that any decline in homicides can with certainty be attributed to whatever the most recent gun-control restrictions were.

But it rarely works in the opposite direction. For example, during the 1990s, many American states liberalized gun laws considerably, allowing more conceal-carry provisions and lessening controls in general. Needless to say, The New York Times doesn't point to this and say "American homicide rates decreased in response to loosening of state gun laws."

Of course, I'm not saying that these changes in gun laws by themselves indisputably "prove" that more conceal carry laws reduce homicides. But, if I subscribed to the same standards of rigor as most mainstream journalists, I'd likely have no scruples about doing this, in spite of what other factors ought to be considered.

Faced with a lack of evidence that 1996's law caused Australia to follow the same trend in homicides as both the US and Canada, advocates for laws like Australia's then fall back on the strategy of pointing out that Australia's homicide rates are lower than the US's. The problem with this strategy, of course, is that Australia's homicide rates were not comparable to those in the US either before or after 1996. The causes of the difference in rates between the two countries obviously pre-dates modern gun regulation measures in both countries. (We might also point out that several US states — some of which have very lax gun laws — have very low homicide rates comparable to Australia's.)

Attempts to explain this away have been numerous, and in many ways, justifying gun control policy has come down to endless attempts at using regression analysis to find correlations between gun policy and homicide rates. These can often be interesting, but their value often rests on finding the right theoretical framework with which to identify the most important factors.

Those who work in public policy, and who lack a good foundation in broader issues around criminality tend to just go directly to legal prohibitions as the key factor in homicide rates. But this isn't exactly the approach taken by those who engage in more serious study of long-term trends in homicides.

Famed crime researcher Eric Monkonnen, for example, in his essay "Homicide: Explaining America's Exceptionalism," identified four factors which he thought most likely explained the higher rates in the United States: the mobility of the population, decentralized law enforcement, racial division caused by slavery, and a generally higher tolerance for homicide. Monkonnen concludes: "To assume that an absence of guns in the United States would bring about parity with Europe is wrong. For the past two centuries, even without guns, American rates would likely have still been higher."

Monkonnen's conclusions on this matter don't necessarily make him laissez-faire on gun control. But they doillustrate his recognition of the fact that factors driving differences in homicide rates between two very different societies go far beyond pointing to one or two pieces of legislation. And if gun control laws are to be posited as the cause of declines in homicide, there need to be a clear "before and after difference" in the jurisdiction in which they are adopted. Comparisons with other countries miss the point.

Suicide Rates Are Back at Pre-1996 Levels

Perhaps recognizing that homicide rates haven't actually changed all that much in the wake of 1996, some defenders of Australia's gun legislation have tried to gild the lily by claiming that an additional benefit of legislation has been a decline in suicide rates. This is a common strategy among gun control advocates who often like to claim gun control is a suicide prevention measure.

[RELATED: "Guns Don't Cause Suicide"]

For example, it's not difficult to find media headlines proclaiming "suicide figures plummeted" in Australia after the adoption of the 1996 law. But Australia runs into a similar problem here as with gun control: suicide rates fell substantially during the same period in Canada, the US, and much of Europe.

Moreover, in recent years, suicide rates in Australia and the US have climbed upward again. There's little doubt that suicide rates fell from 1995 to 2006, dropping from 12 per 100,000 to under 9 per 100,000. But after that, suicide rates climbed to a ten-year high in 2015, rising again to 12 per 100,000, or a rate comparable to what existed before the 1996 gun measure. In other words, suicides are back to where they were. But as recently as 2017, we're still hearing about how gun control also makes suicides decline.

Overall, this is just the level of discourse we should expect from the media and policymakers on this matter. Even the flimsiest correlation to the passage of a gun control law is assumed to have been the primary factor behind a decline in homicides. Meanwhile, any easing of gun laws that coincides with declining homicides (as happened in the US) is to be ignored. In both cases, the situation is more complicated than reporters suggest.

But don't expect this to be a restraining factor on the drive for new gun laws in New Zealand. In Australia, the 1996 gun-control measure was passed only 12 days after the massacre used to justify the new legislation. New Zealand politicians look like they're trying to take an even more cavalier attitude toward deliberation and debate. Meanwhile, in Norway, where Anders Brevik murdered 77 people in 2011 — 67 of them with semi-automatic firearms — the national legislature didn't pass significant changes to gun control regulations until 2018.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Contact Ryan McMakenTwitter

Source: Australia's Gun Laws and Homicide: Correlation Isn't Causation | Mises Wire

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (225-228)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

All of the slides in this set are dated from the 1960s. Subject matter varies but includes some home construction/remodelling and what looks like a shot outside an airport pick-up/drop-off area (check out the old taxis) among other things.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

Rio Tinto - processed September 1969

processed October 1964

processed August 1968

processed April 1964
https://supload.com/Hyi5TEPU4

yohko8 - Devil Hunter Yohko

Harmony Explosion 2018 (13) – Sit Down, You’re Rocking The Boat (Boys Chorus)

Source: Bit.Tube | Harmony Explosion 2018 (13) - Sit Down, You're Rocking The Boat (Boys Chorus)

The boys chorus performs 'Sit Down, You're Rocking The Boat' at Harmony Explosion 2018 at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida.

View on Daily Motion

View on Bit.Tube

Computer Fun (May 1984)

Computer Fun (May 1984)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (221-224)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

All the slides in this set are unlabelled but do have the date they were processed stamped on them. The first three were developed in 1960 and the last one in 1962. The first picture is of a house, the last is of a snowy, mountainous landscape (probably Alaska) taken from the air, and the other two are photos of kids.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

processed June 1960
processed October 1960
processed October 1960
processed July 1962
https://supload.com/rJAMd5EIV

The Rosetta Stone’s Hidden Lesson on Taxes and Special Interests

Tax season is a good time to remind us that the history of taxes tells the story of whole civilizations. What is taxed, and how much is it taxed, tells us what the rulers valued. What was exempt tells us who had the political pull to be excluded.

It is no different today. If you’re irritated about how complicated the tax system is, part of the blame rests with the code’s numerous exemptions and deductions. These complexities do not occur randomly. Each rule has an influential interest group looking to offer their loyalty in exchange for tax avoidance.

The Rosetta Stone—one of the most famous artifacts in archeology—is such an example. For all its translation value, its purpose was to secure tax-exempt status for temples. The Rosetta Stone stands today as a monument to the inevitable pressures that create a complex tax code.

A Stone Unturned

The artifact’s archeological significance is well understood. The Rosetta Stone—named after the city of Rosetta where it was found—says the same thing in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a third Egyptian script called demotic. Because Greek was known and Egyptian was not, archeologists could use the artifact to understand the countless other Egyptian writings (especially tax documents) that have survived into the present day. The Rosetta Stone is why we know so much about ancient Egypt.

But why was it written in three languages in the first place? What did it say? Why was it carved in hard black stone when much cheaper papyrus was readily available? It was all because of taxes. Charles Adams recounts the origin of the Rosetta Stone in his fascinating history of taxation, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization.

High Taxes Created an Egyptian Rebellion

After Alexander the Great died, his generals split his empire among them, with Egypt going to Ptolemy I. In the 190s B.C.E. his descendent, Ptolemy V, faced civil war. Like so many rulers before him, the king had burdened his people with excessive taxes. Soldiers and workers rebelled, and the war raged for over ten years.

Sources painted a picture of a failed state. The state seized assets and threw tax debtors in jail. The prisons were so crowded, farms and villages were empty. The dikes along the Nile were in desperate need of repair. Flooding was rampant.

Ptolemy eventually capitulated to rebels, freeing them from prison and offering them amnesty. He ended naval conscription, forgave all tax debts, and returned confiscated property. Peace returned to the land of Egypt.

Tax Exemption Placated a Powerful Interest Group

To help ensure lasting peace, Ptolemy also granted Egyptian temples tax-exempt status. This was a particularly smart move. The temples hadn’t had tax exempt status since the time of the Pharaohs, a status taken from them when the Assyrians conquered Egypt some five hundred years before the Rosetta Stone was carved. It was a point of pride on the part of priests to get it back and key to re-establishing peace.

The priests also found it quite lucrative because Egyptian temples were not mere places of worship. Temples owned vast tracts of land. Workers were exempt from the poll tax, farmers were exempt from the harvest tax, and temples paid no taxes on the offerings workers and farmers had to fork over to use the land. Much like a modern politician, Ptolemy used the tax code to placate this powerful interest group. The priests made out like bandits.

The law was one thing, but enforcement was another. To ensure tax collectors honored the temples’ new tax-exempt status, the priests put up a massive black slab of basalt, a stele that celebrated the king’s wisdom in giving the temples such wonderful tax benefits.

What’s left of that stele is what we call the Rosetta Stone. Its impressive presence essentially told prospective tax collectors: “Just so you know, we know the king said we don’t have to pay taxes, so don’t try anything.” An accompanying statue of the king added further authority; it was a setup temples probably repeated throughout the kingdom.

But why three languages? Because the temple clergy wanted to inform three different segments of the population, and each understood a different language. Religious leaders understood hieroglyphs, the general population understood demotic, and the tax collectors understood Greek. The tax collectors were known to make excessive demands—that was an impetus for the civil war—so this was the temple’s way of making sure everyone knew what the law said.

Nothing Is Certain but Death and Taxes and Tax Avoidance

The Rosetta Stone reflects a major investment on the part of the temples. Stela carved in stone were expensive to make and install and illustrate how valuable temples found these tax exemptions. It’s probably why the government would later use similar reprieves to placate future tax rebels and why these kinds of rules have followed us to modern times.

Multiply the Rosetta Stone a few hundred times, and you’ll get something that looks like the US tax code. Despite lawmakers 2017 efforts, US federal taxes will remain a mess for the foreseeable future. Exemptions aren’t the only reason for tax complexity, but the pressure of interest groups makes them an inevitable one. Any one distortion is a small nuisance, a mere link in a chain. But with each link, the chain grows until it binds and burdens taxpayers.

The Rosetta Stone is one of our earliest examples of a special interest using the tax code for their own benefit. How fitting that it originated from an imposing and leaden obelisk.

David Youngberg

David Youngberg is an associate professor of economics at Montgomery College in Rockville, MD.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Harmony Explosion 2018 (12) – Tonight (Boys Chorus)

Source: Bit.Tube | Harmony Explosion 2018 (12) - Tonight (Boys Chorus)

The boys chorus performs 'Tonight' at Harmony Explosion 2018 at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida.

View on Daily Motion

View on Bit.Tube

EGM 2 (March 1996)

EGM 2 (March 1996)

The Democratic Socialist Platform Echoes the Madness of the Khmer Rouge

In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, they quickly emptied the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. This was to be year Zero; a rebirth of Cambodia as an engineered egalitarian, classless rural society with “the corruption and parasitism of city life” eliminated. Several million had to leave at once, including hospital patients. Those who refused were summarily executed. Those who left were forced to work in fields, where many died while being fed starvation rations.

Genocide against their own citizens resulted in up to 2.5 million dead out of a population of 8 million. Over 1.3 million of the dead were executed.

Driven mad by class politics, Khmer Rouge soldiers dehumanized their victims. Khmer Rouge soldiers “fired aimlessly at innocent civilians as long as someone offended them in any way.” They reserved special brutality for those in Cambodia’s middle class, “the doctors, bankers, teachers and merchants, the people who read books and even the ones who just wore glasses.”

Dehumanizing those you murder is characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Hitler killed Jews. Stalin killed kulaks. Mao killed landlords. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge took the “most violent and ignorant people, and…taught them to lead, manage, control, and destroy.” As deranged cadres murdered, some chanted the couplet taught by their leaders, “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.”

Identity Politics Leads to Dehumanization

You want to believe that such madness could never visit America. Yet, a cancer of identity politics, with its concurrent demands for social justice, continues to grow. A mindset of dehumanizing those who are not in your tribe is taking root in more people. After all, the “other” is just someone who is in the way of a more “just” society.

Writing in his book Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, Jonah Goldberg observes, “Identity politics in all its forms is just a subset of this worldview. It says ‘My tribe deserves more than your tribe.’”

If my tribe deserves more than your tribe then, in Goldberg’s words, “objective standards of merit or notions of free speech are invalid, even racist, if they perpetuate the amorphously defined evil of ‘white privilege.’”

Goldberg explains succinctly why those demanding social justice aim to dismantle the rule of law:

Spend a few minutes actually studying what activists mean by “social justice” and you will discover that it is often a reactionary effort. It claims the rule of law is a rigged system designed to protect the interests of the patriarchy or white privilege or the “one percent.” Social justice holds that abstract rules or timeless principles are inadequate if they do not lead to “redistributive” or “economic” justice.

The Democratic Socialist Platform

While great attention has been rightfully placed on the potentially destructive force of the Green New Deal, other alarming parts of the democratic socialist platform have slipped under the radar. Consider this part of their platform:

Although a long-term goal of socialism is to eliminate all but the most enjoyable kinds of labor, we recognize that unappealing jobs will long remain. These tasks would be spread among as many people as possible rather than distributed on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, as they are under capitalism. And this undesirable work should be among the best, not the least, rewarded work within the economy.

You might wonder who will do the “spreading” and “distributing” of jobs. The democratic socialists write, “For now, the burden should be placed on the employer to make work desirable by raising wages, offering benefits and improving the work environment.” Impatience with “progress” will quickly morph into demands that the government rectify perceived injustices.

You might also wonder who will decide what is undesirable? The democratic socialists offer no answers. Answers will be provided later, based on the tribal politics en vogue.

If you think Americans will categorically reject such vague foolishness, think again. Rather than associating socialism with government ownership of production, today more Americans think socialism means “equality.”

If too many “ethnic and racial undesirables” are represented in high-paying jobs in the medical community, will doctors be forced to trade jobs and salaries with medical aides? Will software engineers trade jobs and salaries with office custodians? How likely is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to trade jobs with a coal miner in Wheeling, West Virginia?

To achieve the goal of distributing “undesirable” jobs would require no less than complete totalitarian control of the economy. Democratic socialists will enforce the rule of tribal power in place of the rule of law.

Hayek on Social Justice

In Volume 2 of Law, Legislation and Liberty: the Mirage of Social Justice, Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek challenges us to consider "whether it is possible to preserve a market order while imposing upon it some pattern of remuneration” based on “social justice” criteria and imposed by “an authority possessing the power to enforce it." Hayek's answer is "no."

Why, then, is the concept of social justice so popular? Hayek provides an answer:

The results of the spontaneous ordering of the market [are] interpreted as if some thinking being deliberately directed them, or as if the particular benefits or harm different persons derived from them were determined by deliberate acts of will.

In short, someone did it; so someone needs to fix it.

Using Hayek’s lens, we can see that a belief in injustice could begin in childhood and extend into adulthood. Who has received everything they felt they deserved from their parents, from school, from work, or from life?

We tell ourselves stories about our second-grade teacher who forgot about us, a parent who didn’t understand us during our teenage years, or a boss who didn’t recognize our talent. Looking through the lens of the “story of me,” we feel like victims. This is why stories of victims and victimizers dominate the media. Looking for who is at fault can become a full-time occupation.

No wonder there are so many angry and bitter individuals; they are still trying to get others and life to conform to their expectations. Taking responsibility for our experience of life begins with understanding that life will never conform to our imagined ideas about how things should be.

In his lifetime, Hayek earned a fraction of what Stephen King has earned, and no one is at fault. Hayek writes,

Incomes earned in the market by different persons will normally not correspond to the relative values of their services to any one person ... the performance of a Beethoven sonata ... or a play by Shakespeare have no "value to society" but a value only to those who know and appreciate them.

In other words, there is no objective value.

Should a tax be placed on Stephen King’s novels to ensure that unpopular writers are better compensated? We can only reach what we see as “justice” by mistreating some people. Hayek writes:

To assure the same material position to people who differ greatly in their strength, intelligence, skill, knowledge, and perseverance as well as in their physical and social environment, government would clearly have to treat them very differently.

Hayek points us to look in a different direction where “only the conduct of the players but not the result can be just.” Of course, democratic socialists argue the opposite—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said a society that "allows billionaires to exist" along with extreme poverty is "immoral." Ocasio-Cortez didn’t say billionaires are immoral, but by conflating billionaires and poverty, Ocasio-Cortez is implying cause and effect.

The murderous Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, in a 1979 interview said, “Our policy was to provide an affluent life for the people. There were mistakes made in carrying it out.” In one of history’s great understatements, Pol Pot allowed, “Several thousand people may have died.” Good intentions don’t matter, totalitarian social justice policies are antithetical to fostering human well-being.

Take a moment and reflect on the breathtaking progress that has occurred in the world due to capitalism. Alexander Hammond observes, “in 1820, 94 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 per day adjusted for purchasing power). In 1990 this figure was 34.8 percent, and in 2015, just 9.6 percent.” Perhaps those living in 2219 will wonder how we, in 2019, could live on such meager earnings.

Democratic socialists are tirelessly working to subvert progress. Their policies will destroy the economy and shrink the economic pie. Tribal conflicts, steadily diminishing in the West under capitalism, will rise again to threaten the peace and prosperity of humanity.

Today, some use violence to prevent free speech. We can shudder to think what tribal violence is possible in a future America when citizens are morally and economically impoverished by democratic socialist totalitarian doctrines.

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry's essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Harmony Explosion 2018 (11) – ‘Cause I’m A Blonde

Source: Bit.Tube | Harmony Explosion 2018 (11) - 'Cause I'm A Blonde

The Toasters perform 'Cause I'm a Blonde' at Harmony Explosion 2018 at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida.

View on Daily Motion

View on Bit.Tube

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (217-220)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

All the slides in this set are unlabelled and undated but are probably from the late 1950s or early 1960s and are of forest scenery in the mountains, probably in the Pacific Northwest.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

https://supload.com/HkonJxfUE

Antic (June 1984)

Antic (June 1984)

Antic: The Atari Resource was probably the 2nd most popular magazine for Atari 8-bit computers. It its later years it shifted more focus onto the Atari ST though. The June 1984 issue, which was still a while before the 16-bit ST was introduced, includes: Features

• Anatomy of an Atari 800XL - Inside the belly of the beast
• Exploring the XL - One programmer's perspective
• Scroll Your Way to the Top - A short course on coarse scrolling
• Use BASIC to Animate - An easier way to program your own games
• Color Finetuner - Adjust your colors to a "T"
• Antic Pix Furniture - Computing in comfort

Departments

• Inside Atari: Evolution of the XL Computers
• Education: Alphabet Music
• Languages: Talk to your Robot
• Profiles: Activision's James Levy
• Toolbox: BASIC - A Variable Approach
• Game of the Month: Escape From Epsilon
• Assembly Language: Shortcuts to Success

• I/O Board
• Help!
• Public Domain Software
• New Products
• Product Reviews
• Advertisers List
• Listing Conventions
• Shopper's Guide

Trump’s Tariffs Cost Americans $19 Billion in 2018

“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” President Trump tweeted last March as his administration began to impose higher tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

Economists Warn Against Protectionism

At the time, the University of Chicago polled dozens of America’s top economists on the subject, asking if they believed the tariffs would make Americans better off. Not a single one agreed they would.

Notwithstanding the warnings of economists, the Trump administration continued to raise tariffs on imported goods throughout the duration of 2018, such that some $280 billion of imports were hit with tariff rates ranging between 10 and 50 percent.

In response to America’s move toward protectionist trade policy, countries such as Russia, China, Mexico, and the European Union have imposed retaliatory tariffs on $121 billion worth of US exports.

A year after Trump’s tweet about the ease with which trade wars could be won, economists from Princeton, Columbia, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have released an analysis of how Trump’s trade policies have impacted Americans, and the results so far aren’t promising.

American Consumers Pay Tariffs

In addition to the economic toll of the trade war the tariffs caused, they find that the full cost of the tariffs was passed on to US consumers, meaning the tariff hike was effectively a tax hike on all Americans. On top of that, in response to facing less international competition, American businesses have increased their prices.

The economists estimate that Americans were left about $7 billion poorer because of the economic consequences of the tariffs, and they also paid $12 billion more in taxes to the government. Ironically enough, the Trump administration is issuing up to $12 billion in payments to farmers who have been hurt by the trade war.

Essentially, Trump’s tariffs started a trade war, made Americans poorer, and caused them to pay more in taxes, and this new tax revenue may not even offset the costs of “bailout” payments to farmers harmed by the trade war. Genius.

One can only hope that one day, the clear historical record of failure it has produced will lead to protectionism being discarded into the ash heap of history.

Being Classically Liberal

Follow Being Classically Liberal on Facebook.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

 

 

Harmony Explosion 2018 (10) – Greased Lightning

Source: Bit.Tube | Harmony Explosion 2018 (10) - Greased Lightning

A performance of 'Greased Lightning' at Harmony Explosion 2018 at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida.

View on Daily Motion

View on Bit.Tube

Q*Bert (Atari 2600)

Q*Bert (Atari 2600)

While there can be no doubt that Q*bert is one of the great arcade classics and one of the most recognizable classic arcade characters, I always found it to be incredibly frustrating. Yes, it was a difficult game but it isn't really the difficulty itself that really bothered me. It was the fact that I was always leaping to my death by accident because I never quite grasped the pseudo 3D viewpoint. For those that don't know, in Q*bert you controlled...well, Q*bert...in his effort to escape various creatures and obstacles by leaping around a pyramid. Game play was fairly simple. You just jumped from square to square up or down the pyramid. The goal was to hop on each square to change its color. Once all squares were changed, you proceeded to the next level. Of course you had to avoid getting trapped by the various on-screen enemies. However, for me the view point always caused me issues. It seemed like I was always leaping to my own death by accident. As the levels progressed, things got harder. You would have to jump on each square multiple times, enemies would move faster and there would be more of them, etc. Q*bert was first released to the arcades in 1982. Ports to various systems started appearing the following year. While this add is targeted towards the Atari 2600 version (and mentions the upcoming Intellivison version), there were a wide variety of systems this game was ultimately available for. Because of the limited nature of the Atari 2600, it really isn't one of the better ports. The graphics were actually ok for that system but the pyramid was smaller and there were fewer enemies. The controls also suffered (and I already hated the controls anyway). If you are looking for an original copy of the Atari 2600 version then they are relatively common and can be had for a reasonable price. You can always use emulation too. However, if you really want to play Q*bert you are better off using MAME to emulate the arcade version or checking out the more recent release Q*bert Rebooted which was released for various modern systems in 2015 and includes a port of the original arcade game. The ad above is from the August/September 1983 issue of Video Games Player magazine. Screen shots are from the Atari 2600 version of the game.

Struggling to Pay Back Your Student Loans? These States Will Revoke Your Job License

 

Student loan debt is one of the biggest burdens to young Americans, recently ballooning to $1.5 trillion and topping car and credit card debt. Millions are struggling to repay money they borrowed for an education they were told would set them up for financial success, but many states across the country have barred individuals from working if they have not yet paid off their loans.

Fourteen states across the country currently impose policies to suspend, deny, or revoke occupational licenses from borrowers, preventing them from working and, ultimately, fully paying off their loans. This practice applies to a wide range of professions, from massage therapists, barbers, and firefighters to psychologists, lawyers, and real estate brokers.

License Revoked

With over 8.9 million recipients of federal student loans reportedly in default and as much as 40 percent of student loan borrowers at risk of defaulting on their payments by 2023, these restrictive policies only make it more difficult for them to work their way out of debt.

In one recent example, last month 900 Florida health care workers received notices from the Florida Board of Health notifying them that if they didn’t repay their student loan debt, they would have their licenses suspended. Denise Thorman, a former certified nursing assistant in the state, lost her license last year because she fell behind on her payments.

“Your license is gone, your livelihood's gone, the care of your patients is gone. How fair is that?” she told local ABC affiliate WFTS last month.

The degree of enforcement of these laws varies from state to state, but those with such rules nonetheless claim the right to revoke professional licenses. In 2017, The New York Times reported there were “at least 8,700 cases in which licenses were taken away or put at risk of suspension in recent years” due to student loan defaults, “although that tally almost certainly understates the true number.”

Fourteen states currently assert their authority to rescind occupational licenses over unpaid loans: California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Minnesota, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Iowa, and South Dakota, Iowa, and South Dakota. Iowa’s laws allow the revocation of all state-issued licenses, like driver’s licenses, while South Dakota can revoke driver’s, hunting, and fishing licenses, along with camping and park permits.

A National Burden

For many Americans, the opportunity to work in a specialized field was the reason they opted to go into debt in the first place. A bipartisan effort in the US Senate now seeks to prevent states from denying borrowers the ability to work because of delinquent loans.

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently partnered to introduce the Protecting Job Opportunities for Borrowers (Protecting JOBs) Act (S.609). This is the second time they have proposed this type of legislation. The bill would “prevent states from suspending, revoking or denying state professional licenses solely because borrowers are behind on their federal student loan payments,” according to a press release issued last week by Rubio’s office. The legislation, which would give states two years after its passage to comply, offers protections for driver’s licenses, teacher’s licenses, professional licenses, and “a similar form of licensing to lawful employment in a certain field.”

“It is wrong to threaten a borrower’s livelihood by rescinding a professional license from those who are struggling to repay student loans, and it deprives hardworking Americans of dignified work,” Rubio said when announcing the legislation.

State policies revoking or suspending the licenses of delinquent student loan borrowers affect a surprising number of workers, largely because the number of occupations requiring a state-issued license has quadrupled since the 1950s.

“At the national level, nearly 20 percent of workers are now licensed, up from just 5 percent in the early 1950s,” researchers at the Institute for Justice (IJ) said in a recent report.

IJ authors analyzed data from 36 states to calculate the burden of these government-issued licenses, estimating they cost Americans two million jobs annually. Further, they reported that “[b]y a conservative measure of lost economic value, licensing may cost the national economy $6 billion. However, a broader and likely more accurate measure suggests the true cost may reach $184 billion or more.”

To their credit, some states have already moved to do away with these restraints on economic freedom. Forbes reports that last year, “Alaska, Illinois, North Dakota, Virginia, and Washington all eliminated their default suspension laws for job licenses,” and eight more are considering similar legislation this year. The Kentucky legislature just passed a bill to prevent licensing agencies from suspending borrowers’ professional credentials.

The Root of the Problem

The federal government has played a central role in the student loan debt crisis and exploding costs of higher education. As FEE recently explained, the Higher Education Act of 1965, which put taxpayers on the hook for the loans made by private lending institutions, helped create the higher education bubble, which has seen a 1,600 percent increase in costs since its passage.

Tuition data from National Center for Education Statistics and inflation data calculated using 1963–1964 tuition and tuition increase at rate of inflation from CPI Inflation Calculator. Graph by Noa Maltzman.

By the 1980s, student loan defaults were already becoming a problem. In 1990, the Department of Education followed the lead of a handful of states, like Texas and Illinois, which had already started imposing laws to restrict borrowers’ licenses if they fell behind on payments. “Deny professional licenses to defaulters until they take steps to repayment,” the department said in its lengthy guidance entitled “Reducing Student Loans Defaults: A Plan for Action.”

Nearly 30 years later, student loans continue to weigh down individuals and the economy as a whole. That the federal government issues loans to people, assisting their plunge into debt, and then advocates barring them from working to pay them off only adds insult to injury.

Carey Wedler

Carey Wedler is a video blogger and Senior Editor for Anti-Media.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (213-216)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

There are no dates or labels on this set but they are all on a beach. It looks to be somwhere on the West coast, probably Oregon or Washington.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

https://supload.com/rJDHklM8V

Harmony Explosion 2018 (9) – What A Wonderful World

Source: Bit.Tube | Harmony Explosion 2018 (9) - What A Wonderful World

A performance of 'What A Wonderful World' at Harmony Explosion 2018 at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida.

View on Daily Motion

View on Bit.Tube

Synapse (Atari 8-bit)

Synapse (Atari 8-bit)

There can be no doubt that the early 1980s were the golden age for games on the Atari 8-bit computers. The Commodore 64 was rapidly surpassing Atari by this point but Atari was still going strong though it wouldn't be for much longer. Synapse made a ton of great games for the Atari 8-bit and other 8-bit computers. This ad from the June 1984 issue of Antic highlights several of them. Encounter

Alone on a distant planet, you stumble into a futuristic 8-level tank battlefield that really plays for keeps! Watch out for the deadly drones and sneaky saucers.

This one was sort of a clone of Battlezone, the vector based arcade game. Dimension X

Test yourself with incredible 3-D action that never stops! An alien invasion fleet has the capital city surrounded, and it's up to you to stop the destruction! Good luck - you'll need it.

This one tries to be a slightly more advanced version of something like Battlezone or Encounter but at the end of the day, the game play wasn't as good with this game. Zeppelin

First the prison break, but that's only the beginning! The underground world of Zarkafir is full of surprises, from the lethal energy fields to devastating earthquakes. Can you defeat the Timelords?

This was a side-scrolling shooter of sorts that takes place in underground caverns. A funny place for a zeppelin perhaps but this was a really good game and large for its time with 250 rooms to blast your way through. Uniquely, up to four players could play with the extra players controlling various guns on the zeppelin that player 1 was flying. Other titles listed include Blue Max, Fort Apocalypse, Shamus and Shamus Case II, Necromancer, Pharoah's Curse, and Quasimodo. I played most of these and they were all excellent games though I played them on the Commodore 64 and not the Atari 8-bit. While Synapse had the occasional mediocre game, the average quality was quite high. It's a shame they went out of business so early (later in 1984) in part because they were ripped off by Jack Tramiel who refused to pay them for software they shipped for Atari. To make matters worse they made a decision to start emphasizing text adventures which started fading in popularity around the same time.

The Effort to Abandon Electoral College Gains Steam. Here’s What It Would Ruin for America.

Colorado is joining a list of states attempting to overturn the way Americans have selected their presidents for over two centuries.

The Colorado legislature recently passed a bill to join an interstate effort called the “interstate compact” to attempt to sidestep the Electoral College system defined by the Constitution. Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, called the Electoral College an “undemocratic relic” and vowed to sign the bill into law.

So far, 12 states representing 172 Electoral College votes have passed the initiative into law. With the addition of Colorado (which has nine votes), that number will rise to 181. They need 270 for the compact to go into effect. It would then undoubtedly be challenged in the courts.

Some major voices on the left were gleeful about the potential change.

 

A Radical Proposal

While the Constitution, intentionally, gives wide latitude to states to create their own electoral systems, the law passed in Colorado, along with the rest of this effort, would be unprecedented. It would be the first time states potentially outsource their Electoral College votes to the will of the nation as a whole rather than having elections determined by their own voters. The result of this, ironically, could be very undemocratic.

For instance, if the people of Colorado vote overwhelmingly for a Democrat, yet the total popular vote of the nation goes Republican, all of the state’s votes would go to the Republican, essentially overturning the will of the people in Colorado.

The Electoral College is already fairly democratic. Nearly every state switched to direct, democratic elections of electoral votes in the early 19th century, as opposed to selection by state legislatures. What the national popular vote would do is overturn the concept of federalism, which recognizes that states have unique interests that deserve representation in the electoral system. We are not just a nation of individuals but a nation of communities and states.

Recent Elections Show the Importance of the Electoral College

Some have dismissed the Electoral College system as outmoded and unjust. But they are mistaken—the Electoral College system remains highly relevant and necessary today. The 2016 election actually demonstrated that.

In 2016, states that had gone Democratic in presidential politics for a generation flipped to Republican, in large part because of a unique candidate who appealed to their interests. While one candidate capitalized on their support, the other took them for granted and focused elsewhere. The result was a startling upset that demonstrates why the Framers wanted an Electoral College.

Without an Electoral College, candidates could more easily write off certain constituencies located in limited areas. The Electoral College binds those votes up with a larger mass of votes so that in order to win the whole, candidates have to appeal to the interests of more constituents.

Under a popular vote system, candidates could ignore entire localities and focus on driving up votes among their natural supporters.

Many on the left have also complained that the Electoral College gives an undue weight to small states, which, in their minds, are conservative.

It’s true that small states are given a boost because Electoral College votes are based on population and Senate votes. Since every state automatically has two senators, small states do get slightly more weight per their population. But in practice, this ends up benefitting Democrats just as much as Republicans.

In 2018 , for instance, the 10 smallest states sent 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans to the Senate, and the 10 largest states sent 11 Democrats and nine Republicans to the Senate.

This system of electors is not perfect, of course. But it is the best system for a large and diverse country like the United States, as it favors candidates who do the best job of appealing to diverse interests and not just the big population centers.

Historical Relevance

In fact, while the Founding Fathers disagreed on many things, the Electoral College was one thing that received the widest acceptance, as Alexander Hamilton recorded in Federalist 68:

The mode of appointment of the chief magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system … which has escaped without severe censure. … I venture somewhat further, and hesitate not to affirm that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.

In addition to protecting diverse interests, the diffused federal nature of the Electoral College is also a vital tool to counteract election fraud and contentious recounts that could undo the public will.

Imagine if the 2000 recount of the presidential contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush included not just Florida, but the entire nation. That’s what would have happened if the Electoral College weren’t in place to isolate election systems from each other.

It doesn’t take long to see how the new system that the Colorado bill aims for could become a nightmare to deal with in other ways, too, especially in tightly contested races.

This Twitter thread explains one highly plausible scenario in which the national popular vote is decided by around 100,000 votes—a tiny margin given the nation’s population is over 320 million.

 

National Popular Vote Compact is back in the news, with Colorado just joining -- it's a clever end-around circumventing the Electoral College. The idea is to get states with 270+ electoral votes to pledge to support the popular vote winner, no matter how their state voted (1/9)

— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) February 25, 2019

If Colorado were to narrowly choose a Democrat, while the other states chose the Republican by a wide margin, Colorado would have no way of making the other states conduct a recount.

The people of Colorado would essentially be forced to throw the election to a candidate they didn’t support.

Even more problematic is the effort in New Jersey to strip President Donald Trump from the state ballot over his refusal to release his tax returns. This will likely be ruled unconstitutional, but consider what it would do if implemented under a national popular vote: with Trump off the ballot in all of New Jersey, it would skew the vote for the entire nation.

Interestingly, stripping a candidate from the ballot has been used as a tactic against a Republican presidential candidate before. Southern states made it nearly impossible to create ballots for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election, which severely depressed his support in those states.

Fortunately, because of the Electoral College, Lincoln was able to win without these states, even though he ended up with only around 39 percent of the popular vote.

If the nation had simply taken a popular vote at the time, Lincoln may never have been elected president.

A Concerning but Unlikely Scenario

At the end of the day, the Colorado law is unlikely to ever be put into effect, despite the best efforts of activists.

It’s important to note that while Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has publicly voiced support for abolishing the Electoral College, she has said it would take a constitutional amendment to do so.

“There are some things that I would like to change, one is the Electoral College,” she said in 2017 when asked about things she’d change in the Constitution. “But that would require a constitutional amendment and amending our Constitution is powerfully hard to do.”

Given the unlikeliness of such an amendment—which, according to Gallup, actually reached a high point of popularity after the 2016 election—national popular vote activists have turned to more indirect means to accomplish their ends.

This misguided attempt to subvert the Constitution and abolish the Electoral College has been cooked up for partisan purposes. It is based on the false notion that Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 reflected a failure in our electoral system—not an abysmal candidate—and that this “relic” from the founding stands in the way of progressive dominance of U.S. politics.

Such a view is not only partisan but also historically ignorant. It overlooks all that the Electoral College has produced—chiefly, a stable political system that forces politicians to reckon with our nation’s diverse needs.

We would be wise to cling to that system and reject these machinations to upend it.

This article was reprinted from The Daily Signal.

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman is an editor for The Daily Signal

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (209-212)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

There are no dates or labels on this set but they are all of wintery landscapes, probably from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest area. Most likely they are from the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

https://supload.com/Hy-ACJMIE