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Selwyn Duke

Ah, liberals. They really are a breed apart (mostly from sanity). And a timely example of how we’re a divided nation concerns the conservative/liberal dispute over how to greet people at Christmastime. As the Star-Telegram  HYPERLINK "http://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/national/article121851543.html" \l "storylink=cpy"
reports in a piece titled "‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’? Your response says a lot about your politics”:

Two-thirds of Democrats (66 percent) said stores or business should greet customers with "Happy Holidays” or "Seasons Greetings” instead of "Merry Christmas” out of respect for people of different faiths. Two-thirds of Republicans (67 percent) said stores and business should not go with the religion-neutral sayings.

The poll was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, HYPERLINK "http://www.prri.org/about/" \o "" \t "_blank" a nonprofit, independent research organization.

The divide also cuts across age groups and religious backgrounds. Two-thirds of young adults (ages 18-29) are in favor of "Happy Holidays,” while 54 percent of seniors favor "Merry Christmas.”

The poll found white evangelical Protestants (65 percent) and Catholics (58 percent) as the strongest proponents of businesses using "Merry Christmas.” Non-white Protestants (56 percent) and religiously unaffiliated (58 percent) favor stores using "Happy Holidays.”

Of course, part of the connection here is that young people and non-white Protestants tend to be more liberal.
The newspaper also points out that while Donald Trump’s 2015 Yuletide card stated "Merry Christmas + Happy Holidays,” Barack Obama’s never had "Merry Christmas” written on his. This year’s does feature Obama’s picture, though, making him "just the fourth known president to ever feature a photo of himself on the White House Christmas card since the HYPERLINK "http://www.refinery29.com/2016/12/132624/obama-holiday-cards" \l "slide-8" tradition began in 1927,”  HYPERLINK "http://nypost.com/2016/12/12/obama-omits-christmas-on-christmas-card-again/"
reports the New York Post. Well, it is fitting, in a way. Obama has spent eight years playing Bad Santa, stealing from taxpayers to give to those on his "nice” list, which, coincidentally, is exactly the same as his cronies list.

Of course, with Obama about to exit stage left, conservatives do have more about which to be merry. Liberals, not so much. (Except for Hillary Clinton. She has gotten the present of  HYPERLINK "http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/12/just_folks_in_the_chappaqua_woods.html"
ample time to meander in the Chappaqua woods, hand-in-hand with the love of her life — and of innumerable other lives — Bill.) But since I like to be a uniter, not a divider, a peacemaker and not a scalp-taker, I want to find some common ground liberals and conservatives can share here.

While choosing Christmas cards at a local drug store last year, I found myself next to some early-twenties, stone-faced, quasi-clipped-haired female. I don’t remember how our interaction began, but I know at one point she started talking out loud, ostensibly to herself, about how she didn’t want any religious cards. The commentary was obviously meant for my ears.
So being the chivalrous fellow I am, I helped her out. I informed her, nicely, that "holiday” was actually a contraction of "Holy Day.” The information didn’t exactly make her body piercings vibrate with joy. She shrugged it off as if it were no big deal, and I’m not sure if I said goodbye. But I’d hope that I had, as that word is basically a contraction of "God be with ye” — and she seemed in need of His guiding hand.

Another good suggestion for liberals is to spend the next couple of weeks in a place where their senses needn’t be accosted with the sights and sounds of the season. North Korea comes to mind. You can be arrested for celebrating Christmas there and executed for evangelizing. Never fear, though, it’s not as if you’ll want for celebratory occasions. As Time  HYPERLINK "http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1949984,00.html"
wrote in 2009, "On December 24, many North Koreans observe the birthday of Kim Jong Suk — the deceased mother of dictator Kim Jong Il…. Three days later, they are given a day off work for Constitution Day. Even New Years' Day is more about revolutionary zeal than ushering in 2010, when thousands of North Koreans will walk in a yearly procession to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace at the northeast outskirts of the capital to pay homage to the preserved body of Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea.” Wow, sounds like a blast.

The real problem with wishing liberals a merry (or happy) anything is not that it may offend them, but that it seems like an exercise in futility. Wouldn’t the wish "Tearless Tolerance” be more appropriate? Nonetheless, I will say to all and sundry: Merry Christmas and Happy Holy Days — and, hey, may God be with ye.


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Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Selwyn Duke

There’s a reason we don’t let nine-year-olds vote.

But what about those overgrown children who are nine between the ears?

It wasn’t long ago that Hillary Clinton  HYPERLINK "http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/21/hillary-clinton-leadership-dictatorship-sot.cnn"
condemned Donald Trump for refusing "to say he would respect the results of this election.” Calling it something "no other presidential nominee has ever done,” she proclaimed, "y doing that, he is threatening our democracy.”

Of course, that was when Clinton was sure she’d win.

Now, with liberals having rioted, issued death threats against Trump electors and basically having thrown a tantrum, it’s apparent they’re willing to storm the walls of the Bastille to get their way.

In a most puerile display of petulance, of unmitigated childishness, the claim Hillary didn’t really lose because she "won the popular vote” has become popular liberal sentiment. Well, consider an analogy. Did you know that in tennis you can win more games than your opponent but lose the match? If I lose 6-0, 6-7, 6-7, I’ve won 18 games to my opponent’s 14. Such outcomes do sometimes occur, yet in all my years playing competitive tennis (my former life), I never heard anyone losing such a match, anytime, anywhere, claim he really won. It never enters your mind. You know the rules. You accepted the rules going in. You played by the rules. And you lost under the rules. Period.

In fact, I’ve never seen even the youngest child make such a claim. But now some of the oldest Democrats are doing just that regarding the election. It’s dishonorable, childish, unmanly and, frankly, utterly pathetic.

To be clear, the overgrown juveniles have every right to lobby to change the Electoral College system for future contests, misguided though such a goal is. But to claim you "didn’t really lose” — after embarking upon the process knowing the rules, strategizing based upon the rules and competing under them — is taking sore-loser status to new lows.

It also reflects ignorance. Not only does the "We really won” claim ignore that not only would Trump (and Clinton) have campaigned differently had we operated based on popular vote, but voters would have behaved differently; for example, perhaps millions of blue-state Republicans stayed home Election Day, realizing their votes would be irrelevant. Again, contests are waged based on the rules in place, not on rules not in place.

We also have no idea what the popular-vote total actually is because not all the votes were counted. Some states have laws dictating that if the margin of victory is too great to be overcome by uncounted votes (e.g., absentee ballots), they need not be counted. The reason for this imprecision is that you don’t have to be precise about what is not a determining factor in the outcome.

And we don’t have a "popular vote.”

It’s much as how in tennis, while I can win more points than my opponent but lose the match, I never once knew what the points total was. It wasn’t counted because it was irrelevant.

Then, since liberals claim this matter is about legitimacy, let’s talk about illegitimate votes. Reporting on the  HYPERLINK "http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cces/home" Cooperative Congressional Election Study, even the liberal Washington Post  HYPERLINK "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/?utm_term=.a21c012cdb28"
told us in 2014 that more "than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples [taken by researchers] indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted.” The Post further informs, "Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.”
In other words and quite laughably, liberals want to label Trump’s victory illegitimate based on a popular vote that itself is known to be illegitimate. Oh, and spare me the "Vote fraud is unproven and hardly ever occurs” line. With liberals having pushed Jill Stein’s recount efforts with jihadist-like zeal, this claim is more hollow than ever.

As to the real threat to our nation, the liberals illustrate it well, being the "men of intemperate minds [who] cannot be free” and whose "passions forge their fetters.” For barbarity begets tyranny. Like a child losing privileges due to irresponsibility, if people prove too immature to govern themselves, they will ultimately lose the power to do so. This is why it’s too bad voting rights can’t be granted based on mental age — it could save our republic.


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Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Paul Driessen

Heartland Institute research fellow Sterling Burnett is an expert on climate change science, policy and politics. In this insightful article, he succinctly outlines two essential and fundamental steps that the new President Trump can take to undo much of the energy, economic and employment damage inflicted on the United States by the Obama Administration.

First, reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s unfounded determination that human emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide somehow "endanger” Americans’ health and welfare. Second, withdraw from international climate agreements that drive and justify many domestic climate actions – especially the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the foundation for all subsequent climate agreements and rules.

It’s climate regulations that threaten us

Here are some climate actions President Trump could take to Make America Great Again

H. Sterling Burnett

In President-Elect Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter, a "100-day action plan to Make America Great Again,” Mr. Trump outlines several measures he says he will undertake to create jobs and spur economic growth.

While much of his proposed agenda will help to improve the economy while also leaving reasonable environmental protections in place, I believe there are two additional environment-related policy changes that he could take to jump-start the economy.

In a September 21, 2015, appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Mr. Trump said, "I’m not a believer in man-made global warming. I mean, Obama thinks it’s the number-one problem in the world today. I think it’s very low on the list.… We have much bigger problems.”

If these comments accurately reflect Trump’s views, a first important step he could take to undo the damage done by the Obama administration’s vainglorious attempt to control climate and weather would be to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) determination that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant endangering public and environmental health.

This "endangerment finding” came about in response to EPA following a narrow 5-4 Supreme Court decision in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA. In that case, a majority of the justices ruled that, if EPA determines carbon-dioxide emissions are causing global warming – and global warming may reasonably be expected to endanger public health or welfare – then EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

In fact, the justices ruled, EPA would be required to regulate carbon dioxide under such a finding, unless it can provide a reasonable basis for not choosing to regulate this vitally important, plant-fertilizing gas.

Relying on unsubstantiated projections produced by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, EPA did determine that CO2 emissions from cars and industry do threaten human welfare. That led directly to the agency’s decision to limit those emissions.

For instance, the endangerment finding was the basis for ratcheting up automobile fuel-economy standards to 54.5 mpg by 2025. That could soon mean consumers no longer have the right or ability to choose the vehicles they drive – based on safety, passenger or cargo considerations, for example – by either forcing all but the smallest cars off the roads or, at the very least, making larger cars and trucks too expensive for all but the relatively wealthy to drive.

Additionally, the endangerment finding serves as the foundation for various Obama administration regulations requiring utilities, oil and gas producers, and other entities to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. If these draconian rules are not overturned by the Trump Administration, Americans will pay much more for energy and their energy supplies will be less reliable.

Mr. Trump cannot undo the endangerment finding with the stroke of a pen. To reverse it, he must instead charge EPA to demonstrate, through independent, validated research, that carbon-dioxide emissions are "toxic” (which they are not at any levels that might occur in Earth’s atmosphere) – or that global warming is causing measurable amounts of sea-level rise, increased hurricane numbers or intensity, the spread of diseases, or other harms directly attributable to carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States.

If EPA cannot directly link such problems to U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions – and it can’t – or cannot show such problems can be dramatically reduced by cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions – and again it can’t – then EPA should withdraw the endangerment finding.

Withdrawing the endangerment finding would end the legal justification for a range of burdensome climate regulations. In the process, it would also end radical environmental activists’ ability to use courts to impose climate policies on an unwilling public whose elected representatives have repeatedly rejected climate policies.

Second, President-Elect Trump also recognizes that, to fully reverse Barack Obama’s harmful climate policies, the United States must withdraw from international climate agreements that drive and justify many domestic climate actions – and must stop diverting billions of dollars of taxpayer money from important domestic and defense concerns to U.N. climate programs.

In his Contract with the American Voter, Mr. Trump pledges to "cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs, and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.”

Trump can accomplish this unilaterally by halting the Obama administration’s illegal shift of State Department funds – funds that Congress directed would be used in other diplomatic programs, such as combating virulent diseases – to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund.

The easiest way for President Trump to end the United States’ participation in all international climate agreements would be for him, on day one, to remove America’s signature from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Article 25 of the UNFCCC allows any state party to that convention to withdraw upon giving one year’s notice, without incurring any further obligation

In fact, withdrawing from the UNFCCC would cancel United States obligations to all other U.N.-brokered climate agreements subsequent to it, including the Paris "agreement” that President Obama signed, because all subsequent agreements were built upon UNFCCC.

Our nation is not threatened by manmade climate change. It is threatened by regulations implemented in the name of protecting us from dangerous manmade climate and weather.

These two actions would be a great first step toward "putting America first” during President Trump’s first 100 days in office.

_________

H. Sterling Burnett, PhD is a research fellow on energy and the environment at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

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Dana Mathewson

Look for this to cease under President Trump.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/12/21/congress-obama-admin-fired-top-scientist-to-advance-climate-change-plans.html

A new congressional investigation has determined that the Obama administration fired a top scientist and intimidated staff at the Department of Energy in order to further its climate change agenda, according to a new report that alleges the administration ordered top officials to obstruct Congress in order to forward this agenda.

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Paul Driessen

EU regulatory policies and practices on insecticides seem designed to prevent the use newer, safer products, especially neonicotinoids, particularly where bees are concerned. EU bureaucrats often seem to give the US Environmental Protection Agency rationales for applying "precautionary” measures on pesticides that can be our last, best or only safeguards against insects and diseases that would otherwise devastate canola, citrus and other crops.

My analysis summarizes the Catch-22 nature of the EU approach and suggests a few simple steps that the new Trump-Pruitt EPA team could take to avoid making the same mistakes.

Another good target for EPA reform

Europe gives Trump Administration excellent tutorials on how not to regulate pesticides

Paul Driessen

With reform-minded folks in charge of the Executive and Legislative Branches, unelected, unaccountable, un-removable bureaucrats may soon be exerting far less power over our policies, regulations, lives and livelihoods. Energy and climate are high on the fix-it list. Another important topic is insecticides.

The European Union and Canada have provided object lessons in how not to regulate these important chemicals. Scott Pruitt and his new team over at EPA will certainly want to avoid their malpractice.

For nearly a decade, manufactured controversies have raged around a relatively new class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. These advanced systemic crop protectors are absorbed into the plant itself and thus target only pests that suck or chew on crops, particularly during the plants’ early growth phases.

That minimizes impacts on beneficial insects – like crop-pollinating bees. domesticated and wild bees are barely exposed and thus unlikely to be harmed when neonic seed or soil treatments are used, in contrast to what can happen when manmade or "organic” chemicals are sprayed on crops. But despite this minimal risk, anti-pesticide activists have tried for years to blame neonics for recent honeybee health problems.

In 2013, their well-funded advocacy campaigns played a major role in causing the EU’s decision-making European Commission to impose a "two-year” ban on using neonicotinoids with bee-attractive crops.

Not surprisingly, almost four years later, there is no sign that the Commission will reconsider its position, despite accumulating evidence that managed bee populations are not now and never were in any danger of collapse or extinction. As my longer article on MasterResource.org explains, that evidence includes the EU’s own 2014 and 2015/16 studies, and nearly a dozen large-scale field studies around the world.

Going even further, the European Food Safety Authority now says bees are at grave risk from neonics used on European crops that do not attract bees, such as winter cereals, beets, potatoes, leafy vegetables, maize (corn) and sorghum – whether the neonics are seed treatments, foliar sprays or soil applications. There may be no actual evidence of harm, the EFSA says, but a risk to bees "cannot be excluded.”

Just as crazy, the agency’s 2013 Bee Guidance Reference Document lets bureaucrats decide which studies and data can be accepted and deemed relevant – and which can be ignored. It also means chemicals that can control crop pests may never be approved; and only ineffective chemicals will be approved (along with chemicals that are or could be dangerous for bees, but are deemed to be "natural” or "organic”).

That explains why EU member nation governments for three years have refused to approve the BGRD. However, in the wacky world of EU regulations, the mere fact that member governments have refused to approve a guidance document doesn’t prevent unelected Eurocrats from using it to advance their agendas.

The BGRD specifies a three-tier scheme for evaluating potential impacts on bees. At Tier 1, extremely low laboratory test thresholds pretty much automatically force evaluations under more complex, costly and time-consuming second and third tiers. At the highest tier – full field testing – the guidance specifies wide spatial separation requirements between test fields and control fields, where beehives are located.

To ensure experimental integrity, the BGRD requires that neonic test areas must be free of other pesticide-treated, bee-attractive crops, and far enough away from such areas that tests are not affected. But that means scientists need areas four times larger than Paris, France. That’s virtually impossible in densely populated Europe. Catch 22!

To pass the "no risk” test, evaluators must then prove the pesticide being tested doesn’t produce more than a 7% fluctuation in a beehive’s populations. But natural fluctuations can easily reach 15% from frigid cold snaps, infestations by Varroa destructor mites, or even beekeepers applying chemicals to hives to control mites or other pests and diseases. So it’s impossible to show that population changes greater than 7% were not due to neonic use on crops. Catch-22 again! But it gets even worse.

Euro regulators even ignored some of the best available data: large-scale field studies done under Good Laboratory Practices. Nearly a dozen such studies consistently demonstrate that no observable adverse effects on honeybees result from field-realistic exposures to properly applied neonic pesticides.

But instead of accepting these studies, EU bureaucrats rely on laboratory studies that other researchers have shown consistently overdose bees with pesticides. That lets regulators focus on adverse neonic impacts that can justify bans, but under conditions that bees would never encounter in the real world.

In another case, five carefully conducted, inter-related studies published in the journal Ecotoxicology covered a large-scale 2013-14 northern Germany field study of honey bees, bumble bees and solitary red mason bees that forage in oilseed rape (akin to canola) fields treated with the neonic Clothianidin.

The elaborate, sophisticated studies assessed neonic residues from bees and hives under actual field conditions. They found that the residues were well below levels that can adversely affect bees – and that neonics "did not cause any detrimental effects on the development or reproduction” any of the three species. Enter Joseph Heller, yet again.

The studies were paid for by Bayer CropLife, because EU agencies generally don’t fund such studies (though they do give millions a year to environmentalist groups). Voila! Anti-pesticide activists can challenge and dismiss the well-documented experimental results – and the EFSA can ignore the results in reaching its latest conclusions on risks to bees that are not attracted to neonic-protected crops. All because of a guidance document that EU member states never approved!

Unfortunately, bad science and regulatory policy are not confined only to the other side of the Atlantic. HealthCanada recently imposed a phased-in ban on another relatively new neonic pesticide. It did so using an EU-like Catch-22 approach, despite any actual evidence of real-world harm – and without considering insect infestations, crop losses, the absence of safe alternative pesticides, or the fact that other insecticides actually are harmful to bees and/or aquatic life.

All this suggests there is ample reason to worry about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s own inbred inclinations. A late 2014 EPA study/memorandum contends that neonic pesticides were ineffective in controlling soy crop pests. It was refuted by scientists who had better data and repudiated by the US Department of Agriculture. But EPA did not withdraw or cancel the 2014 soy efficacy memo.

A 2015 preliminary EPA assessment essentially exonerated neonic seed treatments, as posing virtually no risk to bees. But another one said neonics on citrus trees are potentially dangerous, even though neonics as the only solution for "citrus greening” disease that is decimating lemon, orange and grapefruit trees.

These EU, Canadian and EPA actions offer important lessons for Trump-Pruitt pesticide regulators.

* Stick to risk-based standards embedded in U.S. legislation, and avoid any drift toward the "precautionary principle,” which looks only at alleged or inflated risks from using chemicals – never at the risks of not using them, and never at risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using the chemicals.

* Focus on replicable, evidence-based, field-tested science. Don’t let agenda-driven activists pressure EPA (or the Agriculture Department) into excluding the best and most relevant available data.

* Revise or eliminate standards, policies and regulations that were based on less than defensible, real-world data and analyses; that do not fully consider the costs and benefits of using (or not using) available chemicals; or that fail to balance demonstrated agricultural, consumer and environmental considerations.

EPA policies on neonics and other issues would be a perfect place to begin changing the way Washington works.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.

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Timothy Birdnow

Now old Hillary's electoral prospects were dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of her loss was certified across these United States and signed by the Electors of the College of gentlemen and ladies appointed to the task. It was called by the Associated Press on election night in November, and that is good upon Change for anything the venerable news outlet put it's hand to. Hillary's prospects were dead as a door nail.

Obama knew she was finished? Of course he did. Obama and Hillary were partners in crime for I don't know how many years.

Well, actually I do; since Obama managed to snatch the nomination from old Hillary back in 2008.

Oh! But she was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Hillary! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within her froze her husband's randy ardor, nipped her pointed nose, shriveled her cheek, stiffened her gait; made her eyes red, her thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in her grating voice. A frosty rime was on her head, and on her eyebrows, and her wiry chin. Se carried her own low temperature always about with her; she iced her office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas. Her pantsuits and Mao jackets were flecked with frost.

And the same could be said of Obama, the old community organizer, who, if he could work his will, would have had every "bitter clinger" in Middle America boiled in his own motor oil and garnished with a dollop of high sculpture coal.

When told of her loss by John Podesta Hillary proclaimed "Bah!" said she "Humbug!" "Are there no prisons?" "No Union sweat shops?" "How could we not find enough votes in those places?"

She bemoaned the inconvenience of picking men's pockets without the government access to back it up.

At which she began devising a devious scheme; blame the Russians for doing what she herself had failed to do, steal the election.

All the Democrats got onboard, from Obama to the CIA and even old the F.B.I.'s Fezziwig Comey. The fake news media turned even bluer than when Hillary was present, crying out from every window at passers-by "Trump and the Russians stole the election!" And claims were made, claims heard by a friend who heard from a friend, who heard from another that the shadowy Russians had tampered with our election. Obama even uttered a threat to retaliate at a time of our choosing (boldly plagiarizing George W. Bush.)

After downing a full quart of vodka as was her custom and settling in for a winter's nap Hillary was awakened from her stupor to find her bed curtains drawn back and found herself face to face with an unearthly visitor.

It was like a child, yet not so like a child but like an old man. At first Hillary thought it was Huma Abedin, but she vaguely resembled Vince Foster, and also looked more like Monica Lewinsky.

"I am the ghost of elections past."

"Long past?"

"No, the elections you tampered with in YOUR past."

The Foster/Lewinsky glowed with the light of truth, and carried with her/him (now HERE is a transgendered person, thought the old lag) a conical hat.

"Put that ridiculous hat on your head; you're blinding me!"

"That is the light of truth. Would you extinguish the Truth?"

"Hell yes, if it means I can be President!"

Hillary was compelled to take hold of the cloak of the spirit and leave the room in her night clothes (and was, thankfully to all, invisible.)

Upon leaving her Chappaqua digs Hillary saw a great host, spirits wandering in the wind.

"Who are these spirits wandering in the Earth like this?"

The Ghose replied;

"These are the spirits of the deceased. They wander the Earth awaiting elections where they are granted life anew as Democratic voters."

"Oh." It made perfect sense to Hillary; she even recognized a few of them from previous elections.

The spirit conducted her first to Nairobi Kenya.

There in 2006 she witnessed her former boss, Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow member of the U.S. Senate, tampering with the Kenyan election. Obama went to Kenya to openly campaign for Raila Odinga, neo-Marxist and radical Muslim and fellow Luo tribe member. Obama appointed an aid to act as special liaison to Odinga canadafreepress.com/article/obama-and-odinga<http://canadafreepress.com/article/obama-and-odinga> and, when the other O lost, he was quite put out. Odinga claimed fraud and called for violence, which erupted across the country leading to the deaths of many Kenyans and the destruction of much property. Over 300 Christian churches were burned by Odinga's Muslim followers. A power sharing arrangement was enacted with Odinga becoming Prime Minister (at the behest of the U.S.) and repeated attempts have been made to install Odinga as President. That effort was ongoing through Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State and is still happening today. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2013/03/205553.htm

U.S. financing of election "reforms" in Kenya amount to $20 million dollars in "aid".
https://researchfunding.duke.edu/kenya-electoral-assistance-program-keap-2017

Then in 2010 Hillary and Obama violated the Siljander Amendment in a push to enshrine abortion in the Kenyan constitution.
http://www.lifenews.com/2011/12/16/obamas-push-to-legalize-abortion-in-kenya-broke-u-s-law/ This is tampering at the highest level, and the spirit told Hillary so. She replied "Humbug!"

So the Spirit took her to Honduras.

There she was shown the drama of the ouster of communist President Manuel Zalaya, who sought to overturn the Honduran constitution and install himself President-for-life.
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/06/28/wsj-white-house-tried-to-prevent-honduran-presidents-ouster/

Zalaya was term limited, but wanted more. He tried to violate the constitution by holding a referendum to get rid of that pesky term limit. He lost in court, with the Honduran Supreme Court ultimately ordering his removal from office (as he had no intention of obeying either the Court order nor the orders of his legislature.) In a perfectly legal fashion the other branches of government ordered his removal and the military carried it out. Led by Hillary, the U.S. branded this a "coup" and demanded Zalaya's return to power.

Hillary was adamant that Zalaya be returned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/world/americas/31honduras.html

"During a half-hour telephone call last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton took a leading role, making it clear to Mr. Micheletti that the United States was growing impatient with the stalemate and demanding that democracy be restored.

(Interim Honduran President) Mr. Micheletti later joked with his aides that she stuck so close to her message it appeared she had a limited vocabulary.


"I kept trying to explain our position to her,” he said, according to officials close to the talks, "but all she kept

saying was, ‘Restitution, restitution, restitution.’ ”

End excerpt.

Zalaya was later allowed to return to Honduras but not to power, a result of U.S. pressure. The end result was an eruption of lawlessness and chaos that triggered a mass migration of people - especially young people - from Honduras to the United States, where the Obama Administration immediately scattered the refugees across the country.

To this Hillary responded "It's all humbug, I tell you!"

So the Lewinsky Foster figure took her to Israel.

There in 2015 the United States under her boss Obama spent $300,000 to get Benjamin Netanyahu defeated.
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/congress-investigating-obama-admin-funded-campaign-unseat-israeli-pm/

"But I didn't have anything to do with that!"

"No" the Spirit replied "but those who are helping you make the claim now did."

So the Spirit led on.

To Egypt, where Clinton and Obama helped drive Hosni Mubarak from power in the so-called "Arab spring" by training the young protesters on community organizing. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/revolution-in-cairo/inside-april6-movement/

"In December 2008, one April 6 member visited the United States to take part in a State Department-organized "Alliance of Youth Movements Summit" in New York City. According to a recently released Wikileaks cable, the activist said he discussed with other activists there techniques to evade government surveillance and harassment."

End excerpt.

To Libya where Hillary's own policy of driving the erstwhile U.S. ally Moammar Khadafy from power led to the rise of ISIS.

To London where American banking giants Citigroup and Morgan Stanley as well as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan donated massive sums of money to defeat the Brexit vote.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/11/official-pro-european-union-campaign-is-part-funded-by-goldman-s/

"But that didn't have anything to do with the U.S. government" Hillary protested.

"They took TARP money from your government and then attempted to influence a foreign election" the Spirit replied.

On and on they moved, to Belarus, to Bolivia, to Nicaragua. Everywhere the hand of the Hillary Obama machine was evident, heavily pressed on the body politic.

"Remove me!" Hillary exclaimed, "I cannot bear it!" At which she tried to smother the Spirit with his/her cap.

In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Hillary observed that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over her, she seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head.

The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Hillary pressed it down with all her force, she could not hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.

After a moment, in which Hillary's eyes moved in opposing directions crazily, the apparition was gone.

Did you expect more? Did you expect Hillary to embrace the light and turn from her ways? Come on; this is Hillary we're talking about.

Hillary remained true to her nature, shaking down contributors and manipulating supporters and media alike. She would become a byword, a cautionary tale, an bad luck charm. It was said of her that if anyone knew how to Scrooge over the American People it was Hillary.

God help us, Everyone!

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Timothy Birdnow

In an otherwise fine piece at American Thinker Andrew Solomon makes a serious misstep speaking about California and plans by the moonbats to resist the Trump program:

"And so they will double down on dumb, as they always do, misinterpreting their own nation. Bookended as they are, appropriately so, on the left side of the map, they will now spin tales as the "new resistance," with themselves as brave little fighters who have now sworn to fight the federal government. It will be interesting when they run into the same problem Jan Brewer did – Brewer being the then-governor from Arizona, who fought Obama to actually enforce the law and challenged the government to stop the drug cartels from entering her state illegally. The law in question was ironically found unconstitutional. Trump should step right into that fight, head on, and get into California's face for violating federal law, knowing that the courts cannot backtrack on their own precedent. And he should do it soon rather than wait. Get your boot print firmly on the neck of these political insurgents, Donald, and bring down the full weight of the federal government on each of them.

And if they want to try the same thing with having a statewide Obamacare after Trump removes it nationally, I say make the national program so good, so inexpensive and competitive, that California goes bankrupt trying to compete as people vacate the state for good."

End excerpt.

First it is a mistake to think California will go the way of Arizona here; liberals live under a different set of rules than they impose on the rest of us, and where Jan Brewer was absolutely committed to obeying the law the California left will simply sneer at it. Arizona's immigration law was almost identical to the Federal law, after all, and was intended to simply enforce the laws our good masters in Washington chose to ignore. When a court struck them down Brewer did not simply impose them anyway. But the leftists in California most certainly will.

Liberals are huge hypocrites, and don't care about their hypocrisy. They always have two sets of rules, one for themselves and another for the rest of us.

And they will most certainly put up a fight in a very different way than Jan Brewer and Arizona did. They will judge shop. They will tangle things up in court while carrying on with their sancturary policies. In the end trump will be forced to take some punative action and the media will portray him as a monster, a tyrant similar to Hitler, who runs roughshod over the rights of the States. That they all hate states' rights will be immaterial, and no other state could so disrespect Washington, but that won't matter. Again, they are hypocrites.

And we do not want California to fail, any more than we want a puss-filled growth to fail and spill the contents into the blood stream. The mountain states are turning blue thanks to expatriated Californians, and that is a big problem. Having wrecked the Golden State they now seek to wreck Golden Colorado. And they have been so successful that a part of Colorado tried to seceed from the rest of the state to maintain the traditional values of old Colorado. The move failed, but it showed what is happening to this once pristine and wonderful place.

And bear in mind; Hillary probably won the popular vote (though that's debatable given the number of illegal votes cast nationwide) and that was in no small measure because of all the leftist screwballs in California. While California is a big electoral college hurdle, imagine what will happen if these screwballs leave the nest and colonize other states! Like gangrene they will move into healthy limbs and eventually kill the host.

That host, of course, are these United States.

So we should want to keep them in California. I advocate extending the wall with Mexico, turn it north and have it run along the Nevada border, and bifurcate the West Coast from the rest of America. If any of them try to leave they should be stopped by armed guards. Force them to stew in their own juices.

There is a movement in Californai to seceed from the Union. I say wish them a fond farewell! We'll see how long they continue to welcome illegal aliens.

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Brian Birdnow

By the time the readers view this column the electors will have cast their votes, crushed liberal hopes and named Donald Trump the 45th President of the United States, unless hell freezes over, due, of course, to global warming. While much ink has already been spilled, with more to come, in trying to put this into perspective we shall have to wait, unfortunately, for a few years to really grasp what has happened and what this means in the longer run. Do not forget that eight years ago we faced a new paradigm with the Democrats dominating behind a charismatic leader, and a broken, bedraggled Republican Party reduced to impotence and obstructionism, while barely managing to stay relevant in the new era. Much can happen in a few years, as the formerly charismatic Barack Obama would admit in a moment of candor. What we can say is that the unthinkable did really happen. Donald Trump won the Presidency, the Republicans easily held Congress and the Senate, and the GOP issued the Democrats a thrashing in down ballot races, winning a resounding national victory.

While the political scientists and the pundits search for a common denominator here, we can comment on a few clear themes. While Donald Trump won the election, we must note that his numbers were quite interesting. The fact of the matter is that Trump ran behind the Republican Party at the national level, finishing behind Hillary Clinton, in absolute numbers while the GOP won a national victory. Furthermore, Trump got 58% of the white vote last month, while the unlamented Mitt Romney actually got 59 percent of the white vote in 2012. So, Trump did no better with his natural core constituency than did Romney four years ago. Trump was able to turn working class white men and women to his standard, in stark contrast to the supposition that the working class would turn out to vote Democratic, particularly women who would find Trump personally repulsive, and would vote for Clinton in vast numbers.

So, what do we make of this phenomenon? As Mark Shields, the PBS commentator said on election night, "Well, there must be a lot more people in this country who really dislike Hillary Clinton than we thought.” The Democrats might take cold comfort in this possibility. In truth, Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. She never corrected her 2008 flaws in the sense that her shrill speeches failed to fire up a crowd, and her ordinary speaking style was plodding and dull. Her handlers knew this and tried to keep her off the campaign trail, and stuck to tightly managed events, leading to the charge that she was packaged, and processed. In addition to these flaws, the old Hillary negatives showed up, concerning her dubious likeability, her secretive and manipulative nature, her tendency to scold and hector the electorate, and a remarkably disingenuous nature, bordering on hypocrisy that helped lead the party down the road to ruin. So, the Democrats might be on solid ground to think that the voters disliked Hillary Clinton more than they disdained Donald Trump.

The Democrats should, however, not put too much emphasis on a poor candidate, and they had better get over the blaming of the voters, as well. This election did show the growing chasm between the working-class voters, the "silent majority”, to borrow a Nixon term, and the increasingly unhinged cultural left wing in the country. The NRA and other Second Amendment groups had good reason to fear a Clinton victory despite her bobbing and weaving when questioned on the issue. When she opined that "The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment” Mrs. Clinton dropped the mask and drove thousands of recreational shooters and sportsmen deeper into the Republican Party. When, seeking to fire enthusiasm among the "Green” voters Hillary remarked that when she won the election she would put the coal companies out of business, and thousands of coal miners out of their jobs. Whether she meant this or whether it was campaign hot air we’ll never know. It certainly opened the Democrats up to the charge that they cared only for their environmentalist wing, and cared nothing for the blue-collar workers who would lose these jobs when the coal companies were driven to the mat. The candidate spoke very little during the campaign about wage stagnation, cost of living, the eternal health care problem, or other dinner table issues. The ordinary American, instead, watched liberalism descending further into certifiable cookery, insisting on the "right” of grown men to use the girl’s restroom in public facilities.

This takes us to the crux of the matter. Some of the more responsible organs of the cultural-political left in this country have argued that the election represented a pushback of a sort against the cultural transformation that Barack Obama promised back in 2008. The St. Louis Post Dispatch, for instance, stated that the liberals were playing with fire when they bowed to the LGBT pressure and made public restrooms the new battleground. The Post sensibly argued that the public was very slowly digesting gay marriage and kiss-ins at the local Chik-Fil-A. The paper stated that the bathroom brouhaha was a case of pushing too far and too fast, and that the voters might take this grudge into the booth on Election Day. While this formulation of the problem offers a certain logic, it ignores a larger reality.

This election is important for the fact that working class whites, and Catholic voters have finally realized what the liberals, and their political vehicle, the Democratic Party, actually think of them. The working-class people have woken up to the fact that the liberals malign them regularly as hillbillies, lowbrows, and ignoramuses. The Catholics, who voted for Obama in numbers greater than the general population in 2008, are written off as Bible thumpers, prudes, and mind numbed robots, taking their orders from male ecclesiastics. The WikiLeaks releases prove that beyond a doubt.

As we said earlier, it is too soon to predict what effect this election will have on our permanent political universe. The working class will almost certainly lean more Republican, while the Catholics might stay Republican, or return to their Democratic roots. These things remain to be seen, but Pelosi, Schumer, Warren, and Bernie Sanders will not help the Democrats here.

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Jack Kemp

Hey, Rocky. Watch me pull Presidential Electors out of my hat...Ooops. Wrong Hat!

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Dana Mathewson

Moochie wants her anonymity back. Yeah, sure.

http://nypost.com/2016/12/20/michelle-obama-ready-for-anonymity-after-painful-election/

I like this part:
Still, she said she and the president are supporting President-elect Donald Trump’s transition because "it is important for the health of this nation that we support the commander-in-chief.”
She added that the same thing wasn’t done for her husband, but "this is what’s best for the country.”

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Dana Mathewson

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/12/20/underwater-hebrew-tablet-reveals-biblical-era-ruler-judea.html

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Dana Mathewson

This from Powerline:

At the heart of liberal utopianism is the concept that through political exertion you can have a perfect society without tragic outcomes of any kind. This is one reason why liberalism rebels against human nature. (In fact, I think we should routinely refer to liberals as "human nature deniers.” Sauce for the goose and all that.)

"It is this ineluctable characteristic that explains why liberals are having trouble making it through the five stages of grief over Hillary’s election face plant. Acceptance? No way."

By the great Steven Hayward: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/12/being-a-liberal-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry.php

Being a Liberal Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
At the heart of liberal utopianism is the concept that through political exertion you can have a perfect society...

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Dana Mathewson

Self-delusion on steroids!

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2016/12/20/whoopi-goldberg-implies-is-more-informed-than-president-elect-trump.html

Whoopi Goldberg thinks she can take on Donald Trump.

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Dana mathewson

From Urgent Agenda:

Good stuff!

http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/12/19/caddell-grace-missing-obamas-leave-white-house/

NO STYLE – FROM BREITBART: Political pollster and analyst Pat Caddell told Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday that, concerning the Obamas leaving the White House, "We are watching this ending here. It’s not quite as bad as the Clintons … but the lack of grace, that’s what’s missing here.” Caddell continued, "The Bush people, they had a certain conduct. … George W. Bush kept his mouth shut about Obama forever. What’s Obama doing saying, ‘I’m going to be back here right after vacation. … I need to be in Washington. I need to comment’? Where’s the part where you gracefully leave the stage?” Additionally, pointing out that, post-election, no one in major media was fired or demoted for getting the election so wrong. "None of them have been fired. Are you kidding?” he said. "The pollsters who are bad,” he continued, "what are they doing? They’re back with new polls this week.” Said Caddell, "The media has forgotten that the election even happened. They are giving no ground on anything.” He is absolutely right. The left is increasingly contemptuous of elections or any other democratic norms. Their concept of democracy is that it's something that happens only when their side wins.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/bill-clinton-trump-hillary-loss-232803

ANOTHER ONE WITH NO CLASS – FROM THE POLITICO: President-elect Donald Trump "doesn’t know much,” former President Bill Clinton told a local newspaper earlier this month, but "one thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him.” Clinton spoke to a reporter from The Record-Review, a weekly newspaper serving the towns of Bedford and Pound Ridge, New York, not far from the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York. The former president held court on Dec. 10 in Pleasantville, New York, where he took questions from the reporter and other customers inside a small bookstore. On the question of Russian cyberattacks damaging the candidacy of his wife, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the former president said "you would need to have a single-digit IQ not to recognize what was going on.” But he blamed FBI Director James Comey for her loss, telling those gathered around him that he had "cost her the election” by announcing with less than two weeks to go before the election that the bureau was examining fresh evidence related to her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. I can understand disappointing. Fantasy is another story. Bill Clinton knows full well what happened and whose fault it was. Maybe he's just trying to avoid another family blowup.

A stone slab found off the coast of Israel has finally revealed the name of the ruler during one of the most iconic moments in Jewish history: the Bar Kokhba revolt.

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Dana Mathewson

(Hat Tip to Chet Kozlowski)

Hi, Folks. It's the Holiday Season and not everything needs to be about politics. Well, not about the recent election, anyhow. My old friend Chet sent me this and I wanted to pass it along.

A government employee sat in his office, and out of boredom, decided to see what was inside his old filing cabinet. He poked through the contents and came across an old brass lamp. "This will look good on my mantel," he said, and took it home with him.

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Paul Driessen

Over the next couple of weeks, many conservatives are likely to get a bellyful of bombast from liberal office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if these revelers are too much imbued with holiday spirits. Democrat loyalists are having serious meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, especially those with climate and environmental responsibilities.

My column this week offers folks a little intellectual ammunition that they might find helpful during those "spirited” discussions.

Environmentalist insurance policies

Intellectual ammo for holiday party responses to claims that you need meteorite insurance

Paul Driessen

Many liberals went into denial, outrage and riot mode after November 8. Now they’re having meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees with climate and environmental responsibilities:

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry at Energy, Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt for EPA, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at State, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke at Interior. As Department of Agriculture secretary and multiple assistant, deputy assistant and other senior level positions are filled, the meltdown will likely raise sea levels by several feet.

It’s even worse than "white supremacists” and "Russian hackers” rigging and stealing the election. Having these people at the helm will be an "existential threat to the planet,” say meltdowners.

A typical over-the-top reaction came from an aptly named spokesperson for radical pressure groups and five-alarm climate scientists that feed at the trough of taxpayer and tax-exempt foundation funding "This is the wealthiest, most corporate, most climate-denying cabinet in history,” snorted Kiernan Suckling, director of the anti-development Center for Biological Diversity.

After eight years of anti-fossil-fuel, anti-growth, anti-job, anti-blue-collar policies – and the Left’s fervent wish for eight more years under Hillary Clinton – any Trumpian shift is bound to look that way to them.

So we’re likely to get a bellyful of bombast from like-minded (or ill-informed) office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if they’re too much imbued with holiday spirits. At the risk of offending those who do not share an NRA perspective on gun control (stance, grip, sight alignment, trigger control), here’s a little intellectual ammunition that conservatives may find helpful during those "spirited” discussions.

The United States needs to reduce taxes and regulations that have hobbled energy development and job creation – threatening to put federal bureaucrats firmly in control of our states, communities, livelihoods and living standards. However, as I noted recently, these essential, long overdue changes will come with no reduction in air, water or overall environmental quality standards that ensure our health and welfare. They will address rogue agency actions that actually impair our living standards, health and wellbeing.
Environmentalist insurance policies

Intellectual ammo for holiday party responses to claims that you need meteorite insurance

Paul Driessen

Many liberals went into denial, outrage and riot mode after November 8. Now they’re having meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees with climate and environmental responsibilities:

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry at Energy, Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt for EPA, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at State, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke at Interior. As Department of Agriculture secretary and multiple assistant, deputy assistant and other senior level positions are filled, the meltdown will likely raise sea levels by several feet.

It’s even worse than "white supremacists” and "Russian hackers” rigging and stealing the election. Having these people at the helm will be an "existential threat to the planet,” say meltdowners.

A typical over-the-top reaction came from an aptly named spokesperson for radical pressure groups and five-alarm climate scientists that feed at the trough of taxpayer and tax-exempt foundation funding "This is the wealthiest, most corporate, most climate-denying cabinet in history,” snorted Kiernan Suckling, director of the anti-development Center for Biological Diversity.

After eight years of anti-fossil-fuel, anti-growth, anti-job, anti-blue-collar policies – and the Left’s fervent wish for eight more years under Hillary Clinton – any Trumpian shift is bound to look that way to them.

So we’re likely to get a bellyful of bombast from like-minded (or ill-informed) office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if they’re too much imbued with holiday spirits. At the risk of offending those who do not share an NRA perspective on gun control (stance, grip, sight alignment, trigger control), here’s a little intellectual ammunition that conservatives may find helpful during those "spirited” discussions.

The United States needs to reduce taxes and regulations that have hobbled energy development and job creation – threatening to put federal bureaucrats firmly in control of our states, communities, livelihoods and living standards. However, as I noted recently, these essential, long overdue changes will come with no reduction in air, water or overall environmental quality standards that ensure our health and welfare. They will address rogue agency actions that actually impair our living standards, health and wellbeing.

Indeed, nearly all these autocratic government actions are based on some variation of the infamous "precautionary principle.” This infinitely malleable pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no cause-effect link can be proven.

Even worse, the bogus principle looks only at often-inflated risks from using chemicals, energy systems or other technologies that activists or regulators dislike – never at the risks of not using them; never at risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using them. Sustainability "guidelines” are very similar.

Just as perversely, if the Powers that Wannabe like a technology, they ignore or actively suppress any harmful impacts. For instance, since wind turbines can supposedly replace fossil fuels, they ignore bird and bat deaths, human health damage from infrasound, and the fact that essential metals are mined and processed under horrendous conditions by men, women and children in African and Asian countries. https://www.cfact.org/2016/10/08/blood-cell-phones-and-teslas/

Those environmental, health, human rights, and child labor violations are far away (literally not in their backyards), and thus can be conveniently ignored.

So can the poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death perpetrated and perpetuated by extremist groups that campaign tirelessly to shut down industries in developed nation communities – and prevent the poorest nations on Earth from gaining access to modern technologies that improve and save lives.

Eco-extremists claim they can save lives by preventing higher temperatures, rising seas, and more storms, droughts and crop failures due to "dangerous manmade climate change” decades from now. So they block fossil fuel power plants that provide reliable, affordable energy for modern homes, hospitals, schools and factories that improve health and living standards – and end up killing millions right now, year after year.

Climate change has been real throughout history. Sometimes beneficial (moderately warm, with ample rainfall), sometimes destructive (decades-long droughts or cold spells, glacial epochs with mile-thick ice sheets crushing entire continents), it is driven by solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other powerful natural forces that humans cannot control. Carbon dioxide may play a role, but only a minor one, and rising atmospheric CO2 levels make crops, grasslands and forests grow faster and better.

The "unprecedented” manmade climate cataclysms that Al Gore and Barack Obama promised are not happening. For example, we were supposed to get more frequent, powerful and destructive storms; instead, a record 11 years have passed without one category 3-5 hurricane making landfall in the USA.

To attack fracking and natural gas use, bureaucrats claim methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – but won’t admit that it is 1/235th as prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere (0.00017%), and at least 1/600,000th as prevalent as water vapor (1-4%), the most important GHG.

Their "social cost of carbon” schemes assign ever-higher monetary impacts to every climate and weather problem they can possibly attribute to using carbon-based fuels – but totally ignore the enormous and undeniable benefits of utilizing oil, natural gas and coal that still provide 82% of US and global energy.

They’re convinced their anti-energy diktats will "save the planet,” by shutting down US power plants and factories, despite vastly greater emissions from China, India and a hundred other nations that are rapidly expanding their fossil fuel use, to lift billions more people out of abject poverty, disease and malnutrition.

The same anti-technology activists and bureaucrats also detest biotechnology and genetically modified crops that require less water and can battle insect predators with a tiny fraction of the insecticides required for conventional grains and vegetables. They equally despise another GM marvel, Golden Rice, which prevents Vitamin A Deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year. http://www.allowgoldenricenow.org/

Instead of applauding the reduced blindness, malnutrition, starvation and death these crops can bring, precautionary and sustainability extremists obsess about imaginary risks of eating them, allowing more millions to die unnecessarily, year after year. It’s not their kids, after all. Why should they be concerned?

The same callous, phony ethics prevail on the disease front. Eco-activists support bed nets – but not insecticide spraying to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and certainly not DDT, the most powerful, longest-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Sprayed once every six months on the walls of mud or cinderblock houses, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite, and kills any that land.

But radical ideologues focus on trivial, irrelevant side effects that "some researchers say could be linked” to DDT use – and let 600,000 parents and children die excruciating deaths every year from malaria.

Every one of these anti-technology, "precautionary” attitudes is the environmentalist equivalent of protecting American kids from powerful chemicals, fatigue, nausea, hair loss, and increased risk of illness and infection – by banning chemotherapy drugs, and just letting the little cancer patients die.

They are the equivalent of requiring you to carry a $10,000-a-year insurance policy that covers you only if you are killed by a meteorite – or by a raptor or tyrannosaur. At least meteorite risks are real, if extremely remote.

Raptors and T rexes exist only in our imaginations, special effects computers and movie theaters – much like the manmade climate chaos and other precautionary extremism that come from computer models and PR hype, and drive too many of our policies, laws and regulations.

Have fun at your holiday parties. This season promises to be even more animated than most.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.




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Indeed, nearly all these autocratic government actions are based on some variation of the infamous "precautionary principle.” This infinitely malleable pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no cause-effect link can be proven.

Even worse, the bogus principle looks only at often-inflated risks from using chemicals, energy systems or other technologies that activists or regulators dislike – never at the risks of not using them; never at risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using them. Sustainability "guidelines” are very similar.

Just as perversely, if the Powers that Wannabe like a technology, they ignore or actively suppress any harmful impacts. For instance, since wind turbines can supposedly replace fossil fuels, they ignore bird and bat deaths, human health damage from infrasound, and the fact that essential metals are mined and processed under horrendous conditions by men, women and children in African and Asian countries.

Those environmental, health, human rights, and child labor violations are far away (literally not in their backyards), and thus can be conveniently ignored.

So can the poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death perpetrated and perpetuated by extremist groups that campaign tirelessly to shut down industries in developed nation communities – and prevent the poorest nations on Earth from gaining access to modern technologies that improve and save lives.

Eco-extremists claim they can save lives by preventing higher temperatures, rising seas, and more storms, droughts and crop failures due to "dangerous manmade climate change” decades from now. So they block fossil fuel power plants that provide reliable, affordable energy for modern homes, hospitals, schools and factories that improve health and living standards – and end up killing millions right now, year after year.

Climate change has been real throughout history. Sometimes beneficial (moderately warm, with ample rainfall), sometimes destructive (decades-long droughts or cold spells, glacial epochs with mile-thick ice sheets crushing entire continents), it is driven by solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other powerful natural forces that humans cannot control. Carbon dioxide may play a role, but only a minor one, and rising atmospheric CO2 levels make crops, grasslands and forests grow faster and better.

The "unprecedented” manmade climate cataclysms that Al Gore and Barack Obama promised are not happening. For example, we were supposed to get more frequent, powerful and destructive storms; instead, a record 11 years have passed without one category 3-5 hurricane making landfall in the USA.

To attack fracking and natural gas use, bureaucrats claim methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – but won’t admit that it is 1/235th as prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere (0.00017%), and at least 1/600,000th as prevalent as water vapor (1-4%), the most important GHG.

Their "social cost of carbon” schemes assign ever-higher monetary impacts to every climate and weather problem they can possibly attribute to using carbon-based fuels – but totally ignore the enormous and undeniable benefits of utilizing oil, natural gas and coal that still provide 82% of US and global energy.

They’re convinced their anti-energy diktats will "save the planet,” by shutting down US power plants and factories, despite vastly greater emissions from China, India and a hundred other nations that are rapidly expanding their fossil fuel use, to lift billions more people out of abject poverty, disease and malnutrition.

The same anti-technology activists and bureaucrats also detest biotechnology and genetically modified crops that require less water and can battle insect predators with a tiny fraction of the insecticides required for conventional grains and vegetables. They equally despise another GM marvel, Golden Rice, which prevents Vitamin A Deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year.

Instead of applauding the reduced blindness, malnutrition, starvation and death these crops can bring, precautionary and sustainability extremists obsess about imaginary risks of eating them, allowing more millions to die unnecessarily, year after year. It’s not their kids, after all. Why should they be concerned?

The same callous, phony ethics prevail on the disease front. Eco-activists support bed nets – but not insecticide spraying to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and certainly not DDT, the most powerful, longest-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Sprayed once every six months on the walls of mud or cinderblock houses, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite, and kills any that land.

But radical ideologues focus on trivial, irrelevant side effects that "some researchers say could be linked” to DDT use – and let 600,000 parents and children die excruciating deaths every year from malaria.

Every one of these anti-technology, "precautionary” attitudes is the environmentalist equivalent of protecting American kids from powerful chemicals, fatigue, nausea, hair loss, and increased risk of illness and infection – by banning chemotherapy drugs, and just letting the little cancer patients die.

They are the equivalent of requiring you to carry a $10,000-a-year insurance policy that covers you only if you are killed by a meteorite – or by a raptor or tyrannosaur. At least meteorite risks are real, if extremely remote.

Raptors and T rexes exist only in our imaginations, special effects computers and movie theaters – much like the manmade climate chaos and other precautionary extremism that come from computer models and PR hype, and drive too many of our policies, laws and regulations.

Have fun at your holiday parties. This season promises to be even more animated than most.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 01:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Jack Kemp

And there will be a movie out about this in wide distribution on January 6, 2017... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/?ref_=nv_sr_1

From the NY Post

http://nypost.com/2016/12/18/how-this-brilliant-mathematician-made-john-glenn-a-national-hero/

How this brilliant mathematician made John Glenn a national hero

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, taking "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But he got there thanks to a woman, Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who calculated Apollo 11’s trajectory to the moon and back. Johnson was one of many African-American women who advanced the space race but whose fingerprints on history had been all but buried in moon dust — until recently.

In "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” (William Morrow), journalist Margot Lee Shetterly unearths the heroic true tale of the women who worked at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory at a time when "computers” referred not to machines but to humans, and NASA, then called NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), had segregated computing units: the East Area was for whites, the West Area for blacks. Back in September, Shetterly’s book was an instant best seller, and on Christmas Eve, the movie of the same name starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe lands in theaters.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 01:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Timothy Birdnow

Ah, the simple life!

I went down to the Ozark Hilton Friday, ostensibly to make sure everything was buttoned down for the coming winter. Or at least as buttoned down as a place made out of debris can be. A rat pushed through the eaves (and the drop ceiling in the living room) and has been inhabiting my tool shelf. I'm going to have to do something about that little love child. At least he isn't really tearing things up like the last squatter tenant I had there.

For new readers of this website the Ozark Hilton is my affectionate name for the cabin I built out of trash and debris I collected throughout the City of St. Louis. Deep in the hill country of south central Missouri lies a 20 acre patch of land and there sits the Ozark Hilton, the finest shack in the area.. I'm not kidding about that; a drive around the back roads reveals cabins of far lesser quality than my own, and they are clearly inhabited year round. There was a guy who parked two school buses next to each-other and was living there, but he fell on hard times and had to drive his homes away. Be that as it may I'm the rich city slicker at the top of the hill! I have no electricity, no running water, not even an outhouse; I set a toilet seat on top of some cinder blocks to do my business. It's a wonderful system because it is self-cleaning, with the animals removing the waste by my next visit. I heat the OH with a barrel and some wood.

It's, um, rustic.

It is so named because when I first bought the property 16 or more years ago I visited it with my father and we went to a local bar in the small town 15 miles away. A local asked us where we were staying and we said we were camping, to which he replied "oh, you boys are staing in the Ozark Hilton, are you?" The name stuck.

At any rate, I headed to the poshest digs in the county on Friday. Only one problem; time was not on my side. See, at this time of year it gets dark by 4:30 and you have to have all your chores down by then, because you need to get a fire made, cart in enough wood to last through the night, unload the truck with your stuff, and fill all the oil lanterns and get them lit. I like a fair amount of light, so I wind up firing up about ten of them. They all have to be cleaned (the glass globes are usually dirty with soot) and filled and lit. In cold weather the lighters I leave down there freeze up, too, and I have to warm them against my body, usually tucking them into my waistband. I have to do all of that before 4:30 this time of year.

Well, I developed diarrhea and wound up making five pit stops on my normally 3 hour trip. I had to make do with all manner of restrooms, from clean to filthy to one outhouse that was freezing and stunk and which I have become far, far too familiar with over the years (it seems to be a regular stop for me.) It was almost four o'clock by the time I arrived at my lovely cabin in the oaks.

It didn't help that a freezing rain slowed traffic and made the roads slick.

As a result I had to make all haste. Firewood had to be lugged inside, all the lamps lit. It was cold in the cabin and I manaded to warm it rather quickly (my barrel stove does heat the place pretty fast, although it only heats one of the two rooms; the living room just has to remian cold in winter) but it is a lot of work getting it going and not smoking you out. The system I have in place is minimal, with a stovepipe barely poking out of the side of the place, so there is little draw. I cover the barrel top with a Weber kettle grill lid, but the new barrel I put doewn doesn't seem to fit the barbeque pit lids I have, so I have to just brace it up and lean stuff against it to hold it in place. The barrel tends to smoke.

It was after dark when I finally finished lighting my lights. I went to settle in but found the door into the main room had sagged on it's hinges and I couldn't get it to close properly. It is vital to close that door or cold air blows across the cabin and across my tender flesh. I solved the problem by stuffing a bunch of plastic grocery bags and an old pair of pants in the gaps. It worked pretty well, but I couldn't open the door to use the restroom (which consists of another door to the outside which requires no flushing.) I had an empty gallon jug which had contained water, so I made do.

At any rate, it was warm enough but the fire kept me busy. I used to bring books down, but my vision has degenerated and I can no longer read in the low light level of the Ozark Hilton, so I usually bring a portable dvd player and a battery, one of those kind you can jump your car with. Watched a couple of movies between my fire tending. I had hoped to find a disc down there somewhere, as I lost a disc from my Firefly complete series collection, but it was nowhere to be found. The rat probably swiped it for his own nefarious ratty purposes. He likes to steal my stuff; he loves my lighters, and if he can get them he steals them to use as a base for nest building. He takes all kinds of other stuff; candles, empty bottles, what have you. I had an opossum skull I was keeping as a trophy; it's disappeared, and I know that little Obama has added it to his collection of stolen artifacts. I put out some rat poison a few weeks ago, and not only did a rat eat it but he dug the bag full of poison out and ate that too. I hope this isn't the same rat I keep seeing, because if it is I'm going to be the one who has to move out. A rat that can swallow a pound bag of poison is not someone I want to tangle with.

But I didn't seem him/her this weekend, so much the better. Likely he was hiding, huddled down in the cold.

I wish I could have just huddled down and not have to endlessly feed the fire. At one point my knee decided to zig when I wanted to zag, and I fell on my face, cutting my forehead above the right eye. I am no stranger to accidents down there; I shattered my ribcage falling off a ladder, impaled my foot on a rusty nail, was stung half to death by a swarm of yellow jackets, had numerous wasp stings, cuts, etc. I now have cell service, but how do I explain my location in an emergency?

I've had other close shaves and dangers. I have caught the cabin on fire more than once, and had a tough time putting it out. It once happened in winter and my water was frozen solid! I used to use a kerosene heater in the cabin, but once I woke up with a spike driving into my head and stepped outside to vomit - and magically felt better! Carbon monoxide is no joke. I have never used that contraption since (it burned too much expensive fuel anyway.) The dangers of the simplle life are myriad.

Which is precisely why we invented civilization. There is much nostalgia in living simply, but the reality is it's a huge pain in the posterior. A simple thing like turning on a light is difficult to the natural man. I find it a pain, and I'm using store-bought lamps and petroleum-based fuel. Before coal oil the prefered light fuel was whale oil, and it didn't work so well. Prior to that a guy used olive oil or some other vegetable oil, and that had to be produced by farmers. Oh, and it gave very little light. The cold blast kerosene lantern was an amazing invention, far better than those old whale oil jobs. (Better, too, than the older lanterns; I have an old fashioned hot blast lantern, which burns the exhaust from the lamp. It's nowhere near as bright at the cold blast, which sucks air from outside and blows it on the wick to increase the amount of light.)

We may not like it, but civilization makes our lives so much better than it would be in a state of Nature. Nature is cold, hot, hungry, sickly, and laborious and anyone who believes otherwise is kidding himself.

I enjoy getting out in the wild, but I enjoy it because I can return to the comfort of my 21st. century life. I very rarely stay more than one night at the Ozark Hilton, and for good reason.

Let's not forget security. I've never had any trouble down there, but I did once hear something BIG outside the cabin, something that made a cooing sound that turned into a full blown roar. Never have figured out what that was, but I assure you I have never encountered something like that in St. Louis. I've also heard coyotes and I suspect wolves. Oh, and the scariest was a few weeks ago, during hunting season; I went out of the cabin to use the latrine and there was a light on the other side of the hollow! Hunters were camped there (not on my property) and I could probably have had a conversation with them had I hollered. It scared me; you just don't know. I had to rely on Divine protection, because I certainly wasn't packing. The best I could do down there is hit someone with an ax.

Every time I go there I am reminded of the value of this civilization which so many of our people dislike. I dislike it too, in many ways, but I understand it's value, because I voluntarily walk away from it on occasion just to remind myself what it's like. And I bring all the comforts of home with me, or a great many of them. A true state of nature would be far less entertaining.

We should all give thanks for the civilized life. I fear some day our soft and squishy generation is going to find out what it means to be without, when God finally gets fed up with our ingratitutde. One big solar flare would do it, knocking out the power grid and all electronics (which, in this day and age, means everything). It happened in 1859 with the Carrington Event, a coronal mass ejection that would have wiped out our modern civilization were it to happen today. There are other, myriad dangers, be they an asteroid strike, an interstellar dust storm, or a nuclear war or pandemic. Those last are more than a possibiility, with Mankind playing with forces he does not really understand. CRISPR technology could lead to the easy bake oven version of the Black Death. This while civilization is overspecializing, becoming too dependent on the technology which is allowing us to fashion our own guillotine.

If it comes down to it we may all wind up in places like the Ozark Hilton. Thanksfully, for me it probably won't be for long as the medication I need to survive won't be available. I could wind up one of the lucky ones.

I doubt the young generation of snowflakes and participation trophy recipients will last long under these conditions.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Wil Wirtanen

http://personalliberty.com/trophy-toting-progressives-destroying-spirit-made-america-great/

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