September 26, 2019

Turnabout is Fair Play, Joe

Timothy Birdnow

Turnabout is fair play - and can be so sweet!

Grab Your Popcorn: RNC Calls on Joe Biden to Release All His Calls With Ukraine…And China

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Antenorans in the Senate Vote to Overrule State of Emergency on Border

Timothy Birdnow

Gateway Pundit reports on an act of betrayal in the Senate (what else is new).

The Senate voted on overturning the declaration of emergency on the border, and my very own Senator Roy Blunt (D, er, R Mo) has again voted for this.

I turned against Roy Blunt years ago. He is a despicable weasel, a guy who would sell us out for a five dollar donation. I really wish we had someone good to challenge him in the primaries.

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Ukrainegate Just another Political Hit

Judson Phillips observes:

The "whistleblower"

complaint against President Trump is pure political theater. This is from the New York Times: "Mr. Atkinson also found reason to believe that the whistle-blower might not support the re-election of Mr. Trump and made clear that the complainant was not in a position to directly listen to the call or see the memo that reconstructed it before it was made public,."

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September 24, 2019

Is Joe Namath's concussion cure also the cure for our Veterans?

by Jack Kemp

You may be familiar with this NFL Colts quarterback who quit this week because of CTE brain damage. Wikipedia states that:
 
BEGIN QUOTE

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head injuries.[1] Symptoms may include behavioral problems, mood problems, and problems with thinking.[1] Symptoms typically do not begin until years after the injuries.[2] CTE often gets worse over time and can result in dementia.[2] It is unclear if the risk of suicide is altered.[1]
Most documented cases have occurred in athletes involved in contact sports such as boxing, American football, professional wrestling, ice hockey, rugby and soccer.[1][4] Other risk factors include being in the military, prior domestic violence, and repeated banging of the head.[1] The exact amount of trauma required for the condition to occur is unknown.[1] Definitive diagnosis can only occur at autopsy.[1] Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a form of tauopathy.[1]

END OF QUOTE

This is the same painful condition drove Junior Seau of the New England Patriots to suicide years ago - and I suspect a great many veterans who got hit bad by concussions from IED bombs while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I found an article where Joe Namath, the famed NY Jets Hall of Fame quarterback who is now in his 70s who has been SUCCESSFULLY treated for CTE by using a hyperbaric chamber, the same device skin divers used to equalize the pressure in their lungs and bloodstream if they rise to the surface too quickly from a deep dive and get the bends. As I say, this may well do some veterans a lot of good and end such symptoms like  mental confusion, violence, suicidal tendencies, etc. I don't have any direct contact info here, but there are many details in the article. Hyperbaric treatments have been said by advocates to greatly stimulate new blood vessel growth in human brains (thus, more oxygen and nutrients delivered to damaged brains).

Here is the link to the full Joe Namath article from ESPN. Namath tried various prescription drugs and "self medication alcohol," all to no avail.

And - also - here are some quotes from an article excerpted from the book Incurable Me: Why the Best Medical Research Does Not Make It into Clinical Practice by Kenneth Stoller, M.D.

BEGIN QUOTE

...in 2012, Harch demonstrated use of HBOT to treat blast-induced, postconcussion syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder...


In 2009, and again in 2010, Paul Harch, MD, Director of the LSU (Louisiana State University) Hyperbaric Medicine Department, delivered testimony to both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees reminding them that the epidemic of suicides among military veterans was most likely due to cocktail of "off-label” antidepressants they were being prescribed—black-boxed antidepressants, none of which are approved for treating TBI...


The DOD and VA medicine are unfaltering – they insist that there is no treatment for TBI, while billions of dollars continue to be expended on black-boxed drugs and long-term care of treatable TBIs. Meanwhile, female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women; for female veterans between 17 and 25, the rate is twelve times the national rate...

END OF QUOTE

Lastly, here is fifteen minute testimony on Youtube by a West Point graduate and Iraqi War veteran whose concussions were greatly helped by hyperbaric treatments.

He states that eighteen different drugs didn't help, that these drugs were capable of causing suicidal thoughts which on of the eighteen did to him until he stopped taking it. The Army officer tried a bunch of different therapies, including psychological ones, art therapy and spiritual exercises. He also talks about his military and family life stress. A Veterans' charity got him to Dr. Paul Harch who evaluated his brain, followed by hyperbaric treatments. This bright, articulate officer said that 3,000 vets have been helped by this therapy. And he states it is used in Russia, China, England and Israel.

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How Much Carbon Dioxide is Natural?

Timothy Birdnow

On Facebook Tim McNabb asked the following question:

Serious question. Are volcanic eruptions less "greenhouse gassey" than those humans make. If so, how so (greater, less, more or less abundant)...

This prompted a reply from Tim's resident liberal:

Kevin Nelstead

Being that climate change is rather complex and still not completely understood, I have no problem with people disputing the "consensus" on climate change. I think the evidence that humans have, and will continue to, effected Earth's climate is rather convincing, but I am quite willing to discuss this with those who disagree with me.

Having said that, I will say that I believe that this meme, variations of which have been floating around the internet for years, is utter nonsense.

According to the US Geological Survey, all the world's volcanoes emit somewhere between 0.13 and 0.44 gigatons of CO2 per year. Humans, on the other hand, release about 35 gigatons of CO2 per year, which is somewhere between 80 and 270 times what all volcanoes in the world produce. So to say that Mt Agung produced as much CO2 in a few minutes as humans do in a year is ludicrous. Instead, the opposite is true: humans produced more CO2 in a few hours, primarily by burning fossil fuels, than a large volcanic eruption does.

https:// volcanoes.usgs.g ov/vhp/ gas_climate.html

I left the following reply:

We don't know how much co2 is put ouhttps://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/ice-covered-icelandic-volcano-may-emit-more-carbon-dioxide-all-country-s-othert by volcanism. From the article:

"Scientists estimate that volcanoes worldwide emit, on average, about 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 per day (only about 2% of the amount that human activity causes). Yet that estimate may be far too low because it’s based on measurements from only 33 of the world’s most volcanically active peaks (only three of which are ice-covered), among the 1500 or so that have erupted in the past 10,000 years. More data gathered from Iceland—as well as Antarctica, which is home to dozens of ice-smothered volcanoes—may help scientists come up with a better estimate for volcanic CO2 emissions."
I rather suspect we really don't know how much carbon is being put into the atmosphere either, despite confident predictions; most are based on measurements taken at Mauna Kea observatory. They take the older numbers and subtract them from the new. (Of course, Mauna Kea is an active volcanoe..) But even if we can accept the numbers as Gospel we don't know how much nature is producing. See https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/discovery-of-massive-volcanic-co2-emissions-puts-damper-on-global-warming-theory/

From the article:

"This major problem with the AGW principle has been rationalized away by consensus climate scientists who insist, based supposedly reliable research, that volcanic emissions are minuscule in comparison to human-induced CO2 emissions (Gerlach 1991).

Terrance Gerlach’s volcanic CO2 calculation was based on just 7 actively erupting land volcanoes and three actively erupting ocean floor hydrothermal vents (seafloor hot geysers).

Utilizing gas emission data from this very limited number of volcanic features, Gerlach estimated that the volume of natural volcanic CO2 emissions is 100 to 150 times less than the volume of man-made CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and therefore of no consequence.

To put this calculation process into perspective, the Earth is home to 1,500 land volcanoes and 900,000 seafloor volcanoes/hydrothermal vents.

By sampling just an extremely small percent of these volcanic features it is impossible to imagine that the calculation is correct.

Especially knowing that volcanic activity varies greatly from area to area, volcano to volcano, and through time. Utilizing just 0.001 percent (10/901,500) of Earth’s volcanic features to calculate volcanic CO2 emissions does not inspire confidence in the resulting value."

So the National Geological Survey is just guessing at all that. We don't know how much carbon dioxide the Earth emits. Also, how do you calculate human emissions? Do you believe we are getting accurate data from Communist China? From any country in Subsaharan Africa?

It's all guesswork. And the guesses coming out of government are worth very little, as government has a vested interest in promoting this theory because it promotes their power and control and enrichment. Also, you aren't going to get ahead in government if you dispute the "facts". Ask Joanna Simpson, the NASA employee who had to hide her skepticism of AGW theory to keep her job.

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Breeze in a shotglass over Trump Ukraine Scandal

Timothy Birdnow

MesSNBC is turning purple over the fact that Trump released money to Ukraine recently that had been promised but held up.

From the article:

It didn’t cause much of a stir at the time, but the Associated Press ran a reporttwo weeks ago that may be relevant anew. It noted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced at a conference that the United States had released $250 million in military aid – with an additional $140 million on top of that sum.

Now, we have been told by the Left that Trump has been in  bed with Putin and the Russians, that he was in fact a Manchurian Candidate, a "  Russian asset"  . And yet he has paid out money promised to the Ukrainians for military assistance to protect themselves against the very nation that supposedly put Trump in power.

The article continues:

There may very well be nothing to this, but it was a curious series of events. The Trump administration was supposed to give Ukraine $250 million, but that money was on holdwhen the American president spoke via phone to his Ukrainian counterpart – a conversation in which Trump reportedly pressed Zelenskiy eight times about investigating Biden.

Soon after learning that the military aid was on hold, the editorial board of the Washington Post published a piecealleging that the Republican was effectively trying to "extort” Ukraine, making the $250 million contingent on Kyiv agreeing to participate in Trump’s political scheme.

Soon after, in the face of bipartisan congressional pushback, the Trump administration agreed to release the aid to Ukraine – though according to the Associated Press, the package was worth $390 million, not $250 million. This, of course, came shortly before House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) exposed the existence of the whistleblower’s complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general.

Are they serious? Biden has been a disaster as a candidate and the Democrats are likely going to lose if "Crazy Joe" wins the nomination. It would be in Trump's interest to have Biden as a candidate. Trump has a superb sense of timing; why didn't he condition this on their waiting until Biden had the nomination sewn up? Wouldn't this have made a great October Surprise?  To bring it out now only helps the Democrats rid themselves of an embarassing candidate.

The article makes much of the fact that supposedly the President of Ukraine was "surprised" to get the money. So? Isn't this exactly what you would do if you wanted to send a message to Russia not to meddle in our election? For that matter, it may have been a message to Russia to quit giving iran military hardware, which may well be where they obtained the drones they used to attack the Saudi oil fields.

Isn't this exactly what the Democrats and the media have been demanding? A hard line on Russia?

And do not forget, it was Biden who used his power as America's Vice (no truer words...) President to compel the Ukrainians to not prosecute his kleptocratic son.

Forget not, also, that Hillary Clinton was working closely with the Ukrainians to steal the election from Trump, and THEY were at the forefront of the Steele Dossier, which was a dirty attempt at a coup against Trump. The real scandal is the deep relationship between Ukraine and the Democrats. See here, here, and here for more details of the cozy relationship between the Ukrainians and the Clinton/Democratic axis of evil.

Trump is doing exactly what the Democrats and the Media have demanded of him; not fly off the handle and act rashly. IF he did in fact push Ukraine over Biden it was not because he has any reason to fear the senile ex veep.

Oh, and all of this is a creation of the media; we have no actual transcripts or names or whatnot. All we have is an unnamed whistleblower. We've seen how these anonymous sources have panned out before. (Hint; they are probably interns who work for WaPo or the New York Times.)

And let us not forget Mr. Obama (peace be upon him!) telling Russia's Michael Medvedev to ""tell Vlad I'll have more flexibility after the election" in a live mic mistake. He was promising to disarm America after his re-election. I would say that is far worse.

This is not just a tempest in a teapot, it barely amounts to a breeze in a shotglass.

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Is Greater Adria Atlantis?

Timothy Birdnow

Scientists have found a "lost continent" under the Mediterranean.

From Fox News:

The research, publishedinGondwana Research,notes that the continent was part of North Africa and eventually settled under Southern Europe more than 200 million years ago. It has been given the name"Greater Adria," after the Adria region, which stretches from Turin to the Adriatic Sea.

When I started to read this I had hoped it would confirm Atlantis, but it is far, far too old. Well, maybe the Atlanteans were dinosaurs?

The article does offer this tantalizing tidbit:

The vast majority of Greater Adria is underwater, but there are still parts that are visible, researchers noted.

"The only remaining part of this continent is a strip that runs from Turin via the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the boot that forms Italy," van Hinsbergen added.

Get that? Some of the evidence is fairly easy to find; it just got missed by modern investigators thanks to too many cooks in the kitchen. Perhaps the ancients discovered evidence of this continent themselves and this led to the Atlantis legend? They didn't find evidence of any civilization, but it seemed a good thing to use for a cautionary tale.

Of course, the only mention of Atlantis was by Plato, and HE pegged it as "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" aka in the Atlantic. People have been looking for the so-called sunken island continent in the Atlantic ever since. But was this an old rumor and Plato knew he couldn't place it in the Mediterranean? While the story of Atlantis may be wrong, perhaps the ancients found evidence of Greater Adria?

Now the ancients didn't have diving equipment, but they were a lot more savvy than we realize, and learned a heckuva lot without our complex tools. Maybe...

It is certainly worth pondering.

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Climate Sense and Nonsense

Dana Mathewson

Our different contributors have been providing a lot of information about "climate change," or the lack of it, recently in these pages. At least some of this is probably in reaction to the big U.N. Climate WhateverTheyCalledIt yesterday. The article I'm about to post has a wonderful name for it.

The reason I'm adding more fuel to the fire is that this article goes into detail about "computer models," something we've been hearing about for years but for which we have received very little in the way of specifics.

Steven Hayward writes in Power Line:

Since today is Climatepalooza at the UN and in the streets of DC (aside: how many Nobel Peace Prize nominations will Greta Thunberg receive this year?), it might be worth checking in on a couple of serious questions. Like climate modeling on the science side, and decarbonization on the policy side.

In conjunction with the climate hijinks, The Economist put out a special climate change issue, and much to my surprise, The Economist, which usually just parrots the party line, includes a pretty good article explaining the basics of computer climate modeling, and especially their large limitations and defects. Although the magazine tries hard not to sound openly skeptical, it is hard for any unbiased reader to finish this piece and think "the science is settled.” Some useful samples:

Modeling is a complicated process. A model’s code has to represent everything from the laws of thermodynamics to the intricacies of how air molecules interact with one another. Running it means performing quadrillions of mathematical operations a second—hence the need for supercomputers. And using it to make predictions means doing this thousands of times, with slightly different inputs on each run, to get a sense of which outcomes are likely, which unlikely but possible, and which implausible in the extreme.

Even so, such models are crude. Millions of grid cells might sound a lot, but it means that an individual cell’s area, seen from above, is about 10,000 square kilometres, while an air or ocean cell may have a volume of as much as 100,000km3. Treating these enormous areas and volumes as points misses much detail. Clouds, for instance, present a particular challenge to modellers. Depending on how they form and where, they can either warm or cool the climate. But a cloud is far smaller than even the smallest grid-cells, so its individual effect cannot be captured. The same is true of regional effects caused by things like topographic features or islands.

Building models is also made hard by lack of knowledge about the ways that carbon—the central atom in molecules of carbon dioxide and methane, the main heat-capturing greenhouse gases other than water vapour—moves through the environment. Understanding Earth’s carbon cycles is crucial to understanding climate change. But much of that element’s movement is facilitated by living organisms, and these are even more difficult to understand than physical processes.

He continues, of course. And it's a very good read indeed, found here: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/09/climate-sense-and-nonsense.php I urge you to peruse the entire article!
more...

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No Election Fraud?

Timothy Birdnow

No vote fraud? Really?

Michigan official once honored by Dems now facing election fraud charges

From El Zorro (Fox):

Sherikia Hawkins, 38,city clerk for the city of Southfield,was arrested Monday after the Oakland County Clerk’s office noticed discrepancies in voter
counts while certifying absentee ballots from Southfield. State police investigated and found that records had been altered so that nearly 200 voter files were improperly listed as invalid.

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Hold Your Green Trojan Horses!

Bill H.

Talk about  Green Trojan horses!

The Green New Deal contains the following goals, quoted here specifically:

1…to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States;


2…to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century;


3…to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated ruralcommunities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth by guaranteeing universal access to clean water;


4…providing and leveraging, in a way that ensures that the public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment,
adequate capital (including through community grants, public banks, and other public financing), technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, Federal, State, and local government agencies, and businesses working on the Green New Deal mobilization


5…guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States


6...strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and
harassment


7…strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employ23
ers, industries, and sectors


8…to grow domestic manufacturing in the United States;


9…ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies;


10…providing all people of the United States with (i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; and (iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature


What does any of those thing have to do with a changing climate, or with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Talk about a "Trojan Horse" !!!

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Three Cheers for Congressional Retirements!

Timothy Birdnow

The Washington Post bemoans the exit of Republicans from Congress.

Trump’s takeover of GOP forces many House Republicans to head for the exits

Boo hoo!

They begin with George Mitchell, the RINO King, announcing his retirement supposedly after Trump told Ilhan Omar to go back to where she came from if she didn't like the country that welcomed her as a refugee. Is that why Mitchell is splitting? Maybe, maybe not, but what kind of leader quits because he doesn't like the guy in office right now? A leader actually LEADS, and if he is embarrassed by Trump wouldn't it be better to ride it out and work to either a.try to temper Trumps bombastic character by working with him or b.quietly working behind the scenes to find a more reasonable replacement? To quit publicly in this fashion is not the sign of a person we should want in government; it's the sign of a baby who hasn't gotten his way and is throwing a tantrum.

Mitchell allegedly complained when he couldn't get a meeting with Trump over the Omar tweet:

"We’re here for a purpose — and it’s not this petty, childish b------t,” Mitchell, 62, said in an interview in early September. Pence’s office declined to comment.

Yet Mitchell never protested the petty nature of Omar and the other "squad" members comments insulting America and her people. He calls Trump petty, and he may be right, but who were petty first? And  who is making this a public spectacle? Mr. Mitchell clearly is irony-impaired.

The WaPo continues:

Mitchell is among a growing list of House Republicans — 18 to date — who have announced plans to resign, retire or run for another office, part of a snowballing exodus that many Republicans fear is imperiling their chances of regaining control of the House in the 2020 elections.

I've argued for a long time that the GOP had to be purged first before they could act as a vehicle for even holding ground. I remember having this argument with other conservatives as far back as the Bush 43 era; that we had to accept some electoral losses if we wanted to accomplish anything at all. Too few on our side ever agreed, thinking the "bit tent" approach was the key. But when you broaden your base to the point where they no longer agree on basics you have no base at all, and the end result is precisely what we have seen in the GOP; a cadre of professional politicians whose only purpose is to protect their position. They change colors faster than a chameleon, because they want to be everything to everyone.

It leads to division. Divide and Conquer.

It's even worse, because they will play to the media more than the base; the media can do terrible damage to them. The reality is the media IS the base of the RINO wing of the party. As a result, we have been treated to a globalist, fabian socialist program from Congress for decades, and it hasn't mattered who is in office. The pace is all that is different, not the destination. That's because these Republicrats all hold the same positions, because they are playing to the same base. It's the media, the big, big money donors, the international corporations, and whatnot. It's not the voters.

I once read an article by an ex-Congressman (I don't remember who exactly at the moment) who explained how it worked; you spent over half your day on the telephone calling people trying to get donations. Whoever brought in the most money got the best committee assignments and leadership posts. In other worlds, Congress is the best legislature money can buy. They HAVE to please the donors. And who are the donors? Many of them donate to both parties; they are the globalists, the corporatists, the liberal elites.

Without them a Congressman is doomed. He or she will get the worst assignments, the least amount of campaign money, the least amount of attention. When the lose their seat nobody will even remember who they are. OR they can play ball and wind up one of the insiders, the true Mafia, invited to all the right parties, supported by the big names, flown around on junkets by such luminaries as Jeffrey Epstein, etc. It's a seduction, and those who won't be seduced rarely last.

But all of this ties in with a structural defect in the system. If the head fo the party doesn't play along...

The only solution is to get rid of the rotten apples. Like Yahweh keeping the Israelites in the desert until the generation that worshiped the golden calf died, the GOP has to be purged and until that happens it will be nothing but a parasitic organism. The WaPo article states forty percent of the Republicans in Congress are gone since Trump's election. All I can say to that is "thank God!" They are little more than ticks anyway, sucking off the lifeblood of an unwilling host. They need to be burned off, like any tick. I was happy when Eric Cantor was so scorched, for instance.

There can be no real reform with the same people who caused the problem in power.

The article continues:

"Did any member of this conference expect that their job would start out every morning trying to go through the list of what’s happening in tweets of the day?” Mitchell asked, referring to Trump’s Twitter habits. "We’re not moving forward right now. We are simply thrashing around.”

What does he mean "moving forward"? We gained no ground under George W. Bush at all, nor under his father. We've been LOSING ground since Reagan. But we need to return to the "comity"  of the past, the time when two syndicates agreed on how they were going to carve up their crime territories.

If it hadn't been for this very attitude we would never have had Trump. Trump was a response to Republican cravenness. Had the GOP ever had a spine, ever actually listened to the base and tried in good faith to provide what that base wanted we wouldn't be in this pickle with an orange haired carnival barker embarassing them. But they were more eager to get theirs as easily as possible than to do what they promised. If you have a bouncer at the door of your fancy French restaurant you shouldn't be surprised when people turn to Ronald McDonald.

And why should ANYONE listen to the Washington Post for political advice? They freely offer it here.

I welcome the political bloodbath. It would have been better to bathe in clean water, but at least these filthy cretins are soaking in a fluid...

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Aron Eisenberg aka Nog RIP

Timothy Birdnow

The actor who played Nog on Star Trek; Deep Space Nine has passed away.

Aron Eisenberg, who co-starred on the '90's television show, passed away at age 50. While the cause of death was not released he had received two kidney transplants.

The character Nog was a young Ferengue who joined Star Fleet after growing up on the space station Deep Space 9. He was the son of the  dopey Ferengue Ram, a kind hearted alien and brother to Quark a snail eating, money grubbing, giant eared alien and  cutthroat bar owner and notorious  fencer of stolen goods.

At any rate, so many from the Star Trek franchise have passed away, and not all of them elderly. They may start talking about a Star Trek curse.

So let's wish the man Godspeed and say a prayer for his soul and his family.

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Misplaced Fears of Destroyed Futures

Timothy Birdnow

Judson Phillips observes:

The media is featuring these children, screaming about the myth of global warming, saying it will destroy their future.

Global warming is a myth.

They know nothing about the massive national debt, which is not a myth and will destroy their future.

AND TIM ADDS:

They also seem unconcerned about terrorism or Iranian nukes, both of which could destroy their futures. It's astonishing; people cowering from hot air while real bogeyman exist out there. That's what the Left has done for us.

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September 23, 2019

Beware of Costly, 'Green' Trojan Horses

Dana Mathewson

This article might alternatively be titled "There Ain't No Such Thing As a Free Lunch:" an idea that you'd get the impression the current crop of leftists running for the position of Democrat presidential candidate seem to be totally unaware of.

In this article the particular subject is electric automobiles, whether fully battery powered or hybrid. Leftists (and liberals) totally ignore the fact that the batteries are an environmental trainwreck.

Some 3,000 years ago in Anatolia, the Greeks laying siege to Troy had a brilliant idea: sneak some men into the city through a wooden horse masked as a gift and then the gates could be opened for the rest of the army. The Trojan Horse may have been a genius military maneuver, but it shouldn’t translate to expensive and unnecessary public policy.

Democrats will have to learn this the hard way as they attempt to sneak their disastrous "Green New Deal” proposal through Congress bit by bit through other, vital pieces of legislation. In particular, rumors abound that lawmakers will try to resurrect and expand the Electric Vehicle (EV) tax credit via must-pass bills circulating through Congress. For the sake of consumers and taxpayers across America, members of Congress should stop trying to sneak costly Trojan Horses into unrelated legislation. Americans deserve a transparent lawmaking process that produces policies to the benefit of all.

To radical members of Congress tirelessly championing a Green New Deal, trillions of dollars in new spending and costly "renewable” mandates aren’t enough. The EV credit, which has promised buyers an up-to-$7,500 reprieve off their tax bills for nearly a decade, is quickly being phased out. Carmakers are only allowed to benefit from this misguided policy for their first 200,000 EVs sold, and top producers such as GM and Tesla sped past the limit in 2018. A vocal minority of pro-EV (at any cost) lawmakers are pushing to keep the tax credit and expand it beyond the 200,000-car limit.

There’s just one problem: these lawmakers never stopped to consider the redistributive consequences of their preferred policy. In 2018, Dr. Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute calculated that nearly 80 percent of EV tax credit beneficiaries are from households raking in six-figures. The finding is unsurprising, jiving with many economists and policymakers’ suspicion that the tax credit has merely benefited wealthier-than-average Americans who would’ve purchased these fashionable cars anyway.

Yep. You and I are subsidizing them even if we aren't buying them, which is another negative. And those who are buying them don't generally need our help.

Meanwhile, the average American household pays dearly for these stealth EV subsidies. A 2018 study by NERA Economic Consulting found that U.S. households on the whole would stand to lose nearly $100 billion over the next 15 years if the credit was expanded and the cap lifted. That works out to more than $700 in increased costs per household, a high cost to pay for a projected 1 percent decline in gasoline demand.

Carbon emissions would barely budge, and a turbocharged EV tax credit would actually wreak havoc on the environment (and labor rights). The World Economic Forum notes, "raw materials needed for batteries are extracted at a high human and environmental toll. This includes, for example, child labour, health and safety hazards in informal work, poverty and pollution. Second, a recycling challenge looms over the eleven million tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries forecast to be discarded by 2030, with few systems in place to enable reuse and recycling in a circular economy for batteries.”

Plenty of the inputs needed for electric batteries come from beleaguered, battle-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where mineral extraction work makes Middle Eastern oil drilling look like a walk in the park. Having investigated these Congolese mines, the Washington Post reports, "[M]ining activity exposes local communities to levels of toxic metals that appear to be linked to ailments that include breathing problems and birth defects, health officials say.” And, according to Reuters, "Demand for electric vehicles is fueling a rise in child labor in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

There's more here: https://townhall.com/columnists/rossmarchand/2019/09/23/taxpayers-and-consumers-need-beware-of-costly-green-trojan-horses-n2553507 and I really urge you to read it, even if you're not contemplating buying what a friend of mine calls a "coal-powered" car.

 

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Carson continues Obama Zoning Policy

Timothy Birdnow

The Obama Administration instituted a policy of Federal coercion over zoning policies across the country, ostensibly to promote racial integration but in essence to gerrymander the electoral districts and overturn the spoils of Republican electoral success.

Sadly, the Trump Administration is still doing it. Robert Romano dishes:

The American people are still awaiting the Trump administration rewrite of the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housingrule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The original rule, finalized in 2015, conditioned more than $3 billion of annual community development block grants to more than 1,200 cities and counties on making changes to local zoning based on income and racial guidelines.

It would have put the federal government in charge of zoning for every major population center in the country that depends on federal funding, an effective end of local government in the name of social justice. In addition, critics blasted the danger of this power being used for political gerrymandering.

Congress largely barred HUD from implenenting this by defunding any such efforts. But sadly, Ben Carson is pursuing this strategy anyway:

However, HUD Secretary Ben Carson appears committed to continuing to use block grants to make changes to zoning, not to address racial or income inequality, but to help making housing more affordable. In an Aug. 13, 2018 interviewwith the Wall Street Journal he said, "I would incentivize people who really would like to get a nice juicy government grant [to look at their zoning codes].”

This is very disappointing; Carson should know better. But these bureaucrats tend to start thinking only in terms of what they have the power to do. The basics of Federalism takes a back burner.

In the end, if this is allowed to continue, the precedent has been set, and future presidents under a more favorable Congress will get what Obama wanted.

This is an abomination. It should be ended.

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"Woke" Joke

Timothy Birdnow

Andrew Sullivan, the sometimes conservative writer and blogger, puts the "woke" movement to bed in a fine piece at the New Yorker Magazine.

From the article:

Like any religion, wokeness understands the need to convert children. The old Jesuit motto (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) was, after all, "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” And so I was moved but not particularly surprised by George Packer’s tale of a progressive school banishing separate restrooms for boys and girls because this reinforces the gender binary. The school did not inform parents of this, of course:

Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms....
And there is plenty more to enjoy:

As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it’s close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with "social justice.”

It’s also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching "White boys”:

I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.

This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as "White” (note the capital "W”) and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don’t like it:

This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting "white fragility” which is a function of "white supremacy.” QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their "whiteness,” or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become "white identitarians” of the far right.


 

 Here is the end quote:
Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of "social justice” or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.

Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It’s a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.
I'm not a big fan of Andrew Sullivan but he wrote a fine piece here.

A tip of the porkpie to Always on Watch.

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The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard

Timothy Birdnow

Handwriting is going the way of the dinosaur, and that is a terrible shame because the discipline of manually writing something down is far more effective in learning and remembering than any dry lecture or computer web page.

Daren Jonescu and I thrashed this out some time ago, and he wrote a wonderful blogpost at his site about the matter. Daren states:

The idea that the skill of writing one’s language in the manner in which adults have written it for hundreds of years is a dispensable frivol in a modern curriculum, while "How a Recycling Center Works” is essential knowledge, is more than just a sign of the times. It may be a sign of the end times. In the foreseeable future, there will be no one left who can read the Declaration of Independence in its original form—quite apart from the issue of understanding it. That document, and so many other extant testaments to man’s greatness, will thereafter be perceived as a mere picture, a collection of dainty lines and curves, and less comprehensible than Egyptian hieroglyphics. An important means of civilizational continuity will have been lost, as future generations will be forced to rely on "translations” to read their own language.

Daren is right and he further points out that the act of writing is something quite primal, the connection between the human hand and the human brain. Pecking on a keyboard is not the same, and the loss of the discipline of writing by hand makes for sloppy thinkers. You have to think carefully when actually scribbling your thoughts out. The ease of a keyboard means you don't have to take care.

Daren continues: more...

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Proof the Gang Green are Liars

Warner Todd Houston makes the following wise observation:

The fact that globaloney religionists spend so much time propagandizing to little kids proves they don't think the world will end in 12 yrs and that they are universally liars. After all, if they are expecting the kids to "fix" things, those kids won't be in charge of governments or hold the reins of power for at least 30 more years, long after these priests of disaster say it'll be too late! Clearly, these leftists have another agenda that they are using the threat of globaloney to obscure.

Here is something to consider,

Timothy Birdnow observes:

The Gang Green want world government, which is why they won't give this up despite a complete failure of the theory to match reality. No tropical tropospheric hot spot, as the models insist MUST be there. No planetary warming and no "missing heat" in the oceans. No abnormal rise in the rate of sea level rise. No major shrinking of the polar ice caps. Nada, none of it.

It is interesting to note that the Global Warming scam was first proposed at the Endangered Atmospheres Conference, chaired by the disproven Margaret Mead. One of the organizers was Bill Holdren, Obama's "Science Czar". They were looking for something that affected everybody and realized the atmosphere could be used to promote socialism and world government. They picked the wrong horse - global cooling - and promoted the idea of an oncoming ice age caused by particulate matter blocking sunlight. It failed when the multidecadal cooling trend ended, so they just shifted gears and went to global warming.

It is interesting to note the U.N. has been at the epicenter of this the entire time. And so many Third World countries, or enemies of the United States, are on board. That is to be expected; they all want to pick our bones. It is a globalist effort.

And Benito Mussolini argued that Mankind needed a spiritual cause, that the Marxist vision of socialism failed in that regard. These people have found a spiritual cause, the mystical "Green" and "Sustainability

". We had sustainability; it was the Obama economy, where we had no growth. It sucked.


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September 22, 2019

Venusian Delusion

Timothy Birdnow

Bill H. Draws our attention to this asinine article from CNN.

From the Complete Nuts Network:

However, a recent study compared five climate simulations of Venus' past and every scenario suggested that the planet could support liquid water and a temperate climate on its surface for at least three billion years. Like the other planets in our solar system, Venus formed 4.5 billion years ago.
Those temperatures could have included a maximum of 122 degrees Fahrenheit and a minimum of 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
But between 700 and 750 million years ago, something triggered the release of carbon dioxide from rocks on the planet, transforming its climate.

"Our hypothesis is that Venus may have had a stable climate for billions of years. It is possible that the near-global resurfacing event is responsible for its transformation from an Earth-like climate to the hellish hothouse we see today," said Michael Way, study author at The Goddard Institute of Space Science. Way presented his study this week at the European Planetary Science Congress - Division for Planetary Sciences Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva.

No, Venus was much warmer, and it was changes in solar irradiance that triggered the planetary warming. But let us continue:

Out of the five simulations, three of them included Venus' current topography and added a deep 1,017-foot ocean, a shallow 32-foot ocean and trace amounts of water in the soil. Researchers compared this to two other simulations, one using Earth's topography with a deep ocean and an ocean world.

To recreate likely conditions on Venus that happened 4.2 billion years ago and changed over time, they gradually increased solar radiation to reflect the sun as it warmed. This also shifted atmospheric conditions over time.

What happened to Venus is pretty clear. Venus had a surface temperature around two hundred degrees F (real habitable, that!) but then the Sun got warmer and it boiled away the Venusian oceans (which still show in large basins on the planet.) All that water vapor in the air heated the planet before breaking up and dissipating into space due to the solar wind and no magnetic field to block it - and the extra solar irradiance heated the planet.  Then too, Venus has a very thin crust (probably due to its ridiculously slow and retrograde rotation) and so massive volcanic activity ensued, eventually making the atmosphere one ninety times as dense as the Earth's. It is that density that matters - far more than the carbon dioxide levels. If it were all nitrogen the planet would still be far too hot.

The article proves my point:

But something happened around 700 million years ago that remains a mystery, although the researchers think its connected to volcanic activity. Magma would have released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and as the magma cooled, the gas couldn't be reabsorbed in the surface.

This amount of co2 would not have been "reabsorbed into the surface"; there was far too much of it. This is a ridiculous statement. This stuff came from deep in the interior of the planet, not from the surface.

Venus is a very different world from Earth. It has a year that is shorter than its' day, and the planet rotates in reverse (if you could see the sun at all it would rise in the west.) Scientists think something probably smacked into it in the distant past.

Venus also has no plate tectonics, and so there is no change in her surface structure for millions of years - followed by a period of spasmodic seismic activity which leads to a complete "resurfacing". During this period massive amounts of internal gas are likely released - mainly carbon dioxide. The stuff won't blow out into space and has no water to absorb into, so it just sits there looking ugly (sort of like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is about as old). This means the air pressure keeps rising and more heat is trapped. It has little to do with the composition of the atmosphere and everything to do with it's density.

If carbon dioxide were the primary reason for this, Mars would be habitable, a planetary Riviera. It's not; Mars is very cold, colder than it should be. The atmosphere actually freezes out in winter, forming huge dry ice caps.

BTW this research was done at the Goddard Institute, James Hansen's weaponized stomping ground. I would check the clock if they said good morning to me there.

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September 21, 2019

Censorship at Twitter

Timothy Birdnow

Twitter has closed thousands of accounts accusing them of being "fake news".

If Twitter wants to edit content then they should be treated as a news outlet and not a social media platform.

Funny how this happened on the runup to the 2020 elections. And the article states that they deleted pro-Saudi accounts, which would only benefit Donald Trump during the current Iranian crisis.



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