Interesting Items 01/09

Interesting Items 01/09 –

Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Torture
2. Cook Inlet
3. ObamaCare
4. Licenses
5. Servers
6. BLM
7. Sydney
8. Curry
9. Belugas

1. Torture. Four flowers of O’Bama youth kidnapped and tortured a young disabled white man in Chicago last week.  They made a live YouTube video of the mayhem because they were aspiring rap artists.  The disabled man appeared to be somewhere on the autism spectrum.  Media reaction was predictable, with the O’Bama / democrat friendly media doing everything humanly possible to bury the story and make excuses for the vermin.  Most of the rest of us were horrified.  Despite the screams of F___ Trump and F___ White people, Chicago police did not acknowledge that race was a factor.  The perps were eventually charged with a hate crime, which I think is a mistake.  I don’t play the hate crime game.  I do play the punishment game, especially with people who have turned in their humanity cards and forfeit their lives.  We will see how this all goes as lynching like tar and feathers is an old American tradition that had to start somewhere, sometime for a reason.

2. Cook Inlet. Craig Medred ran a story about genetic testing of salmon caught by the Kodiak commercial fleet.  It looks like Kodiak commfish caught as many as 636,000 reds bound for the Kenai and upper Cook Inlet streams in 2012.  Kodiak is a mixed stock fishery that is notoriously difficult to manage.  One obvious solution would be to restrict Kodiak commercial fishermen to operate near Kodiak streams.  Will this happen?  Not with the current regulatory capture of the resource by commfish.  I expect the Cook Inlet fish wars will heat up significantly over the next few weeks as we run up to the Board of Fish meeting on Cook Inlet later this month.  https://craigmedred.news/2016/12/30/who-got-your-fish/

3. ObamaCare. Early indications out of congress, particularly the Senate majority, is that they will tend to slow roll repeal of ObamaCare until they come up with a replacement.  This is expected, as they would likely want to have the issue around for the 2018 congressional races.  Do not allow them to weasel out of this.  The replacement for ObamaCare is relatively simple and can be done with only a couple of pages of legislation.  Simply block grant the money directly to the states with no strings.  Include all Medicare and Medicaid monies in the block grant.  Allow the states to make their own rules.  Allow unrestricted MSAs.  Theoretically vouchering the money from the states to the recipients would be best.  States can decide whether their insurance companies can insure across state boundaries, cover 26 year olds, cover smokers, pre-existing conditions, or any of 10,000 things ObamaCare told us to do.  All the rules and regulations go out the window with the repeal.  I have no patience with any delay.  It can be done in either a one step or a two-step process separated by a few days to a week or two.  I have no patience with a majority that wants years to repeal and replace.  Democrats waited for decades with a pre-written Bill in their hip pocket ready to insert into legislation should they ever get a sufficiently large majority in congress.  The Stupid Party should have the same thing ready to go for repeal.  Failure is not an option.  Never allow perfect to be the enemy of good enough or any action.  http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/obamacare-replacement-freedom-caucus-gop-232215

4. Licenses. In their continuing attempt to garbage up their voting rolls, California has issued driver’s licenses to over 800,000 illegals.  The licensing took place via a 2015 piece of legislation, and was done with the promise that their immigration status would not be made public.  This year a second piece of legislation goes into effect that will automatically register licensed California voters to vote.  And this is how you manufacture a permanent voting base for California democrats.  Do not expect this to be reversed any time soon.  The problem California has is that now that it has by law combined its legal and illegal voters to the point where it is impossible to determine who can and cannot vote.  This renders their participation in national elections at risk, as it is possible to refuse to certify their Electoral College votes because nobody knows who voted – legal citizens or people who are not legally able to vote but do so anyway due to the machinations of the one party state in California.  http://www.breitbart.com/california/2016/12/30/california-licenses-800k-illegal-aliens-motor-voter-law/

5. Servers. FBI Director Comey confirmed last week that the FBI never got physical access to any of the hacked DNC servers or John Podesta’s hacked device.  Analysis pointing to Russian hacking was done by a private firm contracted by the democrats.  Additionally, it appears that none of the national security agencies had physical access to the servers and devices.  The entire fake news narrative that the Russians hacked the election is based on what happened to those servers.  And if there was no forensic analysis of what happened to them, it is impossible to pin the blame on the Russians.  Although the company that did the analysis is highly respected per the story, they are still contractors and will still give the result they are paid to give.  Note that the Hillary campaign first started the Russian hacking story to deflect attention from her private server last summer.  If you were really hacked and if you really want to blame the Russians, why not let the FBI analyze the hacked equipment?  One explanation would be that the hacking was done due to your own incompetence – ie) ‘Password’ is not the best choice for a password.  Either is ‘12345’.  And it is usually not a good idea to send personal information to a Nigerian prince who will wire you an unexpected $20 million.  Another explanation would be that the rest of the information on the servers / devices is toxic and could tend to confirm the close connection between the Hillary campaign, the DNC and their media surrogates; the connection that they used to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/10/comey-fbi-denied-repeated-requests-to-access-dnc-servers-podesta-s-device.html

6. BLM. O’Bama’s BLM issued four land management plans last week essentially locking up another 6.5 million acres of public lands in NE Alaska.  The largest area is some 2.4 million acres and will be locked up to protect it from mining so that salmon, bald eagles, and native plants (tundra) can have their habitats protected.  The plans refer to the areas as “… areas of critical environmental concern”, a term that is basically an excuse for BLM to prohibit human use without their permission.  BLM uses the term when they choose land that “… special management is needed to protect, and prevent irreparable damage to important historical, cultural, and scenic values, fish or wildlife resources or other natural systems or processes.”  Governor Walker’s response was his usual tepid “too bad, so sad.”  BLM’s planning process appears to be a guided missile aimed directly at mining in the region.  As there is little in the way of other ways to make money in that part of the state, its actions are designed to keep the locals impoverished, out of work, and fully dependent on the largess out of Washington or Juneau.  http://freerangereport.com/index.php/2017/01/08/obama-moves-to-lock-up-6-5-million-acres-of-resource-rich-alaska-lands/

7. Sydney. Meteorologist Anthony Watts documented one of the ways that NOAA generates data on manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions was due to the way they located their temperature observation stations.  Here in the US, the technique is done in two ways.  One way is to shut down observation stations in rural and remote areas.  Due to the urban heat island (UHI) effect, rural areas are generally cooler than urban ones, if for no other reason than there is less concrete and asphalt around.  Over the last few decades the number of stations here in the US have decreased in number from around 6,000 to around 2,000 today.  And it was the rural and remote stations that went away.  All by itself, this guarantees an increase in average observed temperatures.  The second reason is that the remaining stations that were formerly on the edge of town, in small airports or on farms, get surrounded by more brick, concrete, asphalt and steel as the locations grow over time.  Farms don’t stay farms.  Airports don’t remain the same size.  And the more heat retaining stuff near the measurement stations there is, the higher the average temperatures will be measured over time.  Unfortunately today, the politicized climate scientists take the results and breathless report them as actual global warming rather than artifacts of location over time, and demand we all instantly do something about the crisis at hand.  The latest example of this sort of location growth comes out of Oz, where the history of the Sydney Observatory, the longest running weather station in the country was described by Dr. Bill Johnston in JoNova’s Blog.  Over the last 140 years, the thermometer locations have moved several times.  Brick walls were constructed.  The entire observatory was surrounded by a highway bypass of one of Oz’s busiest roads.  Yet over all that time, the location continued to record and report temperatures.  And over the last 140 years, it has reported a temperature rise.  Surprise!  Surprise!  Surprise!  I submit that the temperature data is so corrupted that is it may be impossible to get a true and accurate reading of where we were, where we are today and where we may be going tomorrow.  Well worth your time to read.  http://joannenova.com.au/2017/01/sydney-observatory-where-warming-is-created-by-site-moves-buildings-freeways/

8. Curry. Climate scientist Judith Curry resigned her position as Department Chairman for Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences last week.  She cited the absolute craziness of the field of climate science today, “… growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.  Research and other professional activities are rewarded only if they pursue approved directions and results approved by a fully politicized academic establishment.  Curry initially was supportive of the notion of manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions.  Her position started changing at the release of the Harry Read Me e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit.  Over time she has swung quite skeptical of the “consensus.”  As she swung away from the consensus, she was attacked the only way the climatistas know how to attack – personal, vitriolic, and false.  Sooner or later, you get tired of getting beat up for where your scholarship takes you.  She asked for Emeritus status and will be around in the future.  http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/judith-curry-bids-adieu.php

9. Belugas. NOAA Fisheries released a management plan intended to help the static population of Cook Inlet beluga whales recover.  The plan identified 10 threats to the population and included all the usual suspects like habitat loss and climate change.  While not specifically mentioned, climate change was woven throughout the document.  Overhunting, which was the tool NOAA used to cut the population of belugas by nearly 80% in the late 1990s is now listed as a low threat.  This problem is entirely caused by NOAA, which presided over an unregulated subsistence hunt of belugas that cut their numbers in less than two years.  The greens got themselves involved and managed to get the whales listed as endangered as a vehicle to shut down oil drilling and shipping activity in Cook Inlet.  I believe that if the feds break something, they bloody well ought to fix it.  In this case, NOAA ought to import 500 – 800 belugas from elsewhere in Alaska waters where they are plentiful to solve this problem.  Will they?  Not under this regime.  The Trump administration?  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/wildlife/2017/01/04/recovery-plan-for-endangered-belugas-focuses-on-biggest-threats-to-dwindling-population/

More later –

– AG