Interesting Items 10/23

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

In this issue:

1. Uranium
2. Fires
3. NHS
4. Jones
5. Sue & Settle
6. Falsifiable
7. Penguins
8. $18 billion

1. Uranium. One of the things I was never able to figure out was the free ride that the Clintons and the O’Bama regime got for Hilly’s 2010 deal with Rosatom that transferred 20% of US uranium mining to the Russians.  Last week a report surfaced out of congress that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion, and money laundering.  The FBI was intercepting communications as early as 2009.  That year they also had significant evidence including eyewitnesses and supporting documents.  The Russians routed millions to the Clinton charitable foundation during the time Hillary was Secretary of State.  The FBI flagged a substantial amount of that money flow.  FBI director during all this?  Robert Mueller through 2013.  Eric Holder’s Do(In)J did not bring immediate charges in 2009, opting to “investigate” for the next four years.  Peter Schweitzer wrote about this in his book Clinton Cash.  Holder and Clinton both sat on the committee that approved the sale, transferring control of 20% of US uranium production to Putin.  Looks like everyone was involved in either aiding or abetting the illegal acts and / or their cover-up including now Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, former FBI Director Comey, FBI Deputy Director McCabe, and current Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein.  Yes, there was Russian influence, collusion, bribery, but it all was with the Clintons.  And it all happened during the O’Bama years.  And it was the O’Bama holdovers in Do(In)J and the FBI who covered it up.  The FBI is completely broken and politically compromised.  Perhaps it is time to go all Carthage on it and its soon to be former employees and future residents of Club Fed.  http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/355749-fbi-uncovered-russian-bribery-plot-before-obama-administration

 

2. Fires. Wine country north of San Francisco burned last week.  The fires were devastating with thousands of homes, buildings and businesses burned down.  Over 40 people are confirmed dead with dozens still missing.  Expect wine prices to spike significantly as several wineries were wiped out.  Many other were damaged.  I have seen reports that the fires were started by high wind bringing down power lines which then sparked fires in tinder-dry undergrowth.  There has been at least one illegal arrested for starting fires.  Sonoma County is a self-described sanctuary county.  How’s that working out for you guys so far?  California has been burning for over 60 years that I know of.  The hills around San Fernando Valley were burning in 1960 when I lived there.  We got ash on the house and in it.  It was burning a decade later when the Doors sung about it in LA Woman.  Cali is a dry state that has long periods of dry, hot winds.  And those winds move fires relentlessly.  d have put the FCC in charge of content on the internet, and did for a while.  So, what is really going on?  Several writers point to the defacto shut down of forest management by greens via the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and associated litigation during which nothing gets done.  It appears that Cali greens have brought hell on earth to a place near and dear to them.  The O’Bama regime also participated by shutting down a large chunk of the US Forest Service contract airborne firefighting tanker fleet.  Time to get back into the business of managing forests before more people needlessly die.  http://dailysignal.com/2017/10/13/environmentalist-policies-exacerbating-wildfires-time-rethink-forest-management/

 

3. NHS. When the government is large enough to give you everything you want, it is also big enough to take it all away.  Latest example of this comes from Great Britain where local National Health Service (NHS) regions announced they would be denying what they refer to as non-urgent surgeries to obese patients and smokers.  The obese need to reduce their weight.  Smokers need to stop smoking for at least weeks.  There will be a breathalyzer test given to prove that.  Two regions hope to save 68 million Pounds.  One way will be to start rationing medical care based on what the government deems is correct behavior.  The excuse given is an attempt to control or curb what they call “unhealthy lifestyles.”  Unfortunately, in this day of Political Correctness, unhealthiness is in the eye of the beholder.  I guarantee that the treatment will flow for gays, transgenders, Muslims and anyone else who is part of currently designated victim classes.  The rest of us can just go hang.  This is the future your democrat party and its media enablers have in mind for you and I via their quest for single payer health care.  https://hotair.com/archives/2017/10/18/great-moments-single-payer-nhs-proposes-refusal-surgeries-smokers-obese/

 

4. Jones. The left is going to make a real push toward winning the open US Senate seat in Alabama vacated by now Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  Insurgent Roy Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice who won the Republican primary handily is now being set up to be the next Akin, Mourdock, Angle or O’Donnell by the media and Beltway insiders.  We saw a couple stories last week about Moore.  One was his reaction to the NFL flag protests.  The other was about receiving a paycheck that the critics believe he didn’t earn.  When this sort of thing happens, the democrat always, always gets a completely free ride by the media at all levels while the conservative gets savaged.  Democrat candidate Doug Jones is closely linked to a Soros-funded living wage organization with close ties to ACORN.  The organization is called the Brennan Center, named after the odious author of Roe v Wade.  Jones worked with it producing a paper on criminal justice reform.  The living wage is a great idea to pander to economic illiterates with finely crafted promises of free money.  Once implemented, it is one of the best ways to guarantee higher unemployment and automation replacing those on the entry rungs of the job ladder.  Moore better quit opining on NFL (Alabama doesn’t have a NFL team) and concentrate on persuasion, as he’s going to need it.  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/10/19/roy-moore-challenger-doug-jones-pushing-acorn-pet-project-known-devastating-workers-small-businesses/

 

5. Sue & Settle. One of the decades-long games played by greens has been the sue & settle game.  This involves working with kindred spirits in federal agencies, like the EPA, USF&WS, NOAA, NASA, FDA, OSHA, etc., though you see it used to greatest impact by the EPA and USF&WS (endangered species listings) to implement environmental policy they could never shove through the regulatory process via the courts.  Usually the greens come up with something they want to do.  They work out details with federal employees who were hired out of their organizations.  They come up with an agreed upon settlement.  Lawsuit is filed.  Feds refuse to defend themselves and instead reach what is called a consent agreement, conveniently identical to the pre-coordinated document, and settle the lawsuit with the feds in federal court.  Result are rule and regulation changes that never go through the public process but have the force of law behind them.  There have been a lot of environmental, climate change, and endangered species listings along with attendant habitat protection agreements made with this technique over the last couple of decades.  Last week EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced that sue & settle was no longer EPA policy, “The days of regulation through litigation are over.”  Along with it are the days of routinely paying millions of dollars in attorney’s fees for the litigants.  Now if he can figure out a way to withdraw from 20-years’ worth of consent decrees over bogus lawsuits, we will be in great shape.  This was a good start, a very good start toward putting the EPA monster back on its leash.  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/16/epa-harnessed-pruitt-issues-directive-to-end-epa-sue-settle-practice/

 

6. Falsifiable. Karl Popper noted that “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”  So, what does this mean really?  What distinguishes science from pseudoscience?  In short, it is the ability to not only prove something is true, but to likewise prove it is false.  An example comes from astrology, today, the study of the position or the planets, moon and sun, and with it their effects on our personal lives.  Astrology is a pseudoscience because there is no position of the planets, moon and sun that does not have an influence on our daily lives.  Today, climate science has joined astrology as a pseudoscience, because there is literally no atmospheric occurrence that cannot be attributed to climate change, and along with it variations in numbers of plants, animals and humans, their health or lack thereof.  Other pseudosciences include numerology, phrenology and Lysenkoism.  Even long-accepted theories like gravitation and relativity can be proven false.  But we can never prove climate change, the renamed manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions, false.  That ought to bother all of us.  http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2017/10/bharadwaj-climate-science-has-become-non-popperian

 

7. Penguins. One thing about ice coverage at the poles is that it does change over time.  And the animals that have evolved over millions of years have figured out, at least as a species, how to deal with changes in coverage.  A year to year basis is something else entirely.  Latest example is out of Antarctica where heavy ice coverage in east Antarctica moved feeding grounds (holes in the ice) for Adelie penguins far enough from the nesting grounds that the adults couldn’t get back with enough food to feed the chicks.  Result in this particular rookery of 40,000 penguins was that nearly all chicks born this year died of starvation with only two surviving.  This is the second time in four years for this colony.  A similar event in 2013 killed all the chicks.  The article went on to blame the failure on other factors including climate change, fishing and tourism.  Nice that the ice coverage mostly got a pass.  Perhaps ice-free oceans at least during breeding season is not such a bad thing after all.  http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/10/13/only-two-chicks-survive-as-colony-40000-penguins-suffer-breeding-tragedy.html

 

8. $18 billion. The left’s own favorite Darth Vader, one George Soros, gave his own personal Death Star, the Open Society Foundation a gift of $18 billion last week.  The transfer represents a substantial portion of his net worth indicating that perhaps he is retiring from the field of battle (we should be so lucky).  This makes the Open Society Foundation the second largest “philanthropic” organization in the US behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  I could not think of a better target for tax reformers than outfits like Open Society that make a living of community organizing and stirring up armed revolution against legitimately elected governments.  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/10/17/death-star-george-soros-transfers-18-billion-open-society-foundations/

More later –

– AG