Interesting Items 10/30

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

In this issue:

1. Fusion
2. Abortion
3. Opioids
4. Tribes
5. Herbicides
6. Deflation
7. AI
8. Cross

1. Fusion. We finally started getting financial information out of House Intelligence Committee last week about Fusion GPS, the DC dirty tricks outfit.  It turns out that the dossier on Trump was funded in part by the Hillary campaign and the DNC.  Additional funding came from an anti-Trump hedge fund billionaire Republican named Paul Singer.  Millions of democrat campaign dollars were laundered through Perkins – Coie for so-called “legal services”, when in fact they were intended for Fusion’s dirty tricks opposition research operation.  It turns out that some or perhaps more than some of the information contained in the dossier was actually provided by the Russians.  This blows up completely the narrative that Trump was colluding with the Russians on the election when the people who actually paid for the dossier were democrats and anti-Trumpers.  Additionally, Senator John McCain finds himself back in legal trouble again as he went out of his way to acquire a copy of the dossier and provide it to the FBI.  The O’Bama FBI and Intelligence community then used the document as an excuse, a vehicle to use the intelligence community put the Trump campaign under surveillance before and after the election.  And none of this information is coming out of the Mueller investigation.  This is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.  http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/10/25/john-mccain-wont-say-whether-he-knew-he-was-handing-clinton-funded-russia-dossier-to-fbi/

 

2. Abortion. A very sad story out of Texas, where the Margaret Sanger crowd got their hands on a pregnant 17-year old and aborted her kid.  The 17-year old was detained in the Rio Grande valley after illegally entering the country.  She was also 16 months pregnant.  Somehow the Planned Parenthood crowd got hold of her as a vehicle to challenge the Trump administration’s new policy of refusing to pay for abortions for illegals.  They found a federal judge who ordered the abortion.  The case was appealed all the way to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit (packed with O’Bama judicial appointees courtesy Harry Reid), which reversed a previous appeals court ruling, sending the entire mess back to the presiding judge for action.  This opinion further erodes the distinction between rights of American citizens and those who are here illegally.  A real cynic would note that it is a nifty way to solve the anchor baby issue, but I am not that cynical, as the child is and always will be an innocent in the discussion.  http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Undocumented-immigrant-teen-in-Texas-has-abortion-12306644.php

 

3. Opiods. President Trump last week declared that the opioid crisis was now a public health emergency.  The declaration directs federal agencies to provide more money to combat the new epidemic.  I think I am ambivalent on this one, as nobody to the best of my knowledge has addressed the source of the new epidemic.  Even HIV / AIDS had a Patient Zero, a guy who entered the country and started spreading the disease.  Opioids have been around for a very long time, and they have been prescribed in various forms for at least as long, that is after they were made illegal by the feds.  Where did this problem come from?  What started it?  Was it the unwarranted and foolish expansion of federal involvement in health care via O’BamaCare?  How about Medicaid expansion?  I’ve seen a few reports that hold that all the new addicts started on pot first.  Is the rolling pot legalization push fueling the epidemic?  We are not in any position to do anything other than throw money at an undefined problem until we figure out what changed over the last several years leading to this.  And until that is done, I’m going to remain skeptical.  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/10/26/trump-to-declare-opioid-public-health-emergency.html

 

4. Tribes. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANSCA) was passed in 1971.  In return for 44 million acres of Alaska and millions of dollars, Alaska natives gave up all their claims to aboriginal lands and rights.  The Act set up the system of village and regional corporations.  There was a single reservation (Indian Country) in SE AK.  Over the decades, primarily during times of democrat infestation of the WH and Alaska’s Governor’s Mansion, native separatists in Alaska and elsewhere have done their level best to undo the deal, and try to create reservations, Indian Country, and tribes here in Alaska.  The largest first step took place during Bill Clinton when one of his appointees in Department of the Interior, Ada Deer, decided that there were 229 tribes here in Alaska.  None of those tribes ever existed outside the fevered dreams of local native separatists and activists like Deer.  Why do this?  Well, if you are a democrat and want to ensure everyone in Bush Alaska votes for you in perpetuity, what better way to do so than to promise their lives will be ever so much better if they are going to be set up as sovereign tribal entities with the same powers as the State of Alaska?  And if you keep voting for democrats, we will make sure you get the resources to govern yourself with.  With that in mind, last week Bill Walker’s Attorney General, Jana Lindemuth decided that there were 229 sovereign tribal governments with some to be determined authority over what happens in their areas.  As none of these have land, it will be difficult to determine who is in charge of what, where and when in Bush Alaska.  The 16-page opinion was published a week ago.  So much for equal rights under the law.  But when you install a native separatist like Byron Mallott as LtGov, what do you expect?  These are democrats.  Putting people at one another’s throats for lifetimes, is what they do so very well.  http://mustreadalaska.com/attorney-general-ok-sovereign-tribal-governments/

 

5. Herbicides. One of the reasons people get into organic gardening is fear that persistent chemicals contained in commercial herbicides / weed killers can cause cancer. My experience with organic gardening is that the substances you use are just as deadly in the correct quantities as the commercial herbicides.  The difference is that they are not persistent for the most part.  Don’t believe me?  Try a cup or two of compost tea after lunch.  As it turns out, the commercial chemicals may not be as deadly as the chemical purists believe.  Last week, the State of California became the first state to demand that Monsanto label glyphosphate, an active ingredient of its Roundup product as a carcinogen.  California will also include glyphosphate in its list of potentially cancerous chemicals.  Monsanto is currently in federal court in SF fending off a class action lawsuit challenging that Roundup is safe to use.  The court action is documenting the involvement of both sides in approvals, denials, and research into Roundup as a safe product.  The 184 plaintiffs are using a 2015 UN International Agency for Research on Cancer as a foundational document for their claims.  The problem is that the agency, like the UN agency edited contradictory data out of their study.  They edited out comments from multiple scientists that their studies found no link between glyphosphate and cancer in humans.  This is the same sort of foolishness that we have seen on a daily basis in the manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions argument.  The government agencies are simply making it up as they go, modifying data to meet pre-conceived conclusions, erasing data that does not support those conclusions, and overselling data that does.  Government science is hopelessly corrupt today, led by anything and everything connected with the UN.  Perhaps government science out of the UN is not the only corrupt part of that institution.  https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/10/un-scientific-group-edits-data-in-key-study-targeting-weed-killer-component/

 

6. Deflation. I have written from time to time about deflation, the Singularity, and the ATOM.  To review, the Singularity is a time where exponential accelerating advances in AI, computing power, medical technology, and nanotechnology accelerate to the point where it is no longer possible to forecast what happens next.  Depending who you listen to and believe, that point will come sometime mid-century.  The penetration of technology into the economy, any economy, is profoundly deflationary.  It is also accelerating exponentially over time.  Deflation is a very bad thing, as it destroys capital for investment.  The Great Depression of the 1930s was deflationary, cutting the size of the money supply by a third.  The Japanese Lost Decade of the 1990s was similar.  The more penetration of technology into an economy, the greater the rate of deflation.  Economies work best with an inflation rate of perhaps a couple percent.  So how do you as a government create inflation in a deflationary economy?  Simple, you print money.  We have seen the Federal Reserve do precisely that after the crash of 2008, dumping several trillions of printed money into the economy.  In the past, such a wanton printing and dumping of free money into an economy would have been inflationary, triggering a response like we had here in the US during the Carter years.  But inflation is nowhere to be seen following quantum easing.  Why?  Because of accelerating penetration of technology into the economy.  One writer I follow closely is Kartik Gada, who hosts The Futurist web site.  He came up with a regime called the ATOM (Accelerating TechnOnomic Medium), essentially exponentially increasing payments to individuals over time.  The greater the technological growth, the greater the ATOM payments.  If this guy is right, and I think he is, it is only a matter of time before nations start doing this.  And over the last few weeks, I have read from time to time about central bankers scratching their heads about the lack of inflation.  They haven’t broken the code on the ATOM yet, but they are getting closer.  This is worth your while to look into and understand, as it is going to be a large part of all our lives in the not so distant future.  http://www.singularity2050.com/2017/10/-atom-award-of-the-month-october-2017.html

 

7. AI. With the previous discussion of the Singularity and ATOM in mind, an example of advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) came last week with a machine that plays the board game, Go.  2016 was the first time a computer program called AlphaGo defeated a Go grandmaster.  A short time ago, that program was defeated by an upgraded version of the program called AlphaGo Zero.  The defeat was not a small one. It was a floor-cleaning thrashing, 100 games to zero.  AlphaGo was equipped with a pair of neural networks to evaluate most probable next moves and the probability of winning should it make that move.  AGZ combined the two networks.  The programmers had it play itself and after 4.9 million games, the new version acquired enough experience and learning to defeat the original.  In contrast, the original had to play 30 million games to acquire its knowledge and experience.  The new version just made the original obsolete.  AI is coming like a freight train.  https://gizmodo.com/stunning-ai-breakthrough-takes-us-one-step-closer-to-th-1819650084

 

8. Cross. Yet another anti-Christian opinion this time out of the black-robed tyrants infesting the Fourth Circus (How’s that for an opening mini rant?)  This time around, the Judges decided a 40-foot tall cross built with funding from the American Legion and local families in 1925 honoring 49 Prince Georges County men who died in WWI all of the sudden represents an establishment of religion violation because the cross is placed on a public intersection.  The cross has a bronze tablet with the names of the men lost along with quotes from Woodrow Wilson.  It is part of a larger memorial park in the immediate area honoring veterans of several wars.  The Maryland – National Capital Park and Planning Commission, a state agency, owns the land and monument and has a budget to maintain, repair and renovate the cross.  The initial complaint was brought by the American Humanist Association, who opined that a cross on government property sends a message of exclusion for other religions.  The judges ignored the fact that the cross is part of a memorial to all veterans of the included wars.  If Trump gets another SCOTUS nomination or two, all this crap goes away for a long, long time.  https://hotair.com/archives/2017/10/19/fourth-circuit-maryland-war-memorial-shaped-like-cross-unconstitutional/

More later –

– AG