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(Natural News) When you hear the word formaldehyde, what do you think of? Does it conjure up images of gloomy mortuaries and dead bodies? If so, you’re not alone – most of us associate this chemical with the preservation of tissue in a laboratory environment. You may, therefore, not be aware that formaldehyde is actually… |
Tag: alone
Trump Witch Hunt Over: No American Was Even Charged With Conspiring With Russia
by Mish Shedlock, The Maven: Not a single US citizen was charged, let alone convicted, of conspiring with Russia to influence the election. Today, Robert Mueller has concluded his Trump-Russia Investigation, handing the report to Attorney General William Barr. Thanks to Glen Greenwald for the Tweet Chain of the day. It regards the witch hunt which […]
The post Trump Witch Hunt Over: No American Was Even Charged With Conspiring With Russia appeared first on SGT Report.
SETI launches new tool to help improve the search for extraterrestrial life
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(Natural News) Researchers who are seeking out signs of alien life can now compare their findings with the results of earlier studies thanks to an online tool developed by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. The newly released research tool will allow people from around the world to contribute their evidence that we are not alone in… |
Goodbye to the Internet: Interference by Governments Is Already Here
This article was originally published by Philip M. Giraldi at Strategic Culture Foundation
There is a saying attributed to the French banker Nathan Rothschild that “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Conservative opinion in the United States has long suspected that Rothschild was right and there have been frequent calls to audit the Federal Reserve Bank based on the presumption that it has not always acted in support of the actual interests of the American people. That such an assessment is almost certainly correct might be presumed based on the 2008 economic crash in which the government bailed out the banks, which had through their malfeasance caused the disaster, and left individual Americans who had lost everything to face the consequences.
Be that as it may, if there were a modern version of the Rothschild comment it might go something like this: “Give me control of the internet and no one will ever more know what is true.” The internet, which was originally conceived of as a platform for the free interchange of information and opinions, is instead inexorably becoming a managed medium that is increasingly controlled by corporate and government interests. Those interests are in no way answerable to the vast majority of the consumers who actually use the sites in a reasonable and non-threatening fashion to communicate and share different points of view.
The United States Congress started the regulation ball rolling when it summoned the chief executives of the leading social media sites in the wake of the 2016 election. It sought explanations regarding why and how the Russians had allegedly been able to interfere in the election through the use of fraudulent accounts to spread information that might have influenced some voters. In spite of the sound and fury, however, all Congress succeeded in doing was demonstrating that the case against Moscow was flimsy at best while at the same creating a rationale for an increased role in censoring the internet backed by the threat of government regulation.
Given that background, the recent shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and at mosques in Christchurch New Zealand have inevitably produced strident demands that something must be done about the internet, with the presumption that the media both encouraged and enabled the attacks by the gunmen, demented individuals who were immediately labeled as “white supremacists.” One critic puts it this way, “Let’s be clear, social media is the lifeblood of the far-right. The fact that a terror attack was livestreamed should tell us that this is a unique form for violence made for the digital era. The infrastructure of social media giants is not merely ancillary to the operations of terrorists — it is central to it [and] social media giants assume a huge responsibility to prevent and stop hate speech proliferating on the internet. It’s clear the internet giants cannot manage this alone; we urgently need a renewed conversation on internet regulation… It is time for counter-terrorism specialists to move into the offices of social media giants.”
It’s the wrong thing to do, in part because intelligence and police services already spend a great deal of time monitoring chat on the internet. And the premise that most terrorists who use the social media can be characterized as the enemy du jour “white supremacists” is also patently untrue. Using the national security argument to place knuckle dragging “counter-terrorism specialists” in private sector offices would be the last thing that anyone would reasonably want to do. If one were to turn the internet into a government regulated service it would mean that what comes out at the other end would be something like propaganda intended to make the public think in ways that do not challenge the authority of the bureaucrats and politicians. In the US, it might amount to nothing less than exposure to commentary approved by Mike Pompeo and John Bolton if one wished to learn what is going on in the world.
Currently I and many other internet users appreciate and rely on the alternative media to provide viewpoints that are either suppressed by government or corporate interests or even contrary to prevailing fraudulent news accounts. And the fact is that the internet is already subject to heavy handed censorship by the service providers, which one friend has described as “Soviet era” in its intensity, who are themselves implementing their increasingly disruptive actions to find false personas and to ban as “hate speech” anything that is objected to by influential constituencies.
Blocking information is also already implemented by various countries through a cooperative arrangement whereby governments can ask search engines to remove material. Google actually documents the practice in an annual Transparency Report which reveals that government requests to remove information have increased from less than 1,000 per year in 2010 to nearly 30,000 per year currently. Not surprisingly, Israel and the United States lead the pack when it comes to requests for deletions. Since 2009 the US has asked for 7,964 deletions totaling 109,936 items while Israel has sought 1,436 deletions totally 10,648 items. Roughly two thirds of Israeli and US requests were granted.
And there is more happening behind the scenes. Since 2016, Facebook representatives have also been regularly meeting with the Israeli government to delete Facebook accounts of Palestinians that the Israelis claim constitute “incitement.” Israel had threatened Facebook that non-compliance with Israeli deletion orders would “result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.” Facebook chose compliance and, since that time, Israeli officials have been “publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders.” It should be noted that Facebook postings calling for the murder of Palestinians have not been censored.
And censorship also operates as well at other levels unseen, to include deletion of millions of old postings and videos to change the historical record and rewrite the past. To alter the current narrative, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook all have been pressured to cooperate with pro-Israel private groups in the United States, to include the powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL is working with social media “to engineer new solutions to stop cyberhate” by blocking “hate language,” which includes any criticism of Israel that might be construed as anti-Semitism by the new expanded definition that is being widely promoted by the US Congress and the Trump Administration.
Censorship of information also increasingly operates in the publishing world. With the demise of actual bookstores, most readers buy their books from media online giant Amazon, which had a policy of offering every book in print. On February 19, 2019, it was revealed that Amazon would no longer sell books that it considered too controversial.
Government regulation combined with corporate social media self-censorship means that the user of the service will not know what he or she is missing because it will not be there. And once the freedom to share information without restraint is gone it will never return. On balance, free speech is intrinsically far more important than any satisfaction that might come from government intrusion to make the internet less an enabler of violence. If history teaches us anything, it is that the diminishment of one basic right will rapidly lead to the loss of others and there is no freedom more fundamental than the ability to say or write whatever one chooses, wherever and whenever one seeks to do so.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
Goodbye to the Internet: Interference by Governments Is Already Here
This article was originally published by Philip M. Giraldi at Strategic Culture Foundation
There is a saying attributed to the French banker Nathan Rothschild that “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Conservative opinion in the United States has long suspected that Rothschild was right and there have been frequent calls to audit the Federal Reserve Bank based on the presumption that it has not always acted in support of the actual interests of the American people. That such an assessment is almost certainly correct might be presumed based on the 2008 economic crash in which the government bailed out the banks, which had through their malfeasance caused the disaster, and left individual Americans who had lost everything to face the consequences.
Be that as it may, if there were a modern version of the Rothschild comment it might go something like this: “Give me control of the internet and no one will ever more know what is true.” The internet, which was originally conceived of as a platform for the free interchange of information and opinions, is instead inexorably becoming a managed medium that is increasingly controlled by corporate and government interests. Those interests are in no way answerable to the vast majority of the consumers who actually use the sites in a reasonable and non-threatening fashion to communicate and share different points of view.
The United States Congress started the regulation ball rolling when it summoned the chief executives of the leading social media sites in the wake of the 2016 election. It sought explanations regarding why and how the Russians had allegedly been able to interfere in the election through the use of fraudulent accounts to spread information that might have influenced some voters. In spite of the sound and fury, however, all Congress succeeded in doing was demonstrating that the case against Moscow was flimsy at best while at the same creating a rationale for an increased role in censoring the internet backed by the threat of government regulation.
Given that background, the recent shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and at mosques in Christchurch New Zealand have inevitably produced strident demands that something must be done about the internet, with the presumption that the media both encouraged and enabled the attacks by the gunmen, demented individuals who were immediately labeled as “white supremacists.” One critic puts it this way, “Let’s be clear, social media is the lifeblood of the far-right. The fact that a terror attack was livestreamed should tell us that this is a unique form for violence made for the digital era. The infrastructure of social media giants is not merely ancillary to the operations of terrorists — it is central to it [and] social media giants assume a huge responsibility to prevent and stop hate speech proliferating on the internet. It’s clear the internet giants cannot manage this alone; we urgently need a renewed conversation on internet regulation… It is time for counter-terrorism specialists to move into the offices of social media giants.”
It’s the wrong thing to do, in part because intelligence and police services already spend a great deal of time monitoring chat on the internet. And the premise that most terrorists who use the social media can be characterized as the enemy du jour “white supremacists” is also patently untrue. Using the national security argument to place knuckle dragging “counter-terrorism specialists” in private sector offices would be the last thing that anyone would reasonably want to do. If one were to turn the internet into a government regulated service it would mean that what comes out at the other end would be something like propaganda intended to make the public think in ways that do not challenge the authority of the bureaucrats and politicians. In the US, it might amount to nothing less than exposure to commentary approved by Mike Pompeo and John Bolton if one wished to learn what is going on in the world.
Currently I and many other internet users appreciate and rely on the alternative media to provide viewpoints that are either suppressed by government or corporate interests or even contrary to prevailing fraudulent news accounts. And the fact is that the internet is already subject to heavy handed censorship by the service providers, which one friend has described as “Soviet era” in its intensity, who are themselves implementing their increasingly disruptive actions to find false personas and to ban as “hate speech” anything that is objected to by influential constituencies.
Blocking information is also already implemented by various countries through a cooperative arrangement whereby governments can ask search engines to remove material. Google actually documents the practice in an annual Transparency Report which reveals that government requests to remove information have increased from less than 1,000 per year in 2010 to nearly 30,000 per year currently. Not surprisingly, Israel and the United States lead the pack when it comes to requests for deletions. Since 2009 the US has asked for 7,964 deletions totaling 109,936 items while Israel has sought 1,436 deletions totally 10,648 items. Roughly two thirds of Israeli and US requests were granted.
And there is more happening behind the scenes. Since 2016, Facebook representatives have also been regularly meeting with the Israeli government to delete Facebook accounts of Palestinians that the Israelis claim constitute “incitement.” Israel had threatened Facebook that non-compliance with Israeli deletion orders would “result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.” Facebook chose compliance and, since that time, Israeli officials have been “publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders.” It should be noted that Facebook postings calling for the murder of Palestinians have not been censored.
And censorship also operates as well at other levels unseen, to include deletion of millions of old postings and videos to change the historical record and rewrite the past. To alter the current narrative, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook all have been pressured to cooperate with pro-Israel private groups in the United States, to include the powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL is working with social media “to engineer new solutions to stop cyberhate” by blocking “hate language,” which includes any criticism of Israel that might be construed as anti-Semitism by the new expanded definition that is being widely promoted by the US Congress and the Trump Administration.
Censorship of information also increasingly operates in the publishing world. With the demise of actual bookstores, most readers buy their books from media online giant Amazon, which had a policy of offering every book in print. On February 19, 2019, it was revealed that Amazon would no longer sell books that it considered too controversial.
Government regulation combined with corporate social media self-censorship means that the user of the service will not know what he or she is missing because it will not be there. And once the freedom to share information without restraint is gone it will never return. On balance, free speech is intrinsically far more important than any satisfaction that might come from government intrusion to make the internet less an enabler of violence. If history teaches us anything, it is that the diminishment of one basic right will rapidly lead to the loss of others and there is no freedom more fundamental than the ability to say or write whatever one chooses, wherever and whenever one seeks to do so.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
Gloomy Economic Outlook: The Fed Cuts The Growth Prospect For The U.S.
While there are plenty of experts out there who will tell us the economy is doing just fine and none of us should worry about a recession, the Federal Reserve slashed the economic growth prospect for the United States. The news seems bleak right now.
Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has said that he doesn’t expect a recession, but he’s saying there will be an economic “slowdown.” According to CBS News, the Federal Reserve kept a key interest rate unchanged on Wednesday and said it doesn’t expect to hike rates for the rest of the year. This is quite a change from the course the Fed was on in December when the central bank expected two rate hikes. The Fed also expects the U.S. economy to expand 2.1%, which is lower than previous projections, which they assumed to be at 2.5%.
“We foresee some weakening, but we don’t see a recession,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday in a press conference. In its policy statement, the Fed said that the job market remains “strong” but noted that “growth of economic activity has slowed” since late 2018. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, which provides a so-called “nowcasting” tool to assess current growth, says the economy is growing only growing at a 0.4 percent in the first quarter of 2019.
The Fed also projects one quarter-point rate hike in 2020 and none in 2021, although that could all change. It will stop shrinking its bond portfolio in September as well. That move alone would help hold down long-term interest rates. The Fed’s pause in credit tightening is in response to slowdowns in the U.S. and global economies. It says that while the labor market remains strong, “growth of economic activity has slowed from its solid rate in the fourth quarter.”
But The Fed cannot fix credit exhaustion.
Central Banks Prepare For A Slow Down In The Economy; But The Fed Can’t Fix This Crisis
Too many Americans are too far in debt to borrow any more money and that could present some major problems in the economy. With student loan debt, auto debt, and credit card debt at all-time highs, any interest rate hike could devastate a family living paycheck to paycheck, but it could also pop the “everything bubble” many analysts have warned about for several months now.
Living Paycheck To Paycheck: The New Crisis And Normal For The American Middle Class
Despite the recent dip in economic growth, Powell said that U.S. “economic fundamentals are still very strong,” adding that Fed officials “see a favorable outlook for this year.” They expect the unemployment rate to drop from 3.8% to 3.7%.
Gloomy Economic Outlook: The Fed Cuts The Growth Prospect For The U.S.
While there are plenty of experts out there who will tell us the economy is doing just fine and none of us should worry about a recession, the Federal Reserve slashed the economic growth prospect for the United States. The news seems bleak right now.
Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has said that he doesn’t expect a recession, but he’s saying there will be an economic “slowdown.” According to CBS News, the Federal Reserve kept a key interest rate unchanged on Wednesday and said it doesn’t expect to hike rates for the rest of the year. This is quite a change from the course the Fed was on in December when the central bank expected two rate hikes. The Fed also expects the U.S. economy to expand 2.1%, which is lower than previous projections, which they assumed to be at 2.5%.
“We foresee some weakening, but we don’t see a recession,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday in a press conference. In its policy statement, the Fed said that the job market remains “strong” but noted that “growth of economic activity has slowed” since late 2018. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, which provides a so-called “nowcasting” tool to assess current growth, says the economy is growing only growing at a 0.4 percent in the first quarter of 2019.
The Fed also projects one quarter-point rate hike in 2020 and none in 2021, although that could all change. It will stop shrinking its bond portfolio in September as well. That move alone would help hold down long-term interest rates. The Fed’s pause in credit tightening is in response to slowdowns in the U.S. and global economies. It says that while the labor market remains strong, “growth of economic activity has slowed from its solid rate in the fourth quarter.”
But The Fed cannot fix credit exhaustion.
Central Banks Prepare For A Slow Down In The Economy; But The Fed Can’t Fix This Crisis
Too many Americans are too far in debt to borrow any more money and that could present some major problems in the economy. With student loan debt, auto debt, and credit card debt at all-time highs, any interest rate hike could devastate a family living paycheck to paycheck, but it could also pop the “everything bubble” many analysts have warned about for several months now.
Living Paycheck To Paycheck: The New Crisis And Normal For The American Middle Class
Despite the recent dip in economic growth, Powell said that U.S. “economic fundamentals are still very strong,” adding that Fed officials “see a favorable outlook for this year.” They expect the unemployment rate to drop from 3.8% to 3.7%.
The USDA Admits to Killing Over a Million Wild Animals Per Year to Protect Livestock
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s own reports, it has killed over 34 million animals in the last decade alone.
Most of those animals were native, wild animals. The rest were accidental killings of domesticated animals.
In 2017 …
The post The USDA Admits to Killing Over a Million Wild Animals Per Year to Protect Livestock appeared first on Global Research.
We Fight Now or the Socialists Win
Source: William L. Gensert
The Democratic Party is no longer a political party; it has become a religion. Its acolytes practice politics with every bit of the religious fervor of Islamic militants throwing a gay man off the roof of a ten-story building because Sharia tells them it’s what he deserves. Make no mistake, every day, our new socialists fight for the right to do the same to us.
After driving two hours to vote against Sandy O, I was told my ballot would be challenged because my signature didn’t match from when I registered as a Conservative in 1976. I offered to show ID, which only engendered anger. ID is not allowed — too reminiscent of using Voter ID to weed out illegal voters. Of course, the real reason for the challenge was the “C” next to my name. The poll lady was not about to allow a conservative to vote. If they were willing to do that in an election they were guaranteed to win, what will they do next year?
Democrats know Donald Trump will win in 2020 and are planning to cheat to deny him victory. These new socialists are importing a new electorate through open borders and have proposed legislation to allow illegals the vote. They stole seats in the midterms using ballot harvesting and miraculously appearing boxes of “uncounted” Democrat ballots and will do the same in 2020.
The midterms were a trial run for 2020. The left is organized and prepared.
To have any chance, we must behave the way the left behaves, and that means we should take a page from the Democratic playbook.
In 2008, there were members of the New Black Panthers stationed outside voting locations. The right needs to do the same, and have people in place to document everything. Challenge them at the polls; challenge them outside the polls; challenge them every time we see them cheat; challenge every single vote if need be. Sue them in court over every irregularity, otherwise, they’re going to deny enough ballots, harvest enough votes, or find enough in trunks of cars to win. We will need to fight for a fair 2020 election, or they will steal it.
The media was always biased, but at least they used to pretend that they weren’t. After Obama’s election, they dispensed with all pretense and worshipped the man as a god. Now, they worship the Democrats’ socialist ideology. Every article either praises the left or pillories anyone who disagrees with them.
The battle in the media is lost. We will never get fair and balanced coverage. Yet, if we have learned anything from Donald Trump, controlling the media doesn’t guarantee controlling the message. Part of the president’s success has been in dictating the narrative. By using Twitter, perhaps at times injudiciously, but at other times brilliantly, Trump has bypassed traditional media and gone directly to the people — it got him elected and it can be used to fight the socialist takeover of this nation. Facebook, Twitter, comments on articles, and public activism are all weapons at our disposal.
We have allowed the Democrats using Antifa, Black Lives Matters, and SJWs dominion over the public square. We need similar tactics; there are far more of us than them, and in a battle against an army of pajama boys, we have the edge.
And we must be assertive not only vocally but physically. A group of men preventing Antifa/BLM/SJWs from pummeling dissenters will be on CNN 24/7 — they will provide the platform because they will not be able to resist portraying the right as the aggressors. So of course, we need to travel in groups and record everything. Think what the left would have done to Nicholas Sandman had there not been video exposing their lies.
Most importantly, we must never attack first; we are not them. Nietzsche said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Never strike first, but certainly strike last; we don’t start, we finish.
But even if we can prevent them from stealing the election, it won’t be over. This is a battle for the soul of the nation, and they are not only trying to win elections, they seek to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” into the next socialist utopia. They are pursuing us at every opportunity because for them to win they must get rid of us.
One need only look at their policies to see what is coming. Do we want to live in a world of unlimited abortion, before, during, and after birth? Should our children live in a nation without cars, planes, meat, and affordable electricity? Do we want our grandchildren to live in a world where a president has so corrupted executive agencies under his command they try to first steal an election and then depose his successor in a coup attempt based on lies bought and paid for by the likes of Hillary Clinton? Are we willing to let Democrats give illegals the same rights and benefits as citizens? Will we allow them to force those not directly responsible to pay reparations to those who didn’t directly suffer? Can we live in a country that has taken away our 2nd Amendment and 1st Amendment rights?
Donald Trump fights, but he’s one man. He can’t save us alone. If we believe the dream that is America is worth saving, we are going to have to fight, for if we don’t, America is lost.
Please follow William L. Gensert on Twitter @williamlgensert
David Holmgren: A Baby Boomers’ Apology
Via Raul Ilargi Meijer’s Automatic Earth blog,
There are days, though all too scarce, when very nice surprises come my way. Case in point: yesterday I received a mail from David Holmgren after a long period of radio silence. Australia’s David is one of the fathers of permaculture, along with Bill Mollison, for those few who don’t know him. They first started writing about the concept in the 1970s and never stopped.
Dave calls himself “permaculture co-originator” these days. Hmm. Someone says: “one of the pioneers of modern ecological thinking”. That’s better. No doubt there. These guys taught many many thousands of people how to be self-sufficient. Permaculture is a simple but intricate approach to making sure that the life in your garden or backyard, and thereby your own life, moves towards balance.
My face to face history with David is limited, we spent some time together on two occasions only, I think, in 2012 a day at his home (farm) in Australia and in 2015 -a week- in Penguin, Tasmania at a permaculture conference where the Automatic Earth’s Nicole Foss was one of the key speakers along with Dave. Still, despite the limited time together I see him as a good and dear friend, simply because he’s such a kind and gracious and wise man.
In his mail, David asked if I would publish this article, which he originally posted on his own site just yesterday under the name “The Apology: From Baby Boomers To The Handicapped Generations”. I went for a shorter title (it’s just our format), but of course I will.
Dave has been an avid reader of the Automatic Earth for the past 11 years, we sort of keep his feet on the ground when they’re not planted and soaking in that same ground: “Reading TAE has helped me keep up to date..”
In light of the children’s climate protests today, which I have yet to voice my qualms about (and I have a few), it only makes sense to put into words a baby boomer’s apology. To have that phrased by someone with the intellect and integrity of David should have everyone sit up and pay attention, if you ask me. And perhaps it would be good if more people would try and do the same: apologize to those kids.
Here’s my formidable friend David Holmgren:
David Holmgren: It is time for us baby boomers to honestly acknowledge what we did and didn’t do with the gifts given to us by our forebears and be clear about our legacy with which we have saddled the next and succeeding generations.
By ‘baby boomers’ I mean those of us born in the affluent nations of the western world between 1945 and 1965. In these countries, the majority of the population became middle class beneficiaries of mass affluence. I think of the high birth rate of those times as a product of collective optimism about the future, and the abundant and cheap resources to support growing families.
By many measures, the benefits of global industrial civilisation peaked in our youth, but for most middle class baby boomers of the affluent countries, the continuing experience of those benefits has tended to blind us to the constriction of opportunities faced by the next generations: unaffordable housing and land access, ecological overshoot and climate chaos amongst a host of other challenges.
I am a white middle class man born in 1955 in Australia, one of the richest nations of the ‘western world’ in the middle of the baby boom, so I consider myself well placed to articulate an apology on behalf of my generation.
In the life of a baby boomer born in 1950 and dying in 2025 (a premature death according to the expectations of our generation), the best half the world’s endowment of oil – the potent resource that made industrial civilisation possible – will have been burnt. This is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from a special geological epoch of extraordinary biological productivity. Beyond our basic needs, we have been the recipients of manufactured wants and desires. To varying degrees, we have also suffered the innumerable downsides, addictions and alienations that have come with fossil-fuelled consumer capitalism.
It is also true that our generation has used the genie of fossil fuels to create wonders of technology, organisation and art, and a diversity of lifestyles and ideas. Some of the unintended consequences of our way of life, ranging from antibiotic resistance to bubble economics, should have been obvious, while others, such as the depression epidemic in rich countries, were harder to foresee. Our travel around the world has broadened our minds, but global tourism has contaminated the amazing diversity of nature and traditional cultures at an accelerating pace. We have the excuse that innovations always have pluses and minuses, but it seems we have got a larger share of the pluses and handballed more of the minuses to the world’s poorest countries and to our children and grandchildren.
We were the first generation to have the clear scientific evidence that emergent global civilisation was on an unsustainable path that would precipitate an unravelling of both nature and society through the 21st century. Although climate chaos was a less obvious outcome than the no-brainer of resource depletion, international recognition of the reality of climate change came way back in 1988, just as we were beginning to get our hands on the levers of power, and we have presided over decades of policies that have accelerated the problem.
Over the years since, the adverse outcomes have shifted from distant risks to lived realities. These impact hardest on the most vulnerable peoples of the world who have yet to taste the benefits of the carbon bonanza that has driven the accelerating climate catastrophe. For the failure to share those benefits globally and curb our own consumption we must be truly sorry.
David Holmgren
In the 1960s and 70s, during our coming of age, a significant proportion of us were critical of what was being passed down to us by our parent’s generation who were also the beneficiaries of the western world system, which some of us baby boomers recognised as a global empire. But our grandparents and parents had been shaped by the rigours and grief of the first global depression of the 1890s, the First World War, The Great Depression of the 1930s and, of course, the Second World War. Aside from those who served in Vietnam, we have cruised through life avoiding the worst threats of nuclear annihilation and economic depression, even as people in other countries suffered the consequences of superpower proxy wars, coups, and economic and environmental catastrophes.
While some of us were burnt by personal and global events, we have mostly led a charmed existence and had the privilege to question our upbringing and culture. We were the first generation in history to experience an extended adolescence of experimentation and privilege with little concern or responsibility for our future, our kin or our country.
Most baby boomers were raised in families where commuting was the norm for our fathers but a home-based lifestyle was still a role model we got from our mothers. In our enthusiasm for women to have equal access to productive work in the monetary economy, few of us noticed that without work to keep the household economy humming we lost much of our household autonomy to market forces. By our daily commutes, mostly alone in our cars, we entrenched this massively wasteful and destructive action as normal and inevitable.
As we came into our power in middle age, the new technology of the internet, workshop tool miniaturisation and other innovations provided more options to participate in the monetary economy without the need to commute, but our generation continued with this insane collective addiction. In Australia, we faithfully followed the American model of not investing in public transport, which moderated the adverse impacts of commuting in European and other countries not so structurally addicted to road transport. By failing to build decent public transport and the opportunities for home-based work, and wasting wealth in a frenzy of freeway building that has choked our cities, our generation has consumed our grandchildren’s inheritance of high quality transport fuels and accelerated the onset of climate chaos. For this we are truly sorry.
In pioneering the double income family, some of us set the pattern for the next generation’s habit of outsourcing the care of children at a young age, making commuting five days a week an early childhood experience. This has left the next generation unable to imagine a life that doesn’t involve leaving home each day.
These patterns are part of a larger crisis created by the double income, debt-laden households with close to 100% dependence on the monetary economy. Without robust and productive household economies, our children and grandchildren’s generations will become the victims of savage disruptions and downturns in the monetary economy. For failing to maintain and strengthen the threads of self-provision, frugality and self-reliance most of us inherited from our parents, we should be truly sorry.
Some of us felt in our hearts that we needed to create a different and better world. Some of us saw the writing on the walls of the world calling for global justice. Some of us read the evidence (mostly clearly in the 1972 Limits To Growth) that attempting to run continuous material growth on finite planet would end in more than tears.
Some of us even rejected the legacy of previous generations of radicals’ direct action against the problems of the world, and instead decided we would boldly create the world we wanted by living it each day. In doing so, we experienced hard-won lessons and even created some hopeful models for succeeding generations to improve on in more difficult conditions. That our efforts at novel solutions often created more sound than substance, or that we flitted from one issue to another rather than doing the hard yards necessary to pass on truly robust design solutions for a world of less, leaves some of us with regrets for which we might also feel the need to apologise.
These experiences are shared to some degree by a minority in all generations but there is significant evidence that the 1960s and 70s was a time when awareness of the need for change was stronger. Unfortunately, a sequence of titanic geopolitical struggles that few of us understand even today, a debt-fuelled version of consumer capitalism, and propaganda against both the Limits to Growth and the values of the counterculture, saw most of us following the neoliberal agenda like sheep into the 1980s and beyond.
After having played with the privilege of free tertiary education, most of us fell for the propaganda and sent our children off to accumulate debts and doubtful benefits in the corporatised businesses that universities became. We convinced our children they needed more specialised knowledge poured down their throats rather than using their best years to build the skills and resilience for the challenges our generation was bequeathing to them. For this we must be truly sorry.
Many of us have been the beneficiaries of buying real estate before the credit-fuelled final stages of casino capitalism made that option a recipe for debt slavery for our children. Without understanding its mechanics we have contributed to – and fuelled with our faith – a bubble economy on a vast scale that can only end in pain and suffering for the majority. While some of us are members of the bank of Mum and Dad, when the property bubble bursts we could find ourselves following the bank chiefs apologising for the debt burden we encouraged our children to take on. Some of us will also have to apologise for losing the family home when we went guarantor on their mortgages. For not heeding the warnings we got with the GFC, we will be truly sorry.
Some of us have used our windfall wealth from real estate and the stock market to do good works, including creating small models of more creative and lower footprint futures that have inspired the minority of the next generations who can also see the writing on the wall. But most of us used our houses as ATMs for new forms of consumption that were unimaginable to our parents, from holidays around the world to endless renovations and a constant flow of updated digital gadgets and virtual diversions. For this frivolous squandering of our windfall wealth we must be truly sorry.
While our parents’ generation experienced the risks of youth through adversity and war we used our privilege to tackle challenges of our own choosing. Although some of us had to struggle to free ourselves from the cloying cocoon of middle class upbringing, we were the generation that flew like the birds and hitchhiked around the country and the world. How strange that on becoming parents (many of us in middle age) we believed the propaganda that the world was too dangerous for our children to do the same around the local neighbourhood. Instead we coddled them, got into the chauffeuring business, and in doing so encouraged their disconnection from both nature and community. As we see our grandchildren’s generation raised in a way that makes them an even more handicapped generation, we must be truly sorry for the path we took and the dis-ease we created.
After so many of us experimented with mind-expanding plants and chemicals, some of us were taken down in chemical addictions, but it was dysfunctional and corrupt legal prohibitions more than the substances themselves that were to blame for the worst of the damage. So how strange that when in middle age we got our hands on the levers of power, most of our generation decided to continue to support the madness of prohibition. For this we must be truly sorry: to have seen the light but then continued to inflict this burden on our children and grandchildren. For having acquiesced in the global ‘war on drugs’ that spread pain and suffering to some of the poorest peoples of the world we should be ashamed.
When the ‘war on drugs’ (a war against substances!) became the model for the ‘war on terror’ (war against a concept!) some of us reawakened the anti-war activism of the Vietnam years but in the end we mostly acquiesced to an agenda of trashing international law, regime change, shock and awe, chaos, and the death of millions; all justified by the 9/11 demolition fireworks that killed a small fraction of the number of citizens that die each year as a result of our ongoing addiction to personal motorised mobility.
While the shadow cast by climate change darkens our grandchilden’s future, the shadow of potential nuclear winter that hung over our childhood as not gone away. Many of us were at the forefront of the international movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons and thought the collapse of the Soviet Union had saved us from that threat. Coming into our power after the end of the cold war, our greatest crime on this geopolitical front has perhaps been the tacit support of our generation for first, the economic rape of Russia in the 1990s, and then its progressive encirclement by the relentless expansion of NATO. In Australia we have meekly added our resources and youth to more or less endless wars in the Middle East and central Asia justified by the fake ‘war on terror’. For this weakness as accessories to global crimes wasting wealth and lives to consolidate the western powers’ control of the first truly global empire, we should hang our collective heads in shame.
While some of our generation’s intellectuals continued to critique the ‘war on terror’ as fake, the vast majority of the public intellectuals of our generation, including those on the left, have supported the rapid rise of Cold War 2.0 to contain Russia, China and any other country that doesn’t accept what we now call ‘the rules based international order’ (code for ‘our empire’). This is truly astonishing when looked at in the context of our lived history. Let us hope that sanity can prevail as our empire fades and future generations don’t brand us as the most insane, war-mongering generation of all time. For our complicity in this grand failure of resistance we should be truly sorry.
On another equally titanic front, the mistake of giving legal personhood to corporations was not one that our generation made. However most of us have contributed our work, consumption and capital to assist these self-organising, profit-maximising, cost-minimising machines of capitalism morphing into emergent new life forms that threaten to consume both nature and humanity in an algorithmic drive for growth. At a time of our seniority and numbers, we failed to use the Global Financial Crisis as an opportunity to bring these emergent monsters to heel. Do our children have the capacity to tame the monsters that we nurtured from fragile infants to commanding masters?
And if they do find the will to withdraw their work, consumption and capital enough to contain the corporations, will the economy that currently provides for both needs and wants unravel completely? This is a burden so great most of us continue to believe we have no responsibility or agency in such a dark reality. We trust that history will not place the burden of responsibility on our generation alone. But for our part in this failure of agency over human affairs we apologise. Further, we should accept with grace the consequences for our own wellbeing.
Most of us feel impotent when thinking of these failures to control the excesses of our era, but on a more modest scale we have mindlessly participated in taking the goods and passing on the debt to future generations. No more so than in our habitual acceptance of antibiotics from doctors to fix the most mundane of illnesses. For our parents’ generation, antibiotics represented the peak of medical science’s ability to control what killed so many of their parents and earlier generations.
For us, they became routine tools to keep us on the job and our children not missing precious days at school. Through this banal practice we have unwittingly conspired with our doctors to rapidly breed resistance to the most effective and low-cost antibiotics. We took for granted that future generations would always be able to work out ways to keep ahead of diseases with an endless string of new antibiotics. For having squandered this gift we are truly sorry.
Further, despite the fact that some of us have became vegetarian or even vegan, our generation’s demand for cheap chicken and bacon has driven the industrial dosing of animals with antibiotics on a scale that has accelerated the development of antibiotic resistance far faster than would have been the case from us dosing ourselves and our children. For supporting this and other such obscene systems of animal husbandry we apologise to our grandchildren and succeeding generations and hope that somehow an accommodation between humanity, animals and microbes is still possible.
We experienced and benefited from the emergent culture of rights and recognition for women, minorities and the people of varied abilities, and many of us who fought to extend and deepen those rights have pride in what we did. However some of us are beginning to fear that in doing so we contributed to creating new demands, disabilities, and fractious subcultures of fear and angst unimagined in previous generations. While we might not be in the driving seat of identity politics and culture wars, we raised our children to demand their rights in a world that is unravelling due to its multiple contradictions.
In this emerging context, strident demands for rights are likely to be a waste of valuable energy that younger people might better focus on becoming useful to themselves and others. For overemphasising the demand for rights and underplaying the need for responsible self- and collective-reliance, perhaps we should also be sorry.
And is this escalating demand for rights by younger people itself connected, even peripherally, to the increasing callous disregard for the rights of others? Especially in the case of refugees, this careless disregard has allowed political elites to use tough treatment of the less fortunate to distract from the gradual loss of shared privilege that once characterised the ‘lucky country’. To the shame of those in power over the last two decades (mostly baby boomers) those policies are now being adopted on a larger scale in Europe and the US.
In our lifetimes religious faith has declined. For many of our generation, this change represents a measure of humanity’s progress from a benighted past to a promising future. But the collective belief in science and evidence-based decision making has now become a new faith, “Scientism”, which seeks to drive out all other ways of thinking and being from the public space. At the same time, religious fundamentalism is now resurgent. Is this too something that our generation unleashed by preaching tolerance while enforcing an ideology we didn’t even recognise as such?
A significant sign of the good intentions of our generation has been our recognition that the ancient war against nature, which has plagued human life since the beginnings of agriculture, and indeed civilisation, must end. One powerful expression of our efforts has been the valuing of the biodiversity of life, especially local indigenous biodiversity. In the ‘New Europes’ of North America and the Antipodes, seeking to save indigenous biodiversity has grown into an institutionalised form of atonement for the sins of the forefathers.
While this seems like one of our achievements, even this we have bastardised with a new war against naturalised biodiversity. Perhaps the worst aspect of this renewed war against novel ecologies is that we have accepted the helping hand of Monsanto in using Roundup as the main weapon in our urban and rural habitats. The mounting evidence that Roundup may be worse than DDT will be part of our legacy. While history may excuse our parent’s generation for naïve optimism in relation to DDT, our generation’s version of the war on nature will not save us from harsh judgement. For this we should be truly sorry.
Of course any public apology in this country invites comparisons to the apology by governments to the stolen generation of Australian indigenous peoples for the wrongs of the past. This unfinished sorry business is beyond the scope of this apology, but it is an opportunity to reflect critically on our common self-perception of supporting indigenous peoples’ rights in contrast to the normalised racism of previous generations.
Our generation’s invitation to, and enabling of, Australians of indigenous descent to more fully participate in mainstream Australian society may have been a necessary step towards reconciliation; or could it have been a poison chalice drawing them even deeper into the dysfunctions of industrial modernity that I have already outlined. We can only hope that people with such a history of resilience and understanding in the face dispossession will take these additional burdens in their stride.
In any case, this apology is not one that comes from a position of invulnerable privilege, giving succour to those who are no threat to that privilege. For many baby boomers, now caring for parents and dealing with their deaths, we are more inwardly focused. For some of us, especially those estranged from parents, through this both painful and tender processes we are finally growing up. But a comic tragedy could play out in our declining years if a combination of novel disabilities, the culture of rights and amplified fears lead to our children and grandchildren’s generations mostly experiencing harder times as far worse than they might really be, and deciding we are the cause of their troubles.
We baby boomers will increasingly find that in our growing dependence on young people we will be subject to their perspectives, whims and prejudices. Hopefully we can take what we are given on the chin and along with our children and our grandchildren’s generations we can all grow up and work together to face the future with whatever capacities we have.
We might hope this apology is itself a wake-up call to the younger generations that are still mostly sleepwalking into the oncoming maelstroms. In raising the alarm we might hope our humble apology will galvanise the potential in young people who are grasping the nettle of opportunities to turn problems into solutions.
We hope that this apology might lead to understanding rather than resentment of our frailty in the face of the self-organising forces of powerful change that have driven the climaxing of global industrial civilisation. Finally, the task ahead for our generation is to learn how to downsize and disown before we prepare to die, with grace, at a time of our choosing, and in a way that inspires and frees the next generations to chart a prosperous way down.
Global Cooling: The Real Climate Threat
Source: Vijay Jayaraj
Climate alarmists constantly warn us that man-made global warming is making our world less habitable and that climate doomsday is fast approaching. But a closer look at our climate reveals a surprising climate discovery that our mainstream media have conveniently ignored for decades: the role of the sun in determining Earth’s climate.
For the first time in humanity’s history, our leaders could be actively devising policies — based on their defiant and biased obsession with global warming — that will render us highly vulnerable to even the slightest cooling in our climatic system.
“We are causing irreversible damage to our environment,” “We are headed for a climate doomsday due to excessive warming,” “Climate change may wipe out humanity” — these are our everyday news headlines.
As a climate scientist, I find these headlines, and the stories they introduce, vague and full of hasty generalizations. The repeated, one-dimensional doomsday cry about carbon dioxide’s role in global temperature blinds the public to other causes.
CO2 is just one of many factors that influence global temperatures. Its role in recent warming is far from dominant. Indeed, there is poor correlation between CO2 emissions and global temperature. Between 2000 and 2018, global temperature showed no significant increase despite a steep increase in carbon dioxide emissions from anthropogenic sources. The same was the case between the years 1940 and 1970. When carbon dioxide concentration increases at a constant and steady rate and temperature doesn’t follow the pattern, we can be certain that carbon dioxide is not the primary driver of global temperature.
If not CO2, what?
Life on Earth is possible because of Earth’s perfect positioning in the solar system: not too close to the sun and not too far. For centuries, academicians have acknowledged this, and climate scientists today know that the sun is biggest influencer and driver of global temperature.
NASA’s page on solar influence clearly states that changes in the sun largely determine Earth’s atmospheric and surface temperatures. Astrophysicists and climatologists measure these changes in the sun in terms of quantifiable phenomena such as sunspot activity and solar cycles.
However, in recent times, NASA has succumbed to pressure from climate doomsday proponents. NASA’s original page on the sun’s impact on our climate system is now hidden from the public domain.
With the advent of dangerous man-made global warming theory, CO2 has taken the limelight, and the sun has been relegated to a mere spectator.
This could be warming-obsessed alarmists’ biggest mistake ever.
In central Europe, for example, temperature changes since 1990 coincided more with the changes in solar activity than with atmospheric CO2 concentration. The same has been true globally, and across centuries.
The Maunder Minimum (1645–1715) and Dalton Minimum (1790–1830) — periods of low solar activity — were responsible for the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age. England’s River Thames froze. Whole civilizations collapsed as people starved because cold-induced poor harvests led to malnutrition that made people too weak to resist disease. Likewise, increased solar activity in the Roman Warm Period (~250 B.C. to A.D. 400) and Medieval Warm Period (~A.D. 950–1250) brought warmer temperatures on Earth, and thriving crops led to greater nutrition and lower mortality rates.
Hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers affirm the overwhelming impact of solar activity on Earth’s temperature.
But will there be a cooling?
Observations of sunspot activity at the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) indicate that there has been a lull in solar activity during the past 18 years — the same period during which there has been no significant warming, confirming a direct correlation between solar activity and global average temperature.
Some climate scientists say another major cooling is likely soon. Their claims are not outlandish.
Evidence for the lull in solar activity is so clear that even NASA admits the cooling trend. Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center commented, “We see a cooling trend[.] … High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”
Most recent scientific studies on solar cycles suggest that the next solar cycles (25 and 26) could be similar to the Maunder and Dalton minima that plunged much of the world into disastrous cold.
An article in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Astrophysics and Space Science last month warns that the solar minimum might already have begun. Its authors also say there is a high possibility that it will be even colder than those of the Little Ice Age.
That is disturbing news.
Most of our current efforts — including the choice of our renewable energy technologies and our anti–fossil fuel developmental policies — are incompatible with fighting off the impacts of severe cold weather (localized and short-term), let alone long-lasting and global cooling like what happened with the solar minima of the Little Ice Age.
In the event of global cooling, people all over the world — the poor, especially — will be vulnerable. Our vulnerability will be largely because of global warming alarmists’ neglect of climate reality and the power-hungry climate agenda currently dominating national and international politics.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), contributor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Chennai, India.
Dozens killed in shooting attacks on New Zealand mosques
March 15, 2019
By Praveen Menon and Charlotte Greenfield
WELLINGTON/CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (Reuters) – A gunman shot dead 49 people and wounded more than 40 at two New Zealand mosques on Friday, some as they were kneeling at prayer, livestreaming online some of the killings in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called an assault on the nation’s values.
The gunman broadcast footage of the attack on one mosque in the city of Christchurch on Facebook, mirroring the carnage played out in video games, after publishing a “manifesto” in which he denounced immigrants, calling them “invaders”.
The video footage widely circulated on social media, apparently taken by a gunman and posted live online as the attack unfolded, showed him driving to a mosque, entering it and shooting randomly at people inside.
Worshippers, possibly dead or wounded, lay huddled on the floor, the video showed. Reuters was unable to confirm the authenticity of the footage.
It was the worst ever mass killing in New Zealand and the country raised its security threat level to the highest, Ardern said, adding, “This can now only be described as a terrorist attack.”
Police said three people were in custody including one man in his late 20s who had been charged with murder. He will appear in court on Saturday. Police have identified none of the suspects.
“We were not chosen for this act of violence because we condone racism, because we are enclave for extremism,” Ardern said in a national address. “We were chosen for the fact that we are none of these things. It was because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values.
“You have chosen us but we utterly reject and condemn you.”
Police Commissioner Mike Bush said 49 people had been killed. Health authorities said 48 people were being treated for gunshot wounds, including young children.
Leaders around the world expressed sorrow and disgust at the attacks, with some deploring the demonization of Muslims.
U.S. President Donald Trump condemned the “horrible massacre” in what the White House called a “vicious act of hate”.
The gunman’s manifesto praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose”. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘SHOOTING EVERYONE IN THE MOSQUE’
One man who said he was at the Al Noor mosque told media the gunman was white, blond and wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. The man burst into the mosque as worshippers were kneeling for prayers.
“He had a big gun…He came and started shooting everyone in the mosque, everywhere,” said the man, Ahmad Al-Mahmoud. He said he and others escaped by breaking through a glass door.
Forty-one people were killed at the Al Noor mosque, seven at a mosque in the Linwood neighborhood and one died in hospital, police said. Hospitals said children were among the victims.
The visiting Bangladesh cricket team was arriving for prayers at one of the mosques when the shooting started but all members were safe, a team coach told Reuters.
Three Bangladeshis were among the dead and one was missing, the consulate said.
Shortly before the attack began, an anonymous post on the discussion site 8chan, known for a wide range of content including hate speech, said the writer was going to “carry out an attack against the invaders” and included links to a Facebook livestream, in which the shooting appeared, and a manifesto.
The manifesto cited “white genocide”, a term typically used by racist groups to refer to immigration and the growth of minority populations, as his motivation.
The Facebook link directed users to the page of a user called brenton.tarrant.9.
A Twitter account with the handle @brentontarrant posted on Wednesday images of a rifle and other military gear decorated with names and messages connected to white nationalism. What looked like the same weapons appeared in the livestream of the mosque attack on Friday.
Facebook said it had deleted the gunman’s accounts “shortly after the livestream commenced” after being alerted by police. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all said they had taken steps to remove copies of the videos.
KILLINGS CONDEMNED
It was not immediately clear if the attacks at the two mosques were carried out by the same man.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said one of the men in custody was Australian.
All mosques in New Zealand had been asked to shut their doors and post armed guards, police said, adding they were not actively looking for any other “identified suspects”.
Political and Islamic leaders across Asia and the Middle East condemned the killings and voiced concern over the targeting of Muslims.
“I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11,” Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan posted on social media. “1.3 billion Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated “the urgency of working better together globally to counter Islamophobia and eliminate intolerance and violent extremism in all its forms,” a spokesman said.
Six Indonesians had been inside one of the mosques, with three managing to escape and three unaccounted for, its foreign minister said.
Afghanistan’s ambassador said three Afghans had been wounded. Two Malaysians were wounded, their foreign ministry said.
Muslims account for just over 1 percent of New Zealand’s population, a 2013 census showed.
“FIRING WENT ON AND ON’
The online footage, which appeared to have been captured on a camera strapped to a gunman’s head, showed him driving as music played in his vehicle. After parking, he took two guns and walked a short distance to the mosque where he opened fire.
Over the course of five minutes, he repeatedly shot worshippers, leaving more than a dozen bodies in one room alone. He returned to the car during that period to change guns, and went back to the mosque to shoot anyone showing signs of life.
One man, with blood still on his shirt, said in a television interview that he hid from a gunman under a bench and prayed that he would run out of bullets.
“I was just praying to God and hoping our God, please, let this guy stop,” Mahmood Nazeer told TVNZ.
“The firing went on and on. One person with us had a bullet in her arm. When the firing stopped, I looked over the fence, there was one guy, changing his gun.”
The video shows the gunman then driving off at high speed and firing from his car. Another video, taken by someone else, showed police apprehending a gunman on a pavement by a road.
Police said improvised explosive devices were found. The gunman’s video had shown red petrol canisters in the back of his car, along with weapons.
Violent crime is rare in New Zealand and police do not usually carry guns. Before Friday, New Zealand’s worst mass shooting was in 1990 when a gun-mad loner killed 13 men, women and children in a 24-hour rampage in the tiny seaside village of Aramoana. He was killed by police.
(This story has been refiled to add country name to dateline)
(Additional reporting by Tom Westbrook, John Mair and Swati Pandey in Sydney, Ruma Paul in Dhaka and Michael Holden in London; Writing by Micheal Perry and Frances Kerry; Editing by Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie/Mark Heinrich)
Mike Pence Asks Help Encouraging Congress to Support Border Emergency
Vice President Mike Pence asked Credit Union National Association Government Affairs Conference (CUNA GAC) attendees Tuesday to put pressure on members of Congress in the coming days to support President Donald Trump’s southern border emergency declaration.
Pence identified the “crisis of illegal immigration, drugs, dangerous criminals, and human trafficking” at the southern border. “It’s a crisis like we’ve never seen before,” he said as he spoke to those attending the Credit Union National Association’s Government Affairs Conference.
“Seventy percent of illegal immigrants report being victims of violence on their journey to our southern border,” Pence told the group. “And according to Doctors Without Borders, nearly one-third of women traveling to our southern border report being sexually assaulted on the journey.”
“In the last five months alone, Customs and Border Protection has seen a more than 300 percent increase in the number of families apprehended compared to the same period one year ago,” he went on. “My fellow Americans, every day we don’t secure our border, we are allowing the crisis to worsen and more lives to be endangered and exploited.”
Drug cartels and smugglers are exploiting weaknesses at the southern border. The vice president brought this to the attention of the crowd. He cited statistics showing as of 2016 drug overdose has become the leading cause of death for Americans under 55 years of age, “In 2016, all across America, some 174 people lost their lives to drug overdose every single day.”
He emphasized the effect the crisis at the southern border is having on “every community in America” and cited it as the reason President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border.
Members of Congress have expressed their intention to block the president’s declaration.
“Despite the fact that he has clear statutory authority under the National Emergencies Act, some in Congress are actually trying to stop the president from exercising the authority that Congress gave him to address what is an undeniable humanitarian crisis on our southern border,” said Pence.
Pence let the group know that once he left them, he would be going to Capitol Hill to continue discussions on supporting president’s declaration.
“A vote against the president’s emergency declaration is a vote against border security,” said Pence. “A vote against the president’s emergency declaration is a vote to deny the real humanitarian and security crisis that is happening at our southern border.”
“We’re calling on every member of the United States Senate: Set politics aside. Stand up for border security. Stand with this president. And put the safety and security of the American people first,” Pence said to applause from the crowd.
“I encourage each one of you, as you meet with representatives in the House and Senate, just encourage them to take a stand for border security,” he encouraged the group, recognizing that they would be going up to Congressional offices in the coming days. “Encourage them to stand with this president as he’s taking such decisive action to secure our border.”
Michelle Moons is a White House Correspondent for Breitbart News — follow on Twitter @MichelleDiana and Facebook.
Mike Pence Asks Help Encouraging Congress to Support Border Emergency
Vice President Mike Pence asked Credit Union National Association Government Affairs Conference (CUNA GAC) attendees Tuesday to put pressure on members of Congress in the coming days to support President Donald Trump’s southern border emergency declaration.
Pence identified the “crisis of illegal immigration, drugs, dangerous criminals, and human trafficking” at the southern border. “It’s a crisis like we’ve never seen before,” he said as he spoke to those attending the Credit Union National Association’s Government Affairs Conference.
“Seventy percent of illegal immigrants report being victims of violence on their journey to our southern border,” Pence told the group. “And according to Doctors Without Borders, nearly one-third of women traveling to our southern border report being sexually assaulted on the journey.”
“In the last five months alone, Customs and Border Protection has seen a more than 300 percent increase in the number of families apprehended compared to the same period one year ago,” he went on. “My fellow Americans, every day we don’t secure our border, we are allowing the crisis to worsen and more lives to be endangered and exploited.”
Drug cartels and smugglers are exploiting weaknesses at the southern border. The vice president brought this to the attention of the crowd. He cited statistics showing as of 2016 drug overdose has become the leading cause of death for Americans under 55 years of age, “In 2016, all across America, some 174 people lost their lives to drug overdose every single day.”
He emphasized the effect the crisis at the southern border is having on “every community in America” and cited it as the reason President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border.
Members of Congress have expressed their intention to block the president’s declaration.
“Despite the fact that he has clear statutory authority under the National Emergencies Act, some in Congress are actually trying to stop the president from exercising the authority that Congress gave him to address what is an undeniable humanitarian crisis on our southern border,” said Pence.
Pence let the group know that once he left them, he would be going to Capitol Hill to continue discussions on supporting president’s declaration.
“A vote against the president’s emergency declaration is a vote against border security,” said Pence. “A vote against the president’s emergency declaration is a vote to deny the real humanitarian and security crisis that is happening at our southern border.”
“We’re calling on every member of the United States Senate: Set politics aside. Stand up for border security. Stand with this president. And put the safety and security of the American people first,” Pence said to applause from the crowd.
“I encourage each one of you, as you meet with representatives in the House and Senate, just encourage them to take a stand for border security,” he encouraged the group, recognizing that they would be going up to Congressional offices in the coming days. “Encourage them to stand with this president as he’s taking such decisive action to secure our border.”
Michelle Moons is a White House Correspondent for Breitbart News — follow on Twitter @MichelleDiana and Facebook.
The Global Economic Reset Begins With An Engineered Crash
This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.com
For a few years now, since at least 2014, the phrase “global economic reset” has been circulating in the financial world. This phrase is used primarily by globalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to describe an event in which the current system as we know it will either die out or evolve into a new system where “multilateralism” will become the norm. The reset is often described in an ambiguous way. IMF banking elites will usually mention the end results of the shift, but they say little about the process to get there.
What we do know is that the intent of the globalists is to use this reset to create a more centralized monetary system and micro-managed global economy. At the core of this new structure would be the IMF along with perhaps the BIS and World Bank. It is a plan that has been supported openly by both western and eastern governments, including Russia and China.
As noted, the details are few and far between, but the IMF describes the use of open borders and human migrations during the reset as a means to transfer capital from various parts of the world. It is a novel if not utterly insane way to transfer wealth that only makes sense if you understand that the globalist goal is to deliberately conjure a geopolitical catastrophe.
The IMF also asserts that blockchain technology will make capital transfer easier and more efficient in this future environment, which explains the enthusiastic globalist support for developments in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies despite the notion in cryptocurrency circles that blockchain would somehow make the bankers “obsolete”.
The IMF also acknowledges that in the meantime a slowdown in capital flows has occurred, and that this slowdown is ongoing since the crash of 2008. What they do not explicitly admit is that the crash of 2008 never ended, and that the decline we are witnessing today is merely an extension of the recession/depression that started ten years ago.
Certain facts have become obvious to anyone with any sense over the past year. First, as the Federal Reserve began tightening stimulus policies by raising interest rates and cutting assets from their balance sheet, the global economy began to return to steep declines not seen since the credit crisis. I predicted this outcome in my article ‘Party While You Can – Central Bank Ready To Pop The Everything Bubble’, published in January of 2018. The plunge has started in almost every sector of the economy, from housing, to autos to credit markets to retail. Now, even jobs, numbers which are highly manipulated to the upside, are beginning to falter.
The assertion in the mainstream media is that this recessionary downturn is new. This is not the case. What began in 2008 was an epic implosion of multiple national economies, and what we are seeing in 2019 is the final culmination of that process – The end game.
It is not a coincidence that the downturn started right after the Fed began tightening stimulus measures in 2017. With only a minor increase in interest rates and moderate cuts to their balance sheet, all the conditions the economy suffered in 2008 are suddenly returning. What this tells us is that the US economy and parts of the global economy cannot survive without constant and ever expanding central bank stimulus. The moment the stimulus goes away, the crash returns.
Does this mean that central banks will try to keep QE going forever? No, it does not. So far, the Fed has not capitulated at all from the path of tightening. In fact, the Fed nearly doubled its normal balance sheet cuts from January 30th to the end of February, dumping over $65 billion in a 30 day period. The Fed also has not changed its dot plot projections for two more interest rate hikes this year. This means all the talk the past two months of the Fed going “dovish” was nonsense. Setting aside their rhetoric and looking at their actions, the Fed has been as hawkish as ever.
The only people who might find this to be news are most stock market daytraders, who ignore all other failing indicators and seem content to base their economic projections on equities alone. Set aside the fact that stocks plunged in December into near bear market territory. The bounce in January and February has convinced them that the Fed is stepping in and will not allow the economy to tank. But the “plunge protection team” is about to pull the rug out from under their feet after training them like Pavlovian dogs to salivate at the sound of the word “accommodation”.
Their mindset is based on a host of incorrect assumptions.
To be clear, while the Fed paid lip service to “accommodation” in their public statements, it was not the central bank that stepped in monetarily to stall falling stocks. That was actually the Chinese central bank, pumping billions in stimulus into global markets at just the right moment.
Chinese stimulus coupled with pension fund buying at the start of this year saved stocks from losses beyond 20%, but markets have met resistance on the way up. Without renewed stimulus measures from the Fed, equities have topped out multiple times and refuse to move towards their previous highs. This suggests that the two month bounce is over, and that stocks will now fall back down to December lows and beyond. If the projections I made in January are correct, then the Dow will fall into the 17,000 – 18,000 point range from the end of March through April.
The facade is slowly but surely melting away, not just in economics, but everywhere. I predicted both the success of the Brexit vote as well as Trump’s win in 2016 based on the theory that the globalists would allow or even help populists to gain a political foothold, only to crash the economic system on their heads and then blame them for the disaster. So far my theory is proving correct.
Trump’s trade war continues unabated despite claims by many that it would be over quickly. Currently, there are no plans for a March summit between Trump and Xi, and the possibility of a summit anytime soon has come into question as Trump’s negotiations with North Korea fell to shambles last month. The negotiations are a farce and are not meant to succeed. I continue to hold to my position that the trade war is a planned distraction and that Trump is playing a role in a globalist scripted drama.
The facade of Donald Trump as a “populist candidate” is quickly ending. His cabinet is loaded with think-tank ghouls and banking elites, so this should come as little surprise. But there are still some analysts out there that naively believe that Trump is playing “4D chess” and that he is not the pied piper he now appears to be. What I see is a president that claimed during his campaign that he would “drain the swamp” of elites, then stacked his cabinet with some of the worst elites in Washington D.C. What I see is a president who argued against Fed stimulus measures and the fake stock market during his campaign, and who now has attached himself to the stock market so completely that any crash will now be blamed on him no matter the facts. What I see is a willing scapegoat; a president that is going to fail on purpose.
In terms of the Brexit, I still predict that there will be a “no deal” event, and that this is by design. The Brexit deal with the EU is slated to be decided in the next few weeks. A “no deal” outcome would be a perfect excuse for a major financial crisis in Europe, which is why I think it will happen. While sovereignty movements in the US will get the blame for the crash through Trump, sovereignty movements in the UK will get the blame for a crash in Europe through Brexit.
It is important to remind the public that this narrative is entirely false. The economy has been in a state of animated death since 2008. Central bank stimulus acted as a kind of fiscal formaldehyde, keeping the visible signs of the crash at bay for 10 years but also creating a bubble even larger and more destructive than the one before. The “Everything Bubble” has now been primed to explode with maximum damage in mind.
The Fed started the tightening process for a reason; the establishment is ready to start the “global economic reset”, and they have their populist scapegoats in place. The crash in fundamentals returned in mid-2018, and I believe that crash will finally be acknowledged publicly by the media in mid-2019.
The point of it all is described in the very IMF interviews and documents I linked to above – Total centralization of the global economic framework, managed by the IMF. They describe it as “multilateralism” or a “multipolar world order”; this is meant to fool us into believing that the reset is about “decentralization”. It isn’t. They intend to move us from one unipolar economic structure to another unipolar economic structure that is even more centralized. That is all.
The crash itself is simply a means to an end. It is a tool to gain fiscal and psychological leverage against the public. The everything bubble was created for a reason. The Fed has tightened into economic weakness over the past year for a reason. The timing of Trump’s trade war and summit failures have happened for a reason. The timing of the Brexit chaos is happening now for a reason. The globalists are pulling the plug on economic life support today; the crash is engineered, and sovereignty movements are supposed to take the blame.
The best option at this time is to continuously force the issue of central bank culpability. Liberty activists have to keep the focus on them and their criminal participation in economic sabotage, and we cannot assume that any government or political leader will be friendly to our cause. The globalists have started the crisis, and we must finish it by making sure they are held accountable.
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You can contact Brandon Smith at: [email protected]
Trump is an Army of One
Source: Brian C. Joondeph
Presidents typically have the backing and support of their political party. Although all presidents have the bully pulpit to broadcast their messages, the presidency is a busy job and the president must delegate messaging and branding to surrogates, including elected officials in the president’s party.
Barack Obama had legions of apologists and defenders. Every Congressional Democrat and scores of leftovers from the Clinton administration were ready, willing, and able to defend all things Obama, as well as viciously pounce on any of his detractors. The Obamacare and Benghazi scandals were vociferously shielded from any criticism.
Bill Clinton enjoyed the same support from Team Democrat, particularly when navigating his scandal-filled two terms in office and impeachment. His supporters attacked independent counsel Kenneth Starr incessantly, impugning his character and calling him a pervert.
In addition, all Democrat presidents have the unwaveringly loyal support of the media, print and digital. News coverage of past Democrat presidents has mostly been favorable, overlooking negative stories and supplying an abundance of humanizing puff pieces. Democrat presidential candidates are routinely endorsed by most major newspapers in America.
Then along came Donald Trump, previously a member of each political party at different times in his life when such party affiliation served his interests. The truth was he was never a Democrat or a Republican, at least as they are defined today. Instead he is a problem solver, beholden to no one and not part of the political establishment. His loyalty is only to America and those who voted for him, not to the donor classes and globalist elites.
Seeking the presidency, he understood the folly of running as a third-party candidate, at least officially, although in reality he was very much a third-party candidate, joining the GOP as the lessor of two evils. He was not part of either party’s ruling cabal, having never held elective office or political appointment. He did not campaign or arrive at the White House with an entourage of advisors and staff, from previous stints as a governor or senator. Trump was an army of one.
Official White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
His past confidants from the Trump Tower days were his family and assorted lawyers and other fixer types, used as necessary when swimming through the shark-infested waters of New York City real estate development. President Trump entered the White House thin on trusted political aides and advisors. Few are still in his administration while most are long gone, some quietly and at least outwardly supportive of Trump, while others departed noisily, making trouble for Trump in exchange for book deals or appearances on CNN. Very few were solidly part of Trump’s army.
Now in the second half of his first term in office, he remains the king of a nonexistent political party, at least in Washington, DC. His actual party is “Yuuge” with a political base that elected and likely will reelect him in 2020. Trump hovers around 50 percent in the polls with 90 plus-percent support among Republicans.
Those few Republicans, like John Kasich, making noise about a primary challenge are chihuahuas nipping at the hooves of a massive Budweiser Clydesdale. The “son of a mailman” had his lunch handed to him by candidate Trump. Facing President Trump in 2020, he will be irrelevant.
Yet Trump is largely alone. Where are Republican members of Congress? Where are the pundits? Defenders are as scarce as moderate Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is on television more in one week than Paul Ryan was in two years.
Trump’s army is small, with only a few Congressional allies such as Mark Meadows and Lindsey Graham. Just a handful of media figures support President Trump while the rest call him a Nazi, a racist, a terrorist, or just a dolt. The remainder of the Republican Party is waiting patiently to stick a knife into Trump’s back when the situation allows.
Republicans controlled the House and Senate for two years. Other than a corporate tax cut, what did they accomplish? Obamacare wasn’t repealed, despite endless promises to do so ahead of each election. The wall, Trump’s signature issue, wasn’t built. Planned Parenthood remained funded as did sanctuary cities. Two Supreme Court nominees were confirmed, although the Kavanaugh process was a travesty, aided and abetted by a handful of squishy Republican Senators.
Even the President’s emergency declaration for wall funding is likely to be rejected due to several Republicans voting against their party leader and one of the primary issues for their constituents. How many Democrats defected in the Obamacare vote, a key issue for their party leader? None.
Despite being an army of one, Trump is more than willing to fight back with all his might. In his famous speech from October 13, 2016 he said, “But I take all of these slings and arrows for you. I take them for our movement, so that we can have our country back.”
Where is his army?
Fortunately, Trump is a fighter. No other Republican could withstand the daily blistering barrage from the media and both political parties ganging up on him to destroy his presidency. Imagine how much more he could have accomplished in his first two years with solid support from the GOP, advancing his agenda and pushing back against spy-gate tricksters?
On the plus side, he holds the keys to declassification and the pain that will bring to many, including potential indictments for conspiracy and treason. Huber and Horowitz are beginning to emerge from the shadows, bringing unpleasant surprises to many conspirators. As Trump told the NY Post last fall, “I’m a counter-puncher and I will hit them so hard they’d never been hit like that.”
On the negative side, there could be 17 or so Republican Senators willing to join with their colleagues across the aisle to vote for conviction on any of the inevitable impeachment charges passed by the hyper-partisan House. Murkowski, Collins, Romney, and others would be happy to see Trump removed from office and after some theatrical handwringing and might vote to convict on any bogus articles of impeachment.
Such defections were not a concern for Bill Clinton 20 years ago, but he was not a party of one; rather he was Atilla leading the Huns to battle. Trump has a fine line to straddle, bringing pain to the deep state but keeping Republican Senators, many of whom identify with the deep state, from tossing him to the wolves. Trump is interfering with the globalist elite agenda, and both parties would rather see him back in Trump Tower, away from the levers of power. After all, he was never supposed to win.
For his voters, the frustration mounts. We have but one vote to give to the president and only our voices on social media as his army. Our elected representatives serve not their voters but instead their donors, as evidenced by the immigration stand-off. His army of 60 million plus is strong but with limited effect. Unfortunately, his political army in Washington, DC is largely against him.
Yet he persists and perseveres, as an army of one. Despite being woefully outnumbered, he is the odds on favorite to prevail.
Cultural Relativism? British Woman Found Dead After Hiking in Guatemala
Growing list of women traveling alone in dangerous countries who never come home.
Cultural Relativism? British Woman Found Dead After Hiking in Guatemala
Growing list of women traveling alone in dangerous countries who never come home.
Cultural Relativism? British Woman Found Dead After Hiking in Guatemala
Growing list of women traveling alone in dangerous countries who never come home.
Democrats Working for Trump’s Re-Election
Source: Clarice Feldman
I find it impossible to disagree with Ryan Saavedra’s Twitter observation:
“The Democratic Party, which has called everything under the sun a “Nazi” for the last 3 years, all of a sudden can’t muster up the spine to condemn blatant anti-Semitism within their own party.”
It’s been in the works for years under the cloak of intersectionality — in truth little more than an effort to ingather voting blocs of illegal immigrants, Palestinian supporters, socialists, blacks locked in the ghettoes of their minds, sexual outliers – LGBT (and “whatever other gender” now included), and malcontent women delighted that even post-birth abortion will be legal.
The three harpies — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — have stripped the veil from the Democratic tango dancers and presented House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a dilemma: Who to bow to — the Congressional Black Caucus without whose votes she would not have her position, or the weak-spined moderates and Jewish House members who might mouth objections but still will continue to vote with the party? From the standpoint of her own interests she chose wisely by endorsing an outrageous resolution. I believe and hope that she chose poorly from the standpoint of American voters.
Here’s the kitchen-sink resolution.You won’t see Omar mentioned in it. The Democrats instead state a full-blown disagreement with hate of every kind from the Japanese internment to Dreyfus and so on. Everything except broccoli and kale.
Far too many reform and conservative congregations are partners in this betrayal. My own former synagogue, which professes love of Israel and Judaism, held a cry- in when Trump was elected, and since the election sports banners welcoming refugees, the latest banner reading “Love your neighbor. Stand Against Hate,” equating an effort to assure immigrants come here legally, have skills we can use and share our values, with hate. When, in fact, bringing in culturally incompatible immigrants like Omar, is bringing in hate.
They’re not alone. There’s the Israel-hating rabbis of J-Street, HIAS, once a religiously supported immigrant aid society which under Obama turned into a cash-rich government railroad that advocates for culturally incompatible immigrants and parks them in poorer conservative communities to alter the voting. At the same time that HIAS is filling its coffers, its work further impoverishes the overtaxed welfare, legal, and educational resources of those places. And there’s the Jonathan Greenblatt-led ADL, now an even stronger arm of the Democratic party, which can be counted upon to downplay or shove anti-Semitism under the carpet, though fighting such discrimination was once its very purpose.
John Hammer nails it when he argues that the Democratic Party this week “wholly and completely sold out its Jewish supporters:”
The Democrats’ profound moral cowardice and shameful obfuscation this week was, at its core, not about criticism of the State of Israel’s (entirely lawful and morally just) presence in the historical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. It was not about what Sen. Bernie Sanders (Communist – VT) so mendaciously and disingenuously calls “legitimate criticism of the right-wing, Netanyahu government in Israel.” It is not even about “anti-Zionism” — a legitimate academic debate in the half-century between Herzl’s initial formulation and Ben-Gurion’s ultimate declaration, but which now serves as the thinnest of all thinly veiled ruses for genocidal aspirants who want to throw all the Juden into the Mediterranean.
No, what happened this week was qualitatively worse. It was worse not merely in degree, but in kind.
What the Democratic Party did this week was refuse to condemn one of its own for relentlessly trafficking in at least two of the oldest, most pernicious canards used to defame the Jewish people. What the Democratic Party did this week was whitewash, deflect, and (oftentimes) openly apologize for open, transparent Jew-hatred.
What the Democratic Party covered for this week was not mere criticism of Israeli government policies. Indeed, what the Democratic Party covered for this week was not even criticism of Israel’s existence. But what the Party of Truman covered for this week is a rogue misanthrope who peddles Judeophobic screeds about financial control and “dual loyalty” so blatant and unvarnished that they might make some “blood libel” dolts blush.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro adds: “This week, the Democratic Party proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is willing to not only countenance but embrace anti-Semitism, so long as the anti-Semitism comes from members of their intersectional coalition.” Omar, he reminds us:
First, she came under scrutiny for an old tweet in which she stated that Israel had “hypnotized the world” — an old anti-Semitic canard attributing magical powers to the Jews. Then, she came under fire for suggesting that American support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins” — an old anti-Semitic canard that Jewish money lay at the root of America’s support for Israel. Finally, she came under scrutiny for stating that American supporters of Israel were exhibiting dual loyalty — a third old anti-Semitic canard suggesting that Jews are unified by clan, and are thus a nefarious force within the broader body politic.
He offers the same explanation for the Democratic abandonment as I do — intersectionality:”
4. Intersectionality Rules The Day. The only honest excuse we’ve seen thus far comes from House Minority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), who stated that Omar’s intersectional experiences are simply too important to criticize her for Jew-hatred. Holocaust survivors, their relatives, and Jews generally ought to check their privilege. “There are people who tell me, ‘Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors,’” Clyburn stated. “‘My parents did this.’ It’s more personal with her. I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain.”
This, in the end, is the real Democratic excuse: Jews are too financially, educationally, and politically successful to be considered victims of anti-Semitism, particularly when that anti-Semitism comes from those who rank higher on the intersectional hierarchy of victimhood. That’s been the underlying Democratic argument for years at this point. Intersectionality means that Jews are the odd group out, even if they’re still the most targeted group in terms of hate crimes.
The Democrats are banking on their new intersectional coalition. If that means ignoring, downplaying, or outright lying about anti-Semitism, they’re willing to do it. And everyone, particularly American Jews, should take note of that vile but clear fact.
It’s worth noting in passing that even the private Sidwell Friends School in D.C., which is chock full of the children of Democratic officials (like the Obamas) and functionaries was the site of an anti-Semitic incident this week. A teacher at the same school earlier harassed the Republican EPA head at a local restaurant. The apples are not falling far from the Democrats’ tree.
Of course, Israel and the Jews are not Omar’s only target. She regularly spouts hatred for the U.S. Seth Barron at the NY Post details her animus to the country in whose House of Representatives she sits as a member of the Minnesota delegation:
What is surprising is the extent to which her narrative consists of complaints about the intolerance, racism, inequity, and filth that she found when she came to the United States, and since. Gratitude for the country and the people who saved and welcomed her family, is largely absent from her telling. Interviewed on the popular Pod Save America podcast, Omar explained that when her family was preparing for resettlement in America, they watched orientation videos “about the life that they are to expect once they arrive here… happy families, and dinner tables where there is an abundance of food, images of happy young children running off to their school buses… images of a country where people are happy and leading a life that is prosperous. You are really looking forward to life as you see it on that screen.”[snip]
Omar has still not arrived in the America she was promised, though she has now been elected to Congress. We continue to disappoint her. “The current reality that people live in… an America where you can’t access the justice system equally because you are born with a different race, or a different gender, or are born into a different class, that isn’t the America that I heard about, that isn’t the America that I watched.”[snip]
The American Dream once referred to the aspirations of Americans to provide better lives for their children. For the left, that idea has come to mean the intentions of anyone, anywhere, who wants to come here. From this perspective, the people who now live in the US are superfluous to America and the American idea. We are placeholders, keeping things together until tomorrow’s Americans — more deserving, though apparently less appreciative — get here. Meantime, we can try to survive this hellish existence until they arrive to bail us out.
Voters aren’t stupid. A Rasmussen survey this week revealed that a majority of likely voters agreed that we now have people in Congress who hate our country. Omar is certainly one of those people.
I’ll be traveling and unable to access the internet much for the next three weeks. When I return I suppose the netherworld of the internet will be suggesting that Trump-Hitler, and the Jews hypnotized Omar into spouting anti-Semitic hate.
Satellites and shoe-leather: How investors get beyond China’s dubious data
March 11, 2019
By Daniel Leussink, Swati Pandey and Trevor Hunnicutt
TOKYO/SYDNEY/NEW YORK (Reuters) – When TAL Education Group, a mid-sized tutoring services firm in China, reported a three-fold increase in its 2018 third-quarter net income earlier this year, few people made much of it.
Rather, investors fretted over a weak performance in China from Apple Inc – a classic yardstick for measuring demand and the health of the world’s second-largest economy.
For Brendan Ahern, the New York-based chief investment officer at Krane Funds Advisors, TAL’s results showed that, while China may be showing signs of pain from a long-running U.S.-Sino trade war, parts of its economy are still doing well.
“With some study of China, you can get results that are very contrary to this view of China as one entity,” said Ahern.
Ahern is not alone. Foreign investors keen to get a grasp of China’s economy have for years distrusted official data.
Many have models built on inputs such as auto sales or air traffic and even indicators such as commentary from food and beauty firms.
“Many people look for alternative data sources in China as proxies for growth, rather than the just the official figures,” said Ross Hutchison, a fund manager at Aberdeen Standard Investments in Edinburgh. “I find it helpful to consider ‘micro’ stories, where you can get a better sense of actual activity.”
In 2018, even as the trade war sapped exports and investment at home, China’s official GDP growth was 6.6 percent – as always, unerringly within official targets.
That was a 28-year low for China, but still almost double the global average of 3.7 percent.
“There are always questions about it and there are always doubts raised about it,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“U.S. investors for the most part put a little haircut on it. If the number is X, they suspect the real number is X minus something, and then it is more about trying to identify the trend of numbers rather than the absolute levels.”
What’s more, for an economy that exceeds $10 trillion and a population of nearly 1.4 billion, analysts says China’s economic statistics are released too swiftly for investors to have faith in their accuracy, leading them to read the economic tea leaves elsewhere.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
FAKES, FILTERS
Around the same time that Apple’s disappointing iPhone sales were making investors nervous about China, Aberdeen’s Hutchison was looking at athletic apparel firm Nike Inc’s estimate-beating results and double-digit sales growth in China.
“To me, it suggests that the worries around Apple are not a canary in the coalmine for faltering Chinese growth, but that increasingly expensive iPhones just aren’t as cool as they used to be,” said Hutchison.
Peter Bye, a portfolio manager on the U.S. equity team at UBS Asset Management, agrees some filtering of data is needed.
Bye cites the example of the 2013 crackdown by Chinese authorities on gift-giving by officials, which skewed demand for luxury brands.
“Therefore, China growth numbers out of some high-end brands again weren’t that indicative of China consumer health.”
His discretionary list of data points includes travel commentary from booking platforms as well as commentary from beauty and food companies around the region pandering to Chinese travelers and customers.
For U.S. hedge fund manager Teddy Vallee, founder of Pervalle Global, the correlations between China’s credit growth and other markets such as global crude and copper are material, so he looks at China’s base money or M1 growth.
“The issue today is we haven’t seen M1 turn higher, so it’s quite difficult to be constructive until this turns,” Vallee said.
(GRAPHIC: Proxy economic indicators for China – https://tmsnrt.rs/2Ch1a4i)
BIRD’S EYE VIEW
The Economist magazine’s Li Keqiang index was inspired by comments from the Chinese premier a decade or so ago that the official GDP was ‘man-made’. Li based his preferred measures of economic growth on bank loans, rail freight and electricity consumption.
But as China weans its economy off a reliance on manufacturing and heavy industry, analysts have found the Li Keqiang index needs additional measures.
Unfortunately, China’s modern economy, more represented by internet payment platforms and sales systems such as WeChat and Alipay, isn’t yet openly sharing data on online traffic.
Jian Shi Cortesi, an Asian equities portfolio manager at GAM Investment Management in Zurich, tracks a China Satellite Manufacturing Index, developed by San Francisco-based SpaceKnow.
It analyses industrial facilities in China using imagery from space and algorithms measuring the level of manufacturing activity.
Qinwei Wang, a London-based senior economist at European asset manager Amundi, uses in-house models incorporating freight and passenger traffic data, floor space under construction and electricity consumption.
“These data are more independent from official GDP and headline data, of high frequency, difficult to manipulate by officials, and cover the relatively broad economy,” said Wang.
For many analysts like Sarah Shaw, a Sydney-based global portfolio manager at 4D Infrastructure, nothing beats boots on the ground.
“If you’re wandering around in Beijing and you can’t get into a restaurant or you can’t get on a train because they are all full, that’s an indication that things are still relatively okay.”
(Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak, Kate Duguid, Lewis Krauskopf, Dhara Ranasinghe, Caroline Valetkevitch and Jennifer Ablan; Writing by Vidya Ranganathan; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
EU Admits Giving Thousands of Prepaid Debit Cards to Migrants
57 million euros funneled from taxpayers to migrants in 2017 alone
High School Students and Peace Making
Remarks at Student Peace Awards of Fairfax County, Va., March 10, 2019
By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War
Thank you for inviting me here. I’m honored. And I’m reminded of lots of happy memories of Herndon High School, class of 87. If there was encouragement back then to take on the sort of projects that our honorees today have taken on, I missed it. I suspect that some improvements have been made in high school education since my day. Yet I did manage to learn a lot at Herndon, and also by participating in a trip abroad with one of my teachers, and from spending a year abroad as an exchange student following graduation prior to beginning college. Seeing the world through a new culture and language helped me to question things I hadn’t. I believe we need a lot more questioning, including of things familiar and comfortable. The students being honored today have all been willing to push themselves beyond what was comfortable. You all don’t need me to tell you the benefits of having done that. The benefits, as you know, are much more than an award.
Reading the summaries of what these students have done, I see a lot of work opposing bigotry, recognizing humanity in those who are different, and helping others to do the same. I see a lot of opposing cruelty and violence and advocating nonviolent solutions and kindness. I think of all of these steps as part of building a culture of peace. By peace I mean, not exclusively, but first and foremost, the absence of war. Prejudice is a wonderful tool in marketing wars. Human understanding is a wonderful impediment. But we have to avoid allowing our concerns to be used against, avoid accepting that the only way to solve some alleged crime is to commit the larger crime of war. And we have to figure out how to persuade governments to behave as peacefully on a large scale as we try to on a smaller one, so that we aren’t welcoming refugees while our government causes more people to flee their homes, so that we aren’t sending aid to places while our government sends missiles and guns.
I recently did a couple of public debates with a professor from the U.S. Army’s West Point Academy. The question was whether war can ever be justified. He argued yes. I argued no. Like many people who argue his side, he spent a fair amount of time talking not about wars but about finding yourself confronted in a dark alleyway, the idea being that everyone must simply agree that they would be violent if confronted in a dark alleyway, and therefore war is justifiable. I responded by asking him not to change the subject, and by claiming that what one person does in a dark alleyway, whether violent or not, has very little in common with the collective enterprise of constructing massive equipment and preparing massive forces and making the calm and deliberate choice to drop explosives on distant people’s homes rather than negotiate or cooperate or make use of courts or arbitration or aid or disarmament agreements.
But if you’ve read this excellent book that’s being given to these outstanding students today, Sweet Fruit from a Bitter Tree, then you know that it simply is not true that a person alone in a dark alleyway never has any better option than violence. For some people in some cases in dark alleyways and other similar locations, violence could prove the best option, a fact that would tell us nothing about the institution of war. But in this book we read numerous stories — and there are many, no doubt millions, more just like them — of people who chose a different course.
It sounds not just uncomfortable but ridiculous to the dominant culture we live in to suggest starting a conversation with a would-be rapist, making friends with burglars, asking an attacker about his troubles or inviting him to dinner. How can such an approach, documented to have worked over and over again in practice ever be made to work in theory? (If anyone here is planning to attend college, you can expect to encounter just that question quite often.)
Well, here’s a different theory. Very often, not always, but very often people have a need for respect and friendship that is much stronger than their desire to inflict pain. A friend of mine named David Hartsough was part of a nonviolent action in Arlington trying to integrate a segregated lunch counter, and an angry man put a knife up to him and threatened to kill him. David calmly looked him in the eye and said words to the effect of “You do what you have to do, my brother, and I am going to love you anyway.” The hand holding the knife began to shake, and then the knife fell to the floor.
Also, the lunch counter was integrated.
Humans are a very peculiar species. We don’t actually need a knife to the throat to feel uncomfortable. I may say things in a speech like this one that don’t threaten anyone in any way, but nonetheless make some people pretty darn uncomfortable. I wish they didn’t, but I think they have to be said even if they do.
A little over a year ago there was a mass shooting at a high school in Florida. Many people have, quite rightly I think, asked the people just up the street here at the NRA to consider what role their corruption of government may play in the endless epidemic of gun violence in the United States. Thank you to Congressman Connolly for having voted for background checks, by the way. But almost nobody mentions that our tax dollars paid to train that young man in Florida to kill, trained him right in the cafeteria of the high school where he did it, and that he was wearing a t-shirt advertising that training program when he murdered his classmates. Why wouldn’t that upset us? Why wouldn’t we all feel some responsibility? Why would we avoid the subject?
One possible explanation is that we’ve been taught that when the U.S. Army trains people to shoot guns it’s for a good purpose, not murder, but some other kind of shooting people, and that a t-shirt from a JROTC program is an admirable, patriotic, and noble badge of honor that we shouldn’t disgrace by mentioning it in conjunction with a mass murder of people who matter. After all, Fairfax County has the JROTC too and hasn’t experienced the same result as Parkland, Florida — yet. Questioning the wisdom of such programs would be vaguely unpatriotic, perhaps even treasonous. It’s more comfortable just to keep quiet.
Now, let me say something even more uncomfortable. Mass shooters in the United States very disproportionately have been trained by the U.S. military. That is to say, veterans are proportionately more likely to be mass shooters than are a random group of men of the same age. The facts in this regard are not in dispute, only the acceptability of mentioning them. It’s all right to point out that mass shooters are almost all male. It’s all right to point out how many suffer from mental illness. But not how many were trained by one of the biggest public programs the world has ever seen.
Needless to say, or rather I wish it were needless to say, one doesn’t mention mental illness in order to encourage cruelty to the mentally ill, or veterans in order to condone anyone being mean to veterans. I mention the suffering of veterans and the suffering that some of them sometimes inflict on others in order to open up a conversation about whether we ought to stop creating more veterans going forward.
In Fairfax County, as much as anywhere in this country, questioning militarism is questioning an existing economy of military contractors. Studies have found that if you moved money from military spending to education or infrastructure or green energy or even tax cuts for working people you’d have so many more jobs and better-paying jobs at that, that you could in fact divert sufficient funds into aiding anyone who needed help in transitioning from military to non-military work. But in our current culture, people think of the enterprise of mass killing as a jobs program, and investment in it as normal.
When the Guantanamo base in Cuba became known for having tortured people to death, someone asked Starbucks why they chose to have a coffee shop at Guantanamo. The response was that choosing not to have one there would have been a political statement, whereas having one there was simply normal.
In Congressman Gerry Connolly’s last campaign, the political action committees of at least nine weapons companies chipped in $10,000 each.
In Charlottesville, we’ve just asked our city council to adopt a policy of no longer investing in weapons or fossil fuels. A quick glance at a few websites shows me that Fairfax County, too, invests retirement funds, for example, in such life-threatening enterprises as ExxonMobil and in State of Virginia investments in funds that invest heavily in weapons. I think of some of the wonderful teachers I had at Herndon and wonder whether they would have appreciated someone making their retirement dependent on the flourishing of the war business and the destruction of the earth’s climate. I also wonder whether anyone asked them. Or rather I’m certain nobody did.
But does anyone ever ask us the most important questions that we need to simply go ahead and answer anyway?
I remember history classes in school — this may have changed, but this is what I remember — focusing very heavily on U.S. history. The United States, I learned, was very special in a great many ways. It took me quite a while to figure out that in most of those ways, the United States was not actually very special. Before I learned that — and it may be that it was necessary that this come first — I learned to identify myself with humanity. I generally think of myself as a member of lots of different small groups, including the residents of Charlottesville and the Herndon High School Class of 1987, among many others, but most importantly I think of myself as a member of humanity — whether humanity likes it or not! So, I’m proud of us when the U.S. government or some U.S. resident does something good and also when any other government or person does anything good. And I’m ashamed by failures everywhere equally. The net result of identifying as a world citizen is often quite positive, by the way.
Thinking in those terms may make it easier, not only to examine ways in which the United States is not so special, such as its lack of a health coverage system to measure up to what other countries have got working in practice even if our professors deny its ability to work in theory, but also easier to examine ways in which the United States is indeed a very special outlier.
Some weeks from now, when the University of Virginia men’s basketball team wins the NCAA championship, viewers will hear the announcers thank their troops for watching from 175 countries. You’ll not hear anything of the sort anywhere else on earth. The United States has some 800 to 1,000 major military bases in some 80 countries that are not the United States. The rest of the world’s nations combined have a couple of dozen bases outside their borders. The United States spends almost as much each year on war and preparations for war as the rest of the world combined, and much of the rest of the world is U.S. allies, and much of the spending is on U.S.-made weapons, which are not infrequently found on both sides of wars. U.S. military spending, across numerous government departments, is some 60% of the spending that Congress decides on each year. U.S. weapons exports are number one in the world. The U.S. government arms the vast majority of the world’s dictatorships by its own definition. When people are outraged that Donald Trump speaks with a North Korean dictator, I’m actually relieved, because the typical relationship is to arm and train the forces of dictators. Very few people in the United States can name all the countries their country has bombed in the current year, and this has been true for many years. In a presidential primary debate last time around, a moderator asked a candidate if he would be willing to kill hundreds and thousands of innocent children as part of his basic presidential duties. I don’t think you’ll find a similar question in an electoral debate in any other country. I think it suggests a normalization of something that never should have been accepted even in rare circumstances.
Chapter 51 of Sweet Fruit from the Bitter Tree describes a U.S. military operation in Iraq that managed to avoid violence on a particular day. What is not mentioned is that this advanced a catastrophic occupation that devastated a nation and led to the development of groups like ISIS. On page 212, the U.S. military commander recounting the incident remarks how horrible it is to kill another human being at close range. “I would shoot all the artillery,” he writes, “drop all the Air Force’s bombs and strafe the enemy with the division’s attack helicopters before I would see one of my young soldiers in a street fight with the enemy at close quarters.” This sounds like kindness, like humaneness. He wants to spare his young soldiers the horror and the moral injury of killing at close range.
But here’s the catch. Aerial attacks usually kill and injure and traumatize and render homeless overwhelmingly civilians, by which I do not mean to accept the killing of the non-civilian so-called enemy — and they do so in much larger numbers than ground attacks. The more the United States wages its wars from the air, the more people die, the more the dying is one-sided, and the less any of it makes it into U.S. news reports. Perhaps those facts are not all-decisive for everyone, but their absence from such accounts is best explained, I think, by the accepted idea that some lives matter and some lives do not matter, or certainly matter much less.
The case that we make at an organization I work for called World BEYOND War is that if everybody matters, war can never be justified at all. Three percent of U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth. A slightly bigger slice could put up an undreamed of attempt to slow down climate collapse — to which militarism is an unheralded major contributor. War kills most, not with any weapon, but through the diversion of funding away from where it’s needed. War kills and injures directly on a major scale, erodes our liberties in the name of freedom, risks nuclear apocalypse for reasons that make any arguments my friends and I had in high school seem mature and practically saintly by comparison, poisons our culture with xenophobia and racism, and militarizes our police and our entertainment and our history books and our minds. If some future war could be plausibly marketed as likely to do more good than harm (which it cannot) it would also have to do enough good to outweigh all the harm of keeping the institution of war around, plus all the harm of all the various wars thereby generated.
Ending militarism could be done by stages, but even getting people to the point of working on it usually requires getting past the number one topic of U.S. history and entertainment, answering a question that we can probably all recite in unison. It’s just three words: “What . . . about . . . Hitler?”
A few months ago, I spoke at a high school in D.C. As I often do, I told them I’d perform a magic trick. I only know one, but I know it will almost always work with no skill required. I scribbled on a piece of paper and folded it up. I asked someone to name a war that was justified. They of course said “World War II” and I opened up the paper, which read “World War II.” Magic!
I could do a second part with equal reliability. I ask “Why?” They say “the Holocaust.”
I could do a third part, as well. I ask “What does Evian mean?” They say “No idea” or “bottled water.”
Of the many times I’ve done this, only once that I recall did someone say something other than “World War II.” And only once did someone know what Evian meant. Otherwise it has never failed. You can try this at home and be a magician without learning any sleight of hand.
Evian was the location of the biggest, most famous of the conferences at which the nations of the world decided not to accept Jews from Germany. This is not secret knowledge. This is history that has been out in the open from the day it occurred, massively covered by the major world media at the time, discussed in endless papers and books since the time.
When I ask why the nations of the world refused Jewish refugees, the blank stares continue. I have to actually explain that they refused to accept them for openly racist, anti-Semitic reasons expressed without shame or embarrassment, that no World War II posters read “Uncle Sam Wants You to Save the Jews!” If there had been a day on which the U.S. government decided to save the Jews it would be one of the biggest holidays on the calendar. But it never happened. Preventing the horror of the camps did not become a justification for the war until after the war. The U.S. and British governments right through the war refused all demands to evacuate those threatened on the grounds that they were too busy fighting the war — a war that killed many more people than were killed in the camps.
There are, of course, more fact-based defenses of World War II, and I could do my best to reply to each one if I had another several weeks and didn’t need to wrap this up. But isn’t it odd that one of the main public projects of the U.S. government is almost always defended by reference to an example of its use 75 years ago in a world with radically different systems of law, with no nuclear weapons, with brutal colonization by European powers, and with little understanding of the techniques of nonviolent action? Is there anything else we do that we justify by reference to the 1940s? If we modeled our high schools on those of the 1940s we’d be considered backward indeed. Why should our foreign policy not have the same standards?
In 1973 Congress created a means for any Congress Member to force a vote on ending a war. Last December, the Senate used it for the first time to vote to end U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. Earlier this year, the House did the same, but added in some unrelated language that the Senate refused to vote on. So, now both houses have to vote again. If they do — and we should all insist that they do — what’s to stop them from ending another war and another and another? That’s something to work for.
Thank you.
Peace.
Democrats Need Stupid Voters
Source: John Leonard
Remember Jonathan Gruber, the chief architect of ObamaCare?
The economics professor from MIT had bragged the law was deliberately written in tortured and confusing language in order to fool the American voter and famously said, “lack of transparency was a huge political advantage.” Gruber also sneered that the overall strategy to have the bill passed into law “depended on the stupidity of the American voter.”
How could Gruber be confident that enough voters would be so stupid as to support Democratic efforts to take control of our healthcare? Well, for one thing, he’s not only a Democrat, but part of their aristocracy. Even more importantly, Gruber is an academic elitist. In other words, making sure people remain stupid about basic economics has been the primary focus of his life’s work. But he’s hardly alone.
How bad is it? Try reading Howard Zinn’s warped “alternative” version of history sometime. Or better yet, read The End of Biblical Studies — written by, you guessed it, an atheist/professor of religious studies (who does not appreciate my work, if his threats to sue me for libel were meant to be taken seriously.)
Unfortunately, these are only two examples of many. Our education system has been completely overrun with dogmatic liberals, from kindergarten through college. The youth of today are being thoroughly indoctrinated into liberal groupthink and encouraged to become obnoxious activists on issues like climate change, demanding drastic action without debate or discussion.
What else might explain the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? How could anyone believe that socialism might succeed in the United States when it has failed miserably everywhere it’s ever been tried? Socialism offers a promise of utopia via a fair and equitable redistribution of wealth, but the reality is a totalitarian government, equally distributed misery, and bread lines. The only people happy with a socialist government belong to the ruling class.
Speaking of bread lines, Bernie Sanders once went on the record to say that bread lines are good. Only a complete idiot or truly evil person would argue that lining up for food is good, because food lines mean that food is scarce, not plentiful. When a line forms to purchase any commodity or product, it means that demand is great and believed to exceed supply. That’s usually taught in the introduction to economics.
Any argument advocating socialism can be easily defeated using a single word: Venezuela. Ironically, as Bernie was defending bread lines in the video at the link above, he said the alternative to socialism (and bread lines) was no food. Bernie said that without socialism, the rich would continue to eat and the poor would starve. But that’s exactly what has happened in socialist Venezuela. Maduro stuffed his face on national television, while the Venezuelans were losing twenty-four pounds on average. Ninety percent of the country lives in poverty, but Maria Gabriela Chavez (the daughter of Hugo Chavez) lives in a palace and has a net worth of $4.2 billion dollars.
Now how’s that for wealth redistribution? Sound fair to you?
Bernie Sanders likes to say that he’s not a socialist, he’s a democratic socialist. According to him, there’s a huge difference between the two forms of government. But Bernie says a lot of crazy things, and the mainstream media never challenges him, even when what he says makes no sense or completely contradicts something he’s said in the past. For example, in 1987 Bernie admitted that universal healthcare would bankrupt America, yet today he promises to implement universal healthcare as part of his campaign for president.
Was Bernie lying then, or is he lying now? Does he care if his fiscal policies bankrupt America?
What are the differences between “regular” socialism, democratic socialism, and National Socialism? Didn’t the people of Venezuela (theoretically) vote for Chavez and Maduro?
Democrats might want us to believe that “democratic socialism” is somehow different and better than ordinary socialism and not comparable at all to National Socialism, but they can’t give us the details in how the ideologies specifically differ. However, there is clearly a common denominator — the word socialism, and the evil it always represents.
Interestingly, for a guy who has never put in an honest day’s work in the private sector in his entire life, Bernie Sanders is surprisingly well off. He owns three houses; one in Washington, one in Vermont, and a “lake cottage” worth six hundred grand. Bernie Sanders has an estimated net worth of approximately two million dollars — not too shabby for a bum who wants your money.
It isn’t terribly difficult to understand how an airhead like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could get elected when you keep in mind the average Democrat voter, but it’s hard to fathom the popularity of Bernie. She’s young and pretty. Bernie, not so much. Then Ocasio-Cortez opens her mouth and says, “I think…”
It won’t be long before voters get tired of hearing about what Sandy O thinks. So far, her “thinking” has cost the state of New York an estimated $27 billion dollars in tax revenue because a private business (owned by rich liberal Jeff Bezos) would have saved another $3 billion in additional tax revenue to the state due to incentives for that business to build a new facility in Queens, creating thousands of new jobs. And she’s only been in office for a couple of months. Imagine how much more damage she’ll be able to do over the next two years!
Question: do the Democrats honestly believe they stand a fighting chance of defeating Donald Trump in 2020 with Bernie Sanders on a platform consisting of any form of socialism? Trump’s economy has done very well, and unemployment is at historic lows.
Remember “It’s the economy, stupid?”
How will Democrats be able to harp on the bogus “Russia collusion” nonsense if Bernie becomes their standard bearer? Remember, he’s the guy who literally spent his honeymoon in Moscow. As for the other “major” contenders, most of them signed on to Sandy O’s Green New Deal before they knew it eliminated air travel and regulated cow farts.
How are they going to defend endorsing that insane policy paper?
As far as collusion is concerned, if the media cared about doing their job instead of acting as the public relations department for the Democratic Party, some intrepid reporter would dig up Ted Kennedy’s seditious letter to the Russians sent in 1984, proving the Democratic Party have been in collusion with the Russian government and acting against the best interests of the United States for decades.
The sad thing is Jonathan Gruber was telling the truth. The Democrats are counting on their voters to be stupid.
Nearly 1,500 pulses of lightning recorded off Southern California coast in 5 minutes
Source:
A band of thunderstorms that stretched from southern Kern County past the Channel Islands was producing a dramatic lightning show Tuesday night in the Southern California sky.
In one five-minute stretch alone, shortly after 8 p.m., the National Weather Service recorded 1,489 pulses of lightning off the coast, 231 over Santa Barbara County and 40 in Los Angeles County, said Kathy Hoxsie, a meteorologist with the weather service in Oxnard.
“It’s a lot,” she said. “We usually don’t get that.”
Those numbers appeared to taper down later Tuesday evening. The storms were expected to move into Ventura and Los Angeles counties overnight.
“There’s no guarantee that they’ll hold together but it looks pretty good right now,” Hoxsie said.
People wanting to catch a glimpse of the show should do so from indoors, Hoxsie said, noting that lightning can strike 10 or 12 miles away from a storm. Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials decided to land a department helicopter because of the extreme weather.
A Delta flight to Seattle returned to Los Angeles International Airport after getting struck by lightning, said Los Angeles Airport Police Officer Rob Pedregon. No injuries were reported.
Later in the evening, a lightning strike caused a brief power outage at three terminals, said LAX spokesman Charles Pannunzio.
“It is dangerous for people to go outside and watch the lightning,” Hoxsie said. “People think they’re safe because it’s not on top of where they’re standing, but that’s not accurate.”
Here are some of the striking images captured during Tuesday’s lightning show:
#CAwx– Lightning strikes in the skies above Santa Barbara, CA, March 5, 2019, as seen in these views from Stearns W… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
SBCFireInfo (@EliasonMike) March 06, 2019
