Oh sure. Shoot a Harpoon *yawn* How come you Boeing people vapor lock when I tell you we need to spit a couple of sonobuoys when we drop a torpedo on a sub?
Category: “Your Tax Dollars At Work”
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All We Are Is Leaves in the Wind….
There is a Disturbance in the Farce. I can smell it. I can feel the vibrations emanating from it. There is a certain… je ne sais quoi in all of this, as if – well, Thor is awakening. It’s not exactly wanting to buy the World a Coke and keep it company, you see.
From the WUWT article in which there are so many embedded links it is simpler to provide a link to the WUWT spot:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced Friday that Democrats would create a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in 2019, which will be headed by Florida Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor.
However, Pelosi’s announcement isn’t placating progressives in her party, such as New York Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who support “Green New Deal” legislation.
“This committee, if it turns out that the rumors about it are true, sound about as useful as a screen door on a submarine,” Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent, told The Hill. (She has a spokesman???)
“As it’s portrayed it’s going to be completely incapable of solving the greatest threat to human kind,” Trent said.
Pelosi, who’s expected to be elected House speaker in 2019, said there’s “tremendous pressure” for Democrats to make fighting global warming a central part of their agenda in the new year.
Pelosi made her announcement amid a government shutdown after she flew thousands of miles to a luxurious Hawaiian hotel where she was spotted Thursday, according to reports.
The creation of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis is one way Pelosi plans on satisfying progressives without angering incoming committee chairs, like New Jersey Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone, who want to advance their own climate bills.
“It is with great enthusiasm that I appoint Congresswoman Kathy Castor as the Chair of our new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis,” Pelosi said in a statement issued Friday.
“She will bring great experience, energy and urgency to the existential threat of the climate crisis,” Pelosi said. “This committee will be critical to the entire Congress’s mission to respond to the urgency of this threat, while creating the good-paying, green jobs of the future.” – WUWT Article
Now, before you go all “toldja so” on this news, let us reflect solemnly on the potential this has for unifying the Old Guard Democrats – those in middle age or higher – with the Young Far Leftreds and bringing them together. The possibilities for conjugality and united efforts toward this goal are bountiful and endless. There is, indeed, a New Hope on the horizon…
So, before you get all jiggy about potentialities for this newly rising relationship, try to look at it the way I do.
And have a Very Happy and Joyous New Year!!!!
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Trump keeps up drumbeat for border wall
President Donald Trump stated: “It’s a disgrace what’s happening in our country. But other than that, I wish everybody a very Merry Christmas.” | Zach Gibson/Getty Images
By DAVID COHENPresident Donald Trump used a Christmas morning gathering in the Oval Office to reiterate the reasons he insists funding is needed for a border wall, even if it means the federal government will continue to be partially shut down.
“I can’t tell you when the government is going to reopen,“ Trump said, according to pool reports.
Not until, he explained, “we have a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it. I’ll call it whatever they want. But it’s all the same thing. It’s a barrier from people pouring into our country.”
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The president said he thought that even those federal workers who were losing their paychecks would be supportive of his efforts.
“I think they understand what’s happening,“ he said. “They want border security. The people of this country want border security. It’s not a question of me. I’d rather not be doing shutdowns.”
I can assure President Trump DON civilians, myself included, would rather not be doing shutdowns, either. Non-essential employees will be furloughed and go home without pay; the lucky exempt folks, including myself, will go in tomorrow and work without pay. Since this isn’t a sequester, there’s a reasonable belief that lost pay will be reinstated. Pretty good deal for the furloughed, who get an unexpected paid vacation, even if the pay is belated. What really chaffs my ass is this is for only $5B USD, which is essentially a rounding error in the US budget. Money isn’t the issue of course, or even The Wall. It’s brinkmanship between Trump and Schumer with us caught in the middle. Again.
Lars, before you jump in with both feet loudly declaring how Trump sucks, take a calming breath and try for that rational sweet spot you hit yesterday, and recognize that both sides pretty much suck here. Thanks.
The rest of the article may be viewed at: The Politico
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What If The Government Shut Down…
T…And No One Noticed?
Government shutdown set to drag on with no deal in sight
Federal workers woke up to to a partial government shutdown Saturday that could last through Christmas or even the New Year, according to multiple congressional sources, despite the appearance of progress towards a deal late Friday.
The gloomy outlook comes as one-quarter of the government entered shutdown mode at midnight, including nine Cabinet departments, several major agencies and roughly 800,000 federal workers who are impacted by the lapse in funding.
Trump canceled plans to fly to his Mar-A-Lago resort Saturday, with it unclear if or when the president will join his family in Florida for the holidays. But the Capitol was largely quiet, with no meetings among House and Senate leaders scheduled and most lawmakers gone.
“I don’t think we see anything major happening until after Christmas,” said one senior Republican aide. “Maybe on the 26th or 27th, we start seeing movement again.”
The onus, congressional aides in both parties said, is on the Senate to find a way forward. Republicans in the upper chamber need nine Democrats to clear the 60-vote threshold to re-open the government, so Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — in tandem with Trump — would have to make some sort of deal.
Unless McConnell goes for the Nuclear Option, and passes the bill with a simple majority. That will be a tough sell among the Republican Senators, though, as several have stated they would vote against the rules change needed to invoke the option. If it did pass, it certainly would be used by the Dems when they get the upper hand some time in the future.
As I went out and about today, I noticed pretty heavy traffic for a weekend, and the parking lots were full at the retail stores- Christmas shopping no doubt. The traffic lights worked as usual, there were no uniforms in sight, and every one was pretty civil and considerate. Government shutdown? No sign that I saw.
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Make A Hole! Make A Hole!
Oh, gee whiz! Whoosie Whatsis Obviously-Confused is now going after her rivals, and she hasn’t even been sworn in just yet. She’s dead set on taking down Hakeem Jeffries because he doesn’t lean far enough to the left to suit Her Highnessness! The horror!
Some of that comes from Breitbart and some from Politico, from an unidentified source who spoke to Occasional-Cortex’s “people”. (She has people? Who knew?)
Kid’s on a roll here. I think it would be a good idea to let her get a full head of steam, just to see how much she can annoy people who have been in Congress for a substantial time, and watch her crash into whatever wall she aims at. The more seasoned Democrats will likely watch her tumble and then get back to business. But – dare I say it? – she’s got BERNIE BEHIND HER!!!
I think there is far more to come here and we need to keep a weather eye on this chica, just to make sure that her headlong barreling rush to grab this-and-that is not forgotten.
What is that proverb? Something about ‘pride goeth before a crash and burn?’ Something like that?
And now comes the news that Bernie is the preferred choice of Democratic Progressives. And he’s only 77 right now, so he can still stick his oar into the political pond.
It’s good to know that they have finally changed their preferred political nominative so that they don’t align themselves with regular Democrats. That would be embarrassing – to be lumped in with that political hoi-polloi, wouldn’t it? Aren’t regular Democrats just underlings to the Democratic Progressives? Has anyone discussed this with DiFi or Nancy or Chuck?
Hey, what if we teamed up Her Highnessness Princess Googly-eyes with The Beto? Wouldn’t that bring in Da Votes? Or would they be at each other’s throats? Who would come out on top?
Stock up on popcorn. And buckle your seatbelts. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride. (Thanks, Bette D!).
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There Are No Coincidences
For a long time after the end of the war in Vietnam, the Communist Vietnamese government had a law in place that any US citizen who entered Vietnam would immediately be arrested.
In 1999, things changed when the British government returned ownership of the Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the mainland Chinese government. There was speculation that the city would become another Communist wasteland. Instead, the Chinese government had been watching how things worked in Hong Kong and in the business world outside of China and took the track of business. Instead of interfering with a successful economic model, they embraced it and began a new way of doing things. Construction of new buildings in Beijing and the irruption of the capitalist business model made many, many people prosperous. And China wanted money coming in. China’s plentiful coal resources spurred the construction of new coal-fired power generating stations, and began to provide power to provinces that had not had a reliable source before. China is now contracting to build coal-fired power plants in other countries.
With Vietnam being heavily influenced by the Chinese government, the capitalist business model was adopted and tourism grew. Americans can visit there, but do not speak out against the government unless you want to spend time in a re-education camp.
Ho Chi Minh started the French-Indochina war over the French presence in Indochina before World War II. He wanted money and the French colonials out of Indochina, period. His war with France began in 1946 just as Kim Il-Sung, the godlike grandfather of ND:tBF, started his own war in Korea in his attempt to unite the north and south of that peninsula. Grandpa Kim wanted power more than money.
Both Uncle Ho and Grandpa Kim got help from the Chinese in their quest. There were Chinese weapons and troops in both Korea and Indochina. When the French capitulated, Ho demanded a ransom for the 10,000 French POWs, but returned only 3,900 to the French. Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel, and Laos and Cambodia became independent states.. MacArthur, in Korea, stubbornly refused to end his trek into the north, demanded a nuclear weapon drop on the north, and was refused and recalled to the US by Pres. Truman. Saigon became the capital of South Vietnam, and Hanoi the capital of North Vietnam, and the Korean peninsula was permanently divided.
In the 1960s, the US sent advisers to South Vietnam. South Korea was still recovering from its own war, with a US base at the DMZ that marked the boundary between the north and south. Occasionally, people would slip through the cracks, into the South or across the Nork-Chinese border into China. Pres. Johnson decided that the US should get more heavily involved in Vietnam and sent in more troops to start a shooting war in 1965.
In 1987, two years before the USSR was dissolved and the war in the Balkans got underway, Donald Trump began to make trips to the Soviet Union for the purpose of making real estate deals. In 2013, the Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow while Trump was there, negotiating a real estate deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. That deal fell through and he returned to the USA. Robert Mueller was Director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013.
In 1989, after 10 years of futile warfare in Afghanistan, Gorbachev declared the Soviet Union bankrupt, dismissed the Politburo and sent everybody home. Shortly afterwards, the Berlin Wall was pulled down and the Balkan Wars began.
During this time, with Trump engaging in his business deals and going wherever he felt like going, the CIA paid the Chinese through a third party to make it appear that the Russians were interfering in the US elections. The third party go-between for this was a woman whose presence was so lowkey as to be almost nonexistent. She went by several names, including the Dragon Lady and Mah Jongg. She appears in a few photos, but very, very few. Her appearance is not completely Chinese, but seems to be something else. There has been speculation that she is part Chinese and part “other” such as Yakut or Vietnamese.
She was known for her ability to pick up languages quickly with the correct accent, especially important when speaking various Chinese dialects such as Mandarin or Yue or Hakka. If your accent is incorrect, no one will understand what you say. This made her a valuable asset for mischief.
She also seems to have been an expert code hacker. In 2016, hackers stole $100 million from the central bank of Bangladesh after obtaining payment-transfer codes and moving the money overseas in what information security experts say appears to be one of the largest bank heists in history. Anyone who can use these codes can also make transitions quickly and instantly once they are confirmed. But the bank reportedly managed to block a further transfer of $870 million initiated by the hacker group.
The destination for this large sum of stolen money was never identified. The speculation was that the Dragon Lady sent it to North Korea, but attempts to trace it failed. Any account that received that money in the beginning was gone, period, with funds immediately transferred to other accounts to hide them. However, Mah Jongg did leave a mark behind, almost as a tease: $1.00 was left in the Bangladesh account.
Only part of the blackmail money that Obama sent to Iran was delivered there. Some of it was diverted to North Korea, and from there to China for the purpose of enhancing the deceit that Russia was involved in meddling in the affairs of other countries, especially the US elections. Remember that recent whine from the Ayatollahs that they were running out of money?
The discovery of Maria Butina’s inept and silly efforts to meddle in things, after she came to the USA in 2016, was also a distraction meant to enhance the notion that Russia was interfering in US politics. She was what Stalin used to call a “useful idiot” – the perfect plant to distract attention from what was really going on.
In addition, the Chinese persuaded Fatty Kim da T’ird and his Nork bombmakers to create a distraction with his 25 kiloton test in September 2016, near the time of US election debates. He’s had plenty of assistance from China in return for distracting outsiders like the US government from their activities. The second test, the half-megaton underground test in September 2017, was a secondary distraction meant to draw attention away from the Chinese and put it on the Russians even though Trump was long since sworn in.
All those missile tests going on in Norkiland, and the posturing and threats by Fatty Kim da T’ird, were distractions right up until the ballots were counted and recounted with more Trump votes being found, and the electoral college had cast its votes. The activities from North Korea abruptly ceased when Trump, in November 2017, got the two Koreas to work together, made business deals with Xi JinPing in China, visited Vietnam, and has watched while every ridiculous effort possible has been dragged into existence to try to unseat him, including the Circus of Trolls called Supreme Court justice hearings.
The effort is still going on. And China is now negotiating for contracts to build coal-fired power plants in countries outside their borders, while now openly demanding that the USA give them more cash.
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
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The Sky Is Not Falling
Daydreams are nice, aren’t they? But they don’t pay the bills or put food on the table, or make sure that your home is clean and free of unwanted other species.
There’s a huge push from many sides to transfer everyone to what is commonly referred to as “green energy” resources. This includes solar and wind energies as resources, with a large portion of it being politically motivated with no thought to the consequences.
In Australia, because they’ve shut down coal-fired plants and have only wind and solar facilities for generating electricity, with gas-fired plants as backup, electricity charges for residents are apparently spectacular and in some cases, enough to make it unaffordable, period. Angela Merkel has been harping on wind energy during her reign as the EU’s head, with disastrous results including the deaths of thousands of ordinary citizens from cold exposure in the winter, when those people could not pay their utility bills. Some had resorted to trying to stay warm by candlelight. It is a disgraceful thing to do to put your personal daydreams ahead of the welfare of people who voted you in, and Merkel is losing her job because of her insistence on using “green power” instead of reliable gas and/or coal. Germany is now, in fact, building new coal-fired power plants because Angela screwed up so badly. France has nuclear-powered plants, so all those protests have been partly over Macron’s plan to raise fuel taxes and partly over his reducing taxes on wealthy people.
China only gave a crap about coal-fired pollution when the air in Beijing got so smog-ridden, it made both Los Angeles and New York City in the 1960s look like pikers by comparison. Coal-fired plants in the USA have scrubbers to remove particulates from their exhausts, and gas-fired plants are replacing coal in some areas because natural gas is cheaper than coal.
In the daydream world of the greenbeans, solar and wind energy are freebies. There are no consequences involved. In the real world, however, you have $500 million in government subsidies given to companies like Solyndra who start the business and then go belly-up, leaving behind the detritus of their scam in the form of empty facilities and unemployed people whose livelihoods disappeared while they were watching.
There’s also the cost to the environment, in the matter of solar farms like the Ivanpah solar facility in the Mojave Desert, which has a record of incinerating migrating birds because the mirrors that focus sunlight toward the three towers embrace the routes of migrating birds.
“As many as 28,000 birds are killed each year — that’s one every two minutes — by the Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave Desert, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service . Ivanpah focuses more than 300,000 mirrors on three 459-foot towers, generating heat of up to 800 degrees — enough to fry birds that happen to fly by. “ – from the article That’s just that solar furnace in particular. There are other solar facilities that endanger wildlife as well.
But this isn’t just about birds, in case you’re wondering. These winged migrants are part of the control species that eat pests like bugs that destroy crops. It’s the food on your plate that’s at stake, not some abstract concept. Birds and bats are natural pest control. Migrating birds feed on the local pests while they are on their way north or south.
“Estimates for bird deaths by wind turbine run from 100,000 a year (the National Research Council) to 300,000 (American Bird Conservancy). Bloomberg News puts the toll at 573,000 birds in 2012. At the high end of the estimates, that’s well more than 1,000 birds chopped to death each day.” – Article
These numbers are not remotely matched by the deaths of 161 birds in a 2015 oil spill off the coast of California, or the 2,303 that died during the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The worst portion of this is that the majority of birds killed by wind turbines are raptors, which includes hawks, vultures and eagles. These are apex avian predators that prey on pests both large and small, and dispose of carcasses as well.
Yes, cats, feral or domestic, allowed to run around outdoors, are also responsible for preying on birds. And so are squirrels. They will rob nests and eat the young when they think the coast is clear. My cat is, therefore, an indoor kitty.
The cost of so-called green energy is considerably higher than it should be. You, the customer who decides to use that, have to pay for the construction, equipment and delivery, which you chose to use. And it is not cheap, either, especially when a company that made big promises goes belly up and unemployment lines lengthen.
So you can understand my curiosity when an offer to switch “green” and “sustainable” energy (meaning wind and solar) arrived, and I read through the offer as outlined, finding that the per KwH charge is $0.095/KwH, never mind the delivery charges and taxes. This is a 50% rise in my usual charge, which is $0.065/KwH, plus delivery and taxes. I did the simple math, based on my current month’s usage compared to last year, because the furnace is running now, which runs up the bill. Whereas my normal winter usage runs around $52.00/month, this 50% hike in the KwH rate will boost my charges to well over $80.00/month, just to have a furnace running, plus a couple of appliances, and a few lights in my little house. The offering also says that rates are variable and may rise as needed. And this source of this power is to come from wind and solar energy farms in my area. Since there are no such things within 250 miles of where I live, it means that wherever it originates, the possibility of breakdowns and outages increases with distance, never mind storm damage to the “farm” itself.
The offering for this marvel of modernity comes from some group located in Washington, DC.
It would be far more constructive to start building more nuclear power plants in this country.
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All Warfare Is Based on Deception
If you can find the quote in the title, it was written up a very, very long time ago.
I detest politicians. More than that, I detest what drives them into being the slumguzzling thieves that they become. Theft of money, theft of power – it’s all the same. They tell you what they think you want to hear, just to get elected. And the minute they get elected, they are off to the races to grab everything they can get their hands on.
Even worse are the thugs and fellow travelers that surround them, and the hangers-on at the perimeter of the mess that has become our government.
The recent TAH article on Julian “Wikileaks” Assange prompted me to dig further, and I found the article at the link from Vox. It hits both sides of the issue, but one item caught my eye: Jerome Corsi kept coming up in the text. I don’t know how reliable Vox is, but the article about this hits many, many points.
And to think, all of this was going on before Thanksgiving.
The Mueller investigations seem like a manufactured conspiracy to me, with the attention-grabber Jerome Corsi right in the thick of it.
Then someone brings up Wikileaks, for no reason other than Assange lost his pussycat and wants attention again, but protests that he had nothing to do with any of this, and now we have this odd-ball connection with Wikileaks, Mueller’s investigation, Manafort’s dissembling, and our current loud-mouthed, attention-seeking conspiracy theorist, Jerome Corsi, who is right at the forefront of it – mired in the thick of it, as it were.
So who is lying, and who is not?
And why is Corsi sticking his oar into this? He’s addicted to creating conspiracy theories. He’s the one who started the rumor about bodaprez not being born in the USA. He likes to make stuff up, from what I read here, seems to be hellbent on causing trouble and stirring the pot everywhere he goes. He’s just published a new book. Is he really this desperate for attention?
We all know about attention-whoring, don’t we?
Why did Mueller hold off until after the President submitted his answers to Mueller to release the statement that Manafort lied? And where’s the concrete proof that Manafort lied? I mean hard, tactile, solid as a brick wall, physical evidence.
As I said, I don’t know how reliable Vox is as a source, however, the reporter makes some very good points and touches conflicting bases throughout the text.
Read the article at the link, and make up your own minds about this.
‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’
Perhaps that’s the reason Mueller hasn’t been fired just yet…?
What a mess.
Note: photo credit goes to Soviet.