Category Archives: Politics

This is for general news.

Today’s Links

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Coming soon to a State near you: A “zombie” disease which makes deer become emaciated and more aggressive may sound like the opening to a horror film. But experts have warned the deadly disease has already affected 24 US states – and could spread to humans next. We all know what experts are worth. On the other paw, Lyme disease was a rare thing when I was young.

Sanctions having an effect on Venezuela: Sending oil to Cuba to free up storage space makes sense from an operational point of view, said Piñón, because it allows Venezuela to preserve its output capacity and keeps wells pumping.“Whenever you have to shut down an oil well you have problems, because it is extremely hard to get it going again, given that you will lose the original pressure of the reservoir,” Piñón said.

If you want to be informed, you should read the short essay “Population Immiseration in America” just so you know the ideas that are being talked about and it has data that is not commonly brought up. That said, I see a lot of issues with the ideas being presented. For example, Japan suffers from a lot of the same issues laid out in this essay without having the same amount of immigration that author calls out as being a major contributor. Another issues would be the fact that it fails to address the role the cult of higher education has on many of the issues being discussed. These and many other issues keep me from agreeing with the general thrust of the essay, but the essay is still generating more discussion then most of the fluff out there.

Short Version: Hand held missiles are getting better and better and that has strategic consequences when they are used intelligently. Long Version: A Hyper-Mobile Defense: Iran’s Novel Strategy to Sustain Proxy Conflicts in the Middle East

Coming soon to a country near you: According to the Register, a total of 2,500 Londoners have been arrested over the past five years for allegedly sending “offensive” messages via social media. In 2015, 857 people were detained, up 37 per cent increase since 2010.The Communications Act 2003 defines illegal communication as “using public electronic communications network in order to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. Breaking the law carries a six-month prison term or fine of up to £5,000.The figures, obtained from the Metropolitan police via a Freedom of Information request, only apply to the London area. I got the link to the above from this rant.

Mostly Not In the News

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The following article is a good test of whether you are following real news or fake news. If you already know what this article says, you are following real news. If it is news to you, you are following fake news. There is no impeachment inquiry. There are no subpoenas.

I have seen a lot of leftists Italians on-line say that this a article that does a good job of explaining what is going on politically in Italy. From what I can see, it gets the facts right but some of its claims are questionable (for example, the idea that the EU is responsible for Italian political instability is laughable as it would imply that Italy had stable governments before joining the EU). The revenge of the elites

This article is in the New York Times so everyone and their Grandma (especially their Grandma) will be sending them this article. This is your fair warning. Australia Just Had a Bad Flu Season. That May Be a Warning for the U.S. In 2017, a terrible flu season in Australia presaged an American outbreak in which 79,000 died.

Not in the American News

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A German View On Brexit: Europe Can No Longer Afford the Brexit Insanity

Coming soon to a country near you? Several unexplained cases of a disease with Ebola-like symptoms in Tanzania have prompted an extraordinary statement from the World Health Organization questioning the response of the country’s health authorities.

The Science Was Settled: The practical upshot of all this is that some of the things you are reading in your science textbooks are wrong.

Maybe In The News?

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Letter from a Pakistani Homeschooler: “He told me you have homeschooled your own children, which came as a shock to me because we Pakistanis consider US schools the epitome of education.” Well, if you grade on a curve, the US might very well be close to the top. But should you grade on a curve?

Nothing to worry about: “France says the ID system won’t be used to keep tabs on residents. Unlike in China and Singapore, the country won’t be integrating the facial recognition biometric into citizens’ identity databases. In fact, the interior ministry, which developed the Alicem app, says the facial recognition data collected will be deleted when the enrollment process is over.”

New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms. They be saying this for awhile now. Then again, they were saying for awhile that New Orleans was at risk for going under in a big storm. Eventually they were right.

May be in the news? In the case of the Georgian man shot to death in late August in a Berlin park, evidence is mounting that the crime may have been a hit contracted by the Russian state.

Not in the News

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I may have posted this once. It it timeless because the myth is timeless. The Gandhi Nobody Knows

They got a lot more wrong then just what is laid out here. But it is a start on what they got wrong.What ‘The Times’ Got Wrong About Slavery in America.

Everyone paying attention already knows this but it is not in the news.

Putting this on only because I can see this happening to me: 16 Indiana students hospitalized after getting shot with insulin by mistake

No commentary needed. But makes you understand why the law is popular to know that their were people being paid only $8 an hour in New York City of all places. $15 minimum wage hike is hitting, hurting NYC restaurants

Not in the News…..

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The fatal mistake: Hospitals and providers agreed to take cuts after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, because they assumed that the law would increase the number of people with insurance and decrease the number who couldn’t pay their hospital bills.

A dark and dirty war that may one day hit you right in the gas tank: At the same time, however, there are many details available already that lend weight to their claims with regards to fighting in or around Najran, even if the Houthi’s assertions about the total number of Saudi casualties, and personnel and equipment they captured, remain dubious. The presence of LAV-25s, for example, strongly indicates that members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) were among those in the convoy that the Houthis attacked.

It is fun to pick on crazy people but it don’t accomplish anything. The example of perfectly crafted dissent that I’d like to submit here appears in this video from Massachusetts local TV news, showing some reactions to the fly-posting of white sheets of paper bearing the statement ‘Islam is right about women’. The reactions are deeply revealing. Nobody can clearly point out why they object to the statement – indeed, nobody seems to object to the statement at all on its face. Yet most seem to express offence at it – if a little unconvincingly.

Rare good news that is not reported.

Coming soon to a state near you.

Joe Biden recounting how he got the prosecutor fired.

Not in the news…..

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Harvard’s Legacies Are Nothing to Be Proud Of Ironically, the main reason for Harvard’s success is due to the very practices that are attacked in this article. You don’t want to go to Harvard for a better education. You want to go to Harvard to network with rich people. If you did not give rich kids an easy pass into the university, how would that work? But to admit this is to admit how little real education takes place in universities around the country.

Controversial stuff from Pakistan. I don’t vouch for it, but it is interesting because it does not come from a US observer. “If ever there was a thought within Pakistan’s leadership — political, military, and business — that Beijing could replace Washington as the foreign capital with the most influence in Islamabad, that idea is now firmly dead. We just have not gotten around to telling China yet.”

Fake Hate: Virginia Girl Admits She Made Up ‘Hair Cut’ Assault at School Where Karen Pence Teaches Just a reminder. You always see the stories. You rarely see the retractions.

The long knives come out for The Hill’s John Solomon Just a reminder, the consensus is enforced.

Things you may have missed……

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In 2014 California passed Proposition 47, which made theft of property valued at less than $950 a misdemeanor offense. This is how it is working out……

You’ve likely seen the videos on social media or the local news: groups of people rushing into a store, grabbing armfuls of merchandise. The brazen crimes are on the rise and CBS13 has learned, in most cases, the crooks get away from authorities.

After searching police reports and arrest records, CBS13 found that while the rate of these grab and dash crimes is on the rise, the rate of arrest is down. We turned to law enforcement and the retail industry for answers. Both blame a California law intended to make “neighborhoods safe.”

In a New Study on Bird Loss, Some Scientists Say Subtlety Is Lost, Too That is code for “they totally misrepresented things to get more publicity.”

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity

Not In the News….

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Who wants to leave California? Young voters can’t afford housing, and conservatives feel alienated. Okay, so this is a standard news source. But California’s troubles with housing and massive outflows don’t always get that much attention.

The Military Officials Who Knew Saudi Arabia Would Fail

That weird whistleblower’s complaint. “Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.” And there is more here.

Even if the rules were not changed just to allow this complaint to go forward, the complaint itself is not standard.

Talking About Biden

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On purely technical grounds, I am cool with the fact that the House of Representatives wants to work on impeaching the President of the United States. The founders of this nation made it so that it only took a bare majority of the House to impeach but also made it so that it took to two thirds of the Senate to convict. Obviously they wanted to make it easy to bring charges but hard to make them stick. The Constitution also made it so that the House is the sole legal entity who has the power to impeach. Courts have suggested (correctly in my opinion) that this means that the house is the sole arbitrator of what is or is not an impeachable offense. On the whole, I think the House will cause less harm trying to impeach the President then other things they are likely to be doing if they don’t occupy themselves chasing after the bad orange man. And regardless of whether it is a good idea or not, it is inarguably constitutional which is more then you can say for a lot of their other activities.

What does get my blood up is being told over and over again by the mainstream media that we should not talk about Biden and that it is the actions of Trump that are the only legitimate subjects of conversation. As a form of therapy, I am going to talk about Biden……

Biden has boasted in the past that he got the Ukraine Prosecutor looking into his son’s company fired. From the Article….

It’s definitely horrible for Biden. The former vice president brought this issue on himself, recounting in 2018 how he told Poroshenko years earlier to fire Shokin or forfeit a promised $1 billion U.S. loan.

“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours,’ ” Biden said at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. ” ‘If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ ”

Biden’s son followed his Father to Ukraine to make money off his father’s name. From the article……

Granted, Shokin was a shady character. Yet at some point he had been investigating Burisma, the largest gas company in Ukraine, which also happened to be paying Hunter Biden a $50,000 monthly salary as a board member.

By coincidence, Hunter had landed this cushy gig in a foreign country only a few months after the Obama ­administration began dispatching his father, Joe, to the very same foreign country on a regular basis.

There was, of course, absolutely nothing in Hunter’s résumé to indicate that he would be a valuable addition to foreign energy interest. He didn’t speak the language, and he had no particular expertise in the energy industry.

There are a lot of lies going around about this entire situation. Most of them revolve around the idea that the prosecutor that Biden got fired had no interest in his son so the two things could not possibly be related. This is not true. From the article…..

At the time, Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma. Shokin told me he was making plans to question Hunter Biden about $3 million in fees that Biden and his partner, Archer, collected from Burisma through their American firm. Documents seized by the FBI in an unrelated case confirm the payments, which in many months totaled more than $166,000.

Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma’s owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. One of those cases involved taxes; the other, allegations of corruption. Burisma announced the cases against it were not closed and settled until January 2017.

After I first reported it in a column, the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting.