But nobody tells you that, either.
Friday, June 16, 2017
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Flashback: The New York Times Jan. 9, 2011, updated for today
Here, updated for today, but not by The New York Times:
It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans Democrats or Tea Party members Bernie Sanders' most devoted supporters. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans Democrats and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats actual incidents of violence against peacefully assembling Republicans, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right left have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants cops, or welfare recipients white people, or bureaucrats small business owners. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government Republican Party is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.
Where are all the Democrats calling for calm, denouncing violence?
Same crickets we hear from Muslims after terrorist attacks.
Camille Paglia crafts an anti-elitist zinger, aimed at our modern day Puritans, calls Comey an effete charlatan
From the interview here:
These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.
Recession omen: 33 states to miss revenue targets, highest number since 2010
From the story here:
Thirty-three states will miss revenue projections in Fiscal Year 2017, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. That’s the highest number of states to miss revenue targets since 2010, during the middle of the recession, when 36 states missed projections.
In total, states anticipate revenues falling short by $12 billion. Most of the shortfall comes from sales tax collections, which are projected to be down $6.6 billion. That troubles some economists because sales taxes are traditionally the most stable revenue sources for states.
Your kid probably isn't working this summer like he should be, because of the minimum wage and cheap immigrant labor
The population level of teenagers in 2017 has recovered to 1978 levels, but only 29% are employed in May 2017 vs. 47% in May 1978.
The minimum wage has made it too expensive to hire your kid to recover shopping carts at the grocery store, and soaring immigration means your kid competes against Francisco to cut the grass and Sanjay to sell ice cream.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Full Oceanic Nino Index data trend shows the Pacific Ocean is definitely cooling slightly
Not quite 0.1 ONI value point since 1951. Data for 2017 shown is for ten months, all the rest twelve.
You know what a baseball field full of dead Republican Congressmen would have meant to the shooter?
A complete and utter shutdown of legislative business which would have made it impossible to move any of the Trump agenda forward at all.
After all, that's been the goal of the Democrats all along.
This leftist shooter simply thought he had found a more definitive way to delay and obstruct Trump. The Party of Violence strikes again.
Someone better find out if he had help, as in . . . conspiracy.
Sounds totally rational to me. Sinister, but rational.
Mollie Hemingway throws together a litany of James Comey's many misdeeds and mistakes
But stops short of calling Comey a law unto himself for some reason, which is what he is.
The article reads like it was written to meet a deadline, and suffers for it.
The best reminder in the story is that under Comey the FBI destroyed evidence, just like Hillary did, for which they both should be in prison:
[U]pon learning that two Clinton staff members had classified information, the FBI didn’t subpoena those computers but gave the employees immunity in return for giving them up. The FBI severely limited their own searches for data on the computers and then destroyed them. A technician who destroyed evidence lied to FBI investigators even after he received immunity, and Comey did nothing. And after the FBI discovered that President Obama had communicated with Clinton on the non-secure server, Obama said he didn’t think Clinton should be charged with a crime because she hadn’t intended to harm national security. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted, “As indefensible as his legal reasoning may have been, his practical reasoning is apparent: If Mrs. Clinton was at criminal risk for communicating on her nonsecure system, so was he.”
Here.
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Big deal: Stories ADMIT Russian election hack attempts FAILED, systems too "disparate"
The latest one is from Bloomberg, here:
One of the mysteries about the 2016 presidential election is why Russian intelligence, after gaining access to state and local systems, didn’t try to disrupt the vote. One possibility is that the American warning was effective. Another former senior U.S. official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the classified U.S. probe into pre-election hacking, said a more likely explanation is that several months of hacking failed to give the attackers the access they needed to master America’s disparate voting systems spread across more than 7,000 local jurisdictions.
Putin didn't hypnotize over 5 million Democrats to stop them from voting for Hillary. She did that all by herself.
Monday, June 12, 2017
Sunday, June 11, 2017
John Hinderaker discovers false testimony by James Comey before the Senate last week
But Comey’s Senate testimony was untruthful. He told the committee that he didn’t document his important meeting with President Bush, but only “sent a quick email to my staff to let them know there was something going on.” ...
[I]t is crystal clear that Comey rendered a “report” on his meeting that included these extensive, self-serving quotes, and that Comey’s side of the story was preserved in notes–unclassified notes, that sounds familiar!–against any possible future contingency.
In short, Comey’s statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee that “I didn’t feel, with President Bush, the need to document it in that way” was false. He did document his story about his meeting with President Bush, in great detail, in a “report” that was turned into “unclassified notes.”
All the evidence is detailed here.
Michael Goodwin identifies multiple Comey leaks, not just one, calls him a "fountain of leaks"
Here:
He admitted to the Senate he leaked just one memo criticizing Trump over the Gen. Michael Flynn case, asking a friend to give it to The New York Times. In its May 16 story, the paper identified its sources only as “two people who read the memo.”
But that was not the first leak, for the Times had reported five days earlier on a separate, personal Comey memo attacking Trump for demanding “loyalty,” calling its anonymous sources “Mr. Comey’s associates.”
Wait, that wasn’t the first leak, either. On March 5, one day after Trump accused President Barack Obama of wiretapping him at Trump Tower, the Times reported that Comey was furious at the charge. Its unnamed sources were “senior American officials.”
All three stories carried the byline of Michael Schmidt, as did others describing intimate details of Comey’s dealings with Trump. Clearly, Schmidt had very, very good sources close to Comey.
The Washington Post also had “Justice Department officials” as anonymous sources for a bombshell report saying Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions failed to disclose two meetings with the Russian ambassador.
In calling Comey a “leaker,” Trump may have made the first understatement of his life. My bet is that Comey was a fountain of leaks, and didn’t show interest in prosecuting others because of his own guilt.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
NYT article suggests politics to blame for growing high anxiety, but declining turnouts for elections say otherwise
While election turnout soared during the 2008 financial crisis, overall the trend is down in the post-war, and flat since 1968. People care and don't care about politics about as much as they ever have.
Here:
The political mess has been “a topic of conversation and a source of anxiety in nearly every clinical case that I have worked with since the presidential election,” said Robert Duff, a psychologist in California. He wrote a 2014 book, “Hardcore Self-Help,” whose subtitle proposes to conquer anxiety in the coarse language that has also defined a generation.
Liberal Jonathan Turley says Comey was describing his own conduct in strikingly unethical terms
Here:
Comey asked why Trump would ask everyone to leave the Oval Office to speak with Comey unless he was doing something improper. Yet, Trump could ask why Comey would use a third party to leak these memos if they were his property and there was nothing improper in their public release.
In fact, there was a great deal wrong with their release, and Comey likely knew it. These were documents prepared on an FBI computer addressing a highly sensitive investigation on facts that he considered material to that investigation. Indeed, he conveyed that information confidentially to his top aides and later said that he wanted the information to be given to the special counsel because it was important to the investigation.
Friday, June 9, 2017
More than 30% of the earth's surface (Pacific Ocean) shows very slight cooling since 1951 on net
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| March period |
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| June period |
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| September period |
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| December period |
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Feminists aren't just emotional, they're so emotional they're redundant
Jessica Valenti for The Grauniad, here:
When so many of us feel powerless, seeing the extraordinary power of one woman felt like a cathartic release. A reminder of what is possible, and of what our daughter – and ourselves – deserve.
So emotional are such feminists that saying "felt like a catharsis" isn't good enough. It has to be "a cathartic release".
And which catharsis isn't a release? And which catharsis isn't felt?
Where is Camille Paglia when we need her? Or is she so old now that she too succumbs to such nostalgia for emotion?
Powerlessness knows no sex. Just ask any old couple married for forty or fifty years. Or a baby, if it could talk.
20 States Hillary lost to John Kerry, but I repeat myself
Arkansas
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
MAINE
MICHIGAN
MINNESOTA
Missouri
North Dakota
OHIO
Oklahoma
PENNSYLVANIA
RHODE ISLAND
South Dakota
Tennessee
VERMONT
West Virginia
WISCONSIN
Wyoming
Liberal legal scholar Jonathan Turley is "deeply troubled" by self-serving careerist James Comey's leak
Here:
The admission of leaking the memos is problematic given the overall controversy involving leakers undermining the Administration. Indeed, it creates a curious scene of a former director leaking material against the President after the President repeatedly asked him to crack down on leakers.
Comey joined the resistance: Never had a habit of writing memos before Trump was elected
Which is quite the admission given all the crap Obama & Co. perpetrated over the years, to which he was privy.
Comey is a NeverTrumper and the personification of the deep state.
From the story here:
Mr. Comey said he began taking notes on his meetings with the president because, from his first interaction with him, during the transition period, he thought Mr. Trump might lie about what was said.
He testified that he documented all of his meetings with Mr. Trump because it was so unusual for him to be discussing ongoing investigations, alone, with a sitting president. Mr. Comey had served in senior law enforcement positions under three presidents.
“The combination of factors just wasn’t present with either President Bush or President Obama,” he said.
Detroit Free Press says Michigan is ground zero for the Muslim clit cutters, girls from MN brought in for secret "operation"
Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan's crazy libertarian Judge Bernard Friedman is presiding over the case. You remember Friedman. He was the judge who overturned Michigan's 2004 Marriage Act in 2014.
From the story here:
[T[he [federal] government estimates that as many as 100 girls may have had their genitals cut at the hands of a local doctor and her cohorts.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Woodward disclosed the information while trying to convince a judge to keep a doctor and his wife locked up in the historic case. It involves allegations that two Minnesota girls had their genitals cut at a Livonia clinic in February as part of a religious rite of passage and were told to keep what happened a secret. ...
Against Woodward's wishes, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman granted bond to two other defendants in the case: Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, 53, of Farmington Hills, who is accused of letting Nagarwala use his clinic to perform genital cutting procedures on minor girls; and his wife, Farida Attar, 50, who is accused of holding the girls' hands during the procedure to keep them from squirming and to calm them. ...
The government believes the three defendants, all members of a local Indian-Muslim sect, subjected numerous girls to genital cutting procedures over a 12-year period. ... [Dr. Attar allegedly admitted] to authorities that he let Nagarwala use his clinic up to six times a year to treat children for genital rashes. ...
The defense has argued that the Attars did not engage in any criminal act and that the procedure at issue is a protected religious rite-of-passage that involves no cutting, but rather a scraping of genital membrane.
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Trump presidential approval at this point 39%, better than Bill Clinton's at 38%, according to FiveThirtyEight
Reported here:
Different polling outfits put Trump at varying levels of approval, but the RealClearPolitics average had him at 39.8 percent Tuesday, while the weighted average from FiveThirtyEight had him at exactly 39 percent. Not great numbers, but still better than Clinton. On Day 138 of his presidency, just 37.8 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Real Clear Energy editor is upset about a greater supply and demand for political speech
From the ninny's op-ed here:
Over time, these market forces lengthened the campaign season by almost a year, boosting the need to raise money to pay for media exposure, which in turn created both a greater supply and a greater demand for political speech. This reached its apogee during Trump’s circus-like, taboo-shattering transgressive candidacy, which created a feedback loop that generated billions of dollars in free airtime.
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
Why Google sucks
Google's search page google.com often highlights an important holiday, birthday, or whatever.
For example, just a few days ago it commemorated the birthdate of the gay "inventor" of the rainbow flag.
Today is the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, when 18-year old American boys died for your stupid libertarian gay "freedoms", many mowed down in their landing boats before they even got to the beaches.
But what does google.com show today?
Bupkis.
The conclusion of The Intercept's story on the leaked NSA report about election hacking is total crap
From the conclusion here:
The NSA conclusion “demonstrates that countries are looking at specific tactics for election manipulation, and we need to be vigilant in defense,” said [Harvard University's Bruce] Schneier. “Elections do two things: one choose the winner, and two, they convince the loser. To the extent the elections are vulnerable to hacking, we risk the legitimacy of the voting process, even if there is no actual hacking at the time.”
Throughout history, the transfer of power has been the moment of greatest weakness for societies, leading to untold bloodshed. The peaceful transfer of power is one of the greatest innovations of democracy.
“It’s not just that [an election] has to be fair, it has to be demonstrably fair, so that the loser says, ‘Yep, I lost fair and square.’ If you can’t do that, you’re screwed,” said Schneier. “They’ll tear themselves apart if they’re convinced it’s not accurate.”
IN OTHER WORDS, THE TRUMP ELECTION WAS ILLEGITIMATE BECAUSE HILLARY WON'T SAY 'YEP, I LOST FAIR AND SQUARE'.
Nixon never said that about JFK's theft of the election of 1960, because he was a patriot.
Every US state certified its election results in 2016. Every one. Because where there were problems, there were back up systems including paper ballots. Because the system is decentralized, multifarious and controlled by local officials it is robust. All the faults of the current chaos of voting in the United States are its strengths, protecting the integrity of the results.
All of this is admitted in the story, because even its authors know it to be the truth.
Monday, June 5, 2017
Sunday, June 4, 2017
NOAA's Climate at a Glance tool deliberately leaves out data going back to 1896 to misrepresent the Grand Rapids, MI, temperature trend
You can ask the Climate at a Glance tool for the data going back to 1896, but it won't give it to you:
But the data exists for Grand Rapids at the National Weather Service, from which I made this graph:
But the data exists for Grand Rapids at the National Weather Service, from which I made this graph:
Hillary says she was a victim of her big lead
Sure you were, sweetheart.
Quoted here:
"I was the victim of a very broad assumption I was going to win," Clinton said.
Huma's brother's house in Dearborn, MI, raided, boxes carted away
Reported here:
On June 1, 2017 a raid took place on the 7200 Block of Jonathon Street in Dearborn, Michigan which is owned by a “shell company,” turns out it’s actually owned by Huma Abedin’s brother and sister. This shell company is the Journal of Muslim Affairs. ... Convoys of cars descended on the home located at 7246 Jonathon Street, assisted by other law enforcement officers from neighboring locals.
And here:
A neighbor who declined to give her name said she saw law enforcement officers Thursday evening surrounding the house and removing boxes. But she didn't see anyone taken into custody.
Judicial Watch obtains new Clinton emails involving Huma contradicting Clinton's claim to have turned over everything
From the story here:
Judicial Watch says it obtained the documents after suing the State Department for its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in March 2015. The FOIA request sought “All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-state.gov email address.”
Judicial Watch notes that the 115 Clinton email exchanges were not among the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton previously handed over to the State Department, contradicting her claim that she had turned over all of her government emails.
34 lyin' cheatin' Muslim convenience store owners and a guy named "Dale" indicted for conspiracy
From the story here:
A federal grand jury has indicted 35 store owners on federal conspiracy charges for trafficking contraband cigarettes, distributing controlled substances and money laundering . . .:
Mohammed Almuttan, aka Abu Ali, 35, St. Louis, MO
Rami Almuttan, aka Abu Louay, 33, St. Louis, MO
Hisham Mutan, aka Abu Mohamed, 41, St. Louis, MO
Saddam Mutan, aka Abu Ali, 24, St. Louis, MO
Mazin Abdelsalam, aka Abu Mohammad, 38, St. Louis, MO
Najeh Muhana, aka Abu Yazan, 41, Fairview, NJ
Fares Muhana, aka Abu Yamama, 40, Cliffside Park, NJ
Ayoub Qaiymah, aka Abu Faysal, 23, Richmond, VA
Naser Abid, 23, Chicago, IL
Yadgar Barzanji, aka Abu Siver, 47, St. Louis, MO
Wafaa Alwan, 50, St. Louis, MO
Ahmed Abuali, aka Bazilla, 31, North Bergen, NJ
Mohammed Kayed, aka Mohammed Fayez, 21, Clifton, NJ
Momen Abuali, 20, Little Ferry, NJ
Firat Sevindik, 42, Cliffside Park, NJ
Mohammed Mustafa, 30, North Bergen, NJ
Mohammad Karashqah, Abu Yazid, 47, North Bergen, NJ
Fayez Sheikha, 46, Mishawaka, IN
Jihad Shihadeh, Abu Malik, 58, Chicago Ridge, IL
Ismael Abadi, 57, Carol Stream, IL
Abed Hamed, Abed Fawzan, 39, Greenville, NC
Maher Hamed, Abu Alazara, 33, Swansea, IL
Abdel Adi, 25, Oak Lawn, IL
Muhanad Khatib, Abu Alamin, 36, Chicago, IL
Eyad Awad, 38, Chicago, IL
Dale Garbin, 60, Kankakee, IL
Hayder Al Fatli, 40, St. Louis, MO
Kutlay Guvener, 35, Chicago, IL
Saad Al Mallak, 30, Dittmer, MO
Hassan Abdelatif, 29, Collinsville, IL
Mahajir Naz, 32, St. Louis, MO
Talal Abuajaj, 23, St. Louis, MO
Basem Hamdan, aka Abu Ramiz, 57, St. Louis, MO
Zainal Saleh, 29, St. Louis, MO and
Ibrahim Awad, 39, St. Louis, MO
English PM Theresa May repeats the "not-the-face-of-Islam" nonsense
Here:
First, while the recent attacks are not connected by common networks, they are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism.
It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam. It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth.
Of course the attacks are connected by common networks. They're called mosques. And the ideology is the ideology of their book.
Why should we expect a liberal ideologue to call out a rival ideology when it would introduce doubt about one's own ideological habit of thinking?
That's the real problem here. Ideology kills, theirs because it teaches killing, ours because it teaches tolerance even of that.
Wake up, America: The religion of pieces committed over 200 attacks in May, nearly 1,500 dead
Ban Islam from America before it is too late.
It's not a religion. It's organized crime.
Track its mayhem here.
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Friday, June 2, 2017
Grand Rapids, Michigan, climate update for May 2017
Mean average temperature was 57.6 degrees F in May 2017 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The mean for May is 57.9.
The lowest minimum temperature was 31. The mean for May is 32.
The highest maximum temperature was 88. The mean for May is 86.
Precipitation was 1.5 inches. The mean for May is 3.44. Fifteenth driest May on record.
May snowfall was 0.0 inches. The mean for May is 0.2.
Heating degree days came to 247. The mean for May is 252. The total through May from July 2016 comes to 5613 vs. mean to date of 6653. The heating season to date has been about 15.6% warmer than normal.
Trump correctly called the Paris Climate Accord a scheme to redistribute American wealth abroad
Here:
We have among the most abundant energy reserves in the planet, sufficient to lift millions of America's poorest workers out of poverty. Yet under this agreement, we are effectively putting these reserves under lock and key, taking away the great wealth of our nation, great wealth, phenomenal wealth. Not so long ago we had no idea we had such wealth. And leaving millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness. The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries. ...
Beyond the severe energy restrictions inflicted by the Paris accord, it includes yet another scheme to redistribute wealth out of the United States through the so-called "green climate fund" -- nice name -- which calls for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing countries all on top of America's existing and massive foreign aid payments.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Jake Novak calls Hillary Clinton's personality "non-viable"
Here:
A winning candidate with a more winning personality wouldn't sit at the Code Conference and come off so obliviously arrogant and utterly without contrition. You can say that's yet another bad decision, but it's primarily a product of Clinton's politically non-viable personality. Her decisions are the fruit of that poison tree. ...
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election the moment the American people took a good look and listened to her for five minutes or so.
For many of us, that was way back in 1992 when we decided we liked Bill Clinton and appreciated that his wife stood behind him, but we didn't exactly go for her. For others, that moment came in 2008 when she just wasn't as likable as the handsome newcomer Barack Obama. And finally, that moment came for the rest of the critical mass of voters in 2016 when she still wasn't any more likable or believable in her way of speaking and appearance than she was for the previous 24 years.
Donald Trump may not be very persuasive either for millions of Americans, but he's a lot more persuasive than Hillary Clinton. And she was his opponent. That's the breaks.
Denise Spellberg is making much of a young Thomas Jefferson's tolerant views of Islam at the expense of the older's war on it
Here:
As a 22-year-old law student in Williamsburg, Virginia, Jefferson bought a Qur’an – 11 years before drafting the Declaration of Independence. The purchase is symbolic of a longer historical connection between American and Islamic worlds, and a more inclusive view of the nation’s early, robust view of religious pluralism.
An older, wiser Jefferson, along with Madison, realized peace was better than war, but that war was better than paying tribute to Muslim pirates in exchange for it, something America ignobly did for fifteen years between 1785 and 1800.
Damn fool Cato libertarian Nowrasteh: Odds of being a victim of terrorism MUCH GREATER AT 1:3,609,709 than winning Powerball at 1:292,201,338
And that's using his own artificial terminus a quo of 1975. Why not pick 1978, or 1992?!
In America we've gone to enormous expense to protect children in car seats and adults with seat belts and air bags, but the libertarians think that preventing your death at the hands of a Muslim head-cutter is an impediment to economic growth.
Cato's Iranian American Alex Nowrasteh, here:
Foreign-born terrorism on U.S. soil is a low-probability event that imposes high costs on its victims despite relatively small risks and low costs on Americans as a whole. From 1975 through 2015, the average chance of dying in an attack by a foreign-born terrorist on U.S. soil was 1 in 3,609,709 a year. For 30 of those 41 years, no Americans were killed on U.S. soil in terrorist attacks caused by foreigners or immigrants. Foreign-born terrorism is a hazard to American life, liberty, and private property, but it is manageable given the huge economic benefits of immigration and the small costs of terrorism. The United States government should continue to devote resources to screening immigrants and foreigners for terrorism or other threats, but large policy changes like an immigration or tourist moratorium would impose far greater costs than benefits.
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