Wells Fargo secrets

Matt Egan reports at CNN Money,

Everyone hates paying bank fees. But imagine paying fees on a ghost account you didn't even sign up for.

That's exactly what happened to Wells Fargo customers nationwide.

On Thursday, federal regulators said Wells Fargo employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts -- without their customers knowing it -- since 2011.

The phony accounts earned the bank unwarranted fees and allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales figures and make more money.

"Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses," Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement.

Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that it had fired 5,300 employees related to the shady behavior over the last few years. Employees went to far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.

The scope of the scandal is shocking. An analysis conducted by a consulting firm hired by Wells Fargo concluded that bank employees opened up over 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized, according to the CFPB.
The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created accounts without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this practice as "widespread" and led to customers being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees -- because the money was not in their original accounts.

Additionally, Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their knowledge or consent, the CFPB said the analysis found. Roughly 14,000 of those accounts incurred over $400,000 in fees, including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees.

Wells Fargo is being slapped with the largest penalty since the CFPB was founded in 2011. The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines, along with $5 million to refund customers.

"We regret and take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request," Wells Fargo said in a statement.

Wells Fargo is the most valuable bank in America, worth just north of $250 billion. Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), the investment firm run legendary investor Warren Buffett, is the company's biggest shareholder.

"One wonders whether a penalty of $100 million is enough," said David Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and former director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "It sounds like a big number, but for a bank the size of Wells Fargo, it isn't really."

Wired to receive stealth communications from her campaign handlers?

The True Pundit website claims,

Hillary Clinton was sporting a mini earbud wired to receive stealth communications from her campaign handlers during Wednesday’s Commander-in-Chief Forum carried live on NBC from New York City, True Pundit has learned.

While Clinton was fielding questions from NBC’s Matt Lauer and the public Wednesday night on live television, a quiet buzz started circulating in New York law enforcement circles about Hillary’s left ear. NYPD sources involved with the NBC forum’s security detail confirm Clinton was wearing an ‘inductive earpiece,” the same technology employed by almost all lead Broadway actors to receive forgotten lines and stealth off-stage cues from directors. The flesh-colored earbud is easily concealed. There are no wires running directly to the ear like you see with the units employed by Secret Service protection detail personnel.

The skin-tone piece Clinton was wearing, however, was somewhat different from the standard issued stealth earpiece and is much different in appearance from a hearing aid. This unit is considered a “micro” earbud which contains all the technology but is a fraction of the size with a very high price tag. In fact, most of the units this size,

approximately 3mm or comparable to a small pearl stud earring, are normally issued to law enforcement or corporate security teams, sources said. At a size that small, the earbud is designed to sit inside the opening of the ear canal, almost invisible to anyone. However, the unit does move and shift along with its wearer and at times can slightly pop out of the canal and require a quick readjustment, experts said.

Ironically, the revelation that Clinton was wearing such a unit might have only been recognized because of astute NYPD officers attached to her security detail who are accustomed to seeing the stealth apparatus at stage shows, conventions and security personnel of VIPs and international dignitaries at the United nations and elsewhere in the five boroughs. Likewise, NYPD detectives employ a parallel technology to communicate during undercover Ops.

Based on experts familiar with the technology, the stealth earpiece operates on a bandwidth from 300 Hz to 4KHz. Many such units are powered by SONY. The range of the unit can be unlimited depending on how the back end is set up. Technically, you could receive cues from 100 feet away or from someone sitting in Washington D.C. while you sat in New York City, experts said. The set up and range is flexible based on need and use. The unit does not require Bluetooth to operate via short distances but long range operations would require Bluetooth, which is easily configured.

Wikileaks may have unwittingly foreshadowed this Bombshell story years ago. Tucked away in its Clinton’s email archive is an otherwise obscure 2009 email from aide Huma Abedin asking Clinton if she remembered to her earpiece. This beckons the question: Did Hillary use her secret earpiece to be coached and guided through her testimony at Congressional hearings on Benghazi, her missing emails and beyond? Alarming to say the least.

"We didn't lose a single life in Libya!"

Last night Hillary said, "We didn't lose a single life in Libya!" What? Is Benghazi not in Libya? Did Ambassador Chris Stevens, the man who repeatedly asked Hillary and Obama to beef up security, not die in Libya? And, what about Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods?

Of course, Matt Lauer let her get away with that huge lie.



glen doherty

Coronal mass ejections and magnetic reconnections

Did you think you would read about coronal mass ejections today? Well, Stephanie Osborn is a rocket scientist who has a wonderful ability to explain space, solar, and geomagnetic weather over at According to Hoyt.

The end result is that a whole bunch of energy gets transferred from the field into kinetic energy. This heats up the plasma AND accelerates it, and, at least on the surface of a star like our Sun, a titanic explosion is the result. A great big blob of plasma goes flying out into space, and that blob is a “coronal mass ejection,” because a big mass of the corona just got ejected from the Sun. (Imaginative name, huh?)



So you can think of the reconnection event as being like a titanic nuclear bomb, and the CME is the mushroom cloud moving up…and out, into interplanetary space. (How big a bomb? Well, solar flares vary in size and power. But NASA solar scientists estimate they’re “the equivalent of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time.” Keep in mind that the biggest nuke ever detonated on Earth was Tsar Bomba, at only 50 megatons.)

The vast majority of them aren’t THAT big, and aren’t even Earth-directed. The chances of one smacking Earth aren’t that great. But because there are a lot of them, especially at Solar Max, it happens fairly often. Sometimes it’s just the edge of the expanding bubble, but sometimes it whacks Earth upside the head. And when they come in, they’re coming fast.

If you’re talking how massive, well, on average they’re about 3,520,000,000 lb (1,600,000,000,000 kg). That’s over three and a half billion pounds of plasma. On average, their speed is about 304 mi/s or 1.1 million mph (490km/s). IF, however, one follows close on the heels of another, so that the first one has swept most of the interplanetary medium out of the way (decreasing drag), the speed can increase to 2,000 mi/s or 7.2 million mph (3,200 km/s). And with the Sun 93 million miles away, that means a really fast CME can reach Earth in just under 13 hours.

Read more here.

Trump for president

Did you watch tonight's Commander in Chief show on MSNBC? Did you notice how much more aggressive Matt Lauer was with Donald Trump than he was with Hillary? Lauer did ask Hillary one good question, then she shut him off from getting in another.

I thought Trump did just fine. I am liking him better and better. He has the potential to be the best president of my lifetime.

Rule of law

The Zman writes,

The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.

Commander-in-Chief forum tonight

From The Week:

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will appear at the same event Wednesday, for the first time this election cycle. Both candidates are scheduled to field questions at the Commander-in-Chief Forum, sponsored by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America group and moderated by Today host Matt Lauer. Clinton and Trump won't share the stage, but will each have half-hour blocks to make their case; Clinton will appear first, at 8 p.m. ET, to answer questions posed by the veterans and active service members in the audience, and Trump will follow. You can watch the event here.

Okay Hillarycons, make your case!

Pat Buchanan writes at Unz about a new book by Phillis Schafley and others, entitled "The Conservative Case for Trump."

...“This is a binary election,” John Bolton is quoted in Phyllis’ book. “[N]ot voting” for Trump is “functionally … a vote for Hillary.”

Yet that is where some conservative and neocon columnists and scores of foreign policy veterans of the GOP, and ex-Presidents Bush I and II, and 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney are heading.

Three of Trump’s rivals for the nomination — Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and John Kasich — who held up their hand and pledged to support the nominee, appear about to dishonor their pledge.

But what is conservative about rendering aid and comfort to the presidential ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton?

...“The Conservative Case for Trump” is a splendid little book by the first lady of American Conservatism.

The Hillarycons now owe it to us to make their case.

Read more here.

Judeo-Christian?

Is Judeo-Christian a misnomer; a contradiction in terms? That is what this blog post alleges.

Destroying more emails

Ace of Spades headlines this story

Hillary Clinton's People Knowingly Destroyed Emails They Knew Were Under Congressional and Legal Subpoena

Then Ace proceeds to analyze here.

Is her disease a threat to national security?

A doctor gives his analysis.

How Snowden hid in Hong Kong

In the National Post Theresa Tedesco writes the story of how Edward Snowden evaded capture after revealing government secrets. Oliver Stone is making a movie about it.

The never-been-told story of those two pivotal weeks when the most wanted man in the world was hidden in the depths of a Hong Kong slum.

Read more here.

What Obama means by "screened."

David Greenfield asks,

How are we going to screen a Syrian or Iraqi man who claims to be from a city held by ISIS?

Are we going to phone the local ISIS office and ask the head headchopper to confirm that the fellow smiling for the camera isn’t affiliated with ISIS? Perhaps the local Jihadi Jack or Allah Akbar Abdul will regretfully inform us that they would be happy to help, but the local government office was burned down during a massacre of Christians, Yazidis and American hostages.

...The most persecuted peoples in Syria are Christians and Yazidis. Obama has officially resettled 9,144 Syrians. 9,077 of them are Muslims. A mere 47 Christians and 14 Yazidis managed to slip through the nets of his careful screening process.

The most persecuted peoples in Syria are Christians and Yazidis. Obama has officially resettled 9,144 Syrians. 9,077 of them are Muslims. A mere 47 Christians and 14 Yazidis managed to slip through the nets of his careful screening process.

Remember those people on television pleading to be saved from genocide and mass rape? Obama took in barely a dozen of them.

8,984 of the poor oppressed refugees are members of the genocidal Sunni Islamic majority in Syria. That’s 98 percent.

That’s not a statistic. It’s a war crime.

A dozen from the victimized minority… and nine thousand from the genocidal majority.

When Obama talks about how thoroughly the refugees were “screened”, this is what he means. He and his people thoroughly screened out the Christians and the Yazidis. They kept out anyone who isn’t a Muslim. Christians make up 10 percent of Syria and 0.5 percent of Obama’s resettled refugees.

Obama, Hillary and a million media voices squawk that a “religious test” for immigration would be Un-American. But there already is a religious test. It prioritizes Muslims and excludes everyone else.

If you are a member of ISIS, you have a better chance of reaching America than your Yazidi sex slave.

That is the simple indictment of the monstrous crime committed by the left. It is not only Obama alone who perpetrated this evil. It is every member of the left, every willing liberal who cheered the refugees who aren’t and refused to hear about the refugees who are. In the last century, they allied with Stalin. In this century, they allied with Mohammed.

Read more here.

What is it?

Hillary spits a mystery substance into a glass here.

Putin's driver killed

A Mercedes crosses over into the lane going in the opposite direction. The car it hits is Vladimer Putin's. Putin is not in it, but his favorite driver is killed.

Definitely cage free

Not a good trip for Obama

No ramp service for Obama in China. He has to leave out the back of the plane. Then he gets called "son of a whore" by the president of the Philippines. Not a good trip.

Retired Generals and admirals supporting Trump

88 retired generals and admirals have endorsed Donald Trump. Their letter of support says, in part,

“Hillary Clinton has made clear she is running as a staunch defender of the status quo when it comes to the issues facing our military, and she has shown through her foreign policy decisions and her mishandling of classified information that she lacks the judgment to do the job,” Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn added in the press release. “Mr.Trump’s deep and growing support in the militrary community and his thoughtful proposals show he’s the right person to lead our men and women in uniform.”

Read more here.

What he learned from Mother Teresa

At The Pulse Ralph Benko writes about an encounter he had with Mother Teresa when he was a teenager.

Today's invisible soup lines

.


We don't have soup lines like this in today's America. Sundance writes at The Conservative Treehouse,

Factually, if the number of American people on EBT or SNAP welfare benefits had to line up for soup and meals (instead of just get money on an electronic card for use anywhere), there would be massive lines, miles-long lines, all day and all night in hundreds of thousands of soup kitchens nation-wide. Such visibility would make the soup lines of the great depression seem insignificant by comparison.

The EBT and SNAP cards are exactly that, “Electronic Soup Cards”.

Read more here.

Pitiful

Matt Walsh writes at The Blaze,

Hillary Clinton is many things, most of them bad, but she is nothing if not pitiful. There have been rumors flying around for months surrounding her declining health, and every coughing fit, every image of the candidate needing help to walk up the stairs, every time she falls down, every lengthy break she takes from the trail, every piece of evidence must lead an observant person to the conclusion that Hillary Clinton is not exactly a picture of health and vitality. And all of these concerns seemed to be officially validated late last week when an authority on Hillary Clinton’s health came forward to confirm them. That authority being Hillary Clinton herself.

It was revealed on Friday that, while being interviewed by the FBI, Clinton cited brain damage and a blood clotting problem as reasons why she couldn’t remember vital details from her time at the State Department. Her health was so bad, she claimed, that she was forced to stay home and illegally conduct government business on her secret private servers. This is a weak — and yes, pitiful — excuse, but we can say with relative certainty that she did have these medical issues. And, even if she’s embellishing and using them as cover to weasel out of felony charges, it does seem true that her various health crises impeded her ability to operate competently as Secretary of State. This is according to her own testimony, remember.

...She could have gone to her doctor’s appointments, taken care of her health problems without scrutiny from the peanut gallery, and lived in ease and luxury with all of her skeletons buried and her dirty laundry packed away and out of sight. But she chose this path instead. One of shame, disgrace, and intense physical strain.

Why?

...Don’t get me wrong. I feel more sorry for my children, who will have to grow up in a country controlled by the likes of Hillary Clinton, than I do for Hillary Clinton herself. But that does not change the fact that she is a sad character. Dangerous, yes. Scary, yes. Corrupt, yes. But pitiful. Just pitiful.

Read more here.

Don't let her owners play with matches!

A good reason to vote for Trump, a very good reason whatever his other intentions, is that he does not want a war with Russia. Hillary and her elite ventriloquists threaten just that. Note the anti-Russian hysteria coming from her and her remoras.

Such a war would be yet another example of the utter control of America by rich insiders. No normal American has anything at all to gain by such a war. And no normal American has the slightest influence over whether such a war takes place, except by voting for Trump. The military has become entirely the plaything of unaccountable elites.

Letting dilettantes, grifters, con men, pasty Neocons, bottle-blonde ruins, and corporations decide on war is insane. We have pseudo-masculine dwarves playing with things they do not understand. So far as I am aware, none of these fern-bar Clausewitzes has worn boots, been in a war, seen a war, or faces any chance of being in a war started by themselves. They brought us Iraq, Afghanistan, and Isis, and can’t win wars against goatherds with AKs. They are going to fight…Russia?

When Washington pushed the South into the Civil War, it expected a conflict that might be over in twenty-four hours, not four years with as least 650,000 dead. When Germany began WWI, it expected a swift lunge into Paris, not four years of hideously bloody static war followed by unconditional surrender. When the Japanese Army pushed for attacking Pearl, it did not foresee GIs marching in Tokyo and a couple of cities glowing at night. When Hitler invaded Poland, utter defeat and occupation of Germany was not among his war aims. When the US invaded Vietnam, it did not expect to be outfought and outsmarted by a bush-world country. When Russia invaded Afghanistan it did not expect…nor when America invaded Afghanistan, nor when it attacked Iraq, nor….

The standard American approach to war is to underestimate the enemy, overestimate American capacities, and misunderstand the kind of war it enters. This is particularly true when the war is a manhood ritual for masculine inadequates–think Kristol, Podhoretz, Sanders, the whole Neocon milk bar, and that mendacious wreck, Hillary, who has the military grasp of a Shetland pony. If you don’t think weak egos and perpetual adolescence have a part in deciding policy, read up on Kaiser Wilhelm.

Now, if Washington accidentally or otherwise provoked a war with Russia in, say, the Baltics or the Ukraine, and actually used its own forces, where might this lead, given the Pentagon’s customary delusional optimism? A very serious possibility is a humiliating American defeat. The US has not faced a real enemy in a long time. In that time the armed forces have been feminized and social-justice warriorified, with countless officials having been appointed by Obama for reasons of race and sex. Training has been watered down to benefit girl soldiers, physical standards lowered, and the ranks of general officers filled with perfumed political princes. Russia is right there at the Baltic borders: location, location, location. Somebody said, “Amateurs think strategy, professionals think logistics.” Uh-huh. The Russians are not pansies and they are not primitive.

The same danger exists incidentally with regard to a war with China in the South China Sea. The American Navy hasn’t fought a war in seventy years. It doesn’t know how well its armament works. The Chinese, who are not fools, have invested in weaponry specifically designed to defeat carrier battle groups. A carrier in smoking ruins would force Washington to start a wider war to save face, with unpredictable results. Can you name one American, other than the elites, who has anything to gain from war with China?

What has any normal American, as distinct from the elites and various lobbies, gained from any of our wars post Nine-Eleven? Hillary and her Neocon pack have backed all of them.

There are lots of reasons not to vote for Clinton and the suppurating corruption she represents. Not letting her owners play with matches rates high among them.

Read more here.

The Era of Hope and Change

Richard Fernandez writes at PJ Media,

The Era of Hope and Change has been one prolonged act of suicide. If anyone had said that Obama would manage to alienate Israel and the Philippines, lose Turkey, pay Iran a hundred billion dollars, preside over the loss of a won war in Afghanistan, lose billions of dollars in military equipment to ISIS, watch a consulate burn, restart the Cold War with Russia, cause Japan to re-arm and go the knife's edge with China would you have believed it? If someone had told you in 2008 millions of refugees would be heading for Europe and that the UK would leave the EU after Obama went there to campaign for them to remain would you not have laughed?

He promised "smart diplomacy" and the restoration of American prestige in the world. How did it come to this?

Read more here.

Amazing sunset

We had an open pit barbeque last night to celebrate Labor Day, but I was too focused on the incredible sunset to get the shot of the fire.

Educating Jews about Donald Trump

How #BlackLivesMatter kills people

Trump's opportunity

Victor Davis Hanson notes in National Review,

Derangement Syndrome is a more apt clinical diagnosis for the Right’s hatred of Trump than it was for the Left’s loathing of Bush.

His latest pivot may be too late, but it certainly hit the right notes by presenting his populist themes — unwise trade deals, defense cuts, inner-city violence, attacks against police, illegal immigration, the war on coal, big-government regulations, and boutique environmentalism — as symptomatic of elite neglect not just of the white working class but of minorities as well, upon whom liberal policy falls most heavily. By curbing his personal invective and focusing on Obama’s incompetence and Clinton’s corruption, Trump may succeed in allowing 4 or 5 percent of the missing Republicans and independents to return and vote for him without incurring social disdain.

About every three weeks, terrorists butcher innocents in one or another Western country, usually screaming “Allahu Akbar” during their victims’ death throes. These terrorists have often been watched but otherwise left alone by intelligence agencies. Liberal pieties follow, along with warnings to the public about their prejudices, rather than admonitions to radical Islamists to stop their killing. The ensuing public backlash does not mesh with the Obama–Clinton narrative that the killings were mere workplace violence, a generic form of “violent extremism,” or had “nothing to do with Islam.” Like Jimmy Carter, with his infamous inability to frame the Iranian hostage crisis, so too the latest manifestation of Hillary Clinton is simply unable to identify the origin, nature, and extent of the terrorist threat — much less offer a solution.

In the same vein, with 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S., almost daily we hear a news report of yet another illegal-alien felony, or a new sanctuary city, or an effort by the “undocumented” to get the vote out — none of which enhances open-borders Hillary.

Many of us have been saying for a year now that the last six months of the Obama administration will likely be the most dangerous interlude since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 or the Carter meltdown of 1980. Restive aggressors abroad have long concluded that Obama is conflicted about American morality, power, and responsibility. After his faux deadlines, redlines, and step-over lines, his apologies, his mythographical speeches, and his deer-in-the-headlights reactions to overseas challenges, he appears to foreign opportunists to be indifferent to the consequences of American laxity and lead-from-behind withdrawal.

Putin is now massing troops near Ukraine. Iran is absorbing Iraq and Syria. China has carved out a thalassocracy in the South China Sea. Tensions will only rise in these areas in the next 90 days, to the point of either outright war or more insidious and humiliating withdrawals from U.S. interests and allies. Either scenario favors Trump’s Jacksonian bluster.

Hillary Clinton has lied about her e-mails, her personal server, and the supposed firewall between her and the Clinton Foundation. She has lied about almost every detail of her tenure as secretary of state, from the killings in Benghazi to her knowledge of sending and receiving classified material. We are back to the cattle-future lying of 1979, when Hillary was said to have had a 31-trillion-to-one chance of telling the truth about her hundred-fold profit.

The problem with chronic lying is that finally the liar reaches a combustible state, one in which she cannot lie any more without contradicting a particular prior lie and yet cannot tell the truth without contradicting all prior lies. To keep them straight, one needs an amoral photographic memory. Hillary Clinton has the requisite shamelessness, but (unlike Bill) not the animal cunning to pull off such serial prevarication. In her latest fabrication that has begrudgingly come to light, Hillary had blamed Colin Powell (who never set up a private server as secretary of state) as the supposed felonious model that prompted her to break the law.

So expect more lies about hacked e-mail from the Clinton Foundation, Hillary’s deleted e-mail accounts, the DNC records, or some as yet unknown private communication about every 48 hours until November. If Trump’s fantasies are the bluster, narcissism, and adolescence of a real-estate and show-biz wheeler-dealer, Clinton’s lies are the steely-eyed and deliberate work of a long-time sociopathic prevaricator who destroys all those around her who weave the webs of her deceit.

Yet Trump so far can get close to Clinton, but not 3 to 4 points ahead. To do that would require continued zeal, but also a complete end to his personal invective against irrelevant third parties — and an ability to raise a lot of money quickly and get his message out in a multimedia campaign.

Read more here.

Which principles are the most important?

At National Review Dennis Prager writes about #NeverTrumpers and #NeverHillaryers:

One side seeks to undo just about every founding principle that made America exceptional. Important examples include small and limited government; preservation of the power of the states to serve as political and social laboratories; a belief in individual responsibility; a society rooted in Judeo-Christian morality — meaning a society composed of people most of whom affirm God and Bible-based moral teachings; and a deep sense of a unifying national American identity and destiny. The Left is successfully undoing every one of those founding principles.

for the first time in American history, a man calling himself a socialist won the great majority of young people’s votes in the Democratic presidential primaries. Senator Bernie Sanders’s new political movement is accurately named “Our Revolution.” But for conservatives, “our revolution” occurred in 1776. So the Left is in fact leading a counter-revolution.

Therefore, with another four years of Democrat-Left rule — meaning a nearly permanent left-wing Supreme Court and left-wing judges controlling lower courts; the further erosion of federalism; an exponential growth in the power of the federal government; further leftist control of education; and the de-Americanizing of America in part by effectively eliminating its borders, in part by substituting multiculturalism for American identity, and in part by giving millions of illegal immigrants citizenship — America will not be America.

We conservatives who will vote for Trump understand that he is the only vehicle we have to prevent this. We recognize that though there are some fine individuals who hold left-wing views, Leftism is a terminal cancer in the American bloodstream and soul. So our first and greatest principle is to destroy this cancer before it destroys us. We therefore see voting for Donald Trump as political chemotherapy needed to prevent our demise. And at this time, that is, by far, the greatest principle.

Read more here.

Fox News losing people and money

Gretchen Carlson is sitting pretty this morning. She got $20 million and an apology from Fox News.
Read more here.


Greta Van Susteren is also in the news.

Also Tuesday, Fox News announced the surprise departure of Greta Van Susteren from a nighttime lineup that has been one of the most successful and stable in cable news.

Van Susteren, who would have marked 15 years with the network in January, said on Facebook that Fox "has not felt like home to me for a few years." She did not elaborate. She has been temporarily replaced by Brit Hume.

Read more here.

Are people a nation's greatest resource?

Victor Davis Hanson writes today at Town Hall about immigration and emigration. Did you know that Mexico receives $20 billion a year from expatriates who have migrated to the US? That does not count the grocery carts full of clearance sale clothing purchased at Walmart for relatives still living in Mexico.

Hanson writes,

People should be a nation's greatest resource. Fairly or not, Mexico has long been seen to view its own citizens in rather cynical terms as a valuable export commodity, akin to oil or food. When they are young and healthy, Mexican expatriates are expected to scrimp, save and support their poorer relatives back in Mexico. When these Mexican expats are ill and aged, then the U.S should pick up the tab for their care.

Read more here.

Frustrated and confused

As the race tightens, will the Electoral College save Hillary? Nate Silver doesn't thinks so. I get frustrated when the daily polls show one or the other up by 2 or 3 percent, then I see sites like Five Thirty Eight reporting that Hillary still has at least a 70% chance of winning, because of the Electoral College.

Moving from desperation and desolation into gratitude and grace.

Are you in a difficult situation now in your life? Melanie Dale has had lots of those experiences, yet

I’ve been changed by a God who loved me through disappointment and continues to carry me through the unfairness of life. I’ve been changed by a God who loved me through disappointment and continues to carry me through the unfairness of life.

I’ve discovered the intense joy that comes through the pain, through unfairness.

I’ve moved from desperation and desolation into gratitude and grace.

Rather than listing all the ways life isn’t fair, I begin to offer praise, and in the praising, I worship deeper, love harder, and experience God’s pleasure.

I just reread that last paragraph and am equal parts mm-hmming and wanting to gag myself with the nearest available spatula. It’s all true . . . half of the time.

After years of telling God it’s not fair, I can now say that I’m grateful for my struggle. I would never, ever tell someone else to be grateful for theirs.

We can’t tell people in their pain to be grateful. That would be the highest cruelty. But over time, after having raw conversations with God and acknowledging the life unfolding around me, I see the beauty of His creation.

Whatever you’re going through right now or whatever you’ve been through, it’s hard, maybe it’s awful, and it will leave a mark.

There will be times when you stare at a wall, and times when you wave your fist in the air, and times when you’ll feel like you’re tearing apart.

Instructions were provided for assembly

Astronomer Fred Hoyle, inventor of the Big Bang theory

“Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shuffling of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point where it is no different from zero. ... For life to have originated on earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instructions should have been provided for its assembly.”

Trump doesn't scare him

Scott Adams writes,

As a trained hypnotist, and a student of persuasion, I see the world through a persuasion filter. My viewfinder shows me confirmation bias, whereas many people are seeing Trump as an irrational conflation of ghosts, devils, and bogeymen that hide in the dark. Team Clinton created that persuasion trap. I recognized the technique. Some of you did too. Most of the world did not.

...Trump has been consistent for decades in his practice of making an aggressive first offer and negotiating down to something reasonable. He talks about it in his book, The Art of the Deal. So when Trump announced he would deport 11 million people, I saw that as an aggressive opening offer, consistent with his history, and nothing worthy of fear. Most of the world saw it as a final offer.

It wasn’t.

...Recently we learned that my interpretation from last year was accurate. Trump is now focusing on the “criminal” aliens who committed additional offenses after entering the country illegally. He plans to “prioritize” that group and get around to the rest at some future date, when circumstances might be different. That’s how a Master Persuader talks.

The problem is that Trump can’t say today that he will be lenient with illegal immigrants tomorrow because that would encourage more people to enter the country. The best play – and the only one likely to work – is to scare people into thinking he will deport everyone, then soften after the bad ones have been expelled and the wall is working. Trump is approaching immigration like a persuader. If you trust him to be kind later, his approach looks both humane and practical. But if you are afraid of the dark, and afraid of New York-style talking, you might see something sinister. I predicted last year that Trump would soften on deporting 11 million people, and he is doing just that, right on schedule. To me, Trump has never been scary on this topic. He was acting like a Master Persuader and using fear to slow incoming immigration as well as to get elected.

Pattern Recognition

The human brain is designed to recognize patterns, but we aren’t terribly good at it. We see patterns where none exist. And once we think we see a pattern, confirmation bias kicks in and supplies our minds with lots of imaginary “evidence.”

For example, if you think Trump is a racist, you were probably offended that he referred to Judge Curiel as “Mexican.” But if you do not think Trump is racist, you might notice that Americans with Italian heritage refer to themselves as Italian. And Americans with Irish backgrounds often call themselves Irish. Even Americans with Mexican heritage call themselves Mexicans. It’s just a shorthand way of talking. Every single one of us talks the way Trump does.

Read more here.

Why the Iran deal is such a disaster

At Director Blue Carolyn Glick shows us how Obama's Iran deal is such a disaster for our beloved America. Read what she has to say here.

Where the action is

Obama at today's G20 meeting, staring across at Putin talking to Erdogan.

Not in good health

Hillary came out today. It was kind of hard to hear her, though, because of her coughing.

Thank you, Frackers!

The price of oil remains cheap on this Labor Day. Glenn Reynolds writes,

THANKS, FRACKERS! Labor Day Gas Prices Hit 12-Year Low.

Fracking empowers ordinary Americans and weakens American enemies. Naturally, all right-thinking people are against it.

Read more here.

Which is it?

So which is it? Is Britain poised to be a global leader in free trade, or will Obama force them to be "at the back of the queue?"

Special

At Town Hall Kurt Schlichter writes,

Just the other day – you know, late afternoon on the Friday before Labor Day – the FBI released more documents and reports related to her email shenanigans. What they revealed was, of course, that a situation that was already terrible was actually about ten times more terrible than we ever imagined. Not only did the Woman Most Qualified Ever To Be President not know how classification works, and not only did the bar-failing, chronically sick crone forget pretty much everything she ever did or said or heard, but she also managed to lose about a dozen Blackberry phones that she used to transmit classified materials.

Now, for those of you who have not worked with classified material and the equipment that transmits it, let me share with you how it might go for someone who, say, was a military guy and not a famous liberal woman:

Hi Colonel. How’s it going? By the way, I think I misplaced about 13 of those communication devices we use for classified materials. Wacky me, right? I forget where. Maybe I left them out at the range, or maybe at the base Burger King. I was getting one of those Whopperritos – yum!

Say Colonel, you don’t look so good. You’re all ashen and sweaty. Did you accidentally click on those Lena Dunham lingerie photos? Are you hungry? Do you want a bite of my Whopperito?

Cue the lockdown of the base, the 24/7 search for the missing gear, and the MPs to come and haul away Lieutenant Schmuckarelli. Oh, but don’t worry about Hillary’s lost gear. Some of those missing phones were hit with hammers, which apparently Huma and Company believes magically erases electronic data, so I guess it’s all good.

Are you freaking kidding me? If it wasn’t a famous liberal woman the elite is dying to install as president, this person would be Cool Hand Lukeing it in Leavenworth until the year 2100.

But famous liberal women don’t have to play by the rules. They can be bizarrely racist and the trained seals of the media will happily clap their fins. They can commit clear, unequivocal crimes and the FBI will eagerly do on its reputation what a bear does in the woods to excuse her. Because, after all, unlike us peasants, famous liberal women are special.

Read more here.

Fighting battles that have already been won

"The great thing with identity politics is that you can do anything you want. You can be rude, you can get away with murder. You can be bitchy, sarcastic, you can get away with anything!"

It is simply not true any more that women have structural disadvantages. The truth is that women are now structurally advantaged, not disadvantaged. Women in their thirties earn more than men doing the same work in both the UK and the United States."

Oh, and let's be sure to ridicule the "septogenerian" who said something that was politically incorrect.

Last time face to face?

Putin and Obama met today for the last time before Obama leaves office.

No regrets

Milo Yiannopoulos believes trolling is his way of "doing God's work" and has gone after feminism and the body positivity movement.

War on Drugs

President Duterte of the Philippines is cracking down on drug dealers and users. Over two thousand have been killed since June 30. A reporter asked him how he will respond if Obama asks him about it.

Duterte responded: "I am a president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony. I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You must be respectful. Do not just throw questions. Putang ina I will swear at you in that forum," he said, using the Tagalog phrase for son of a bitch.

Read the biased AP report here.

Rattlesnake tonight

Outside the building where I was cleaning eggs this evening crept this friendly rattlesnake.

Oldest son saw it, got his shovel, and took care of it.

One more artist

As we left church in Santa Fe, we saw one more artist. The guy with the brush might have been an artist, too.

Sunday morning in Santa Fe

We had about one hour before the beginning of the church service, so we walked over to the Santa Fe Plaza to view some art. The best Navajo rugs were on display here. The man in the jeans is the artist.

What does a buffalo do when confronted with a prairie dog?

They even had jewelry for us Trump supporters!

You would have to have a pretty strong neck to wear this necklace.

The bells are ringing. Time for church.

'No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.'

What did Trump say in his speech at a predominantly black church in Detroit? The Hill provides us with the full transcript.

Pummeled!

Remember the incident in Normandy, France a short while ago, in which a Muslim beheaded an elderly priest? Shortly after his funeral, some Catholics held a prayerful demonstration over the Church's decision to close the chapel where the priest was beheaded. Notice how the bald-headed man fourth from the end on the right side keeps looking to his left? Someone is disrupting the prayer. Soon we find out who the disrupter might have been.

How Trump can make America great again

Better yet, Trump should read the Bookworm Room blog:

The fact that Trump hasn’t been marinated for decades in politics seems to promise that he’ll have a fresh new approach to problem solving, and that he won’t be beholden to the usual D.C. interest groups. It helps that those who have followed his career over the decades say that he has a steep learning curve (which we’re seeing right now with his statesman-like conduct regarding Mexico and his immigration message), that he’s an out-of-the-box thinker, and that he gets things done. Every one of those characteristics is antithetical to the normal political model.

...(Do you find it as amusing as I do that Trump is being tarred as an extreme racist for basically saying that, as president, he would enforce the laws on the books?)

...As a successor executive, Trump can follow America’s laws, rather than ignore or pervert them. Indeed, it’s not just a matter of “can.” It is his constitutional obligation to follow the laws as Congress wrote them, on everything from immigration to Obamacare to environmental and tax laws. Hillary, of course, would follow the trail Obama blazed, ignoring and perverting the laws he ignored and perverted and undoubtedly adding a whole new series of laws to the “I won’t do that” list.

...When I think of all the things that Trump — beholden to no special interests, an out-of-the-box thinker, comfortable with trimming and firing, and known for getting things done — can make happen, I get this incredible thrill.

Read and view more here.

Get Out of Jail Free card

Debate prep? All Donald Trump needs to do is read some of my favorite blogs. For example, here is Ace of Spades recommending James Comey be impeached:

Does James Comey believe it's plausible that the CEO of the State Department did not know that "NOFORN" meant "NO FOReigN exposure"? Or that "(C)" means classified?

And she's claiming she can't remember the details of her security briefings, which covered all this, because of a convenient patch of brain damage which arrives to grant her an alibi but then departs in time to permit her to be Commander in Chief?

That is not plausible. That is a clear lie.

...Second: The safekeeping of foreign intelligence is so critical to this nation's security that the law itself specifically removes the "I didn't know the most basic things about the law" defense. That's the whole point of the charge only requiring a showing of negligence in handling secret information -- not intent.

The law forbids such a defense -- by not requiring the government to prove intent -- because it is so easy to claim "Oh I didn't know," and concommitantly so hard for the government to prove the contrary.

...Congress therefore specifically made the charge provable without proof of intent -- it only requires mere negligence.

But James Comey, to finagel a Get Out of Jail Free card for Mrs. Clinton, read such a demand into the law anyway, on his own alleged authority.

James Comey and his minions must be forced to testify, under oath, whether they believe this "I didn't know breaking the law is illegal" is a valid defense for the average corporate CEO, or if this is just a special favor to the apparently Brain Damaged Smartest Woman in the World.

(C)orrection: A commenter who seems to know the ins and outs of clasification tells me "C" is a type of classification, but it does not stand for classified -- it stands for (C)onfidential, the lowest level of classification.

So while (C) means classified, it does not stand for classified, as I claimed. It stands for (C)onfidential.

I apologize for the frequently-made error.

But it's not my fault.

See, I had brain damage when I was writing these posts.

But I'm all better now, and ready to take a job as Director of the CIA's Clandestine Service.

Read more here.

Stop collecting grievances!

Sarah Hoyt has some things to say about people who see themselves as victims.

If you find that you are tied up in a pool of hate, and can’t achieve anything, it’s not the society, cupcake. It’s you. Obsessing about how people discriminate against you for x or y has become your reason to live, a form of OCD that comes with the bonus of never having to admit you failed/didn’t try hard enough, and never having to make any effort to do anything.

You’re not living in a white supremacy or a patriarchy or any of the bullshit you’ve been telling yourself. (I can give you places to go to experience those, if you wish.) You’re living inside your head, and you’ve allowed it to become a really bad place.

I have a friend who is male and very short. He said for many years he obsessed on the few funny remarks people made about it, and spent time imagining other remarks that were never voice. And he was miserable, and couldn’t function.

I found the same as an immigrant. Yep, one of my jobs blatantly discriminated against me. Yep, other people probably thought things about me that made no sense. BUT I only started achieving when I stopped obsessing on what they might be thinking/saying behind my back and decided that biggoted or not, they were assholes, and the best course of action was to ignore them and do what I wanted to do.

Since then I haven’t found that discrimination impairs my life at all. My friend reports similar results.

Get out of your corner and stop collecting grievances. Embrace true diversity, which includes many, many kinds of assholes.

Free yourself, and then let’s worry about the real problem cultures. Like the ones where women, gays (and yes) other races and religions are at risk for their lives.

The rest is just stupid little games for silly little girls, even those who happen to be male.

Read more here.

Will the New York Times endorse Donald Trump?

Joe Bob Brigs writes at Taki Magazine about the New York Times op-ed bias against Donald Trump.

...Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination on May 26.

I have read every article on every op-ed page since May 26. There were lots of articles before that—the Times writers and editors have been fairly obsessed with Trump for all of 2016—but I limited the study to the past 86 days. (I’m a masochist when it comes to research, but halfway through this project I had to read 37 New York Post crime stories just to feel alive again. So 86 days is enough.)

Observation numero uno: I couldn’t find a single unalloyed pro–Donald Trump essay, column, think piece, whatever. There were some that looked at first glance like they might be pro-Trump, but they all ended up being not really.

...The final tally here would be 102 anti-Trump, 0 pro-Trump, 22 pro-Hillary, seven anti-Hillary, and six too wishy-washy to tell. (By the way, an anti-Hillary column is nothing like an anti-Trump column. “She’s not quite there on child care” would be an example of how Hillary is criticized.)

The real heart of the op-ed ideal, as set down by its founders in 1970 (wink, wink), is the guest articles. There were 410 of them. Sixty-seven were about Trump. Nineteen were about Hillary. Seven were devoted equally to both candidates.

We came up with the following totals:

Anti-Trump: 70

Pro-Trump: 0

Wishy-washy: 4

Anti-Hillary: 3

Pro-Hillary: 23

What does it all mean?

Here’s David Shipley, former op-ed editor of the Times, explaining in 2004 how it works: “If the editorial page…has a forceful, long-held view on a certain topic, we are more inclined to publish an Op-Ed that disagrees with that view. If you open the newspaper and find the editorial page and Op-Ed in lock step agreement or consistently writing on the same subject day after day, then we aren’t doing our job.”

Read more here.

Do we have more manufacturing workers or government workers?

You are right, if you said government workers.

Terence P. Jeffrey reports for CNS News,

...in August 1989, the seasonally-adjusted employment numbers for government exceeded the employment numbers for manufacturing for the first time. That month, manufacturing employed 17,964,000 and government employed 17,989,000.

Manufacturing employment in the United States had peaked a decade before that in June 1979 at 19,553,000

From August 2015 to August 2016 seasonally-adjusted manufacturing employment declined by 37,000--dropping from 12,318,000 last August to 12,281,000 this August.

The 22,213,000 government employees in August, according to the BLS, included 2,790,000 federal employees, 5,120,000 state government employees, and 14,303,000 local government employees.

Read more here.

Hanging on

Trump is rising in the polls, but I don't know how that is relating to the electoral college votes. Hillary is hanging on.

Were the Birchers right about the UN?

In their discussion of the alt-right, Hugh Hewitt and Jonah Goldberg mentioned William F. Buckley driving the John Birchers out of the conservative movement. Here is what I remember about the Birchers. When I was living in Texas, the Birchers put up billboards urging Americans to get out of the United Nations. I don't know what else they advocated, but the UN issue seemed to be their biggest issue. I think they were right on that issue. What do you think?

The alt-right

Jonah Goldberg, Hugh Hewitt, and Ed Morrisey have been discussing what "alt-right" means. I think Goldberg is correct when he tells Hewitt,

So what does the “core alt-right” represent? “The one thing they all agree on,” Jonah says, “is what they call racial realism, or racialism, which is just a social science sounding term for racism. … the one thing they all agree on is that we need to organize this society on the assumption that white people are genetically superior, or that white culture is inherently superior, and that we should have either state-imposed or culturally-imposed segregation between the races, no race mixing with the lower brown people.”

All three agree there is no place in the Republican Party for people who hold these views. Read more here.

What do you think?

Anxiety, depression, and the presidential candidates

Why are Hillary and Donald running for president? In the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan opines that Hillary is the depression candidate and Trump is the anxiety candidate. Stuart Schneiderman disagrees.

when you are depressed you might very well throw tantrums, the better to buck up your flagging self-esteem. Freud once noted that depression was anger turned against yourself. He was wrong about that—depression is learned helplessness—but he pointed to the fact that people who are depressed often try to cure their condition by striking out in anger. The correct term would be impotent rage, because it’s better to be enraged and to hide your impotence than to show the world that you are helpless.

...As for the rationale behind the Hillary candidacy, I find it intriguing that Noonan pictures Hillary alone in her house in Chappaqua, watching television. That is, without a husband and without Huma. But, now that Huma is going to be single, perhaps she can move in to Hillary’s place in Chappaqua, to keep her company. As of now, it appears that Hillary and Huma share a suite when they travel for the campaign. Hillary is effectively never alone. Her shadow is always there.

If I may disagree with Noonan, I think that Hillary has a “darker purpose.” She is running in order to vindicate and validate her life. She entered into a marital arrangement with Bill Clinton in order to advance herself, to gain power for herself and to advance the cause of feminism. When you sell out at that level, you are sorely in need of a large payoff.

Hillary’s surrogates keep saying that she is tough enough for the presidency. They thought the same of Barack Obama, one of the weakest presidents in memory. Foreign leaders never respected Obama and they surely do not respect Hillary.

And that spells a general anxiety about the nation’s prospects. Putting the military in the hands of someone who is weak and ineffectual—we’ve done that already. How is it working out?

...Trump did go to Mexico. Hillary did not. Trump traveled to Lousiana, Hillary did not. Trump puts himself out there in front of the press. Hillary refuses to do a press conference.

Trump would be foolish if he was not afraid of winning a job he is unqualified for, but he is looking a lot less afraid than the dowager empress of Chappaqua.

Hillary is pretending to be confident and in command. But, by avoiding all difficult situations she is looking like a coward. And that makes people anxious.

Surely, Trump is more bluster than courage, but, compared with the feckless Hillary and our current coward-in-chief, he looks like a tower of strength. Thus, as a cure for anxiety.

Read more here.

Another crisis the media is not noticing

In the Wall Street Journal Nicholas Eberstadt takes a look at male unemployment in America.

Labor Day is an appropriate moment to reflect on a quiet catastrophe: the collapse, over two generations, of work for American men. During the past half-century, work rates for U.S. males spiraled relentlessly downward. America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work—roughly seven million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life.

...In short, the American male’s postwar flight from work is a grave social ill. Strangely, nearly everyone—the news media, major political parties, intellectuals, business leaders, policy makers—has managed to overlook it. The urgency of the moment is to bring this invisible crisis out of the shadows.

Imagine how different America would be today if another roughly 10 million men held paying jobs. It is imperative for the future health of the country to make a determined and sustained effort to bring these detached men back—into the workplace, into their families, into civil society.

Read more here.

When communism began to fall, so did mass killings

News stories covered with a pillow, until they stop moving

At Chicago Boyz Sgt Mom reminds us,

There have been any number of important stories covered by the nationally-based establishment media in the last decade or so – in the deathless phrase tweeted by Iowahawk, David Burge, “with a pillow, until they stop moving.”

...The matter of illegal immigrants in the US is one of those radioactive issues that the media, the political and intellectual leadership in this country do not wish to touch. They wish for various reasons, including the fact that there are certain monetary and social benefits to tolerating an influx of illegal immigrants, that the issue be disappeared, bundled out of sight and off the front pages. But the issue adamantly refuses to stay disappeared – precisely because there are so many stories like this one; the horrific bus accident in Louisiana on IH-10 this last week, where it appeared that the driver of the bus was not only an illegal alien, but unlicensed as well.

...It’s a regularly occurring thing, all across the West and southwest; automobile accidents involving uninsured and unlicensed drivers, often illegal residents. Sometimes alcohol is involved as well. Precise statistics are hard to find – especially since partisans on one side don’t wish to find them, and those on the other side may be prone to exaggerate for effect. But with so many ordinary Americans having had an on-the-road accident experience where the other party was unlicensed, fraudulently unlicensed, uninsured, illegal or any combination of the above … there must be a substantial number of them – together with their families, friends, co-workers and neighbors affected to a lesser degree. Then there are the million working Americans whose social security numbers have been stolen by illegals – a matter over which the IRS feels no particular urgency. A large part of Donald Trump’s popularity across flyover America is precisely because he does address issues like this. Perhaps this will break the major media’s reluctance to acknowledge such matters.
Or not. Your thoughts?

Read more here.

Feminists behaving badly

Stuart Schneiderman believes the following rule should be inscribed over the doorway of every therapist's office:

The fact that you believe very strongly in something means that you believe in it very strongly. Nothing more. It also means that you have dispensed with liberality and the marketplace of ideas. It means that you have dispensed with pragmatic and rational thought. It also means that you are most likely wrong.

Schneiderman goes on to tell us about two marriages. In both cases the feminist wife is enraged to learn that her husband might vote for Donald Trump. In both cases the wife behaves badly, and Schneiderman explains why here.

Endlessly smug posers in support of open borders

The Zman writes,

In the run-up to the Brexit vote, the remain side was at great pains to show the issue was about economics. Now that they lost, they are sure it was about xenophobia and racism.

...Europeans believe themselves to be worldly sophisticates and they invest a lot of effort into maintaining that delusion. At this point in history, it may be the only thing Europeans are good at doing. They really are a bunch of ridiculous posers and they are so endlessly smug about it. This suggests it is a studied and cultivated habit, not just a weird quirk.

In Iceland, I was subjected to a long boring lecture by an Icelandic woman over the wonderfulness of open borders. She was unaware that I am a FOP (Friend of Pepe) so she was operating under the impression I was sympathetic. It was hard to keep a straight face, given that Iceland is a rocky island in the North Sea. Even if they welcome the world, the world will not be moving to a barren moonscape that is cold in the dead of summer.

Open borders is a strange religion with many in Europe. The news is a pretty much just a non-stop celebration of open borders. They talk about it with such reverence, you could be mistaken for thinking “open borders” is the new name for God.

Read more here.

Clinton Global Initiative member to moderate the first presidential forum on September 7

Ace of Spades reports (as only he can) that Matt Lauer of NBC's Today show will moderate the first "presidential forum," in which both candidates will be interviewed separately. Lauer, of course, is a noted member of the Clinton Global Initiative.

The Left imagines the worst case scenario

Although Donald Trump gave a comprehensive speech on immigration, the New York Times was much more interested in what he did not say. Trump, as I understand him, wants to deport people who are committing crimes here in America (after coming here illegally). He also wants to build a wall, and deport people who are caught trying to enter the country illegally. The New York Times, as quoted today in a post by Ann Althouse, imagines

that government at all levels will be used to hunt down and remove immigrants from their homes, families and jobs. Mr. Trump was describing a world of lockups and surveillance and fugitive-hunting squads, a vast system of indiscriminate catch-and-punish that works as hard to catch hotel maids and landscapers as it does gang members and terrorists.

The past is present

Oh my gosh, Bookworm reaches conclusions similar to ones reached by Victor Davis Hanson:

The issues we face today were issues people dealt with in the 1930s and 1940s. The smart ones reached conclusions that we would do well to understand today.

Melania is not playing

The Daily Mail is in trouble. They have been sued by Melania Trump, even though they retracted the story they wrote about her. Melania's lawyer is the same one who won millions for Hulk Hogan recently. Read more here.

Blexit

Reading blogs? Always include Bookworm Room on your list. She has outdone herself today with a comprehensive look at Black America.

The set-up for black violence in America is Democrat-run urban enclaves that have doubled-down on policies that ensure (a) fatherless families; (b) no work (e.g., high minimum wage laws); (c) absentee police; and (d) the inability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. (Regarding that last point, statistical data shows that the single best way to reduce crime is to allow law-abiding citizens to have guns. It turns out that predators prefer hunting prey when that prey cannot protect itself. Predators are mean, but they’re neither stupid nor suicidal.)

Democrat leadership (both white and black) has recently embarked upon a movement that has worsened the crime levels black communities face. I speak, of course, of the Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) movement. Despite compelling data showing that police, given similar circumstances, are less likely, not more likely to shoot blacks than they are to shoot whites, and that police are at greater risk from black men than black men are at risk from police, BLM has used hysterical lies to as a way to infest America’s most troubled inner cities.

...A sure way to destroy low-income jobs is to have unlimited immigration, drastically increasing pressure at the low end of the economic scale. This pressure is made worse by illegal aliens, who take payments under the table that are far below what employers can legally pay legal employees. Blacks are hurt most by the pressure of unlimited legal and illegal immigration, yet the Democrat party aggressively supports importing a new generation of slaves into America, just as, in the 19th century, it supported the old, black generation of slaves. Even as blacks unthinkingly give their complete allegiance to the Democrat party, that same party is already lining up their replacements.

...Police, more than any other group in America, are responsible for making sure that black lives really do matter because they guard the most dangerous neighborhoods, keeping predators away from law-abiding citizens and helpless children. Yet the Democrats, both black and white, have thrown all their weight behind the Black Lives Movement, without regard to the fact that the movement has resulted in spiraling crime in black communities.

A community that aborts more children than it allows to live is a death cult and a dying community. Yet the Democrats, both black and white, even as they endlessly mouth the piety that “black lives matter,” also work hard to ensure that abortion without limitation (or even protection for the woman having the procedure) continues to be available, especially in black communities.

Read much more here.

Have things really changed all that much?

At National Review Victor Davis Hanson reminds us the

persistent continuity of the human experience is why studying history remains about the only way to understand who we were, are, and will be.

Read more here.

Communist horrors

At The New Criterion Gary Saul Morson writes,

In 1999, Time magazine proclaimed Einstein the “man of the century”—the person who “for better or worse most influenced the last 100 years”—but Einstein did not remotely affect so many lives as Lenin. Bolsheviks were never very good at material inventions, but they excelled at political technology, inventing an entirely new system we call totalitarian. As they say today, it went viral. There is still no vaccine.

...conservative estimates of executions under Lenin and Stalin—say, twenty million from 1917 to 1953—yield an average of over ten thousand per week.

...Western public opinion has never come to terms with the crimes of Communism. Every school child knows about the Holocaust, Apartheid, and American slavery, as they should. But Pol Pot’s murder of a quarter of Cambodia’s population has not dimmed academic enthusiasm for the Marxism his henchmen studied in Paris. Neither the Chinese Cultural Revolution nor the Great Purges seem to have cast a shadow on the leftists who apologized for them. Quite the contrary, university classes typically blame the Cold War on American “paranoia” about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry.

Some figures speak for themselves. The volume’s scholars estimate twenty million deaths in the ussr, sixty-five million in China, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 million in Mengistu’s Ethiopia and other African countries, and so on, to a total of about one hundred million. (Eerily, the chief revolutionary in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed predicts that the cost of perfect equality will be “a hundred million heads.”) So far as I can tell, these estimates are understatements. For example, the most authoritative study of Stalin’s war against the peasantry in the early 1930s, Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, arrives at a figure twice the one in this volume. The difference between the two estimates—the margin of error—equals the number of Jews killed by the Nazis.

By contrast, Nazi deaths are estimated at twenty-five million. Of course numbers aren’t everything, but one might imagine that it would be reasonable to compare the two systems. In intellectual circles, however, such comparisons taint not Communists, but the person who makes them.

Delivering a toast on the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Stalin declared: “We will destroy each and every enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!” Even when the tsars imprisoned or executed revolutionaries, they never thought of arresting their spouses, children, grandparents, and cousins as well. And note Stalin’s insistence that not just wrong actions but improper thoughts merit “destruction.” Georgy Arbatov, adviser to five general secretaries of the Soviet Communist Party, observed that “the main code of behavior” was “to be afraid of your own thoughts.”

...For understandable reasons, in Holocaust and Gulag literature, we hear the voices of victims but not of the countless perpetrators. Solzhenitsyn observes that while in stories for children it is understandable to portray evildoers as people who tell themselves “I cannot live unless I do evil!,” in real life “that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.”

Today one hears that neuroscientists will soon be able to read thoughts from the outside. What would Stalin have done with such technology? Perhaps my training as a Russian specialist distorts my judgment, but as I contemplate the ideas spreading from the academy through society, I fear, a century after the Russian Revolution, a tyranny greater than Stalin’s.

Read more here.

More stuff we need to know

At According to Hoyt Stephanie Osborne continues her attempt to educate us about Solar, Space, and Geomagnetic Weather, Part III.

the Earth’s magnetic field (aka magnetosphere aka geomagnetic field) is not nice and symmetric. This is because the solar wind is pushing on it. So the side toward the Sun has a “bow shock” and is compressed, and the side away from the Sun is stretched out into a tail. Like this:



The more charged particles hit our magnetosphere, the more get caught in the Van Allen Belts (VAB), and the more apt we are to have atmospheric effects. So an enhanced solar wind stream (EWS) from a coronal hole can generate some interesting phenomena.

But the granddaddy of those phenomena is caused by a coronal mass ejection hitting Earth. Because those suckers are (relatively) dense and VERY energized. And it might look something like this:



Worse…remember how flares are the detonations caused by “magnetic reattachment”? Well, if a CME is powerful enough, it can put so much stress on the magnetotail (that part stretched off to the right in these images) that it can snap off, and reattach closer to Earth! The energy feedback from THAT can get pretty powerful, too!

How energetic IS all this stuff?

Well, these events can actually raise the temperature of the outer layers of the Earth’s atmosphere (the thermosphere, aptly named) sufficient to cause it to expand. This affects us, because that increases drag on satellites and spacecraft, and can cause the orbits of satellites to decay and re-enter well before they were intended. This is really bad if it’s something important, like a weather satellite during hurricane season. After all, if the people of Galveston had had weather satellites in 1900, the city could have been evacuated well before it got hit, because they would have known it was coming for days. If we DON’T have weather satellites because we’ve lost ‘em to increased atmospheric drag, we might as well go back to those days, as far as weather prediction is concerned. Ditto communications satellites. Don’t even mention GPS.

...Disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field can be a problem. It can disrupt radio communication (including cell phones) rather severely. It can damage satellites that remain in orbit. It can generate “induced current” in any lengthy conductor.

...When these truly huge induced currents hit things like transformers and circuit breakers and power stations, they can quickly overload them. This, in turn, can (and has) cause(d) blackouts and brownouts, particularly in parts of the country/world where the power grid is not robust enough to handle significant surges. (Given that most large substation transformers are still hand-built, and have a lead time of months between determining need and installation, that could be a real problem.)

...Long pipelines, like the Alaskan Pipeline, can be affected as well. In fact corrosion is occurring at a higher rate than expected because its northerly location exposes it to such induced currents all the time (remember that the ends of a bar magnet’s field are open). And there are plenty of those.

Read more here.

Surrender

Blurring the lines

At Politico Kenneth Vogel reports on a Politico investigation which revealed that

Bill Clinton's staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

...it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their nonprofit foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple’s aides.

...After leaving the White House “dead broke”, in the words of Hillary Clinton, they quickly raked in tens of millions of dollars from book deals, speaking fees and consulting gigs. At the same time, Bill Clinton was relying on his connections to some of the world’s deepest-pocketed donors, corporations and governments to seed a global philanthropy operation that overlapped with his consulting work and speaking fees and his wife’s work as secretary of state — and served as a jumping-off point for her presidential campaign.

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Go for broke!

At A Holy Experience Ann Voskamp reminds us that

...When you really want to disappear – is when you really want to be found. When you really want to run away from everybody – is when you really want to be found by just somebody.

It’s about aging — and more. It’s about time passing and never coming back — and more. It’s about getting through the birthdays — and letting yourself be loved. Even if it’s imperfectly by imperfect people. Hold out for perfect and you end up holding nothing.

Why is it so hard to let yourself be loved?

Sometimes you can hardly bear to let anyone try to love you because it feels like a lie.

And for crying out loud, life is too blazing short to live lies.

...Is that why a million haggard people hate birthdays? Because love on that day can feel like a lie, like an obligation, like a polite duty and it’s too hard to smile and pretend through its plasticity.

Or maybe it really is — that the moment you accept love, you have to accept yourself, and there’s something in that that seems unacceptable. Strange, how there’s no love without humility...

...If you have Christ – nothing can steal your peace.

And right there those memorized verses from Romans breach the surface of things, because memorization isn’t for the smug saints who have made it but for the desperate sinners who want to make it:

“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus… ”

The enemy wants nothing more at the end of the day than to make you and all your offered years feel like a piece of chopped up meat. You’ve just got to call Satan by what his ugly name really means: prosecutor. The work of the enemy isn’t ultimately to tempt you, but to try you.

...And even the weary and worn-out can cut him down with one sharp edge of a memorized verse:

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? …

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us…. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth —

nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” ~ Romans 8

Sure, time, age, life, this side of glory is traumatic. Living in a fallen world can’t help but be traumatic — falling is traumatic. Every single day is this stream of tiny traumas. (Those who dare to trust call them gifts.) We’ve all had to unplug toilets and clean up puke and crawl into bed and lay waiting for His new mercies to come again before we move. None of us are alone in any of this.

You have to let your life wrinkle. You have to let hope get into the folds of things. You are here to be spent. Saving yourself up isn’t how the saved are meant to live. Go for broke.

And when you are broken – because that’s what happens when you go for broke – and you look into a mirror, a calendar, into that one face, and you can’t stop the aching lump burning up through the center of your heart, listen till the rain comes.

Watch how the clouds break and break open and listen for rain and reach out your hand and feel it’s wet sweetness coming down in all this vulnerable freeness. This is the broken that makes you beautiful.

Live like this right to the very end.

Peace can fall like rain.

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