Highlighted tonight: illegal immigration

This article by Sam Smith in PJ Media would seem to indicate that illegal immigration will be in the forefront of tonight's State of the Union discussions.

Are "super-bugs" a national security threat?

Does your family doctor prescribe antibiotics for just about everything? We had one who did that. The New York Times tells us that the World Health Organization is concerned about "Super Bugs" that are resistant to drugs.

“We are fast running out of treatment options,” said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, the W.H.O. assistant director general who released the list. “If we leave it to market forces alone, the new antibiotics we most urgently need are not going to be developed in time.”

Britain’s chief medical officer, Sally C. Davies, has described drug-resistant pathogens as a national security threat equivalent to terrorism, and Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the recently retired director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called them “one of our most serious health threats.”

Last week, the European Food Safety Authority and European Center for Disease Prevention and Control estimated that superbugs kill 25,000 Europeans each year; the C.D.C. has estimated that they kill at least 23,000 Americans a year. (For comparison, about 38,000 Americans die in car crashes yearly.)

Most of these deaths occur among older patients in hospitals or nursing homes, or among transplant and cancer patients whose immune systems are suppressed. But some are among the young and healthy: A new study of 48 American pediatric hospitals found that drug-resistant infections in children, while still rare, had increased sevenfold in eight years, which the authors called “ominous.”

Read more here.

What a fifteen dollar minimum wage and Obamacare will get you

From the Detroit Free Press:

Fast food giant Wendy’s plans to install self-ordering kiosks in about one out of six of the burger chain’s franchises nationwide by the end of this year.

A typical location would get three kiosks for about $15,000, The Columbus Dispatch reported. David Trimm, Wendy’s chief information officer, estimates that payback on those machines would come in less than two years thanks to labor savings and increased sales.

The kiosks have two purposes according to Trimm: appeasing younger customers by given them an ordering experience they prefer and reducing labor costs.

Would they be doing this if politicians were not demanding $15 per hour minimum wage and the provision of Obamacare?
Read more here.

hat tip Stephen Green

Trump gives wide-ranging interview to Fox and Friends

President Trump sits down with Fox and Friends for a wide-ranging interview. Any news? He thinks Nancy Pelosi is incompetent.

"Like my eyebrows?"

Daniel Nussbaum reports in Breitbart,

Leonardo DiCaprio apparently spared no expense while getting ready for last weekend’s Academy Awards — the Oscar-winning actor and environmental activist reportedly flew a renowned “eyebrow artist” to the stars more than 7,000 miles around the world to have his face tended to ahead of Hollywood’s big night.
According to reports in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Independent, the 42-year-old Revenant star and fellow actor Tobey Maguire enlisted the services of beautician Sharon-Lee Hamilton, who made the 7,500-mile trip from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles to ensure the stars’ brows were just right for the big show.

While the artist’s eyebrow services are reported to cost a relatively affordable $200, Hamilton — whose previous clients are said to include Beyoncé, George Clooney and Kim Kardashian — told the Herald that when traveling for work, her costs are covered by her clients.

Read more here.

For brainless protesters, Soros-funded groups provide scripts to use at town hall meetings

At Breitbart, Aaron Klein reports that Soros financed groups are providing scripts for leftists to use in disrupting town halls.

Lowering prices

Target's CEO says they are now going to lower prices. Will it be too late? Walmart figured that out a long time ago, and has crushed Target and JCPenney, as well as grocers. In the city where I lived and worked before moving to New Mexico, there were always lots of cars in the huge Walmart parking lot. One block away sat Target, where you could always find a parking space up close. Penney was in a fancy mall. The Denver Bronco tee shirt that sold for $30 at Walmart could be had at Penney for $100!

Today's Wall Street Journal has stories about how Trump's idea to tax products coming across the border could have devastating effects on Target and Best Buy. I would think that would apply to Walmart and JCPenney, too.

"Trump absolutely intends on keeping his promises."

Kurt Schlichter reports on this year's CPAC.

President Trump entered the ballroom like a rock star, at least up front with the attendees. In the back in the media area, there was stony silence – except for me and my pal Stephen Kruiser. As opinion folk, we aren’t bound by the whole fake objectivity thing that only applies when it’s a conservative. Looking around at the collection of geebos and durwoods who made up the majority of the press, you could almost see the tracks of their tears on their sad faces from their abject boo-hooing when Hillary lost. And when Trump laid into them, they were most unhappy.

...the real story was that President Trump absolutely intends on keeping his promises. Obamacare will be repealed. There will be a wall. We are deporting illegals. We are cutting taxes. The clock is ticking. Congress better understand – this guy’s patience is not unlimited. If they think they can slide back into the big talk in election years/big walks in off years mode, they are going to find Trump in their districts rallying for their primary opponents.

Read more here:

Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, smart robots

Stu Woo reports in the Wall Street Journal,

Within 30 years, artificial intelligence will be smarter than the human brain.

That is according to Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp., who says that supersmart robots will outnumber humans and more than a trillion objects will be connected to the internet within three decades.

These beliefs underpin the wave of large and surprising deals the Japanese internet and telecommunications company has pulled off in the past year, he said Monday. These include starting a $100 billion technology-investment fund with a Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, buying British microprocessor designer ARM Holdings PLC for $32 billion and acquiring U.S. asset manager Fortress Investment Group PLC for $3.3 billion.

“Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, smart robots: Those are the three main things I’m interested in,” he said.

The Internet of Things is the technology world’s term for connecting everyday objects, such as refrigerators and sneakers, to the web.

...In his speech, Mr. Son said that while average humans had an IQ of roughly 100 and that geniuses such as Albert Einstein were believed to score about 200, superintelligent computers would have IQs of 10,000. He said computer chips possessing superintelligence would be put into robots big and small that can fly and swim. These robots would number in the billions and would be greater than the human population within 30 years, he said.

The chips would also be in everyday objects. “One of the chips in our shoes will be smarter than our brain,” he said. “We will be less than our shoes, and we will be stepping on them.”

Read more here.

The alternative to Merkel is worse

David Goldman writes at Pajamas Media,

...Merkel’s migration policy is bad, but it is neither stupidly bad, nor wickedly bad. Rather, it is tragically bad. Germany has a gap in its soul. In between the citizen-of-the-world liberalism that characterizes its elite and the atavistic nationalism that attracts a small fringe, there is nothing there at all.

...It is useful to step back from the problems of political character and consider American interests in the cold light of day. Brexit isn’t bad for America; it reinforces the special relationship with Britain. If France, however, were to elect Marine Le Pen and put into play French membership in the EU, Germany would tilt eastward. The single most important news from Europe in the past year is the fact that Germany and China are now each other’s largest trading partners. Germany’s export confederation told the daily Handelsblatt, the country’s main financial newspaper, that if the U.S. goes protectionist, one could count on much closer relations between Germany and China. Russia, of course, is part of the bargain.

The last thing America should want is a Berlin that looks eastward rather than westward. Migrants in Germany can make all the mayhem they want, and we Americans may deplore it, but if the Germans choose to tolerate more crime and even more terrorism, that is their misery and of minor consequence to us. The idea that Germany is using the European Union as a blind behind which to cheapen its currency and cheat us in export markets comes (as I wrote Feb. 1 in Asia Times) from “Navarro-Navarro Land.” The U.S. stood godfather to the European Union, as the saying goes, to keep the Germans down, the Russians out, and the Americans in.

Few Americans really know how close we came to losing Germany to the Soviet orbit during the Cold War, or what risks we took to keep it in the West (I reported what I know of the story here). Helmut Schmidt, Germany’s chancellor during the 1980s, reasoned that if war came to Europe, the Germans would never know who won. He thought it best to surrender in advance. Helmut Kohl replaced him (probably with a bit of American help) in 1982, and stood at America’s side in return for American support for reunification. Angela Merkel was Kohl’s protégé, but forced him out over his improper use of funds for party purposes.

We should not risk giving back what we won at great risk during the Cold War. From an American standpoint, Germany’s decision to admit 1.3 million Muslim migrants seems foolish and self-destructive. We must be coldhearted enough to leave the Germans to sleep in the bed they have made for themselves.

Tragically, Angela Merkel is the best leader that Germany can produce at present.

I use the term “tragic” advisedly; Germany is doing the wrong thing because there is no right thing to do. Germany’s total fertility rate is just 1.4 children per female, but foreign-born women (8% of the population) accounted for 17% of all births as of 2010, which means that the native German TFR is around 1.3.

...In the meantime, Angela Merkel is as good a partner as the United States will find in Germany. That is deplorable but true. I predict that she will win the September elections, because the Germans are not so dumb as to ignore wes Geistes Kind lurks in the alternative. To the extent America can help her to do so, we should help Merkel.

Read more here.

Media elites have been caught

Economic growth, tax policy, fair trade

Steve Mnuchin appears on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartriomo to discuss President Trump economics. She is one of my favorite journalists. Actually, she is one of the few I can stand! Mnuchin is impressive, too.

Hat tip The Last Refuge

Mexico's most profitable export

Tom Tancredo writes in Breitbart,

Because of the relative ease of crossing the border and Mexico’s liberal definition of Mexican citizenship, we have the situation recently described by author Ann Coulter, who discovered that persons of Mexican origin now residing in the United States — legal and illegal– are equal in number to over 25 percent of the 130 million population of Mexico.

Let me put this in stark economic terms: Mexico’s national income grows in direct proportion to the size of the illegal Mexican population inside the United States. Does that help explain the Mexican fixation on U.S. politics? Mexico’s most profitable export to the U.S. is not oil or avocados or automobile parts, it is people.

...Mexicans living and working in the U.S. send home over $20 billion annually in cash remittances — more than Mexico earns in foreign currency from tourism or any export commodity.

In 1979, Mexico received only $177,000 (U.S. Dollars) in remittances; in 2016 it was $26.1 BILLION — over 90 percent of it from persons living in the United States.

Read more here.

Donald Trump sneaks out of the White House to go to dinner

Saturday night Trump eluded the press once again (all but one, Benny Johnson of Independent Judicial Review got a tip from a source at the White House) to go out to dinner at his new flagship hotel in Washington D.C. Johnson gives us photographs and almost a minute-by-minute detail of the happenings here.

hat tip The Last Refuge

"We're thrilled with your initial steps to stabilize the health care markets!"

hat tip Conservative Treehouse

This can't be true: illegal voting discovered in Ohio!

nbc4i.com reports,

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted announced an investigation has uncovered that hundreds of non-US citizens are registered to vote in the state, and dozens of them voted illegally.

According to a release from Husted, 385 people who are not citizens of the United States are registered to vote in Ohio. Out of those, 82 voted in at least one election in the last year.

Husted’s office says the 82 non-citizens who are registered to vote and cast ballots will be immediately referred to law enforcement for further investigation and possible prosecution.

“In light of the national discussion about illegal voting it is important to inform our discussions with facts. The fact is voter fraud happens, it is rare and when it happens, we hold people accountable,” Secretary Husted said.

...“I have a responsibility to preserve the integrity of Ohio’s elections system,” Secretary Husted said. “When you consider that in Ohio we have had 112 elections decided by one vote or tied in the last three years, every case of illegal voting must be taken seriously and elections officials must have every resource available to them to respond accordingly.”

Read more here.

hat tip Conservative Treehouse

Systematic Muslim persecution of Christians

Front Page Magazine has an article by Raymond Ibrahim. He details

Muslim Attacks on (and because of) Christian Churches in Indonesia, Philippined, Egypt, and Bangladesh.

Moreover, he details

Muslim Slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, France, and Egypt

Then he details Muslim Attacks on Christian Freedom:

No to Apostasy, Blasphemy, and Evangelism in Liberia, Uganda, Europe, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.

Finally, he details

Muslim Contempt for and Abuse of Christians in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey.

Read the details here.

Last night's embarrassing moment

"A hedge against tyranny"

hat tip Bookworm Room

DNC Required Voter ID and Paper Ballots for Chair Vote.

krakatoa reports at Ace of Spades,

Irony: DNC Required Voter ID and Paper Ballots for Chair Vote.

You could feed all the villages of the world with the intellectual pretzels baked by Progressives.

“We have to make sure that we can not just count the ballots but verify every name and signature,” Brazile said as party members began applauding. “And I want to make sure that at the conclusion of all of our votes, that you, the members of this party, will be able to review those ballots.”

Commenter TheJamesMadison writes,

It's voter suppression.

Why won't they let undocumented Democrats vote?

Commenter Broseidon writes,

Well duh, this is an important vote, it's not something picayune like, uh...President of the United States....

Roland THTG explains,

They just didn't want that mukin fuzzy to be the DNC chair.

Astro Mike further explains,

Well, see they have to check the IDs and ballots because...these are after all democrats, and they will lie and cheat without remorse to win.

They understand each other better than you think.

Read more comments here.