Is this a healthy trend on college campuses? Is this what youexpect by way of tuition? Is this what is best for our nation? Are these the kind of student "snowflakes" that will turn into the kind of adults who will make good citizens, will defend our nation, will uphold our nation's values, support our constitution? You decide. (See 1 below.)
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Friedman on American energy resources. (See 2 below.)
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Megyn Kelly remains beautiful but not her ratings.
As I surmised, she had already peaked in popularity when she left FOX and I did not think her NBC audience would relate.
"The Peter Principle" remains alive and well. (See 3 below.)
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More from Melanie Phillips regarding climate change. The people who get hysterical over our withdrawal from The Paris Climate Accord are no better than when Jesse Jackson shakes down corporate America. (See 4 below.)
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Finally, let's go over some statistics about how our elected officials handle our tax dollars. As usual, when you have OPM, politicians seem not to exercise the same degree of fiduciary responsibility as if it were their own.
The problem is no one really cares about draining the swamp because it is lined with our tax dollars.
I have read what I believe are reliable reports which state:
a) Upwards to 22 billion is spent annually by states on welfare
b) another 22 billion is spent on food and other assistance like WIC, food stamps,cell phones, school lunches etc.
c) 2 1/2 billion is spent on medicaid
d) some 12 billion is spent on primary and secondary education and 17 billion is spent on similar education for children born in America of illegal parents, ie. Anchor Babies.
e) 3 million/day is spent to house illegals in prison and 30% of federal prison inmates are illegals.
f) an additional 90 billion is spent by the federal government on welfare and social services
g) one could argue suppression of wages amounts to some 200 billion but I have trouble counting this because illegals often do work American citizens will not do and part of the reason is that these same citizens are receiving more from government handouts than they would make working.
h) illegals, it is estimated, sent 45 billion home to family members residing in countries from which they originally came
i) Finally, there is no tally on the cost of the crimes committed by illegals with rape being on of the highest.
We spend tax dollars in the hundreds of billions supporting illegal immigrants. I have no problem assisting people in need as long as it does not become a basis for making them emotional dependent cripples. I am utterly opposed to financing those who break our laws. Either enforce the law or change the laws but don't finance illegality. What a horrible precedence this sets.
The above is just some food for thought and I offer it without food stamps.
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Dick
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1) Disturbing Indoctrination Camp Planned for College Freshmen
Three colleges in Philadelphia have decided that if they wait until incoming freshmen actually start classes to start brainwashing them with liberal “social justice” theories, it may already be too late. To that end, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Haverford College are planning a “Tri-College Identity, Equity, and Social Justice Summer Institute” to make sure at least 60 newbies get a crash course in the whacko ideas that constitute the left’s progressive ideology.
The program, according to its designers, has the goal of getting students to “become social agents for change within their own institutions, the United States, and the world.”
And we probably don’t have to tell you what their idea of “change” consists of. It certainly doesn’t mean that they’ll give these students a course in persuasion so they can go out and use those skills to “change” the world the way they see fit. Oh no, these students will be TOLD exactly what’s wrong with the world and what they should do to make it the way it SHOULD be.
To that end, the students will be taught about “power and privilege.” They will be taught about their “identity groups.” They will participate in such activities as “physical exercises” to help them better understand how white men, Christians, and other majority groups are holding the rest of the world under their thumbs.
This kind of thing is nothing new when it comes to our college campuses, but it does seem that in Philadelphia and elsewhere, liberals are turning up the volume slowly but surely. They don’t just want to make conservative ideology a thing of the past, they want to make it clear to incoming students that is has NO PLACE in their colleges…or in the world as a whole. And they’re going to increasingly greater lengths to see that every student is indoctrinated properly.
This is such a shady situation. It’s not enough that these whackadoos have full control over the mainstream media; they now have full control over the nation’s institutions of higher learning. It’s not enough that they teach these students which viewpoint is right and which is wrong, they don’t even want there to be any room for debate left on the table. And they have conservative parents in a tough spot, because it’s not like you can say, “Well, you’re not going to college if that’s what they’re teaching you.” For many career options, there’s no choice in the matter.
Oh, they’ve got a hell of a system going. And it really makes you wonder if there’s any way to prevent the dystopian future they’re building one brainwashed student at a time.
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2)
US Oil Production Makes Waves
By George Friedman and Jacob L. Shapiro
There’s no end in sight to slumping oil prices—good news for consumers but a dire development for major oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia. And now, rising US oil production and exports are contributing to the slump.
Last week, oil prices reached new lows for 2017, with Brent crude dipping below $48 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate dipping below $46. The drop has been attributed to an unexpected increase in US crude inventories, which rose by 3.3 million barrels last week (according to the US Energy Information Administration), despite expectations that it would drop by 3.5 million barrels.
The rise in production is compounded by rising US oil exports, since the US lifted a 40-year ban on these exports in 2015. This led to modest increases in oil exports in 2016 but substantial increases so far in 2017. This is a key reason prices will remain low in the long term.
Ebbs and Flows in US Exports
It is worth remembering why the United States banned oil exports in 1975 (exceptions were allowed at the discretion of the president). 1970 set a record for the highest crude oil production in the US, though this record will likely be broken in the next two years. The US was producing a lot, but it was also consuming a lot, forcing it to import more from OPEC states, which produced about 55% of the world’s oil in 1973.
This meant that OPEC could essentially control prices. And after the US backed Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, OPEC retaliated by raising oil prices. This created a fourfold jump in prices and a global oil shock. One of the many ways the US responded was the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act. This was designed to decrease its reliance on imports by banning oil exports, ensuring US-produced oil would only be consumed domestically.
Fast-forward to today, and supply is no longer as big a concern. The US has weaned itself off foreign oil, partly through technologies like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. In 2013, the US started producing more oil than it imported, and it hasn’t looked back. US crude oil production has almost doubled since 2010 and is already surpassing forecasts for 2017. In late 2016, the US Energy Information Administration estimated that the United States would produce 8.7 million barrels per day on average in 2017. New estimates suggest it will produce 9.2 million barrels per day in 2017 and up to 10 million barrels per day in 2018.
But it’s not just the US production numbers that are making waves: It’s the spike in US crude oil exports. The US exported 830,000 barrels of crude per day in March, a whopping 64.2% increase year over year. In February, it exported 1.1 million barrels per day, a nearly 200% increase year over year. According to The Wall Street Journal, the February numbers are closer to the new norm, as it expects the US to export, on average, roughly 1 million barrels per day in 2017.
A Disaster for Oil Producers
This is a huge challenge for major oil producers, especially Saudi Arabia and Russia. In December 2016, OPEC and its oil-producing partners agreed to cut production by about 1.8 million barrels per day, or roughly 1.5% of global crude production at the time. OPEC, led by the Saudis, has largely made good on this pledge, reducing production by 1.1 million barrels per day in the first quarter of 2017. The Russians have played with the numbers cutting production compared with December 2016 levels but not in year-over-year terms.
The OPEC deal managed to stabilize oil prices around $50 per barrel, and last month the cuts were extended for another nine months. If it were still 1973, that might have caused a jump in oil prices. But in 2017, OPEC produces only about 40% of the global supply, and the US is among the top three producers in the world. The price of Brent crude spiked to $54.15 per barrel after the cuts were extended but has since dropped almost 12% and may continue to fall.
This means that even the combined forces of OPEC and non-OPEC producers can’t prop up oil prices unless they are willing to slash production more severely. It also means that there is enough oil on the market, partly from the US, to satisfy demand, even when major producers limit their supply. Maintaining prices at current levels is the best outcome these producers can hope for. But even this comes with the downside of losing market share to competitors, without getting oil prices back to the levels that Russia and Saudi Arabia would need to stabilize their economies.
When we discuss US power in the world, we often trot out a few key points: The US economy accounts for just under a quarter of global gross domestic product; it has a military force without peer in the world; and its economy is not dependent on exports. We can now add the following points to this list: The US is the third-largest oil producer in the world; it is less dependent on oil imports than at any point in the last 40 years; and it is stealing customers from Russia and Saudi Arabia even with prices as low as $50 per barrel. Even a few years ago, US shale producers would have found it hard to make a profit at that price, but they are succeeding at that now. Oil prices are going down, US oil exports are going up, and the ramifications will be global.
George Friedman
Editor, This Week in Geopolitics
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3)Report: NBC 'Freaking Out' Over Megyn Kelly's Ratings
RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned that former Fox personality Megyn Kelly has been a “ratings disaster” — and she’s only been on the job a few weeks!
The new NBC personality’s interview with Erin Andrews for Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly was destroyed by 60 Minutes, which scored 7.66 million total viewers. Kelly got a paltry 4.35 million people to tune in to her program.And the controversy surrounding her upcoming Father’s Day interview with Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has insisted that the Sandy Hook school massacre is a hoax, isn’t exactly helping matters.
“NBC is freaking out,” a source told Radar. “They didn’t pay her $15 million for this. They are now worried that her numbers will be bad when she joins the 9 am hour of Today.”
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4)A BLOW FOR SCIENCE, SOVEREIGNTY AND SANITY
4)A BLOW FOR SCIENCE, SOVEREIGNTY AND SANITY
President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the 2015 Paris climate accord has been received with predictable hysteria. Nothing could better illustrate the parlous state of western society than this irrational, ignorant and ideological reaction.
Trump is being accused of being anti-science. On the contrary: it’s the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) scam that’s anti-science. Here are some elementary facts.
· Observable fluctuations in global temperature are within the normal historic pattern of atmospheric variation. The world has always warmed and cooled; the climate changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly.
· Global warming theory rests on the belief that rising CO2 levels drive up atmospheric temperature. But there is no straightforward link between CO2 and temperature. From 1860 to 1875 temperatures rose, then decreased from 1875 to 1890, rose until 1903, fell until 1918, rose dramatically until 1941, then cooled until 1976.
· Historically, temperature increases have often preceded high CO2 levels, destroying this theory of cause and effect. Moreover, there have been periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were as much as 16 times what they are now, periods characterised not by warming but by glaciation.
· The warming that was observed between 1978-1998 has stopped and global temperatures have plateaued. This disproves the entire theory that carbon emissions – which have been rising – inexorably drive up global temperature. Faced with the consequent contradiction in the IPCC prediction of an 0.3°C global average temperature rise over a decade, AGW proponents claimed that the prediction allowed for pauses. It didn’t.
· The seas are not generally rising any more than they have done for thousands of years.
· The icecaps are not generally melting; Antarctic ice is actually increasing.
· The polar bears are not dying out but increasing in number.
· There is no upward trend in the occurrence of virtually any extreme events such as tornados, hurricanes, droughts or floods, and some are in fact decreasing.
· Predictions of planetary temperature apocalypse derive from computer modelling.
The assumption that highly complex natural systems can be predicted at all, however, is absurd. And climate change is arguably the most complex system there is: coupled, non-linear, chaotic. The number of feedback mechanisms involved is vast. Computers cannot accommodate such myriad variations. And the idea that by changing just one factor – and a minute factor at that – a predictable outcome can be achieved is scarcely any more believable than the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers in Jonathan Swift’s satirical island of Laputa.
The claim that AGW science is “settled” is itself anti-scientific. Science can never be “settled” but must always remain open to fresh evidence and analysis.The claim that “97 per cent of scientists support AGW theory” is itself bunkum, as shown here.
The reason why so many scientists produce research purporting to demonstrate AGW is that grant-funding and academic advancement depend upon producing such a finding. Even so, as I noted in my 2010 book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, by 2009 700 scientists, several of them current and former participants in the IPCC, had gone on record to voice significant objections to the theory.
Richard Lindzen, the eminent Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Emeritus at MIT, has repeatedly denounced the sophistry and dishonesty of global warming alarmists, most recently in this article which shredded the claim that AGW theory was based on science.
Among many other distinguished scientists who have also spoken out against AGW are:
o Christopher Landsea, a former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones and an IPCC author, who discovered that the IPCC was telling lies about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes;
o Zbigniew Jaworowski, former chairman of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, who says the IPCC’s ice-core research is wrong and that therefore it has “based its global warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false”.
o Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, who has written: “I believe that global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever. There is no evidence to prove that the current climate variations are not a natural cycle.”
o Gerhard Gerlich, of the Institute of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig in Germany, and Dr. Ralf D. Tscheuschner, who co-authored a devastating paper in 2007 entitled Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics. This stated that there was no scientific basis to anthropogenic global warming theory whatsoever.
Not to mention the serial academic misdemeanors exposed in “Climategate”, the huge release of emails from various AGW zealot scientists revealing the suppression of opposing views, the intimidation of editors and the manipulation of data.
Despite all this, western economies have adopted suicidal energy policies on the basis that the AGW scam is true. In Britain as elsewhere, one of the reasons poor people cannot afford to heat their homes is the enormous extra costs imposed by adopting ruinous policies to reduce carbon emissions. In 2013, Der Spiegel declared that as a result of Germany’s disastrous expansion of wind and solar power, electricity had become “a luxury good.”
As Trump said yesterday, according to the National Economic Research Associates the Paris accord would have cost America $3 trillion in lost GDP and as many as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.
Trump is putting the interests of American workers in places like Pittsburgh ahead of this agreement. The fact that the Democrat mayor of Pittsburgh declares, however, that he will continue to implement Paris accord-style policies illustrates a further enormous problem America now faces.
Trump correctly observed that there were “serious legal and constitutional issues” with the accord. “Our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty.”
True and very necessary and overdue, and this will doubtless be cheered by the actual workers in Pittsburgh and elsewhere whose interests their President is choosing to prioritise over and above any crackpot ideological theories. Nevertheless, his policy is being opposed by Democrat mayors and governors, along with multinational corporate giants with either an ideological or financial interest in maintaining the AGW-catastrophe fiction.
It is therefore the latest and perhaps most graphic example of the lethal divide that has opened up in the US between, on the one hand, the President allied with America’s blue-collar workers and, on the other, the intellectual, political and corporate elite which is absolutely determined to thwart the agenda the President was elected to deliver. This is a dagger at the heart of American democracy.
in Britain, the idea that there is a legitimate view at all against AGW theory is simply suppressed. I listened in vain to BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning for a single speaker suggesting Trump might have a point. There was none. This was not a news programme. It was propaganda.
It did not see fit to mention, for example, that the Paris accord empowers some of the world’s worst polluters such as China and India. It allows China to increase its carbon emissions for 13 years since it is only committed to begin reducing them by 2030. India has made no commitment on emissions at all, pledging only to make progress on efficiency at half the rate of recent years. Pakistan merely offered to “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.”
As Trump said: “In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries. This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.”
In denouncing the US move, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasised Germany’s continued commitment to the Paris accord which she called a “cornerstone” of efforts to protect “creation”. Yet as Transport Environment reported, Germany has now seen two straight years of emissions increases due to close of nuclear power station and and replacing it with coal and natural gas after the failure of solar and wind power because of … not enough sunshine or wind. Duh!
In other words, the idea that the Paris accord will do anything to reduce carbon emissions, let alone address the warming of the climate, is patently ludicrous.
In his article, Prof Lindzen says this about climate:
“The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and re-emission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science’.”
In substituting ideology for evidence, the AGW scam represents the repudiation of reason itself. President Trump has struck a blow for science, sovereignty and sanity.
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