Filed under: Politics | Tags: Biden's Open Borders, Big Tech Monitoring, Unaccompanied Minors
Over the past three weeks, some of the biggest and most powerful Tech Companies have announced steps they have taken to monitor their users. On July 26, a group of tech companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter Reddit, Verizon, Airbnb and Mailchimp announced that they will shift the focus of their joint counter-terrorism project dedicated to tracking Islamic extremists to attention on material shared online by_white supremacists” and “far-right militias.”
So there you go. I occasionally hear nutcases talking about “white supremacists” but have never seen the slightest evidence that such groups exist. Since seventy-six percent of the population of the United States of America is white it seems a little silly. Only about fifteen percent of the population is black, and the remainder are the other races.
Apple announced that they would be monitoring users of their I-phones for any photos or conversation about child sexual abuse. I certainly don’t want any conversation or photos of child sexual abuse, but Apple monitoring I-Phones? They are confirming Americans most basic fears of Big Tech and control.
Joe Biden has announced a plan to shift America’s trucks and cars to run on electricity to deal with “greenhouse gas emissions”. Nevermind, of course that the CO2 from car exhaust is not a dangerous greenhouse gas, but a natural fertilizer for plants that is creating bountiful crops and greening the world. As I have mentioned previously, Japan, several years ago was given an edict to switch Japanese vehicles to electric engines, and they soon discovered that Japan was not able to produce enough electricity to both run the nation’s vehicles and light and power the country.
toJoe Biden’s open borders policies have drastically increased the overdose deaths in the country as the Mexican Drug Cartels use the flow of illegal immigrants to cover their importation of drugs. On last Wednesday over 800 illegal minors were stopped at the border in one day. 834 unaccompanied illegal alien minors. The Department of Homeland Security had previously estimated that over 19,000 illegal minors were caught in the month of July surpassing the previous record of 18,877 in the month of March. The totals from March to July are over 84,000. That’s a lot of non-english speaking kids to add to our classrooms this fall. Unfortunately there are a lot of active Covid cases coming in as well. I do not understand why Democrats want open borders, unless it’s just a cynical ploy to get more Democrat voters so they can be more fully in charge.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Covid and it's relatives, Finding a Vaccination, Usually Free
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 killed twenty-five million people. Pandemics are serious, deadly serious.They arrive as a surprise, and the experts have to try to figure out what to do about them. Whether you loathe him or honor him, Donald Trump did exactly the right thing. Covid first appeared in a nursing home a few miles north of my house, when a man from Wuhan, China visited relatives, and relatives and staff got sick, some died. Trump shut down all flights from China, initiated Project Warp Speed to find out what the virus was, and what to do about it. Project Warp Speed turned out a vaccine. Hospital ships were sent to major ports, cruise lines shut down, temporary hospitals set up in city parks, mistakes were inevitably made, some died unnecessarily, but it could have been a lot worse.
I have family members still working from home online. Some have driven many miles to be able to find a vaccine. Some people are afraid of getting a vaccine. It’s not particularly painful, it smarts a bit, but no big deal. Joe Biden is trying desperately to find some way of taking credit for the vaccine. His open borders have been a huge mistake, but he is unprepared to accept any blame. A high number of border crossers are infected, and hospitals in border towns are burdened both with staff and costs.
If you have not been vaccinated, get the vaccine. Risking your own life is one thing, risking the lives of those around you is quite different.
We don’t know why the pandemic appeared in Wuhan, China. Lots of excuses, lab leak, etc. but just why the laboratories in Wuhan were experimenting with this disease is not clear. Too many of our officials are wanting credit for successes and to be free of any accusations of blame or stupidity. If you have not been vaccinated, it would be wise to remedy that. Twenty-five million people dying in a pandemic, as they did last time is not a joking matter.
Olympic medal winners and losers are being welcomed home by their friends and families. Sometimes lined up along the highway. Americans value their participation and the long hard work it took to get there. Megan Rapinoe, soccer captain of the purple hair, has turned out to be the least popular person there. Kneeling for the anthem is not popular with Americans. Subway franchises have asked that she be removed from the company ads. National Review had a nice photo article with good pictures of the athletes in action.
I was astonished at some of the events: beach volleyball? Canoe sprint? I had no idea these were Olympic events. Gives more athletes an opportunity to compete, and more variety for spectators. I don’t know the rules for most events. I didn’t see any preliminary material on what events were included, what the contest involved, but that was probably my lack of searching information out. It was nice to see some participants proud of representing their country (through their own hard work, often for years.) I want to be clear about my appreciation for the years of dedication it took to earn those medals. Hope they lead to successful careers and happy lives.
The photo on the post just below is of The Seven Devils Mountains in the state of Idaho, My home territory. You will find it on a map of Idaho on the western side where the border line comes down from Canada in a straight line, then goes out in a bump. The bump is the Snake River going around the Seven Devils Mountains before proceeding on northwards to join the Clearwater River, and then flowing on into the Columbia. The prominent mountain in the picture may be the She Devil, but I’m not sure of that. There are seven of them. There are small lakes all over the region, mostly filled with trout, and good fishing. Beautiful country.
Back in the gold rush era, around the turn of the last century — 1890-1900, there were promising strikes of gold and copper ore, and a rush into the Seven Devils Mountains, following many other big strikes around the West. Idaho has long been known as “the Mountain State”, with good reason. Who could resist mountains named “The He Devil,” Thunder Mountain, the Bitterroot Range, Leatherman Peak, Lost River Range, Salmon River Mountains, and White Cloud Mountain, for a small sampling. Makes me homesick.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Major Dams, Nuclear Power, Power Outages, The Electric Grid
A year or more ago,( I’m fuzzy about the time frame), the Japanese were handed down an edict demanding that the country move to electric cars, to save the environment. Sound familiar? Well, yes, headline today at UPI: “ Biden sets goal for half of all new vehicles to be electric by 2030.”
What happened in Japan was that they soon discovered that the nation could not produce enough electricity to power the nation’s homes and businesses AND also power the nation’s vehicles. This, of course, falls under the “don’t start making demands until you know what you are talking about.” But President Biden has fallen into the same trap.
There’s also a small question about the role of CO2, which is widely misunderstood. The climate of the earth is controlled by the action of our sun, not by the CO2 in the atmosphere. Check in with Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christie at Huntsville, who take the temperature of the earth daily for NASA. (See link in sidebar) Also Climate Depot and WattsUpWithThat.
Carbon dioxide is plant food. Makes trees grow, crops grow more bountiful, greens the earth, feeds hungry people. It is NOT a poison lurking in the atmosphere to destroy the earth in the next couple of years. That notion came out of Davos, and according to Christiana Figueres, who was at the time the general secretary to the IPCC, was their best option for destroying hated Capitalism. In this country, we’re rather fond of capitalism. Gives everybody the opportunity to create something and become a billionaire, or just plain rich. We don’t reserve that privilege for just the anointed. There’s a lot of that in America, and we mostly entirely approve of capitalism, except for the ignoramuses out there.
I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer to the question. Can we produce enough electricity in our current grid to light and power our homes and industry AND also power all of the nation’s vehicles? We have a remarkable number of vehicles, with all the trucks, and all of the families who have more than one car. We have dams and nuclear power plants, but most of our power plants are run on fossil fuels, currently in “disfavor”. We have, rarely, had some broad power outages, but I have no idea whatsoever. It is, however. a question that should be answered before “setting a goal for half of all new vehicles to be electric by 2030.” This is not an administration that carefully examines the potential before making pronouncements.
I am merely asking the question. I don’t have any answers. Feel free to chime in.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Booster Shots, Masks, Read, School Kids, Vaccination
About COVID: this is a worldwide pandemic, and much as we’d like to have clear answers to our worries, we don’t. We’re learning, but the rules for vaccination and about the vaccinations themselves are changing constantly in response to the data flowing in. Will we need booster shots? How often, how soon, how many? We have gone from the idea that children are unaffected to demanding that they wear masks in school and be vaccinated. Answers come from statistics about illness and death and recovery, but by the time we have lots of statistics, we will have more problems as well.
One of the major problems with Big Tech is that they assume that because they have built big successful companies online and become billionaires, that they are smarter than the rest of us, and free to direct most everything, including deciding what is true and what is false. Yes, they saw an opportunity and took advantage of it, and for some it worked out and for others it did not.
What can we do? Search out the most knowledgeable answers, read a lot. There are a lot of people out there who do not like to read. Some never found pleasure in reading, some are not skilled readers, I don’t know, but it’s very clear that large numbers of people just don’t read much.
Some get their answers from television, but that assumes that the presenters know a lot and read a lot. And are the experts we settle on actually expert? We have lots of “celebrities” ready to keep us informed. What or who is a celebrity? Someone whose name is known, often for having been in a movie, whose name may get the article read, because of the familiar name. Follow that train of thought. Yes. reporters are apt to listen to a celebrity because they may have name recognition and might get their piece published and read, which is good for their reporting career, but information and knowledge don’t really enter into it. Dr Fauci was supposed to be our leading expert, highest paid man in the entire government, then thoroughly disgraced, then just in the last few days he announced that Trump was right in shutting down travel from China and the “warp-speed” vaccine development. Border state governors are trying to deal with covid positive illegal aliens coming over their borders, some officials are open borders people, courts are trying to deal with the officials and the governors. Kamala Harris is disgraced, Former Governor Jeb Bush thinks we should have open borders, our congresspeople can’t decide on their own mask-wearing, let alone what they should do about rules and regulations. I guess, stay at home if you can. Read a lot,.
Cloudy here and it may (oh please!) rain tomorrow.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: A Long Hot Shower!, Bacon!, Limits to What Americans Will Stand For!
We live in a contentious world, as we are reminded as we read or listen to the news each day. Things just do not always go smoothly. Right now it is mostly Covid Vaccinations and Covid Masks, with a little border thrown in. But there are Limits to what the public will stand for, and that limit is being approached.
Many people did not notice when President Joe Biden was speaking Green New Deal a while back, but he was suggesting that it would be necessary to make the holes in showerheads smaller to save water. What?
I had not heard that we are short on water, and had to conserve! Rivers and streams seem full, and we just had some major floods. Why on earth would anyone assume that to save water we had to turn our showers into a fine mist? That was so silly that I put it directly out of my mind. But then inflation (and pipeline destruction) started elevating the cost of gas at the pump significantly. And the press at least was talking about electric cars (which for someone who grew up rural, where it was a long drive between gas stations with plugs to plug in your electric car, sounded both ridiculous and nutty).
Then, the bacon scare began. Apparently California has passed some strange laws to make pigs more comfortable, which are expected to make a lot of farmers give up raising pigs, and result in a scarcity of bacon in the marketplace and raise the price of bacon significantly. That is just going too damn far. There are limits. I am fond of my current showerhead and have no intention of changing it, and have been considering getting a bigger hot water tank. But do not mess with my bacon! You have long since lost any possibility of my vote, but do not underestimate the fury of a woman deprived of bacon. I suspect that I am not alone.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Schoolchildren, Vaccinations, Worldwide Pandemics
The CDC is struggling to make up its mind about whether or not children need vaccinations to return to school, and whether they need to wear masks. Online classes did not work well, and clearly public school in ordinary session cannot come quickly enough, but what the guidelines will be and what they should be and how effective school will be remains a question. Different locations, different states, different experiences from different governors. At first, I thought they told us that children were essentially immune.
The current population of the United States is tallied at 331,095,619 and 20,639,911 brand new citizens were born today and 1,144 people died, (changing as I type this). Also measured by religions, ethnic grouping, age group and sex ratio. But a little attention to the big statistics makes one realize how vague and “iffy” are the pronouncements that come down from the federal government.
I just put away the groceries that were delivered (because of Covid) so I could avoid going to the grocery store. I’m fully vaccinated, 2 Shots, after weeks and weeks of trying to find someplace to get the vaccination. Our Eastside hospitals had a big event with a cast of thousands at Microsoft. Before that it was combing through grocery store pharmacies to try to find one that had appointments available. Your experience was undoubtedly very different.
So it is still early. We don’t know enough. We can only try hard to be well informed. Apparently a new variant has popped up in South Korea. Not yet expanded to the rest of the world. Does that raise the question of continual variations and a continual virus? We need better communicators at the federal level.
Here are the first few lines from Jason Riley writing at the Wall Street Journal about “Critical Race Theory” — “A majority of American fourth and eighth-graders can’t read or do math at grade level, according to the education Department. And that assessment is from 2019, before the learning losses from pandemic school closures.” So we have lost a lot over these months of Covid, and how to make it up, and how permanent the loss remains a question.
We are having a pandemic. President Trump jumped on it promptly, halted all traffic from China, and began “Operation Warp Speed” to get vaccines developed. Great outcry, racial prejudice, etc. etc, but it worked and he saved a lot of lives. Effective vaccines were developed. Different nations had different experience, but it could have been a lot worse.
The influenza pandemic in 1918 killed twenty-five million people. Life expectancy dropped by 18 years. Today, many countries have had very different experiences, as different governments have handled it very differently. Eventually, we will be able to assess what worked and what has not. We know where this one originated, but not how nor why. When the next one comes along, perhaps we will be better prepared.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Be Very Afraid!, Delta Variant?, Everybody Mask!
It’s COVID time again. Everybody Panic!! Get those masks on, and if you are not yet vaccinated, get vaccinated immediately. The Biden administration is trying to decide just what to do to protect themselves and the country, what rules and regulations to issue. Not sure what has made this Monday the big day to get everybody into masks.
The new director of the CDC (the Center for Disease Control) sat for a 20 minute long interview with Bret Baier on Friday. The interview revealed the current politics in the CDC’s declarations and guidance. All as confusing as usual.
Headlines have been pointing out that Covid is coming in at the border with illegal aliens, and the Border Patrol is having a hard time dealing with that. Border area hospitals are full, Some with symptoms are being sent to local hotels. Bad situation. But just what set everything off today, I don’t know, but apparently you are supposed to panic today.
“The Biden Administration continues to exaggerate the risk posed by COVID-19 Breakthrough Infections While Slamming the Press for Doing the Same Thing” read the headline at Reason. The White House is frustrated with alarmist or overwrought Talk about the Delta Variant. So there you go. Everybody back in a mask.
We are fully vaccinated here, two shots of Pfizer. It took a long time and was very hard to find a place to get the vaccine, with lots of computer time searching. Sounds like some other countries (Britain) have much better records about who has been vaccinated and who has not, probably because of their National Health. I think that the big deal is about the Delta Spike. No notable increase in COVID deaths.
Masks are to prevent you from infecting someone else, not to protect you. Nobody has mentioned it in the current flap, but probably it’s a good idea to keep from touching your face. I really hate wearing a mask because it feels hard to breathe.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Blame President Trump!, Not an Invasion, Not at Trump's Direction
A group of Trump supporters, a few carrying flags, decided they wanted to walk through the Capitol building in Washington D.C. They were peacefully admitted by the Capitol Police, and walked around looking at the building. They followed the red velvet ropes that were there to guide tourists. A few carried flags, but didn’t wave them around, just looked around like ordinary visitors. The only real anomaly was the “shaman”, bare-chested with furs and horns, but nobody has yet explained why he was there is such a getup.
No reports of any kind of violence, shouting, flag waving, attacks on anybody or anything. Just looking around. After all, as citizens, they are the owners of the buildings. The congressmen and Capitol Police share the ownership, and just work there as their place of business. AOC claimed that she was terrified by the invasion and feared that she might be raped, but it turned out that she was not even in the building anyway.
Now is this roughly what you have heard from Speaker Pelosi? Didn’t think so. It’s described as an invasion, threatening, dangerous, one would think jackbooted terrorists, primitive and frightening. All they have, really, is the picture of men trying to climb the outside wall to get in. They don’t really have anything else except the guy with the horns and fur. The old saying is “making mountains out of molehills.”
Did you notice that she keeps mentioning “January 6” like the “June 6” date of D-Day? But that is the essence of politics, I guess, to turn every event to your benefit, knowing the press, who need readers, will help at every step. Shocking events, celebrities, outrageous statements, human failings and misery all become “click-bait” for reporters to get people to read their stories. The media knows that a goodly percentage of people do not want to read articles, they would rather look at pictures, so familiar names, outrageous charges, chances of violence or mistreatment, titillating details help to get their pieces read, and if they aren’t read, reporters may lose their journalism jobs.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: CO2 ia Plant Food, Greening the World, Natural Fertilizer for Plants
I keep mentioning that the Carbon Dioxide, CO2, that the Climatistas keep claiming is some kind of poisonous gas that is going to cause catastrophic climate change, and end life of earth, (think AOC , big mouth, massive ignorance) is a natural fertilizer for plants.
CO2 is greening the earth, making crops more productive, feeding a hungry world.
The Australian Government has issued their Climate Report. Farm productivity is UP in Australia by 68 percent. Australian farm productivity had significantly increased. The decline in rainfall from 2001 to 2021 compared to 1950-2000 saw farm profits reduced, on average by 23 percent or $29.200 with farmers receiving low returns due to climate change. But research has shown that Australian farm productivity had significantly increased with farmers producing almost 30 percent more than they did in 1989 .Over the same period, in spite of weather challenges, grain growers had increased productivity by 68 percent.
It’s just nice to find such clear evidence of common sense once in a while. Ignore AOC and John Kerry who don’t know what they are talking about.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: All Online, Easy to Sound Off!, Who is Your Congressman?
I tell my readers often to write to their congresspeople, and realized that you may envision laboriously writing a letter, finding an envelope and a stamp, and taking it to the post office.
No. Go to House.gov, or Senate.gov, find your congresspeople on the list and a click will bring up their website where you can sound off. All the help you need including how to find out just who your congresspeople are, is right there. You can complain to your heart’s content. At worst, some staffer will enumerate the complainers from your district. And you will also find the website for their offices in your home state, so you can write twice. If you are really incensed, you can go to their home office and sound off. They mostly want to get reelected. so somebody is paying attention.
We vote for the one in our party or who we think is the best candidate, neither of whom may win. Doesn’t matter, they are still responsible for representing you. And unless their feet are held to the proverbial fire, they may not be representing you at all. It’s your best opportunity to be heard. Take advantage of it.
ADDENDUM: We are having local elections on August 3. School boards, city councils, county executive, that sort of thing. Hard to get much information about those who are running for office. We have a constant candidate for office (usually a higher one) who calls himself “goodspaceguy”, running for county executive. I have no idea who he really is, why he gets a bang out of seeing his chosen name on the ballot. This year he has a significant white beard. I assume there is a fee to get put on the ballot, but I don’t know that. He has been on the ballot for years and years. Just a local oddity here in the Seattle area. Do you have some in your area?
