Saturday, November 30, 2019

How we are ruled by the Administrative State

Great America

It’s Time for Civilian Control of the State Department

A second Trump term and an improved Congress could begin to enact salutary reforms to our foreign policy institutions, personnel systems, and operations. Cultural transformation of the clerisy is an undertaking for generations.

Joseph Duggan

- November 29th, 2019

Burisma Board member Biden got job because of name

Polish Former President: Hunter Biden Got Burisma Job Due to Family Name

A prominent member of the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian oil and gas conglomerate at the center of the impeachment inquiry, admitted on Friday that Hunter Biden was tapped to join the company because of his father’s political influence.

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Raw tribalism...a racial tax

Evanston will use recreational marijuana sales tax proceeds to fund local reparations program

By GENEVIEVE BOOKWALTER

PIONEER PRESS |

NOV 27, 2019 | 6:35 AM

Evanston Ald. Robin Rue Simmons, 5th Ward, proposed a reparations fund that Evanston City Council approved at their meeting on Nov. 25, 2019. (Genevieve Bookwalter / Pioneer Press)

Evanston aldermen on Monday approved directing all sales tax revenue collected from recreational marijuana purchases to a fund that will establish a local reparations program.

Officials say the program will help the city’s black population stay in Evanston while also providing training for jobs and other benefits.

“We can implement funding to directly invest in black Evanston,” said Ald. Robin Rue Simmons, 5th Ward, who proposed the reparations bill.

While Evanston officials have voted to permit, tax and appropriate money from recreational marijuana sales, many other suburbs have voted not to allow recreational marijuana dispensaries to open when the businesses become legal next year under state law.

Evanston leaders say they see the dispensaries as an opportunity to pay for a local reparations program that would address the lingering institutional effects of slavery and discrimination. The proposal passed 8-1, with Ald. Tom Suffredin, 6th Ward, voting against it.

[Most read] New federal rules for emotional support animals on planes are coming. Here’s why veterans with service dogs support restrictions — and some disability advocates don’t. »

Simmons said the source of the money was especially appropriate, as many black residents were victims of the “war on drugs” and spent time in jail for smoking marijuana, a substance that in specific quantities will now be permitted in Illinois.

The tax on marijuana will “be invested in the community it unfairly policed and damaged,” Simmons said.

A committee of residents is currently examining ways to spend the money and how to best support the black community through housing, education and economic incentives. The fund will be capped at $10 million, according to city of Evanston staff reports. City estimates project the marijuana tax could generate $500,000 to $750,000 per year.

“This is a really special moment in the city of Evanston and also in the country,” said Ald. Peter Braithwaite, 2nd Ward.

Community members attending the meeting praised the effort and thanked the council for investing in residents who were harmed by discriminatory housing and other past policies.“I support the approval of the ordinance for the city of Evanston to commit all of the anticipated tax revenue from the recreational marijuana businesses, to support work aimed at intentionally repairing harms done to the black community from policies and practices in so many different areas,” said Oliver Ruff, a retired teacher and Evanston resident.

Simmons’ proposal came as Evanston’s black population decreased from 22.5% of the population in 2000 to 16.9% in 2017, according to U.S. Census data.

The idea that the United States should make reparations to the descendants of slaves has been part of the national conversation since the slave trade ended, but there has been little formal action and much debate. Questions include what form reparations should take, and what institutions or individuals should make them.

Frustrated by the lack of action at the national level, Rue Simmons has said she believed a local reparations program could gain traction quickly and have a more immediate impact.

Aldermen Monday praised their local effort, which no one spoke against at the meeting, as a good start.

“We are on the right track,” said Ald. Ann Rainey, 8th Ward.

Mexico is not serious about fighting the drug cartels

Mexico warns will not allow US operations against cartels

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador warned Friday that Mexico would not allow armed US operations against drug cartels on its territory.

"We are not going to allow that armed people act in our territory. Armed foreigners cannot intervene in our territory. We will not allow that," Lopez Obrador said.

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he planned to designate the Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, after earlier saying he would help Mexico wage war on the drug gangs and wipe them off the face of the earth.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)AFP | Mexico City

Ratcheting up fear using children as shields.

Alarmists Propose Rebranding ‘Climate Change’ for Greater Shock Value

DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/Getty Images

2:58

Climate change alarmists are pushing for a change in vocabulary to scare people into taking global warming more seriously, starting with terms like “global meltdown” and “climate collapse.”

Writing for AdAge this week, Aaron Hall argues that in order to get people to “take action” against climate change, “rebranding” is crucial, since people have gotten too used to the idea that climate is changing and need to be shocked into the notion that the world as we know it is ending.

“Is there a better way to convey the urgency of the situation, while also encouraging folks to take action? Could the tools of branding and brand naming create a more resonant, powerful name?” Mr. Hall asks.

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What he and his marketing team came up with was a series of much more frightening labels to stick on climate change in the hope of jolting people into meaningful engagement.

The terms “Global Meltdown” or “Global Melting,” for instance, deliver a more negative image than mere “Global Warming,” he contends. “The names signal that ice caps are melting, but also create a more visceral image in the mind — that real feeling of ‘melting’ when it’s too hot outside. A meltdown is a disastrous event that draws from the ultimate terror of a nuclear meltdown, an apt metaphor for global destruction.”

“Climate Collapse” and “Climate Chaos,” on the other hand, “instill a clear message or even a direct call to action,” Hall notes, adding that “there’s nothing neutral about collapse or chaos.”

To up the rhetoric even more, Hall proposes the weaponized term “Scorched Earth.”

“Sometimes a brand name needs to be hyperbolic to truly capture hearts and minds. If we don’t take massive action now, Earth will be uninhabitable — an irreversible barren wasteland,” he insists. “‘Scorched Earth’ paints the direst picture of what’s to come and what we must avoid and is likely the edgiest brand name from our exploration.”

“Whatever we call it, impending climate doom is upon us if we don’t act quickly,” Hall concludes. “Perhaps a new name will shift the needle, even if just a little.”

Mr. Hall’s contention that it does not matter if what is said is true as long as it elicits the necessary response is reminiscent of similar assertions by leaders of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement.

Spokespersons of the movement have acknowledged that their claims that billions of people are going to die from climate change have no basis whatsoever in scientific fact but are necessary to provoke the kind of response that is needed to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

Pressed last month on what the basis was for predictions of mass deaths, XR spokesperson Zion Lights acknowledged there is no real ground for these predictions, but contended that such incendiary language is necessary to motivate people, confessing that “alarmist language works.”

While it is clearly true that “alarmist language works” in some cases, it is also true that people tend to resent being lied to and manipulated.

Like Aesop’s fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, climate alarmists may wake up one fine day to find that nobody believes them anymore.

Such is the price of lying.

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

San Francisco ties cold record as Bay Area freezes

By Douglas Zimmerman, SFGATE

Updated 11:44 am PST, Friday, November 29, 2019

Photo: NWS Bay Area

IMAGE 1 OF 7

Patchy frost developed on the cars parked in the National Weather Service's offices in Monterey on Friday morning.

The London Bridge stabbing...two reports

If you want details of what OCCURRED on London Bridge the first article will give you details the second will take you through a long path of who said what to whom.

WHY WAS HE FREE?

London Bridge attack – terrorist was freed to kill despite judge who jailed him saying he should NEVER be let out

London Bridge attack: victim named in reports as Jack Merritt – latest updates

Friday, November 29, 2019

Echoes of Pol Pot: Bernie Movement’s Close Ties to Norwegian Communists

“Our Revolution” and “People for Bernie,” two key elements of the Bernie Sanders for President movement, have developed a close relationship with a militant Norwegian communist party.

The party in question, Rodt (Red Party), was formerly known as the Arbeidernes Kommunistparti (AKP or Workers’ Communist Party) and was notorious in Norway for its open support of Cambodian communist leader and mass murderer Pol Pot.

The Sanders movement’s ties to one of the most extreme communist parties of Europe gives lie to Sanders’ often-repeated claim that his “democratic socialism” has nothing to do with communism.

The AKP was founded in 1973 as a Maoist competitor to the pro-Soviet Norwegian Communist Party. The AKP, in common with many other Maoist parties of the era, openly supported mass-murderers Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.

According to the “Black Book of Communism,” Pol Pot’s Beijing-backed Communist Party of Kampuchea, or “Khmer Rouge,” was responsible for the deaths of approximately 2 million of Cambodia’s 6 million people in its bloody three-year reign. Approximately 1.3 million of these victims were deliberately executed by the regime and buried in about 23,000 mass graves.

The AKP openly endorsed the Khmer Rouge. When Pol Pot’s Maoist forces conquered Cambodian capital Phnom Penh in April 1975, AKP’s newspaper Klassekampen (Class Struggle) emblazoned “Long live the free Cambodia” as their front-page headline. The AKP dismissed reports of massacres under Khmer Rouge rule as anti-communist propaganda and continued to send delegations to Cambodia until Vietnamese troops expelled the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh in January 1979.

The AKP openly called for armed revolution before 1990 and kept the possibility of having to “defend the revolution with arms” open for some time after.

In 2007, the AKP re-branded itself as “Rodt” and turned its focus more toward electoral politics. The party claims to no longer support violence but does state that its goal is still a “classless society” or “what Karl Marx called communism.”

The AKP maintained close ties to foreign Maoist parties including the New Zealand Workers Communist League and especially the United States’ Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). In recent years, Rodt has broadened its Maoist base to admit Trotskyists and “democratic socialists.”This has been mirrored in the United States by the backbone of the Sanders movement, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which includes in its rank Trotskyists from “Solidarity” and Maoists from Liberation Road, the new name for FRSO.

Rodt’s broadened base has given it a little more traction in Norwegian politics. Rodt now has 20 county council representatives and 190 municipal and city council representatives. The party made a small breakthrough in the 2017 election, winning 2.4 percent of the vote and its first seat in the Norwegian Parliament.

Sanders Movement

After developing deep ties with FRSO over several years, Rodt began to build links with the wider Sanders movement during the 2016 election cycle. In October 2016, the New York City branch of FRSO sponsored a small get-together of “local labor activists, Sandernistas and other lefties” to meet Reidar Strisland—former youth leader of the Oslo section of Rodt. Strisland was in the United States for two months gathering material for a book on the Sanders movement.

Strisland visited comrades in Detroit and Lansing, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio, as well as in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in South Dakota. Strisland was back during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, scoring photo-ops with several DSA-supported candidates, including Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke in Texas and congressional candidate James Thompson in Kansas.

A delegation of Norwegian activists, including Strisland, attended the Sanders movement’s People’s Summit in Chicago in June 2017. A few days later, three American activists, Winnie Wong, Claire Sandberg, and Moumita Ahmed, accepted Strisland’s invitation to travel Oslo to see “Nordic social democracy” firsthand.

Wong was a leader of People for Bernie and a newly minted DSA member at the time. Sandberg was an organizing director for Bernie 2016 and a founder of the FRSO-linked electoral organization We Will Replace You. Ahmed was a leader of People for Bernie and Millennials for Revolution and a member of the DSA

In Oslo, the three Americans socialists addressed a Rodt-run political and cultural festival “Popvenstre,” met with Rodt leaders, and even trained grassroots comrades in U.S. election campaigning techniques in the party’s downtown Oslo office.

According to Wong and Sandberg: “We spent hours in trainings and breakout strategy sessions with Rodt party organizers digging into the nuts and bolts of digital and social media best practices, barnstorms, peer-to-peer text messaging, dank memes, and more.”

The training seems to have worked. In the 2017 elections, Rodt leader Bjornar Moxnes was elected as the sole representative of the party in the Norwegian Parliament.

In a play on the Sanders slogan “Feel the Bern,” Rodt campaigners wore “Feel the Bjorn” T-shirts as they campaigned in Oslo.

Is it legal for American Marxists to involve themselves in Norwegian elections?

In February 2018, Larry Cohen, chairman of the Sanders support network Our Revolution, traveled to Oslo to address a special Rodt strategy conference.

The leader of a Sanders support organization claiming more than 200,000 members and 600 groups across the United States gave a keynote speech at a high-level planning conference with one of Europe’s most militant communist parties—with zero media scrutiny.Key operatives in the movement to elect Sanders to the U.S. presidency are working with a European communist party that once openly supported Pol Pot. Senior American Sanders supporters seem to have played a role in electing a revolutionary Marxist to the Norwegian parliament.

Does the Sanders movement really support Scandinavian “social democracy,” or does it really favor flat-out Norwegian communism?

Nothing to see here, folks.

Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.

Not just Obama but the whole of the anti American leftist political spectrum. The reality of China's energy production

China Proves It: Obama Really Was A Sap

I & I Editorial Board

November 29, 2019

8 comments

11,033 views

Remember when President Barack Obama was running around telling everyone how he’d convinced China to get serious about cutting its carbon dioxide emissions? A new report shows that Obama was easily duped.

Over the course of three years, Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to, he said, agree to “climate targets” (in 2014), “lay out additional actions” (in 2015), and sign the Paris Agreement (2016).

In typical Obama understatement, he declared that “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

Of course, anyone who looked at what China was promising could see that it was a sucker’s bet. China said only that it would try to “stabilize” CO2 emissions by 2030, while the rest of the industrialized world dumped money and resources into “decarbonizing” their economies.

Worse, even before Obama made his boast it was clear that China’s state-controlled emissions data were unreliable. In late 2015 it came to light that the country had far more coal plants that it had admitted, and as a result had been emitting a billion tons more CO2 that it officially proclaimed. A report in Skeptical Science last year notes that CO2 emissions for China still “aren’t known with any accuracy.”

In other words, while Obama wanted the U.S. to actually cut emissions, neither he nor anyone else in the industrialized world knew what China was up to, other than what it claimed.

Now a new study shows that while China was telling Obama that it was taking bold steps on climate change, it was business as usual inside the Middle Kingdom.

In the past two years, China increased its energy production from coal by nearly 43 gigawatts, more than offsetting the decline in coal production in the rest of the world, Global Energy Monitor found. Just the coal plants now under construction in China and the ones that could be revived at any time would produce the same energy as the entire coal-generating capacity of the European Union.

“China’s recent growth is due to a brief but massive spree of project permitting that occurred from September 2014 to March 2016,” the Global Energy Monitor report found. Not that those years just happen to coincide with when Xi was promising Obama that it was serious about global warming.

China is also, the report says, busy financing coal plants in countries such as South Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

“The continued growth of China’s coal fleet and consideration of plans to significantly raise the nation’s coal power cap show that while the country is often hailed as a clean energy leader, the momentum of coal power expansion has yet to be halted,” the report says.

Who could have possibly imagined that communist China wasn’t being sincere? Not Obama, obviously. But nor did anyone else baying for the Paris Agreement.

We’ve been pointing out in this space all along that the climate change alarmists are more interested in taking control of every aspect of our lives than they are preventing slight planetary warming. China was clearly trying to dupe a naïve Obama into squandering massive sums on expensive and unreliable “clean” energy while it busied itself building cheap “dirty” sources for itself.

Thankfully, President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement farce first chance he got.

In our view, the entire “clean energy” campaign is a waste of time and money. If climate change does happen, we can easily adapt to the changes. Even without advanced technology, humans have learned how to survive and thrive in the most inhospitable climates that already exist on earth.

And if the horror stories peddled by climate scientists and the environmentalists and the Greta Thunburgs of the world don’t come to pass – which is far more likely – we won’t have wasted trillions of dollars and impoverished millions in an attempt to “decarbonize” the economy.

— Written by John Merline