Give Trump a chance

One of the nice things about living in a small town is that you can write to the editor of the local paper and actually share your wisdom in print.

I had such an article in last week's paper. It's about the choice between voting for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and the decisions people needed to make in the recent election. I invite you to read it for yourself.

NOAA is doctoring temperature data, as you suspected

Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.  The fact that temperatures have not increased for the last 20 years is well-known in the community that follows the global warming controversy. NOAA produced a new study that said the temperature actually had increased. Turns out that the new data has been selective adjusted to change the results.

Link assortment

I've been negligent lately posting and blogging.  Here are an assortment of links for your consideration:

A Minnesota philosophy professor writes that immigrants have low IQs and refugees are part of "religious-political cult." He's wrong of course, but Reaction is intense from the usual suspects.

Could a Single Marine Unit Destroy the Roman Empire? It was a hypothetical question that became a long online discussion and now a movie in development: Could a small group of heavily armed modern-day Marines take down the Roman Empire at its height?

Phil McKenna at New Scientist "dams may be among the riskier power sources in the world". It turns out that nuclear power is much safer than either dams or coal as energy sources.

This article claims that the women's march was a failure, largely because nobody know what it was about I kind of thought the same thing. When it was forming up, I went to their web site to see what they wanted. It was an unstructured rant and the only thing that stood out was abortion. In fact, a pro-life group wasn't allowed in the march, even though they were women.

I have always thought that the war on second-hand smoke lacked credibility. It's unpleasant of course, but the reaction has been overblown.  This article agrees with me, says it's "fake science". Here's a follow-up article

The press doesn't just have Trump Derangement Syndrome. They now have full-blown Trump Psychosis. And like most people with serious disorders, they are teetering close to the brink of self-immolation.

Remember Obama's stimulus? California spent their funds on a dam that was in pretty good shape instead of Oroville Dam that actually needed some work

Mike Flynn lost his job as a result of the nation's spooks. Here the details  And here's a good follow-up about putting the pieces together

More on fake news: how the media messed up the story about the Olympian who was detained by Homeland Security because of Trump's Muslim ban.

More on Muslim honor killings "Mob Kills Eloped Lovers After Storming Afghan Police Station"

A comprehensive article about Neil Gorsuch, nominee for Supreme Court Justice. Worth reading.

Is the military ready to fight? Most of the Navy's strike fighters are gounded

Sometimes there's good news from the Middle East. The Hamas explosives chief accidentally blows himself up  I particularly enjoys this part:

The report quoted medical sources who said the Hamas commander had been brought to the hospital with his arms and legs blown off.

Academics write scholarly articles. They have to publish of course in their quest for tenure. No surprise that nobody reads them  at least those in the social sciences, which don't even say anything, but that the "research" often isn't repeatable.

Who is H R McMaster?

H. R. McMaster was just selected by Donald Trump to be national security advisor.  I was impressed by this quotation from another web site:

With President Trump selecting LTG HR McMaster to be the next National Security Advisor, we will no doubt be hearing a lot about the Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War. Captain McMaster was in the middle of what may be “the last great tank battle” when his Troop and one other destroyed a brigade of Iraqi tanks. History channel featured it in their series “Greatest Tank Battles” and it is a must watch; I imagine they will replay it soon because of this appointment.

I wanted to add a couple thoughts as I served under him and while I didn’t interact much with him personally, it was clear that McMaster may be the smartest man I have ever met – I went to an “elite” northeast academy and an Ivy – and nobody I know can hold a candle to his ability to learn every side and nuance of almost every conflict around the globe. While at Fort Benning, I was selected by my commander to head up the International Military Student Office where roughly 1000 foreign officers and non-commissioned officers from nearly 100 allied nations attend US Army courses. McMaster was the commanding general at the time of the Maneuver Center of Excellence (combined Infantry and Armor schools) and since it was a somewhat sensitive posting, I had to meet him personally. He was very knowledgeable of what my job would entail and made sure I understood, but he also knew about my entire career up to that point; this is impressive as he had hundreds of captains under him, but not exactly rare as it is a common characteristic of leaders effective enough to make flag rank.

What impressed me the most about him was his interaction with the international students. One of the courses that the international students attended was the captains’ career course and I had 7 cycles of 25-30 students in each ranging in rank from Lieutenant to Lieutenant Colonel. At the end of each class, MG McMaster would have a lunch with them where he would open the floor to any and all questions. These students came from every part of the world, and McMaster was able to answer nearly every question with stunning detail and understanding of the entire geopolitical ramifications behind each situation. In fact, only once did I every hear him say “I am not entirely familiar with that situation…” if I remember correctly, it revolved around a (relatively) new narcotics conflict in Suriname, but he then still answered the question by being able to draw upon knowledge he had in narcotics trafficking conflicts in other parts of South America, and the overall political climate in Suriname. The most challenging questions came from the Pakistanis of the class and while they sometimes became heated, he would approach the student after and speak personally to ensure that while they may not like what he said, they understood that he felt he had to answer them honestly – there was never hard feelings and always mutual respect from both him and the student. Every single student I spoke to afterward was blown away by how McMaster addressed their question and appreciated how much he understood about the problems in their home countries.

These Q&A sessions were scheduled for an hour and almost always went much longer as he was willing and eager to interact with those students whom he told would be “the future leaders of our allies” Imagine being a Lieutenant from a small nation being given this kid of respect and deference by a 2-star general of the US Army! These lunches were not mandatory but he did them anyway because the foreign students sent to study in the US are those officers whose nations predict will be their future senior leaders, quite possibly even some heads of state; McMaster understood to his core that the impressions he made then would affect US foreign relations 10, 20, 30 years into the future.

McMaster is a speed reader and I believe he also has a photographic memory. He was able to have an expansive grasp of the political ramifications on almost every live conflict in the world and it wasn’t even his job at the time to know them – his job was to train Infantry and Armor officers, but he knew that adding this aspect to his own education and the educations of those studying under him would make them better. This man is a perfect fit for the job of NSA and hopefully he will not meet the same resistance that so many current appointees encounter.

TJ Buttrick, CPT, US Army (retired)

McMaster wrote a best selling book on what went wrong in the Viet Nam War. Read the reviews on Amazon

Socialism

How to evaluate a president

Scott Adams, who predicted back in 2015 that Trump would win the election talks about how to evaluate his performance so far

If you see the world in terms of goals, you might think President Trump has failed at every important goal so far. He didn’t get what he wanted on immigration. He hasn’t gotten his Supreme Court nomination confirmed. He hasn’t replaced Obamacare. He hasn’t defeated ISIS. He hasn’t done a lot of things he said he would do. He even had to fire General Flynn. President Trump is a big ol’ failure when it comes to goals

Read the whole thing to see where this is going.

Oroville Dam is a metafor for California

Victor Davis Hanson on the state of the State

The poor condition of the dam is almost too good a metaphor for the condition of the state as a whole; its possible failure is a reflection of California’s civic decline.

State lawmakers spend their time obsessing over minutia: a prohibition against free grocery bags and rules against disturbing bobcats. When they do turn their attention to development, they tend to pick projects that serve urban rather than rural populations — for example, that boondoggle of a bullet train whose costs keep climbing even as the project falls years behind schedule.

A collection of links I found interesting

A Court OKs Federal Officials Taking Control Of Private Lands To Save Endangered Frogs That Don’t Even Live There. The endangered species act is out of control

Cosmetology Board Investigates Student for Giving Free Haircuts to Homeless People. Many licensing requirements are designed to protect markets from competition even if people are giving away their services.

Maybe you were fortunate to hear the unhinged Robert Reich suggest that the Berkeley protestors were hired by Milo Yiannopoulos to protest. Is Berkeley really looking for the protesters who shut down Yiannopoulos?

Here's good news: butter is healthier for you tha vegetable oil. Enjoy

Mike Flynn was fired as a result of operatives left over from the Obama administration. Here's the real story.

Climate change efforts out of control. California schools cutting meat and cheese from school lunches to fight global warming.

What you need to know about Oroville Dam

Here's an interview with a dam safety expert on the Oroville Dam crisis. He finds fault with the design and with the emergency response. You can listed to the podcast or read the transcript below it.

An assortment of links

It is time for new laws that will make higher education leaders take the 1st Amendment seriously. Concerning the rioters in Berkely supressing free speech by Glenn Reynolds in USA Today

UC Berkeley's Police Chief Offers Terrible Excuses for Her Failure. When things go wrong, the capable leader accepts responsibility

Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas To Pay Low Wages To Immigrants. In fact the US workers are being forced to train their low-priced replacements

To Fix Counterterrorism, End Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism' Strategy. CVE delusionally forbids the conclusion that radical Islamic ideology has any causative effect on terrorist plotting.

 “Fake news” has evolved from describing the product of websites deliberately pushing false stories, hoaxes and conspiracy theories to now include pretty much any claim of dubious nature. Robbed of its original and specific meaning, “fake news” is now used, often sarcastically, to describe any piece of information that someone doesn’t like.

A few progressives have been wondering aloud this week why it is that Democrats have stirred themselves to oppose, with steely resolve, the nomination of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, while more or less going along with the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. So why does DeVos get the Eichmann treatment while Sessions just gets a rap on the knuckles?

Christians Are Bad Tippers, and That's a Problem! Why is that?

Gravy Train Flows Wide And Deep At Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Agency. 228 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau  (CFPB) are paid more than $200,000

Residential Advisor Loses Job Because She Didn’t ‘Demonstrate a Commitment to Social Justice’

Neil Gorsuch has an ideal resume for a Supreme Court justice.

Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago

More than a decade ago, federal and state officials and some of California’s largest water agencies rejected concerns that the massive earthen spillway at Oroville Dam — at risk of collapse Sunday night and prompting the evacuation of 185,000 people — could erode during heavy winter rains and cause a catastrophe.

Three environmental groups — the Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and the South Yuba Citizens League — filed a motion with the federal government on Oct. 17, 2005, as part of Oroville Dam’s relicensing process, urging federal officials to require that the dam’s emergency spillway be armored with concrete, rather than remain as an earthen hillside. 

The environmentalists seem to have been right this time. Read the whole thing   The folks who buy the water didn't want to pay for the upgrades.

A collection of links for you

Andrew Klavan "What I saw at the prayer breakfast"

A nostaligic walk through the history of Pan Am Airlines

John Davidson "Trump is no fascist. He is a champion for the forgotten millions"

NYT CEO Tells CNBC That Paper’s News Coverage Does Not Have a Liberal Bias

Conservatives just had their best fortnight in a decade

There are fascists on campus.

Glenn Reynolds "A few modest suggestions on amending the Constitution"

Is there a campus rape epidemic?

Time for Trump to Release Full Details of the Iran Nuclear Deal

Have you seen the stories that Eric Trump's trip to Uruguay cost taxpayers $98,000? 

Scott Adams on Republicans and Democrats

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, writes a blog. Here's an interesting thought experiment about the differences between Republicans and Democrats

The left has done a stellar job of demonizing Trump supporters and Republicans in general. Their excellent persuasion involves conflating the bad apples with the entire group. Both sides do it. The right calls everyone on the left selfish snowflakes, and the left calls everyone on the right racists. They do it because it works. The brain likes to conflate things. And if the shiniest object in our view involves headlines about racists, or lefty rioters, those images stick in our minds and taint our impressions of the entire group.

Read the whole thing

Global warming update

This Article claims that NOAA manipulated their global warming data to influence the Paris conference on climate change

The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

The insanity of calling Trump "Hitler"

This is an excellent article on Hitler which demonstrates the idiocy of calling Trump by that name.

The thing my father and I have often discussed, through the years, is the eye-rolling art of comparing American presidents to Hitler. It is such an absurdity we find it amusing …and frustrating. It’s often just a punch line. Like the Soup Nazi wasn’t really a Nazi. He was just mean. The Nazi part made it funny. You know …over-the-top. Like “grammar Nazi” or “spelling Nazi.” Nobody is really a “Nazi.” It’s our representation of something we consider jarring, strident, intractable and inhumane.

But the truth about Nazis isn’t funny at all. It’s bloody and horrible and gut churning. And it involves machine guns and butchery and inhumanity on a scale that takes your breath away. Nobody is really a “soup Nazi” …unless they served it in a concentration camp.

The idea of comparing an American president to Hitler is just as absurd …from any angle, in any context. The American system ITSELF pretty much prevents “Hitlers” from showing up. And America ITSELF is anathema to what Hitler was trying to create. An American ANYTHING or ANYONE is hard to fit into the Hitler model. It’s just not apples to apples.

Fracking

As you may recall, the Obama EPA came up with a draft report that said fracking was safe.  They got so much pushback from the anti-frackers that they rewrote the report to list everything that could go wrong in a fracking operation.  The anti-frackers are using this revised report to try and get fracking banned wherever possible, costing jobs and revenue to the states where they succeed.

Here's an article in response to a proposed ban where the author does a critical review of the EPA report and takes out the politics.

Opponents of fracking claim it will contaminate water supplies, but a six-year, $29 million report studying the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing by the Environmental Protection Agency failed to produce any evidence suggesting fracking has caused widespread or systemic impacts on water supplies.

EPA estimates more than 110,000 wells throughout the nation have used hydraulic fracturing to produce oil or natural gas since 2011. Agency officials stated there have been specific instances where oil and natural gas production have led to contaminated water, but the number of cases in which fracking has negatively impacted water supplies is relatively low compared to the number of wells that have been drilled.

Is Trump really a monster?

Piers Morgan, a pretty smart guy but reliably liberal, addresses the issue of whether Trump is a monster who should not be invited to the UK.

There’s the popular global narrative for you after just ten days of Donald Trump’s tenure as President of the United States of America. Indeed, such is his monstrosity status, there is currently a petition in Britain to have him banned from receiving a state visit as a guest of The Queen that has so far been signed by nearly two million people.

This follows the huge marches around the US and UK in response to Trump’s ill-conceived and poorly executed temporary ‘travel ban’ on immigrants and refugees from seven terror-strewn predominantly Muslim countries.

Protesters, led by incensed celebrities and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, have been competing to see who can be most abusive about the President. Many of them, ironically, deploying the very same coarse misogynist rhetoric they cite as one of their main reasons to hate him.

This article is worth reading just to see the list of actually horrible people who have visited the UK

Why is the NYT lying about Donald Trump?

The New York Times is on  a mission to discredit Trump. They should look inward

Things are normal again

Victor Davis Hanson on how Trump represents a shift back from the Left to normal politics and culture

California's loose voter registration

Hillary, and a lot of other Democrats, got a lot of votes in California, especially in areas with lots of illegal aliens. How much does California's system's susceptibility to fraud contribute to the Democrat majority?

Persecution of Christians is growing

Donald Trump's ban of Muslims from certain countries has gotten lots of publicity and protests. You haven't heard much about the exemption for Christians who are being persecuted worldwide, mostly in Muslim dominated countries. Persecution is growing as Muslim dominated countries descend into lawlessness, but it's not just Muslim countries.

Read the article

The kids can't write

Nearly 500 people — all college graduates — applied for a communications job at Marc Tucker’s organization. Candidates were asked to write a one-page summary of a report published last year. “Only one could produce a satisfactory summary,” writes Tucker

Why can't the kids write?

How to switch a pro-choice person to pro-life

Scott Adams is a really smart fellow.  He predicted that Trump would win the election back in 2015. You know him as the creator of the cartoon "Dilbert". He writes regularly in a blog and shares his insights. Here's an interesting one on converting a pro-choice advocate to pro-life which has applications outside this specific exercise.

Five things you should know about Gorsuch

This guy seems like a really good choice  Did you know his wife is a pastor in an Episcopalian Church? He's just an usher.  Read the other four things.

More analysis of Judge Gorsuch

From the Washington Post

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch on religious freedom

The New York Times In favor

The New York Times Against.  But it fails to mention the "Biden Rule" created when Joe was head of the committee, that the Supreme Court nominee should not be confirmed in the last year of a President's term. This was in the very same New York Times.