Now it's goats against rats

In Bremerton they are calling in the goats to reduce the prevalence of rats. But the goats will be called in to do what they do best - eat blackberry bushes!

Seattle Times

Seahawk victory!!

We are ready for the Superbowl with the best defense in the NFL. Oddsshark

The Hawks are busy this week getting ready for the game while the Patriots are busy explaining how 11 of 12 of their game balls could be under inflated at halftime while all the Indianapolis Colts’ balls were within the rules. NESN How could anyone suspect the Patriots of cheating? Coach Belichik was fined $500,000 and a first-round draft choice in 2007 for cheating. ESPN

But the Hawks won’t win by citing history. They will win by scoring while holding back the Patriots offense.

The Harvard Library - Prof Eliot's 5-foot bookshelf

The Harvard Library

The publisher P F Collier and Son over 100 years ago asked the president of Harvard to build a list of books he recommended to provide an overview of Western civilization. His list was 50 volumes - some of which are one book; others are two or three works. It is known as Prof Eliot's 5-foot bookshelf of 1910. Later Prof Eliot also did a series of fiction - seventeen volumes. (Though the original list contains some fiction.)

In print: they sold thousands of copies. Used sets are always available at Ebay.

Online - Prof Eliot’s five-foot library at Open Cultures is the overview. They lead to the following four online sources for the full set.

Eliott's FULL texts, the scanned originals are at Archive.org

• Archive.org

Internet Archive is actually at archive.org. It has the full set in plain text, Epub, Kindle, PDF for download and html (for online reading)… and some I am not familiar with.

• Harvard Classics at Internet Archive

At Project Gutenberg. They have four formats: plain text, Epub, Kindle for download and html (for online)

• H C at Gutenberg

And Bartleby has the full set in html for online reading:

• H C at Bartleby

I learned about this in Weekly Standard magazine.

Race to Alaska

To Alaska by water, w/o motor.

In June, 2015 some brave souls will race from Port Townsend, WA to Ketchikan, Alaska. Human and wind power only, no motors of any kind. No support. Of course contestants will be stopping at ports along the way — it would be way less fun if they couldn’t stop — but no support boats. And they must carry normal safety gear and a GPS locator.

Simple, but a big challenge.

Race to Alaska

Seattle Times

Free speech already dead in Europe

Free speech is dead in Europe. The Islamists certainly want it dead, but it’s the Europeans who killed it.

Benny Huang at Patriot Update

… Free speech is dead in Europe and while it is certainly tempting to blame the immigrants, as intolerant as they may be, it would also be folly. The real culprits are the cowardly, hedonistic, post-Christian, post-industrial native born white majority.

The three bestial al-Qaeda terrorists who murdered twelve people at Charlie Hebdo HQ might seem like menacing enemies of free speech but they’re actually bush league amateurs when it comes to gagging people. The real pros are sitting behind desks in the various capitals of Europe. Nearly every European nation extends some guarantee of free speech to its citizens, and nearly every one of them flagrantly violates that guarantee.

… The authorities in Britain arrest people who harbor banned ideas, and believe me, I’ve got a lot of them. Clegg’s prescient countryman, Eric Blair (George Orwell) predicted this phenomenon nearly seventy years ago and gave it a name—thoughtcrime.

Thought criminals should take notice that they will find no shelter in today’s United Kingdom. Little more than a week before the cartoon jihadists spilled French blood, police in Scotland tweeted the following threat: “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media & any offensive comments will be investigated.” Offensive to whom, exactly? They don’t say. But in a free society it shouldn’t matter a lick. Offensive comments are exactly the kind of comments that free speech is designed to protect. Innocuous comments don’t require protection.

… On the Continent, outspoken MP Geert Wilders faces criminal prosecution under “hate speech” laws for comments he made about immigration. At a rally in the Hague he asked a crowd “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans?” to which they chanted, “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” Mindless xenophobia? I don’t think so, though it’s also irrelevant. Free speech protects mindless xenophobia.
Nor is everyone feeling the spirit of freedom after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Swedish MP Veronica Palm contacted the police to report that another MP of an opposing party, Bjoern Soeder, might have violated Swedish law with a comment he posted on Facebook concerning the terrorist attack in Paris. “’The Religion of Peace’ shows its face,” he said, clearly indicating with his use of derisive quotes that he doubts Islam’s pacifistic nature, as many people do. His nemesis Veronica Palm declared: “This statement is offensive to a group of people and I want to see if it comes under laws against inciting racial hatred.” Ms. Palm apparently does not understand that Islam is not a race. Even if it were, free speech guarantees the right to make racist comments as well.
Are we much better? Oh, a little bit, I suppose. Anyone who thinks that free speech is alive and well in America ought to experience the suffocating environment of academia. If you happen to be on a college campus and you still think America guarantees a healthy exchange of controversial ideas then you’re probably one of the drones who keeps the rest of us line. Good for you.

Europe, however, is a decade or two ahead of us in the downward slide toward mind control. Governmental censorship has infested the birthplaces of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill.

Via No Pasaran!

Longshoremen slow down West Coast ports

For months the longshoremen were claiming they were working as normal, despite clear evidence.

Ask Tom Riggan, CEO of Chelan Fresh. His cold storage is full of fruit and only half of his orders were able to ship through the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. Chilean Fresh had to lay off 250 employees and reduce 70 from full-time to part-time. Seattle Times

Also ask Blaine Calaway of Ellensburg

Blaine Calaway, vice president of sales for Ellensburg-based Calaway Trading, which ships grains, forages and hay products through the Seattle and Tacoma ports destined for Asia mainly as animal feed.

Calaway said he has had to reduce his employees’ hours by half — at a time when his employees usually are working overtime.

The longshoremen are not on strike. True. They are getting regular pay while slowing down loading, way down. 

The Washington suppliers being hurt are losing business now - and in the future. If customers cannot get the Washington fruit or grain they ordered they will buy from competitors, competitors in other countries.

Riggan, with Chelan Fresh, said he is worried about the same thing — specifically competitors buying Red Delicious apples from Italy. One customer in Taiwan has already started supplementing the limited orders it has received from Chelan with Italian apples.

“My fear is — once someone gets their foot in the door, the next year they can be your competition,” he said.

When the labor face-off is over will the officers of ILWU Local 19 help market Washington products to regain the markets they had last year, but lost due to this slowdown?

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We honor the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. today with a national holiday. We honor him for his brave battle against racism to get equal rights for people of all races. And for the nonviolent way he did it.

But you and I are restricted from hearing his words by his family. They have ownership rights and you can’t hear or see his words unless they make money. Having a national holiday would be enough for most people, but not them. USA Today

Churches and businesses torched in Niger

Religion of peace update. Ten dead. Churches and businesses were torched in Niger this weekend. Also a Christian school and an orphanage. An orphanage?

It was Muslims protesting the publishing in Charlie Hebdo of Mohammed cartoons. Protesting?

According to Newsmax 45 churches were torched.

According to All Africa it was 8 churches plus many businesses and five civilians dead in Niamey, and another five in Zinder.

 Photo: Kids guarding “el ganado,” the herd. From WorldRaider.com.

Italy's economy > Germany >> Luxembourg

Italy is in better shape than Germany? Not by the measures now used for big decisions.

But Laurence Kotlikoff says there is a better measure; it’s already being calculated, but not being used in the EU’s main measures. He says Europe should use the infinite-horizon fiscal gap instead of debt versus GDP.

Making Sense at PBS

… Now the Germans will be stuck. For the only way to properly measure a country’s fiscal status is via its infinite-horizon fiscal gap. And on a fiscal gap measure, Italy is in far better shape than Germany.

A country’s fiscal gap is the present value of all its projected future expenditure commitments net of all its projected future tax receipts. Whether the expenditure commitments are called one thing or another doesn’t matter to the fiscal gap. All commitments are put on the books.
Economists have been slow to realize that the official debt and its annual change – the deficit — measures fiscal language, not fiscal policy. But the profession is now clear on the point.

… 

Fiscal gaps are measured as the share of GDP needed to be raised each year in additional taxes to permit the government to meet all its expenditure commitments through time, including those labeled “debt service.” The most recent measurement of EU fiscal gaps was done in 2012 for 24 member states by the European Commission. The results are shown in Table 3.5 of the European Commission’s Fiscal Sustainability Report 2012.

Luxembourg, with its 9.7 percent of GDP fiscal gap, is in the worst shape of the included EU countries. The next biggest fiscal profligate is Belgium with a 7.4 percent gap. The Netherland’s 5.9 percent gap, the UK’s 5.2 percent gap, Finland’s 5.1 percent gap, and Spain’s 4.8 percent fiscal gap are also quite large. France and Germany, on the other hand, are close to fiscal balance with fiscal gaps of 1.6 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively.

As for Italy, its fiscal gap of negative 2.3 percent is the lowest of any of the 24 included countries.

This is shown in table 3.5 and graph 3.4 about page 42 of European Commission Financial Sustainability Report 2012 (PDF)

—— 

Kotlikoff also points out that many prominent economists have called on the US to use infinite-horizon fiscal gap accounting, The Inform Act

Cringe: Kerry tells France: You've got a friend

Esteemed Secretary of State John Kerry (Did you know he served in Vietnam?) skipped the march in Paris to support freedom of the press versus Islam jihad January 9 that included 40 heads of state. So to make up for that huge error he decided to show the people of France that we in the US are with them.

He brought James Taylor with him Friday to sing "You’ve got a friend.” Cringe. It embarrasses me to watch it. The video is embedded here - Newsbusters.

But the US government-controlled media failed to mention it. Don’t they find it news-worthy when the US Secretary of State embarrasses his country before the whole world? More from Newsbusters.

History note: In 1970 Taylor burst on the scene with the song Sweet Baby James and was an instant sensation. It’s acoustic and quiet… and influenced a generation.

Our Pacific Northwest maritime heritage

For us maritime fans there is a site showing present and past… attractions, lighthouses, organizations and ships/boats. It has a wealth of information. For example, 24 lighthouses (must be all of them?) and 29 museums. I didn’t know there was a maritime museum in Raymond; we drive through there when we go to Astoria or Long Beach.

Northwest Maritime Heritage site

Greenbay's strategy weapon

Greenbay's strategy weapon

No. It’s not cheese. Greenbay Packers players bide their time with a tough game - Settlers of Catan. A group of them play whenever they can.

Wall Street Journal - subscription required.

(Sometimes the pay wall can be bypassed by a Google search: "Green Bay’s Board-Game Obsession”.)

They are very, very serious:

But [backup quarterback] Flynn said the players take it so seriously that when he stopped by to play for the first time after a win last month, he was shocked by what happened when he attempted to turn on some celebratory music.

“I was just trying to play some music—some Pearl Jam, and [Bakhtiari] wouldn’t let me. He wanted to hear the players talk and strategize. He was very serious,” Flynn said. “They take it to a different level.”

Graphic: Wall Street Journal

Insider says to replace Obama's people in White House

Leslie Gelb is a Demo insider and he is fed up. He says Obama’s team has failed, but not only have they fail, they can’t see that they failed.

He says to fire all of his inner core, especially in the White House…. including John Kerry (“Do you know who I am?”*).

Daily Beast

The failure of Obama or Biden to show up in Paris made clear that most of the president’s team can’t be trusted to conduct U.S national security policy and must be replaced—at once.

Here’s why America’s failure to be represented at the Paris unity march was so profoundly disturbing. It wasn’t just because President Obama’s or Vice President Biden’s absence was a horrendous gaffe. More than this, it demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It’s simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is—with his current team and his way of making decisions. America, its allies, and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War.

Mr. Obama will have to excuse most of his inner core, especially in the White House. He will have to replace them with strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience.

* That’s what Kerry says when he treats people in Massachusetts like dirt.

Quick release of felony criminals in King County?

Dow Constantine needs to save money on jails and justice. So he wants to quickly release those arrested for felonies. !?

Even Mayor Ed Murray opposes.

Seattle Times

Kent Police Chief Ken Thomas is among those opposed to the book-and-release plan.

“Washington state has the highest property-crime rate in the United States of America,” Thomas said. “The way to deal with that is not less accountability by letting people out of jail but is looking for ways to effectively address the issue.”

Thomas cited an analysis by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs indicating that there were over 12,000 auto thefts in King County.

“That’s more than Snohomish, Pierce, Clark, Spokane and Thurston counties combined,” Thomas said. “The majority of the property crime is happening in King County, and we need to address that.”

Property-crime suspects, Thomas said, “need to be held in custody until they see a judge, even if it’s just a few days.”

Thomas said he and other law-enforcement leaders need to “get to work to come up with solutions to address the issue.”

“We can’t have this happen,” he added.

Dems lost because they didn't sell their tax increases

Go, guys! Make your case for tax increases. Louder!

They say they lost to the Republicans in November because…. I can’t make their case; quotes below

Wash Times

House Democrats, fresh off massive election losses, say the problem is they didn’t make a bold enough case for tax increases and wealth transfer to the poor. They rectified that Monday with a speech by Rep. Chris Van Hollen proposing tax increases on the wealthy with the money going straight to tax cuts for the poor and middle class.

And many more ideas. Why didn’t they do these things when they had control?

And reading their list clearly one of their key goals is to increase the complexity of our tax code. They have little handouts all over the place.

Americans have the right to be stupid - John Kerry

Consider the source: "Americans have the right to be stupid"

-- John Kerry at a news conference at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin February 26, 2013. Reuters

This weekend we saw that esteemed Mr. Kerry claims the right also. Instead of walking with 40 heads of state in Paris in solidarity with the victims of jihadist bombings in France, Kerry was in India. Why didn’t he attend? Seattle Times

Top ten volcanos for 2014

Even the runners up are interesting. Erik Klemetti has a blog about volcanoes at Wired. He held a poll for the top ten volcanic events of 2014. The competition is rough; even #9 Mt Etna has lava spattering.

#7 Nishinoshima Island in Japan today is ten times its size one year ago; yes, the lava built it up to ten times the size. The lava approaching the town of Pahoa on Hawaii’s Big island is #6.  #5 Kelut, Indonesia forced 100,000 people to flee. And there are four even better.

Eruptions at Wired

Photo: Nishinoshima Island, Japan. The warmer colors are the current flow! Photo from Japan Coast Guard

500 miles in a self-driving car - boring

They need it to be dull, of course. The non-driver knows what to do, but never has to do anything - while on a highway.

Wired

Turtle Taxi

Do you want to go slow? In Japan you can take Turtle Taxi. It has a button for the passenger to say “slow down.” It is used mostly by pregnant women and elderly people

Laughing Squid

Victory in Battle of New Orleans 200 years ago today

I never realized how important the Battle of New Orleans, at the end of the War of 1812, was. Indeed, since it came after signing of the peace treaty, I thought it was meaningless. Not at all.

First, it was a stunning defeat by irregulars of a battle-experienced British force of twice our size. They were stunned. And without the victory the British might have stayed in New Orleans and made it an outpost like Gibraltar, enabling them to interfere with our key shipping route, the Mississippi River.

Second, domestically. The New England merchants were unhappy with how the war interfered with their trade. They were unhappy to the point of drawing up a the list demands that concluded by threatening secession! But their delegation arrived in Washington the same day as news of the great victory.  They were instantly disgraced.

In total, it was a very important event in US history. Read more at:

Breitbart

Atlanta fire chief fired for Christian faith

Kelvin Cochran, fire chief of Atlanta for several years, was fired because of a book he wrote for his church.

Mayor Kasim Reed said,
“I want to be clear that the material in Chief Cochran’s book is not representative of my personal beliefs, and is inconsistent with the Administration’s work to make Atlanta a more welcoming city for all of her citizens -- regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, race and religious beliefs,”

Why are the mayor's personal beliefs the standard? He also claimed the book contained judgment and that is not protected speech.
Fox News

In Atalanta there is free speech only for certain groups.

They "printed" the offensive cartoons

I don't think they did this when it was dangerous, but today the Seattle P-I "printed" some of the cartoons - that is, they put them online. Today I expect there is safety in numbers.

The cartoons caused no offense when published, but later some Europe-based Muslim stirred up trouble using them. And people died.

Seattle P-I

Billionaire can't win until he has control

Tom Steyer explaining why his $74 million spent for climate-change-believing candidates resulted in election losses in 2014:

Steyer, meanwhile, said the GOP’s massive victory in November resulted from “that part of the world we don’t control.”

At Breitbart

If no one can put it in words - Liberal lexicon

The power of language: It doesn’t exist if no one can put it in words. George Orwell stumbled on this truth.

Daniel Hannan at New Criterion

…  Orwell got one thing uncannily right. In an appendix to his dystopian novel [1984], he discussed how an idea could be made literally unthinkable if there were no words to express it. The illustration he gave was the word “free.” In Newspeak, “free” could be used only in the sense of “this field is free from weeds” or “this dog is free from lice.” The concept of political or intellectual freedom had disappeared, because no one could put it into words.

What an eerily prescient example to have chosen. In recent years this is more or less what has happened to the word “free.” In 1948, “freedom” still had its traditional meaning of a guarantee against coercion: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship. Since then, however, “freedom” has come to mean “entitlement,” as in “freedom to work,” “freedom from hunger,” “freedom from discrimination,” and so on. Thus, the notion that the state ought not to boss us around becomes harder to convey, and the politician who supports that notion is disadvantaged.

Any discussion of the relationship between government and citizen is perforce conducted in loaded terms. You can still make the case for greater liberty, but not without sounding rather mean. A glossary will give some indication of how loaded the linguistics are against conservatives.

And a few examples from the Liberal Lexicon and its power:

… FREE SPEECH: Support for racists. We have been told so often that “free speech can never be used as an excuse for racism” that the two things have become conflated in our minds. Arguing for the first automatically opens you to the accusation of supporting the second. If you think that I exaggerate, cast your mind back to the case of the pensioner in Liverpool who was charged with “racially aggravated criminal damage” after scrawling “Free speech for England” on a condemned wall.

CONSERVATIVE: Neanderthal. Like “right-wing” (q.v.), but with the added bonus that it can be applied to both sides in the same conflict. Islamist “conservatives” want to impose headscarves while Western “conservatives” want to ban them. Hardline Israeli settlers and hardline Hamas terrorists are both “conservatives.” And so on.

In such a climate, it is difficult for a “right-wing” party which favors “tax cuts” and “profit” and the rest to make its case. People’s ears are not primed to appreciate the cadences of the conservative message. The very words we use condemn us as heartless blimps before we’ve started setting out our arguments.

Leftists grasped all this long ago. Gramsci, Derrida, and others deliberately set out to affect a semantic shift that would thwart their opponents. It happened to their languages, and now it is happening to ours. Until we can reclaim our vocabulary, we will always be playing with a handicap.

The graphic: First edition cover from Brown University Press 

Obama economy worse than we thought

The One, President Obama, said he was going to break down barriers, reduce the wealth gap and make life better for everyone. But he failed; he failed to do what he promised.

Chad Stafko at American Thinker

Now, six years later, the degree to which Barack Obama has failed, as seen in the data, is quite staggering.

Consider the wealth gap. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, in 2014 upper income households had almost seven times the wealth of middle class households. That is the largest gap between these respective groups in the three decades the Fed has collected such data. Yes, it's even higher than the "Evil 80s" under Reagan.

Uh, that wasn't supposed to happen!

Recall President Obama's campaign exchange with Joe the Plumber when he stated, "And I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Obama also spoke of his desire to redistribute wealth in a 1998 speech when he said, "I actually believe in (wealth) redistribution."

Closing the wealth gap is a Utopian goal of liberals and Obama was no different. He campaigned on it.

Yet, lower and middle class Americans, groups with which Democrats so often claim allegiance, have fallen further down the economic ladder under President Obama.

Consider this staggering comparison: In 2007, the average household income in America was $55,627.

In 2014, that figure had slipped to $53,880 -- Americans earned less on average than they did seven years prior. So, what has happened is that the average American family has been earning less than it did when the great Recession began. All the while, over that same period prices of practically everything else we buy rose.

Let's look deeper into segments of wealth within the nation.

According to government data, in 2007 the lowest quintile of earners in America made up 3.4% of total earnings. That means the lowest 20% of earners in America only collected 3.4% of the total earnings pie in 2007.

In 2013 (the latest available data), that figure had dropped to 3.2%. Bear with me on the math, because it is damning evidence of Obama's Utopian economic failure.

That reduction from 3.4% to 3.2% of total earnings means these folks have seen a 6.25% reduction in the slice of their total earnings pie over that period.

What about the highest earning quintile? Over that same period, their slice of the pie actually swelled from 49.7% in 2007 to 51.0% in 2013.

Those are official government numbers. That's the undeniable fact that liberals should know -- under your Messianic President, the rich literally got richer and the poor got poorer.

Even that bastion of objectivity, The New York Times, cited a National Employment Law Project study in an April article in which it was noted that a million jobs in middle-income industries were lost during the Great Recession. The article added that those million workers then often found themselves either unemployed or flipping burgers at a minimum wage job.

Wow. Under Obama the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

Obama fundraiser arrested as child molester

Did you hear? Terrence Bean in Oregon was arrested on felony charges of sex with a minor. He is a big-time Obama fundraiser

USA Today

On Wednesday, Portland, Ore. police arrested Terrence Patrick Bean, who has been charged with two felony counts of having sex with a minor last year. This man is not just any old guy accused of having sex with a 15-year-old – he's a big-money Democratic donor and liberal political activist with connections inside the Obama White House. Bean raised more than a half-million dollars for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.

"Bean has been one of the state's biggest Democratic donors and an influential figure in gay rights circles in the state," reports oregonlive.com. "He helped found two major national political groups, the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and has been a major contributor for several Democratic presidential candidates, including Barack Obama."

A search of the Federal Election Commission's campaign-finance database turns up thousands in donations every cycle by Bean to the Democratic Party's most powerful leaders, ...

… After the relationship between the two men ended, Lawson went public with claims that Bean had a practice of secretly videotaping himself having sex with others.

You didn’t hear about this? There was No mention of it in Seattle Times search.

Christians kidnapped and killed in Libya

Jihadists kidnapped 13 Christians in Sirte, Libya Saturday. They went through a building housing aid workers, asked each person for their ID, and took away thirteen Christians.

Earlier a Coptic couple, both MDs, and their daughter were killed. In March the bodies of seven Christians were found in Benghazi, Libya.

The Jihadists say they are Muslims; I believe them.

The Blaze

New dishwashers and washing machines take forever - and Brazil, the movie

And Obama put this on us. Doing us a favor. Tell us, Mr. President. And wear your unicorn suit while you do so.

American Thinker

… We visited the appliance shop where we had recently purchased a new clothes washing machine a few months earlier. I mentioned to the salesman that our new washer was very slow, taking nearly two hours to finish a large load compared to our old one, which took about 35 minutes. With a bright smile, he explained that that was because of the new federal energy efficiency standards for clothes washers enacted by the Obama administration’s Department of Energy in May 2012.

(I later looked this up on the Energy.gov website, and found that this new regulation was only one of over 40 new onerous energy regulations on products and appliances already enacted, with many more to come, including for Christmas lights. According to the website, these are “sensible steps” that will save consumers “billions on energy bills”. This is a highly suspect claim. When energy consumption decreases, utility companies typically raise the price per kilowatt hour to make up for the loss in revenue.)

And by the way, our salesman interjected, this standard also applies to new dishwashers. They now take as long as three hours to complete the wash and dry cycle. Oh, about your nineteen-year-old dishwasher…don’t expect the new one to last that long. No matter which one you buy, from $250 to $1000, the average expected life of the new washers is five to seven years.

Brazil? The movie:

… At about this time, I started hearing a song in my head. It was “Aquarela do Brazil”, the theme song of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie, Brazil. Gilliam’s film is a “dystopian satire” of a totalitarian society where all of the appliances have been designed and built by mindless bureaucrats.

The protagonist, played by Jonathan Pryce, haplessly tries to use a telephone that has wires and plugs like an old-fashioned operator’s switchboard. Computer screens are so tiny they need to be read with magnifying glasses. Pryce’s air conditioning system is a monstrous contortion of smoking tubes and wires. When it breaks and he tries to get it fixed, he is trapped in a government-controlled nightmare of endless forms and apathetic repairmen.

Robert De Niro plays a “terrorist” rogue engineer who zip-lines himself into people’s apartments and fixes their air conditioning systems without government permission. ...

CIA tells truth about UFO sightings

When the Air Force started high-altitude testing (60,000 feet) of the U-2 spy plane there was increased sightings of “UFOs."

NY Post

In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew between 10,000 and 20,000 feet, while military aircraft such as B-47s and B57s flew below 40,000 feet.
M
When the U-2 started flying at over 60,000 feet, the number of reported UFO sightings exploded.

“[UFO] reports were most prevalent in the early evening hours from pilots of airliners flying from east to west. When the sun dropped below the horizon of an airliner flying at 20,000 feet, the plane was in darkness,” the authors explain.

“But, if a U-2 was airborne in the vicinity of the airliner at the same time, its horizon from an altitude of 60,000 feet was considerably more distant, and, being so high in the sky, its silver wings would catch and reflect the rays of the sun and appear to the airliner pilot, 40,000 feet below, to be fiery objects.

“Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports.” The report adds that at the time, no one believed manned flight was possible above 60,000 feet, and so didn’t expect to see objects so high in the sky.

The original 1998 report at CIA (PDF).

Race baiting is now the third rail of Am politics

Says Ben Stein in American Spectator

… But you cannot win siding with Al Sharpton and looting gangsters against the police. So, the GOP wins a huge win in Congress and Hillary does not look inevitable anymore.

The NYPD are dust in the wind. They tell us which way the wind of the white working class is blowing: against the “progressives” and the race agitators. Suddenly, the Democrats start looking like the fools who touched the third rail of American politics. That third rail is not Social Security any longer: It is race baiting and an unmerited, unwarranted attack on the most racially generous people in the world: white Americans. When the President and that creature de Blasio call them racist pigs and then mutter stupid platitudes when two of the police get killed as explicit race terrorism, the third rail has been not just touched but embraced.

When white middle class and working class people are insulted by the Sharptons and the President, they don’t riot: they vote Republican, the party of law and order. Obama had to touch that rail. It was his destiny, but unless something big happens, it’s going to electrocute his party.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to Al Sharpton, best friend the Republican Party has had since Reagan. ...

Jihadist discloses locations of ISIS safe houses

Abu Abdul-Rahman nee Mark Taylor of New Zealand disclosed the locations of several ISIS safe houses. Whoops! He was proudly sending tweets about his brave activities in Syria. But he didn’t know that he had geo-location turned on and every tweet disclosed the location it was sent from! He deleted the tweets later, but too late. Interested citizens had already captured them and turned them over to intelligence agencies.

He is also a favorite because he publicly burned his New Zealand passport… then asked to have it reinstated.

Breitbart