Seoul: North Korea Fires Rocket Seen as Covert Missile Test (UPDATED) | TheBlaze.com

Seoul: North Korea Fires Rocket Seen as Covert Missile Test (UPDATED) | TheBlaze.com:

"SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Sunday defied international warnings and launched a long-range rocket that the United Nations and others call a cover for a banned test of technology for a missile that could strike the U.S. mainland."

Brexit - France to send Calais migrants to Britain if Out vote wins

Brexit - France to send Calais migrants to Britain if Out vote wins | UK | News | Daily Express:
MIGRANTS living in shanty camps in northern France will be put on ferries and sent to Britain the day after a vote to leave the EU, a French mayor warned last night.
Franck Dhersin said the Touquet agreement, which was signed in 2003 and places the UK border at the French ports, will be quickly torn up after an out vote, allowing the French government to hire DFDS ferries to start the mass exodus immediately.
...Plans for the mass ferry evacuations have the full backing of Calais mayor Natalie Bouchart and Xavier Bertrand, the recently re-elected powerful president of the Nord-Pasde-Calais-Picardie region.
In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Express, Mr Dhersin said:
“We all believe that Britain will vote to leave the EU because of the rise of nationalism, not only in your country, but in other European countries as well.
“Then the Touquet agreement we have at the moment, which puts the UK border in France, will quickly come to an end.
Be in no doubt, it will no longer exist.
“The border will move to Dover and so the migrants who come to Calais and other ports and towns in northern France will then be put on DFDS ferries and taken to Dover. This will happen..."

Secretary Kerry Says ISIS Aren't Muslims

Secretary Kerry Says ISIS Aren't Muslims | The Daily Caller:
At a conference of coalition members tasked with fighting ISIS in Rome yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry said members of the terrorist organization are not Muslims but apostates of Islam.
“Daesh [ISIS] is in fact nothing more than a mixture of killers, of kidnappers, of criminals, of thugs, of adventurers, of smugglers and thieves,” Kerry said.
“And they are also above all apostates, people who have hijacked a great religion and lie about its real meaning and lie about its purpose and deceive people in order to fight for their purposes.”
Apostate, according to The Washington Post, has traditionally been used to describe an individual or, in the plural, a group who abandoned or renounced their religion.
Kerry’s application of the term to ISIS is somewhat ironic considering the terrorist organization has justified its attacks on other Muslims by claiming the victims were apostates themselves, which suggests ISIS militants are active participants in the Muslim faith..."

Chicago Is Falling Apart

Chicago Is Falling Apart - The American Interest:
Budgetary pressures and low investor confidence are forcing Chicago’s public school system to borrow money at ruinous interest rates just to stay afloat. Reuters reports:
The Chicago Board of Education managed to sell only $725 million of an originally planned $795.5 million of tax-exempt bonds, and yields on the deal topped out at 8.5 percent, a massive premium relative to higher-rated debt sold in the U.S. municipal bond market and a clear indication of investors’ view of the depths of the district’s fiscal woes [. . .]
“It’s a Puerto-Rico grade yield and clearly signals that the district is on an unsustainable path,” said Matt Fabian, a partner at Municipal Market Analytics.
That the third largest city in the United States (until relatively recently considered a well-governed municipality with a promising future) is seen as this kind of risk by the credit markets should drive the message home that America’s bluest cities and states aren’t on a sustainable path.
And as the fiscal vise tightens around these governments, various political conflicts will come to the fore.
The first is internal: Public sector unions, which jealously protect their generous pension guarantees, will be pitted against the overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies that disproportionately suffer from underfunded public services (like Chicago’s failing public schools).
The second is external: If blue cities around the country remain unable to provide necessary services at sustainable cost levels, they will inevitably start clamoring for federal assistance. 
Some of that help will have to be given—but only in exchange for profound institutional reforms.
The ongoing blue model collapse is one of the most underreported, and politically consequential, stories of our time.
How it will be resolved—and the contours of the political and fiscal system that will emerge in its wake—remain an open, and crucial, issue.

Lunch video-----Aviation PhotoCrew Aerial Showreel

Noon-toon

After Complaining About Cost of Benghazi Probe, Dems Are Caught Engaging in ‘Height of Hypocrisy’ | TheBlaze.com

After Complaining About Cost of Benghazi Probe, Dems Are Caught Engaging in ‘Height of Hypocrisy’ | TheBlaze.com:

"Democrats on the House Benghazi committee who repeatedly complained about the cost of the probe awarded thousands of dollars in bonuses to staffers, public records examined by Fox News reveal.

According to the records, six Democratic staffers were given a grand total of $33,600 at the end of 2014 and 2015."

Excellent read!-----Great Myths of the Great Depression

Great Myths of the Great Depression | Foundation for Economic Education
Many volumes have been written about the Great Depression and its impact on the lives of millions of Americans.
Historians, economists, and politicians have all combed the wreckage searching for the “black box” that will reveal the cause of this legendary tragedy.
Sadly, all too many of them decide to abandon their search, finding it easier perhaps to circulate a host of false and harmful conclusions about the events of seven decades ago.
How bad was the Great Depression?
Over the four years from 1929 to 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines, and utilities fell by more than half.
People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent.
Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height.
The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933.
One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War.
Old myths never die; they just keep showing up in college economics and political science textbooks. 
Students today are frequently taught that unfettered free enterprise collapsed of its own weight in 1929, paving the way for a decade-long economic depression full of hardship and misery.
President Herbert Hoover is presented as an advocate of “hands-off,” or laissez-faire, economic policy, while his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, is the economic savior whose policies brought us recovery.
This popular account of the Depression belongs in a book of fairy tales and not in a serious discussion of economic history, as a review of the facts demonstrates.
The Great, Great, Great, Great Depression
To properly understand the events of the time, it is appropriate to view the Great Depression as not one, but four consecutive depressions rolled into one.
Professor Hans Sennholz has labeled these four “phases” as follows: the business cycle; the disintegration of the world economy; the New Deal; and the Wagner Act.[1]
The first phase explains why the crash of 1929 happened in the first place; the other three show how government intervention kept the economy in a stupor for over a decade.
Phase I: The Business Cycle
Phase II: Disintegration of the World Economy
Phase III: The New Deal
Phase IV: The Wagner Act

Rams Stiff St. Louis, Leave City with $144 Million Bill

Rams Stiff St. Louis, Leave City with $144 Million Bill - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
St. Louis residents no longer have a football team, but that doesn’t mean they will get to stop paying for one. 
While the Rams won a vote in mid-January to relocate to Los Angeles, St. Louis taxpayers will still be responsible for making $144 million in debt and maintenance payments for the Edward Jones Dome. 

Lewis Reed, the St. Louis Board of Alderman president, has asked the NFL for money to help pay off the debt, but he seems unaware of how the multi-billion dollar league operates. 

As Reason has reported in the past, stadium financing is one way the NFL holds cities hostage—either pay for a state-of-the-art facility or lose the prestige of having a professional football team. 
This has resulted in often lopsided stadium deals that leave cities (and their taxpayers) burdened with much of the debt. 

As Reuters points out:

Across the country, cities have gotten stuck with substantial costs after sports teams leave or even move across town. Often, local governments must pay bonds, maintenance costs, or demolition fees after a team is gone.

Houston’s iconic Astrodome, once dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World, sits empty a decade after the facility housed 25,000 evacuees of Hurricane Katrina and nearly 20 years after the Oilers left. The Detroit Lions’ former Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, was used sporadically after the team moved downtown in 2002, but shuttered for good when the inflatable roof was deflated.

St. Louis isn’t the only city that regrets it’s deal with the NFL. 
Reason’s Ed Krayewski wrote just a couple weeks ago that San Francisco residents are having buyer’s remorse after realizing that their agreement with the NFL to host a Super Bowl in exchange for a new stadium in Santa Clara, CA resulted in a $5.3 million bill for early lease termination. 
So why would any smart city want the NFL? 
Reason TV explored this question in the video below..."

Obama bullied bank to pay racial settlement without proof: report

Obama bullied bank to pay racial settlement without proof: report | New York Post:
Newly uncovered internal memos reveal the Obama administration knowingly exaggerated charges of racial discrimination in probes of Ally Bank and other defendants in the $900 billion car-lending business as part of a “racial justice” campaign that’s looking more like a massive government extortion and shakedown operation.
So far, Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has reached more than $220 million in settlements with several auto lenders since the agency launched its anti-discrimination crusade against the industry in 2013.
Several other banks are under active investigation.
That’s despite the fact that the CFPB had no actual complaints of racial discrimination — it was all just based on half-baked statistics.
A confidential 23-page internal report detailing CFPB’s strategy for going after lenders shows why these companies are forking over millions of dollars in restitution and fines to the government despite denying any wrongdoing.
The high-level memo, sent by top CFPB civil-rights prosecutors to the bureau’s director and revealed by a House committee, admits their methods for proving discrimination were seriously flawed from the start and had little chance of holding up in court.
Yet they figured they could muscle Ally, as well as future defendants, with threats and intimidation.
“Some of the claims being made in this case present issues, such as use of [race] proxying and reliance on the disparate-impact doctrine, that would pose litigation risks meriting serious consideration prior to taking administrative action or filing suit in district court,” the Oct. 7, 2013, memo addressed to CFPB chief Richard Cordray acknowledges.
“Nevertheless,” it added, “Ally may have a powerful incentive to settle the entire matter quickly without engaging in protracted litigation.”
At the time, the Detroit-based bank was seeking permission from the Federal Reserve to remain a financial holding company. 
Without regulatory approval, Ally risked losing key business lines, primarily its insurance subsidiaries.
Prosecutors also sought to use the Community Reinvestment Act as leverage against Ally.
At the time, the FDIC was reviewing the bank’s compliance with the anti- redlining law..."

KICK THE COCKROACHES OUT: Sweden To Deport 80,000 Muslim Refugees Over Migrant-Linked Violence — Freedom Daily

KICK THE COCKROACHES OUT: Sweden To Deport 80,000 Muslim Refugees Over Migrant-Linked Violence — Freedom Daily:

"Sweden will deport 80,000 migrants who arrived in the country last year and also had their asylum application denied.

Anders Ygemen, the country’s Interior Minister, said that the Swedish government had asked the police and other agencies to organize and enforce their removal."

MUST READ!-----DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties

DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties | TheHill
Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan.
Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested.
The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.
Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” 
He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused.
His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots.
The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.
After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.
Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots...”

AM Fruitcake

History for February 8

History for February 8 - On-This-Day.com:
William Tecumsen Sherman 1820 - Union General during U.S. Civil War, Jules Verne 1828, Lana Turner 1921 


Jack Lemmon 1925, James Dean 1931, John Williams 1932 - Composer, conductor 


1861 - The Confederate States of America was formed. 


1896 - The Western Conference was formed by representatives of Midwestern universities. The group changed its name to the Big 10 Conference. 


1904 - The Russo-Japanese War began with Japan attacking Russian forces in Manchuria. 


1910 - William D. Boyce incorporated the Boy Scouts of America. 


1963 - The Kennedy administration prohibited travel to Cuba and made financial and commercial transactions with Cuba illegal for U.S. citizens. 


1980 - U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced a plan to re-introduce draft registration. 


1985 - "The Dukes of Hazzard" ended its 6-1/2 year run on CBS television. 


1993 - General Motors sued NBC, alleging that "Dateline NBC" had rigged two car-truck crashes to show that some GM pickups were prone to fires after certain types of crashes. The suit was settled the following day by NBC. 

The Paris Attacks 'Mastermind' Made 2 Horrifying Revelations...Obama NEEDS TO Listen

The Paris Attacks 'Mastermind' Made 2 Horrifying Revelations...Obama NEEDS TO Listen:

"If there were ever an “I told you so” moment regarding President Obama’s plan to flood the country with Muslim immigrants seeking asylum from civil war and terrorism in the Middle East, this could certainly be it.

New information just revealed about the murderous mastermind of the Paris terror attacks in November confirms the worst suspicions of critics fighting Obama’s plan to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in the United States despite fears that the migrants cannot be adequately vetted."

Michigan Man Accused of Supporting Islamic State Planned to Attack Church: ‘It’s My Dream to Behead Someone’ | TheBlaze.com

Michigan Man Accused of Supporting Islamic State Planned to Attack Church: ‘It’s My Dream to Behead Someone’ | TheBlaze.com:

"DETROIT (TheBlaze/AP) — Authorities have arrested a 21-year-old Michigan man whom they accuse of supporting Islamic State militants and plotting — as well as practicing — to attack a Detroit church.

Khalil Abu-Rayyan, of Dearborn Heights, appeared Thursday in U.S. District Court in Detroit and is jailed pending a Monday hearing. He hasn’t been charged with terrorism-related crimes but has been investigated since May and faces marijuana and gun charges."

How FBI blocks whistleblower fighting dismissal; new bill could help others

How FBI blocks whistleblower fighting dismissal; new bill could help others - The Washington Post
Sometimes Uncle Sam’s rules and regulations just don’t make sense.
Take the case of Darin Jones, a former FBI employee who said he was fired after making whistleblower disclosures about a $234,000 awards ceremony, improper procurement spending and a conflict of interest involving a former assistant director and computer help desk contract among other complaints.
“I was wrongfully terminated from my GS-15 Supervisory Contract Specialist in retaliation for whistleblowing on August 24, 2012, the last day of my one year probationary period,” Jones said.
This story isn’t about whether his allegations are right or wrong, but how the FBI and the Justice Department treats employees who, in good faith, make allegations about waste, fraud and abuse.
Jones’s appeal of his dismissal was rejected because he took his allegations to the wrong place. 
He went to his supervisors, which is reasonable in a rational world.
But the FBI has a list of appropriate places for staffers to take allegations, like the Office of Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility. Jones’s boss wasn’t on the list.
It’s kind of like the FBI refusing to investigate a child’s kidnapping because the parents first called the local police.
In too many cases, FBI whistleblowers are treated like the wrongdoers the FBI hunts, instead of the concerned citizens the FBI needs.
Unlike most other federal employees, FBI staffers who fight adverse personnel actions are subjected to what can be an interminable in-house process, with no outside appeal allowed..."

Obama Goes Out Of His Way To Remove American Flag In The White House... ⋆ US Herald

Obama Goes Out Of His Way To Remove American Flag In The White House... ⋆ US Herald:

"The American flag has been replaced with a bright yellow drape. For whatever reason, Obama is separating himself from the American identity.

Moreover then the obvious visuals and change in décor of the White House, is how Obama has “transformed America” around the world, changing the balance of power and tilting it towards Russia and China, and ailing America with a recognized terrorist state, that of Iran and purposely distancing himself from the middle east’s only true democracy Israel."

Just Say No to Wind Turbines – Birds and Blades

Just Say No to Wind Turbines – Birds and Blades:
Wind energy is not free, not efficient, not safe for humans, not environmentally friendly... 
Wind energy is viewed by many as an alternative energy panacea.
Is it?
Many issues arise from wind turbine power generation.
The wind is touted as free, non-polluting, efficient, a CO2 reduction technique, environmentally friendly, safe for humans, and effective against climate change.
Let’s review today’s facts. 
Please feel free to request primary source material for each of these observations.
The rare earth neodymium is the magnet at the top of the turbine tower.
Chinese rare earth mines kill and maim thousands of workers each year.
Those who survive have extremely high cancer rates.
The mine tailings for the rare earth mines are the most polluted, poisoned places on Planet Earth, according to Chinese environmental organizations.
Visit Baotou, Inner Mongolia, on Google to see the vast polluted lake of poison.
Infrasound, sound below 20 MHz, sickens many who live near wind turbines.
Wind turbine flicker makes others sleepless or ill. 
While turbine set backs are encouraged, little enforcement ensues.
Those people with health complaints are ignored.
More than 260 people have died in wind turbine structural liberations—crash and burns—around the world.
There have been 1,700+ such structural liberations during the past decade.
Significant amounts of pollutants are released during a turbine fire.
The wind industry receives massive tax support (public supported profits!), while rate payers see massive price increases. 
Prices are guaranteed, even when wind does not blow.
...A $40 increase in a monthly electricity bill takes food off the table for poor children and the elderly.
Wind turbines offer intermittent power.
The wind blows irregularly.
Turbines spin only with the wind.
The power grid demands constant power sourcing.
Stand-by generation comes from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power.
These cause increased CO2 emissions, as they must spin in reserve, whether they are in use or waiting. 
Thousands of tons of CO2 are emitted by these stand-by power sources. 
This completely defeats the very climate advantage sought.
Turbines are inefficient. 
At best they convert 12-20% of the potential energy available into electricity.
Their rated capacity overstates their functional capacity by a significant margin.
Yet operators are paid based upon their rated capacity.
Lots more here.
Read on.

More 'cli-fi' in the college classroom: Great (and and not-so-great) climate doomsday stories

More 'cli-fi' in the college classroom: Great (and and not-so-great) climate doomsday stories - The College Fix:
It seems my article from last Saturday about the use of “cli-fi” — climate fiction — stories in various college courses attracted a bit of attention.
...The University of Winnepeg’s Heather Snell’s course description for a class which includes cli-fi is another example:
We study various theoretical and critical strategies for reading YA [Young Adult] texts, including feminist, queer, transgender, postmodern, posthuman, postcolonial, critical race, cli-fi and ecocritical; 
cultural assumptions about children and childhood; trends in educational theory and practice; 
the economic and political contexts of the production, consumption and marketing of YA texts for young adults; and popular culture and media for young adults."