In the 1950’s a man or a woman might ask their spouse innocently, do you know where the kids are?
In 2018 we seriously want to know if our kids know Croatia, where is it? or Tokyo for that matter. Or, have they read the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?
List of 603 acts of violence against Trump supporters.
Each state needs to pass a law requiring ALL political donations to candidates for political representation of their state and their citizens must originate from resident citizens of their state.
Then, during primaries, candidates for the office of President of the United States would provide audited documentation to confirm that donations to their political campaign originated from U.S. citizens. No law is really needed for that purpose. President Trump could set the standard for the 2020 election. Candidates who did not provide audited documentation would not survive the primaries.
October 8, 2018: Professor Richard Lindzen said the UN IPCC report released this week had reduced the alleged tipping point from 2C to 1.5C because there had been no significant warming for 20 years. “Warming of any significance ceased about 20 years ago, and 2C warming was looking increasingly unlikely.” Professor Lindzen provided a lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, England at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Lindzen is an “American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983 until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, “Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report on climate change.
Professor Lindzen is speaking to a non-technical audience and explains his terms well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1306&v=X2q9BT2LIUA
I deleted all Robert De Niro, George Clooney and Ron Howard movies from my server. Barbara Streisand was deleted in 2016, for the record.
Next? Make my day. I have been buying music and movies all of my almost 70 years. My collection of music is 65 days of continously different music and hundreds of movies. I will know what not to buy in the future.
Great and true rant by Dov Fischer. I endorse it completely.
Everyone Is Smart, Except Trump
It really is quite simple. Everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump. That’s why they all are billionaires and all got elected President. Only Trump does not know what he is doing Only Trump does not know how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Anderson Cooper knows how to stand up to Putin. The whole crowd at MSNBC does. All the journalists do.
They could not stand up to Matt Lauer at NBC. They could not stand up to Charlie Rose at CBS. They could not stand up to Mark Halperin at NBC Nor up to Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, nor Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, nor Michael Oreskes at NPR, at the New York Times, or at the Associated Press. But — oh, wow! — can they ever stand up to Putin! Only Trump is incapable of negotiating with the Russian tyrant.
Remember the four years when Anderson Cooper was President of the United States? And before that — when the entire Washington Post editorial staff jointly were elected to be President? Remember? Neither do I
The Seedier Media never have negotiated life and death, not corporate life and death, and not human life and death. They think they know how to negotiate, but they do not know how. They go to a college, are told by peers that they are smart, get some good grades, proceed to a graduate degree in journalism, and get hired as analysts. Now they are experts, ready to take on Putin and the Iranian Ayatollahs at age 30.
That is not the road to expertise in tough dealing. The alternate road is that, along the way, maybe you get forced into some street fights. Sometimes the other guy wins, and sometimes you beat the intestines out of him. Then you deal with grown-ups as you mature, and you learn that people can be nasty, often after they smile and speak softly. You get cheated a few times, played. And you learn. Maybe you become an attorney litigating multi-million-dollar case matters. Say what you will about attorneys, but those years — not the years in law school, not the years drafting legal memoranda, but the years of meeting face-to-face and confronting opposing counsel — those years can teach a great deal. They can teach how to transition from sweet, gentle, diplomatic negotiating to tough negotiating. At some point, with enough tough-nosed experience, you figure out Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” yourself.
Trump’s voters get him because not only is he we, but we are he. We were not snowflaked-for-life by effete professors who themselves never had negotiated tough life-or-death serious deals. Instead we live in the real world, and we know how that works Not based on social science theories, not based on “conceptual negotiating models.” But based on the people we have met over life and always will hate. That worst boss we ever had. The coworker who tried to sabotage us. We know the sons of bums whom we survived, the dastardly types who are out there, and we learned from those experiences how to deal with them. We won’t have John Kerry soothe us by having James Taylor sing “You’ve Got a Friend” carols.
The Bushes got us into all kinds of messes. The first one killed the economic miracle that Reagan had fashioned. The second one screwed up the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran beautifully were engaged in killing each other for years, and he got us mired into the middle of the muddle. Clinton was too busy with Monica Lewinsky to protect us from Osama bin Laden when we had him in our sights. Hillary gave us Benghazi and more. And Obama and Kerry gave us the Iran Deal, ISIS run amok, America in retreat. All to the daily praise of a media who now attack Trump every minute of every day.
So let us understand a few things:
Negotiating with NATO
NATO is our friend. They also rip off America. They have been ripping us off forever. We saved their butts — before there even was a NATO — in World War I. They messed up, and 116,456 Americans had to die to save their butts.
Then they messed up again for the next two decades because West Europeans are effete and so obsessed with their class manners and their rules of savoir faire and their socialist welfare states and their early retirements that they did not have the character to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s. Peace in our time. So they messed up, and we had to save their butts again. And another 405,399 Americans died for them during World War II. And then we had to rebuild them! And we had to station our boys in Germany and all over their blood-stained continent. So, hey, we love those guys. We love NATO.
And yet they still rip us off. We pay 4% of our gigantic gross domestic product to protect them, and they will not pay a lousy 2% of their GDP towards their own defense. Is there a culture more penny-pinching-cheap-and-stingy than the fine constituents of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? These cheap baseborn prigs will not pay their fare. They are too cheap. They expect America to send boys to die for them in one world war, then another — hundreds of thousands — and then to pay for their NATO defense even a century later. And then they have the temerity to cheat us further in trade
Long before Trump, they set up tariffs against us for so many things If the average American knew how badly Europe has been ripping us off for decades with their tariffs, no one in this country would buy anything European again. We would say, as a matter of self-respect and personal pride, “I no longer will buy anything but American, no matter what it costs.”
Every American President has complained about the cheating and imbalance — the NATO penny-pinching-cheapness, the tariff and trade imbalances. In more recent years, the various Bushes complained about it. Even Obama complained about it. But they all did it so gently, so diplomatically. They would deliver the sermon, just as the pastor predictably tells the church-goers on Sunday morning that he is against sin, and the Europeans would sit quietly and nod their heads — nodding from sleeping, not from agreeing — and then they would go back out and sin some more. Another four years of America being suckered and snookered. All they had to do was give Obama a Nobel Peace Prize his ninth month in office and let Kerry ride his bike around Paris.
So Trump did what any effective negotiator would do: he took note of past approaches to NATO and their failures, and correctly determined that the only way to get these penny-pinching-cheap baseborn prigs to pay their freight would be to bulldoze right into their faces, stare them right in their glazed eyes with cameras rolling, and tell them point-blank the equivalent of: “You are the cheapest penny-pinching, miserly, stingy, tightwadded skinflints ever. And it is going to stop on my watch. Whatever it takes from my end, you selfish, curmudgeonly cheap prigs, you are going to pay your fair share. I am not being diplomatic. I am being All-Business: either you start to pay or, wow, are you in for some surprises! And you know what you read in the Fake News: I am crazy! I am out of control! So, lemme see. I know: We will go to trade war! How do you like that? Maybe we even will pull all our troops out of Europe. Hmmm. Yeah, maybe. Why not? Sounds good. Well, let’s see.”
So Trump stuffed it into their quiche-and-schnitzel ingesting faces. And he convinced them — thanks to America’s Seedier Media who are the real secret to the “Legend That is Trump” — that he just might be crazy enough to go to trade war and to pull American boys home. They knew that Clinton and Bush x 2 and Kerry and Hillary and Nobel Laureate Obama never would do it. But they also know that Trump just might. And if they think they are going to find comfort and moderating in his new advisers, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, alongside him…. Nuh-uh.
So CNN and the Washington Post and all the Seedier Media attacked Trump for days: He is destroying the alliance! He attacks our friends!
Baloney. Obama was the one whom the Left Echo Chamber… Chamber… Chamber never called out for attacking our friends — Israel, Britain, so many others — while cozying up to Hugo Chavez, bowing to dictators, and dancing the tango for Raul Castro. Trump is just the opposite: He knows who the friends are, and he wants to maintain and strengthen those friendships. It is no different from a parent telling a 35-year-old son: “I have been supporting you for thirty-five years. I put you through college by signing four years and $100,000 PLUS in Loans. You graduated college fifteen years ago. For fifteen years I have been asking you nicely to look for a job and to start contributing. Instead, you sit home all day playing video games, texting your friends on a smartphone I pay for, and picking little fuzz balls out of your navel. So, look, I love you. You are my flesh and blood. But if you are not employed and earning a paycheck — and contributing to the cost of this household — in six months, we are throwing you out of the house.” That boy is NATO. Trump is Dad. And all of us have been signing for the PLUS Loans.
Negotiating with Putin
Putin is a bad guy A really bad guy. He is better than Lenin. Better than Stalin, Khrushchev, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Pol Pot, Mao. But he is a really bad guy.
Here’s the thing: Putin is a dictator. He answers to no one. He does whatever he wants. If there arises an opponent, that guy dies. Maybe the opponent gets poked with a poisoned umbrella. Maybe he gets shot on the street. Maybe the opponent is forced to watch Susan Rice interviews telling the world that Benghazi happened because of a YouTube video seen by nine derelicts in Berkeley and that Bowe Berghdal served with honor and distinction. But, one way or another, the opponent dies.
Trump knows this about Putin. And here is what that means:
If you insult Putin in public, like by telling the news media just before or after meeting with him that he is the Butcher of Crimea, and he messed with our elections, and is an overall jerk — then you will get nothing behind closed doors from Putin. Putin will decide “To heck with you, and to heck with the relationship we just forged.” Putin will get even, will take intense personal revenge, even if it is bad for Russia — even if it is bad for Putin. Because there are no institutional reins on him.
But if you go in public and tell everyone that Putin is a nice guy (y’know, just like Kim Jong Un) and that Putin intensely maintains that he did not mess with elections — not sweet little Putey Wutey (even though he obviously did) — then you next can maintain the momentum established beforehand in the private room. You can proceed to remind Putin what you told him privately: that this garbage has to stop —or else. That if he messes in Syria, we will do “X.” If he messes with our Iran boycott, we will do “Y.” We will generate so much oil from hydraulic fracturing and from ANWR and from all our sources that we will glut the market — if not tomorrow, then a year from now. We will send even more lethal offensive military weapons to Ukraine. We can restore the promised shield to Eastern Europe that Obama withdrew. And even if we cannot mess with Russian elections (because they have no elections), they do have computers — and, so help us, we will mess with their technology in a way they cannot imagine. Trump knows from his advisers what we can do. If he sweet-talks Putin in public — just Putin on the Ritz<— then everything that Trump has told Putin privately can be reinforced with action, and he even can wedge concessions because, against that background, Putin knows that no one will believe that he made any concessions. Everyone is set to believe that Putin is getting whatever he wants, that Trump understands nothing. So, in that setting, Putin can make concessions and still save face.
That is why Trump talks about him that way. And that is the only possible way to do it when negotiating with a tyrant who has no checks and balances on him. If you embarrass the tyrant publicly, then the tyrant never will make concessions because he will fear that people will say he was intimidated and backed down. And that he never will do. Meanwhile, Trump has expelled 60 Russians from America, reversed Obama policy and sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, and is pressing Germany severely on its pipeline project with Russia.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, Donald Trump is over seventy years old. He has made many mistakes in his life. He still makes some He is human. But Trump likewise has spent three score and a dozen years learning. He has seen some of his businesses go bankrupt, and he has learned from those experiences to be a billionaire and not let it happen again. No doubt that he has been fooled, outsmarted in years past. And he has learned from life.
He is a tough and smart negotiator. He sizes up his opponent, and he knows that the approach that works best for one is not the same as for another. It does not matter what he says publicly about his negotiating opponent. What matters is what results months later.
In his first eighteen months in Washington, this man has turned around the American economy, brought us near full employment, reduced the welfare and food stamp lines, wiped out ISIS in Raqqa, moved America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem, successfully has launched massive deregulation of the economy, has opened oil exploration in ANWR, is rebuilding the military massively, has walked out of the useless Paris Climate Accords that were negotiated by America’s amateurs who always get snookered, canned the disastrous Iran Deal, exited the bogus United Nations Human Rights Council. He has Canada and Mexico convinced he will walk out of NAFTA if they do not pony up, and he has the Europeans convinced he will walk out of NATO if they don’t stop being the cheap and lazy parasitic penny-pinchers they are. He has slashed income taxes, expanded legal protections for college students falsely accused of crimes, has taken real steps to protect religious freedoms and liberties promised in the First Amendment, boldly has taken on the lyme-disease-quality of a legislative mess that he inherited from Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama on immigration, and has appointed a steady line of remarkably brilliant conservative federal judges to sit on the district courts, the circuit appellate courts, and the Supreme Court.
What has Anderson Cooper achieved during that period? Jim Acosta or the editorial staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post? They have not even found the courage and strength to stand up to the coworkers and celebrities within their orbits who abuse sexually or psychologically or emotionally. They have no accomplishments to compare to his. Just their effete opinions, all echoing each other, all echoing, echoing, echoing They gave us eight years of Nobel Peace Laureate Obama negotiating with the ISIS JV team, calming the rise of the oceans, and healing the planet.
We will take Trump negotiating with Putin any day.
https://spectator.org/everyone-is-smart-except-trump/
Bud’s P.S. I would be much harder on NATO than President Trump. These are the people that most Americans fled, for generations, for hundreds of years. If you want class warfare, that’s NATO and the EU.
As I recall, Kavanaugh was employed by the G.W. Bush White House, not the justice department, when the Patriot Act was passed. And, for all practical purposes, at that time the U.S. was at war, the homeland had been attacked. In fact, in that war time circumstance, Congress could have given the President far, far more onerous executive powers …and those war powers would have been entirely Constitutional.
As I see it, the possible problem with Justice Kavanaugh’s legal positions was never examined in public by the U.S. Senate, and as judge Andrew Napolitano points out, our government in Washington is really only one party … the big government party …with two different populist wings. The big government party works against citizens and in favor of oligarchy and political power, in favor of the rich folk who donate to elect politicians to the government party.
That situation has not changed during my entire life. President Eisenhower warned of the power of the military industrial complex … but it has gotten much bigger and more powerful. Yes, the Patriot Act is a Constitutional crisis, as are the annual NDAA defense funding laws which continue authorizations for the onerous invasions occurring under the Patriot Act. Unfortunately, we may never know Justice Kavanaugh’s legal opinion on the authorities granted in these laws until and unless they are challenged and that challenge reaches SCOTUS.
SCOTUS Justice David Souter, nominated by RINO President G.H.W. Bush, gave government and their crony real estate developers eminent domain … an obvious infringement of 4th amendment and the Constitution itself. Government is only authorized to control D.C. and necessary military bases and ports. Yet, eminent domain expanded that to any enterprise and property determined to be important for the collective. That SCOTUS ruling is exactly the opposite of individual liberty and the Constitution.
I hope the Patriot Act is repealed by a conservative Congress and annual NDAA’s are constrained by Congress to funding of the military, instead of controlling the people. I believe the first thing we must fight for is the transparency in government: stop the secrecy. Getting through that secrecy wall by court actions like FOIA is a monumental barrier to entry, barrier to the truth. Secrecy in government is a giant leap backwards to feudalism, which protects and enables oligarchy.
Never forget that Donald Trump is part of the oligarchy.
After repeal of the secrecy laws, next to go must be most of the Administrative Procedures Act, wherein Congress has unconstitutionally absolved itself of its constitutional duties by delegating most of them to the executive branch and its gigantic, inefficient, and self-protecting bureaucracy. And now, the courts support the bureaucracy by making mostly administrative law rulings under that act.
I understand this just completed Kavanaugh red meat circus as a frontal attack by the left on the most critical point of the Constitution and jurisprudence. That is, that a man or woman is considered innocent until proven otherwise. (Napoleonic code is the reverse case and still in practice outside the U.S.) Stalin and George W. Bush and many others threw people in jail without due process. Thankfully, after this recent public circus, most – but not all – of that fundamental right remains for citizens. As Roma Cox and Ben Swann and Judge Andrew Napolitano point out, our government never publicly examined the Kavanaugh rulings and opinions that would have/should have been important to citizens. In fact, according to the Senate Justice Committee, not one Democrat visited the room where Kavanaugh’s papers were on display for them. Citizens are NOT being served by our government.
A teenager, I built my own stereo and speakers from scratch and was among the first to compress audio and video for storage and playback on computers. In the early days, the computer to compress a 30 second video was larger than a refrigerator and took all day, and was expensive. I produced early videos and animations for use by my sales and service teams and collected for fun. Today, my movie and music collection is getting smaller. The arrogance of performers is destroying their talent and their following. Like poets, writers and celebrity of previous revolutions, useful idiots, as Lenin called them, will eventually be destroyed by the same radicals they now support. Meanwhile, they will get no more from me. Good riddance De Niro, Streisand, et al. Unable to control your arrogance, failing to recognize political fantasy, you destroyed your cabaret.
budbromley 
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