Passing wind

Warning, government intends to harm you…again. Insanity times 10…Thursday, the Obama administration announced its first step toward regulating methane emissions from hundreds of thousands of oil and natural-gas wells across the U.S., putting more pressure on jobs and on an industry already stressed by low prices. What the Obama administration’s EPA is proposing is an insane waste of taxpayer dollars, as well as disinformed, counterproductive environmental policy.

Methane is a trace gas in the atmosphere, comprising about 1700 parts per billion parts of air or 0.00017% of air or 1.7 ppm. Most of that methane comes naturally from the environment. Methane, also known as natural gas, is only 0.36% of total greenhouse gases. Human-contributed methane is only 0.066% of total greenhouse gas. So, despite all the evidence to the contrary, even if you still believe in the hypothesis of human-caused global warming, there is not enough methane to cause a global warming problem.

Both human contributed methane and total methane concentrations are more than 10 TIMES LESS than human-contributed CO2 and total CO2 as a proportion of total greenhouse gases. Total CO2 concentration is about 400 ppm in air, and total methane (CH4) concentration is about 1.7 ppm in air. Regulation of human-contributed CO2 was the previous low mark in government stupidity and crony pseudo-environmentalism. The green church is already making you pay alms for your CO2 sins. Now they want to make you pay alms equivalent to 1/10 of a CO2 sin. According to calculations by priests of the green church, the greenhouse warming effect of methane (measured as radiative forcing in Watts per square meter) is less than 1/3 that of CO2.

According to this WSJ reporter (link below): “The U.S. and Canada will commit to cut methane emissions from oil and gas by between 40% and 45% below 2012 levels by 2025, a commitment the Obama administration has previously made.”

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, already working on rules cutting methane emissions from oil and gas wells not yet drilled, will begin devising regulations for existing wells and aims to release in April draft requirements for companies to provide information about equipment, emissions and control technologies from a broad range of oil and gas activities, including production, transmission, processing and storage, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said Thursday.”

“The step, being taken under the Clean Air Act, indicates the agency is preparing to write a regulation that is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of existing wells across the U.S.”

Next they will be measuring, regulating and taxing cow farts. You are next.

Atmospheric Composition and Greenhouse Gases

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-target-existing-oil-gas-wells-in-effort-to-cut-methane-emissions-1457586241

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The consigliere

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is spending taxpayer money to stop informed people from “denying” that an event is happening, even though that event has not been happening for 18 years, and during those 18 years we were brainwashed continuously that it was happening, that the world was getting hotter, dangerously hotter. But it wasn’t getting hotter afterall. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on a hypothesis that was disproved by real-world data.

Where did those billions of taxpayer dollars go that were spent on “green” projects? Where are all those “green” jobs?

FBI – the hapless government agency now charged by A.G. Lynch with considering how to prosecute people and companies for a thought crime – has not been able to do anything right lately. We now have 5 FBI agents under investigation by federal Inspector General Horowitz in the ambush shooting and coverup in the death of rancher Lavoy Finicum in Oregon. Ms. Lynch thinks denying hot air is on the same legal, moral and political playing field with her own department, her predecessor, many others in the Obama administration and perhaps Obama himself causing weapons to be in the hands of drug cartels and radical Islamists who have used those weapons to kill many people. Has the FBI or the Obama administration arrested the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack? Does the public know even half of the truth about Benghazi? Why hasn’t the FBI or A.G. Lynch brought the case of Black Panthers intimidating voters at the polling place, or Bill Clinton soliciting voters at the polling place?  At the same time, the hapless FBI is torturing logic in its supposed plan to read Apple cell phone files. The President that nominated Ms. Lynch as well as the U.S. Senate that confirmed her have no credibility whatsoever.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/10/us-attorney-general-we-may-prosecute-climate-change-deniers/

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It’s time to prosecute CO2 fraud

The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not a problem for life on this planet and the contribution of CO2 by humans will never be a problem.  Higher atmospheric CO2 concentration in air will benefit all life on earth.  Even CO2 concentration in air were 300% higher than today, the CO2 concentration in air would not be a problem for humans, animals or plants, it would be a benefit.  CO2 is plant food, algae food and food for some bacteria. CO2 is part of the natural carbon cycle on this planet. CO2 and carbon are essential to almost all life on this planet. Carbon is an essential building block for almost all cellular life on this planet. CO2 from the atmosphere is the ONLY WAY carbon gets into plants, algae and bacteria cells and from there into animals. Let me repeat: THE ONLY WAY.

Studies of satellite imagery of earth over the last three decades show that the earth is getting greener.  But this is not human-caused.

Today’s atmospheric CO2 concentration is about 400 parts per million parts of air, or more commonly 400 ppm. During the geological age known as the Jurassic Period – which lasted about 60 million years – the mean CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was about 1900 ppm,  more than 400% higher than today, and the temperature at the surface averaged about 16.5 degrees centigrade, about 3.5 degrees centigrade higher than today. But during more than half of the Jurassic period, the CO2 level was stable at nearly 3000 ppm. I used the Jurassic as my example because you may recall from reading or movies that during the Jurassic period Earth  was mostly covered in jungle and dinosaurs roamed the land and seas. Life was very abundant and green at much higher CO2 levels as well as at higher temperatures. The Jurassic was not the only period when this happened. (See graphic CO2 and Temperature.)

Humans contribute to the planet’s CO2, but it CO2 does not accumulate in the atmosphere. And the human portion of CO2, which is a so-called “greenhouse gas”, does not contribute to warming the atmosphere, unfortunately.  More CO2 would be better and more warming would be better, but that is not how the natural equilibrium works.  Total CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 33% since the rough estimates of CO2 in the pre-industrial era, but the increase is not due to humans. Burning fossil fuels and breathing are not significant contributions to the planet’s carbon cycle, these are minor and temporary disturbances to a natural equilibrium partition of CO2 between air and water.  The equilibrium is restored in a time frame and amount directly proportional to the disturbance.  Human-CO2-caused global warming and/or climate change is a hoax, a fraud.

The amount of CO2 contributed by humans from all sources is trivial and temporary with regard to the temperature of this planet. (See attached table Anthropogenic Contribution.) The total CO2 in the atmosphere is very important to keep atmospheric temperature relatively warm and stable, but humans contribute less than 5% of the total CO2 and that amount is continuously mixed and absorbed with the ~95% which is continuously recycling in and out of the environment.  Humans annually contribute approximately 30 gigatons (30 billion tons) of CO2 to the atmosphere, a very small amount compared to the approximately 800 gigatons annually moving through the planet’s carbon cycle. Nature (non-human) produces about 770 gigatons of CO2 per year, humans produce about 30 gigatons per year. About 98% of the total 800 gigatons per year cycle is re-absorbed by nature. This re-absorption of CO2 does not differentiate between CO2 from humans and CO2 from other sources.

Most of the CO2 in the atmosphere was outgassed by the oceans and most of that CO2 in the oceans came from metamorphism of calcium carbonate (e.g. limestone rock) into silicon dioxide (e.g. sand) by volcanic high heat at the subduction zones deep beneath the oceans. During ancient geological periods, volcanoes, fissures and rift zones below the oceans and on land release large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. In daylight, when sunlight is warming the surface of the oceans and lakes, unreacted CO2 gas, which is dissolved in water, is released at the surface into the atmosphere as gaseous CO2.  At night, when the surface of the water cools, CO2 is dissolved from the air into the water to form ionic carbonic acid, bicarbonate ions, carbonate ions, and non-ionized CO2 gas.  Cold water holds more CO2 gas than warm water. Think of your cold, carbonated soda pop drink compared to your warm, flat soda pop. The relative amount of CO2 in the atmosphere compared to the amount of CO2 in ocean water is determined by Henry’s law. (4)

Henry’s law: At a constant temperature, the amount of a given gas that dissolves in a given type and volume of liquid is directly proportional to the partial pressure of that gas in equilibrium above that liquid. An equivalent way of stating the law is that the solubility of a gas in a liquid is directly proportional to the partial pressure of the gas above the liquid. At given temperatures of air and water, a given air pressure, and a given pH and salinity in water, the relative concentration of CO2 in air versus CO2 dissolved in water will be in an equilibrium equation defined by Henry’s law. (4)

“This means that for an atmospheric doubling of CO2, there will have to be supplied 50 times more CO2 to the ocean to obtain chemical equilibrium. This total of 51 times the present amount of atmospheric CO2 carbon is more than the known reserves of fossil carbon. At our current conditions, according to Henry’s law, ocean water holds about 50 times as much carbon dioxide as does the atmosphere above it. ” (7)

An important point here is that ocean and lake water are not pure water. Many molecules are dissolved as ions or suspended in the water. These ions, especially calcium ions, act as buffers which increase the amount of carbon which can be dissolved in the water. When CO2 gas is dissolved in water, about 99% of it breaks apart and becomes bicarbonate ions, and carbonate ions, and an intermediate reaction form known as carbonic acid which reversibly dissociates into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate ions. Carbonic acid readily combines with ionic forms of calcium. More on this at the carbon cycle link below. (3) Furthermore, oceans can never become acidic from either too much carbon or too much carbon dioxide because there is sufficient calcium ion already dissolved in the oceans to buffer all of the carbon on the planet and to convert that carbon into limestone. Thus, ocean chemistry scientists say that the oceans are an infinite sink for carbon. (1)(7)

There is far more calcium on earth than there is carbon, about 4 times more calcium ion in ocean surface water than dissolved carbon forms.  There is far more calcium dissolved in the oceans than there is known carbon on the planet. (And calcium is not the only buffering system in the ocean.)  There are buffering systems in ocean, ongoing chemical reactions, which work to prevent ocean water from becoming too alkaline, and there are buffering systems in ocean which work to prevent ocean from becoming acidic.  This means that ocean can never become acidic by the addition of CO2 or carbon.

Calcium containing molecules are precipitated out of water onto the sea bottom floors of oceans and lakes, primarily as calcite or aragonite, two forms of calcium carbonate. You know this rock as limestone, dolomite, marble and travertine. Most of the calcium carbonate found in and on the floor of the oceans and on land comes from animals and plants that have died and been metabolized by other forms of life. The CO2 in the atmosphere is taken in by plants which use it in photosynthesis to produce carbohydrates in cells and in turn they expire oxygen as their waste product. That’s fortunate for us. Animals like us then eat the plants containing carbohydrates and the carbon becomes part of the animal’s body or is released as waste CO2 in their breath or carbon molecules in their waste. That’s fortunate for plants. This continues sequentially until the animal is eaten or it dies and is metabolized by the food chain beneath it. The cells in the animal or plant are metabolized by a continuous chain of life forms and chemistry, a food pyramid, leaving calcium carbonate waste among other things. The calcium carbonate precipitates in water and eventually becomes sediment and over more time becomes stone. To break down this calcium carbonate in stone again into separate molecules containing calcium and separate molecules containing carbon (such as CO2) requires very high heat, usually the heat of white hot volcanic magma. In other words, once that CO2 has been absorbed by a plant, unless that plant is burned, this CO2 will eventually become calcium carbonate trapped in some form of stone unless that stone is heated to the temperature of a volcano. This process is known as the carbon cycle, and it is absolutely critical for life as we know. See reference (3) below.

When we exhale (we release about 5000 ppm CO2 into the air) and when we burn fossil fuels, we are releasing much needed CO2 into the atmosphere. We are fortunate that our planet is still making fossil fuels like natural gas (methane, CH4), and oil in enormous quantities as it has since life began. Plant life and algae will shut down without sufficient CO2 to “breathe.” Plant life begins shutting down around 150 ppm CO2.  Earth’s current CO2 concentration in air of 400 ppm is dangerously low for plants and algae; a long cold spell will reduce CO2 concentration in air because CO2 is highly soluble in water and that solubility increases as water temperature decreases. It is a good thing we are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is not pollution.

“Several times during the last 3 million years, life above sea level was within 30 parts per million of being extinguished by a lack of carbon dioxide. The flowering plants we rely upon in our diet evolved 100 million years ago when the carbon dioxide level was four times the current concentration. For plant life, the current amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is near starvation levels.” (7)

We are currently in an ice age. (See graphic 1024px_Myr_Climate-Change) The definition of an ice age is that there is ice found year round at both the north and south poles of the planet. There have been periods of tens of millions of years when there was no ice at the poles. We are currently in what is known as an interglacial period, a relatively short period of ten thousand or so years when temperatures are relatively warm but there is still year round ice at the poles. (See attached graphic: Temperature Range.)

AGW (anthropogenic global warming) also known as anthropogenic climate change is a giant fraud. The propagators of this propaganda which is akin to a religion, including the United Nations and the current President of the United States, should be imprisoned for the harms they have caused millions of people including many thousands of unnecessary deaths.

(1) Stumm, W., and J.J. Morgan. 1970. Aquatic Chemistry: An Introduction Emphasizing Chemical Equilibria in Natural Waters. Wiley-Interscience, New York.

(2) http://www.co2science.org/

(3) http://www.columbia.edu/~vjd1/carbon.htm

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_law

(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate

(6) http://humanevents.com/…/the-carbon-dioxide-level-is-dange…/

(7) http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/esef4.htm

Temperature Range

1024px-Five_Myr_Climate_Change

CO2 and Temperature

Anthropogenic Contribution to Greenhouse Effect

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Our authoritarian state

“America has moved into a dangerous era where the only constraints on presidential power are political, not constitutional!” …”The 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be a contest between democratic socialism and national populism.” ~ Excellent article by Andrew Miiller at this link.

https://www.thetrumpet.com/article/13641.2.0.0/world/government/is-america-becoming-an-authoritarian-state

 

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Climate fraud

In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA …stated that they have a 58 year long temperature record, but they only showed the last 37 years. The prior years showed temperature decline. Examining that full record, NOAA’s best data, shows no warming for 60 years.

NOAA Temp data

More on this story here:  http://realclimatescience.com/2016/03/noaa-radiosonde-data-shows-no-warming-for-58-years/

https://budbromley.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/obama-is-dead-wrong-on-climate-change/

 

 

 

 

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Hillary’s Accomplishments

√ Independent Ukraine’s government was overthrown by a fascist-leaning government supported by Obama and Clinton’s State Department, and perhaps covert U.S. supported military. Deadly riots in the streets. Russia invaded Ukraine. Crimea voted to join Russia rather than stay with Ukraine.  An Indonesian passenger airliner was shot down over Ukraine. Who did it? Where is the info from dense network of ultra high def intelligence U.S. satellites monitoring Ukraine’s border with Russia? U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, standing in front of Chevron and Exxon Mobil signs, announces U.S. provided $5 billion to Ukraine.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y0y-JUsPTU#t=456

√  “NATO is going to quadruple its military power around Russia.”  “The new Cold War has become much hotter because of a decision taken in Washington” and is “more dangerous than the preceding Cold War”.  Saying the new Cold War is “solely due to Putin’s ‘aggression’” is “simply not true.” ~ Stephen F. Cohen, Emeritus scholar of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University.  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44163.htm

“We came, we saw, he died,” said Hillary.  Libya’s leader Gadhafi was overthrown and killed in the streets by forces backed by U.S. military (including bombing) and on the ground intelligence as well as NATO.   The U.S. and NATO claimed it was installing a ‘no-fly zone’ over the country for humanitarian reasons, but instead used that as a pretext for bombing, which was a violation of the UN resolution and not authorized by congress.  Chaos now reigns in Libya, which has become a stronghold of ISIS.  Before the bombing, Libya was financially independent, the richest country in Africa.  According to The New York Times, the deciding push to commit aggression against Libya came from Hillary Clinton.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/world/africa/19policy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

√ Four Americans that we know of, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, are slaughtered in an American consular compound and CIA compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 because the Secretary of State Clinton denied repeated requests for additional security and then did not send forces to help them when they were attacked.  Thousands of surface-to- air missiles capable of bringing down airliners have gone missing.  Then Hillary and the rest of the Obama administration tried to cover this up during the closing of the 2012 U.S. presidential election season with a story about a movie in order to protect Obama’s re-electability.

√  Syria crossed Obama’s red line and never looked back.  Under Hillary’s management, U.S. Ambassador to Libya Stevens was involved in arming Libyan rebels including al Qaeda and similar radical Islamists and then transshipping arms from Libya to radical Islamists in Syria who are attempting to overthrow the Syrian regime.  Under Clinton and Obama, the U.S. has armed, trained and funded militants in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian regime with the assistance of Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

√ Beginning during Clinton’s watch, a massive refugee crisis was started and is still underway with millions of refugees flooding from Syria and elsewhere in the middle east into Europe and America.  Obama has committed to accept 300,000 refugees, most of those are Muslims who the DHS and FBI say cannot be vetted.  According to Syrian human rights organizations quoted by the Hillary-friendly Council of Foreign Relations, most of the deaths in Syria are not caused by Syria’s Assad regime, but instead by U.S. /NATO-backed actions.  “She pressed Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, and later endorsed air strikes against the Assad regime”, while the US lied, saying it knew Assad had carried out chemical attacks.  She also supported US bombing of the Syrian government, “apparently undaunted by polling that showed more than 70 percent of Americans opposed to military action.” (Quote from Time)  http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/09/politics/syria-poll-main/

http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2014/04/01/syria-civil-war-total-fatalities/?cid=nlc-dailybrief-daily_news_brief-link15-20140415&sp_mid=45632445&sp_rid=andjZ2xhc2VyQGdtYWlsLmNvbQS2

√ Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown by Egyptians backed by the U.S. government and media and replaced by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Muhamad Morsi, the new Egyptian President immediately removed Egypt’s military and political leadership and began setting up a suppressive Islamic fundamentalist government.  The Obama administration promised him F-16’s.  Egyptians massively demonstrate again and overthrow President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood cronies, replacing him with a former Egyptian military leader Al Sissi.  The former President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood cronies are arrested, brought to trial and sentenced by Egyptian court.

√  SOS Clinton guaranteed US government backing for Chevron to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.  Obama sent his own personal letter to the president of Turkmenistan, backing Chevron and “emphasizing a common interest in helping develop Afghanistan and expressing his support for the TAPI pipeline and his desire for a major U.S. firm to construct it.   ”As Secretary of State, Clinton backed a major escalation of the US invasion of Afghanistan, ramping U.S. forces 30,000 to 100,000 soldiers or more and then Obama announced the date of their departure.  Of the 2,300 American soldiers who have died in the 13-year-old Afghan War, about 1,670 (or more than 70 percent) have died since Obama took office.   http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324576304579072761923326266

√ Iran contentedly works away at developing the nuclear bomb, and backing terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas with the assistance of over $100 billion of money “returned” to Iran.

√ China disrupts its neighbors, builds man made islands in disputed seas with military runways seas and arms them.

√ North Korea threatens South Korea and Japan. U.S. flies B52 over Korea and the under Kerry sends new U.S. jet fighters to South Korea.

√ Venezuela cracked down on democracy protestors attempting to reverse the wrongs of corrupt tyrant Hugo Chávez.  Russia arms to Venezuela.  “Bread and circuses populism has a long history in Venezuela, as does statism and authoritarianism. But Chávez took these things to new heights. Now after 11 years of Chávez, and one year of Maduro who is doubling down on Chávez’s policies, Venezuela is sliding toward basket case status. It has one of the world’s worst murder rates. Shortages of basic goods — including milk, medicines, and toilet paper — are common due to currency exchange and price controls that have made it unprofitable for business to import goods.”   http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/03/honoring_a_venezuelan_tyrant_amid_bloody_protests_.html#ixzz41t66c0hy
√ al Qaeda and ISIS Islamic fundamentalism characterized by ‘death to infidels’ and death to the Great Satan U.S. spreads its reach from Asia to Africa to the Far East (oh, but at least bin Laden is dead).

√  Iraq is battling for survival against ISIS after U.S. pulls out leaving modern U.S. arms to fall into the hands of ISIS.  (a culmination of foreign policy under Ms. Clinton’s tenure).

√  In June 2009, the U.S. State Department and Congress and Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded and armed forces in Honduras in a military coup that overthrew country’s left-of-center President Mel Zelaya, the democratically elected government of Honduras.  Those U.S.-backed forces are repressing the people of Honduras by force.  “Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State… displayed a record of carrying out the policies that were being promoted by her lobbyist friends, when she did everything possible, early in President Obama’s first term, to support U.S. funding for the fascist junta in Honduras that perpetrated a coup d’etat on 28 June 2009 overthrowing that nation’s popular progressive democratically elected President, and who then installed their own regime, and promptly placed their country into a continuing violent terror that caused Honduras ever since to be the nation with the highest murder rate in the world. Hillary’s lobbyist friend in that particular matter was Lanny Davis, who also is an occasional Fox News contributor.”   “Many commentators have mentioned that Hillary Clinton left behind no major achievement as the U.S. Secretary of State, but that isn’t true: the reality is that she did, several – and all of them are harms to the U.S., especially regarding two countries. They are Honduras and Afghanistan.”  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/hillary-clintons-two-fore_1_b_3714765.html

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/hillary-clinton-confirms-commitment-democracy-acknowledging-role-overthrow-honduran-democracy.html

√ “In their annual End of Year survey, in the year Hillary Clinton left the office of U.S. Secretary of State, a poll by Win/Gallup International in 65 countries found that the United States is considered the number one “greatest threat to peace in the world today” by people across the globe.”

√ U.S. allies like Germany and Poland are driven away from America after decades of friendship.

√  But wait, there’s a lot more, The Atlantic reports:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/tracking-the-clinton-controversies-from-whitewater-to-benghazi/396182/

Do you really want more of Hillary Clinton?

Hat tip and references:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/12/violent-crimes-shady-dealings-hillary-clinton.html

Tom Quiner

 

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Ted Cruz: We were there.

“Well, we happen to know him quite well. And we know that the vast majority of these characterizations are completely false; that Senator Cruz is an honest and decent man; that the negative portrayals of him are purposeful and a direct consequence of his willingness to fight for the American people against the massive power of the ruling class that our founding fathers predicted would occur; and that it would be an incredible disservice for you not to take a serious look at him as the only nominee who will lead this country away from its current path and toward the American promise of freedom, security and prosperity our children deserve.”

“Here’s why we believe this.”

http://theresurgent.com/why-we-believe-in-ted-cruz-we-were-there/

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Using student loans to bail out banks

 

More than one third (1/3) of the federal government’s assets are student loans according to the 2015 audited financial statements of the federal government. Hidden in Obamacare, the federal government took over student loans from banks and private lending institutions. Previously, banks loaned students or families money for education and the federal government guaranteed the loans made by the banks. Now banks service loans, but the federal government owns them. Total assets of the federal government are $3.2 trillion and two categories of student loans ($880.6 billion+134.7 billion) total $1,015.3 billion. Due to the Obamacare change, this category of loans has grown over 300% since 2007. At least 4 key points to make here:

(1) The cost for the federal government to service these 17 million student loans was $864 million as of fiscal 2012, the latest data I could find.

(2) Student and education loans are the largest category of assets, larger than all government and military lands and buildings. Balance sheet net worth is assets minus liabilities. This $1 trillion in loans along with $2 trillion in other assets has the effect of reducing the negative net worth, i.e. the official national debt, of the federal government to negative $17 trillion. (The net worth of the U.S. government is negative $17,000,000,000,000.)

“Total liabilities ($21.5 trillion) consist mostly of: (1) $13.2 trillion in federal debt securities held by the public and accrued interest and (2) $6.7 trillion in federal employee and veteran benefits payable.”

“The “public” consists of individuals, corporations, state and local governments, Federal Reserve Banks, foreign governments, and other entities outside the federal government.”

Total liabilities does NOT include liabilities that are not yet funded, that is, commitments to pay which have already been made by the government but which so far are not recorded as liabilities on the balance sheet nor have a source of funding. That number is unknown but could be 3 to 10 times higher than the $21.5 trillion. We can’t know the total until the Federal Reserve is audited, among other agencies.

http://www.forbes.com/…/the-feds-16-trillion-bailouts-und…/…

(3) The Economist reported in June 2014 that over 7 million of these student loans were in default. That is a 41% default rate.

(4) The government has taken over a failing business and made it worse. As a result of Obamacare, the government now has about $1.2 trillion in student loans on its balance sheet, costing over $864 million per year to service the loans and 41% of those loans are in default.

Meanwhile, education is becoming more expensive and lower quality due to a variety of factors, especially artificial, excessive demand. According to BestValueSchools.com, the cost of a college education has increased 4.5 times (450%) in the last 30 years. In comparison medical costs have jumped more than 286% while the consumer price index has jumped 121%. But, larger numbers of college graduates are not landing jobs in their area of study.

Now, at least one candidate for president, Bernie Sanders, is campaigning on promises to make college “free.” The expectation was already out there that college education should be free due to statements by president Obama. Providing “free” college would cost taxpayers more than $1.2 trillion to forgive the outstanding student loans, an amount equal to one fourth of the annual tax revenue taken by the government, plus at least $595 billion per year ($35K per year X 17 million) in additional operating expenses because even the people who today pay for their education would demand it for free. And, those student loans would probably not be classified as assets, meaning the quality of the nation’s balance sheet would take a negative slam from the point of view of creditors and bond ratings agencies. What’s the next step? Nationalize universities to install price controls and capture their endowment funds?

But, over and above all of the above, it appears that the Obama administration used Obamacare in a sleight-of-hand shell game to bail out the banks once again. The government removed seriously non-performing loans from the bank’s balance sheets, and it is now paying the banks hundred of millions of dollars to service those loans. And at least sometimes it is using the IRS as a collection agency.

For their part, the auditors of the federal government financial statements point out yet again that the government is not on a sustainable path.

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/…/15…/02242016_FR(Final).pdf

http://www.bestvalueschools.com/understanding-the-rising-costs-of-higher-education/

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/27/37-of-us-gov-assets-are-student-loans/

 

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The end of education as we know it.

“The campus wars aren’t really about race. Race and the rest of the identity politics roster are the engine for transforming an academic environment into an activist environment.” …

“Imagine if physics majors rioted and demanded that every single area of study on campus had to incorporate theoretical physics and hire physics majors. That is exactly what is happening with identity politics studies. It’s a naked power grab that has the potential to redefine academia as we know it.” …

“They’re not academics; they’re activists with a mandate to impose their filter on everyone.”

“When we talk about political correctness, it isn’t just about banning certain jokes. That’s the smallest part of it. Political correctness is about making the political filter, the left’s lens, mandatory for all.” ~ Daniel Greenfield, February 29, 2016

 

Source: What the Campus Crybully Wars Are Really About

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Candidates positions on global warming

http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/27/heres-where-the-2016-candidates-stand-on-global-warming/

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